Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Wired Magazine's Noah Schachtman about the US Army program that sends cultural experts into war zones. The experts are known as "human terrain analysts," and three of them have been killed in the past two years.
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MARCO WERMAN: I'm looking at an unusual job advertisement. It's an analyst position with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Cultural Research Program. The human terrain idea is unique and controversial; first, the unique. Since 2006 the Army has been sending social scientists into the field with army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those scientists are there to gather and analyze information and then advise the military on non-violent ways to stabilize certain areas; now the controversial.
NOAH SCHACHTMAN: Three social scientists dead, one charged with murder, and another charged with spying for Saddam Hussein.
WERMAN: That's Noah Schachtman who runs Wired's Danger Room Blog. It covers military and national security matters. Noah, let's first take the case of Paula Lloyd, a human terrain analyst who recently died after being set on fire in Afghanistan. Tell us about her.
SCHACHTMAN: Paula Lloyd was a former member of the military and a former aide worker in Afghanistan who signed up for the Human Terrain Program to try to bring some stability to the country by promoting better cultural understanding. And on election day she was on patrol in a village not far from Kandahar, she approached a man with a gas can, began interviewing him, and he all of sudden uncorked the gas can, poured flammable liquid on her and lit her on fire. And recently she died of her wounds.
WERMAN: And the Paula Lloyd case brings us to another Human Terrain Analyst, Don Ayala.
SCHACHTMAN: Yeah, Ayala was Lloyd's colleague and was on that patrol that day, on Election Day. When Paula Lloyd was lit on fire he captured her assailant, a man by the name of Abdul Salam, he put him in handcuffs and threw him to the ground. And then about ten minutes later he grew so irate over what had happened to Lloyd that he pulled out his gun and allegedly executed Abdul Salam, her assailant.
WERMAN: So Noah, I mean you've been to Iraq a few times yourself, still trying to get a sense of what they're actually doing with soldiers out in the field when they are in the field. Is it kind of introducing them the concepts of cultural sensitivity?
SCHACHTMAN: It can be some of that. Certainly early on in the Human Terrain Program there was some of that, "You know, hey if the sheikh offers me a piece of lamb do I take it with my right hand or my left hand or do I refuse it altogether?" But as the program has developed it's gotten deeper and deeper into some of the local cultures and local politics. A very successful example of the Human Terrain Program was a team was able to get into the power structures in Sadr City, the giant slum at the heart of Baghdad. And they were able to show that the people that the U.S. had been dealing with to hand out aid and money and favors, that they were really dealing with the wrong guy, and instead they had to deal with someone who was a lot closer to the firebrand cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.
WERMAN: What useful intelligence has come out of the presence of these Human Terrain Analysts on the battlefield?
SCHACHTMAN: Well, they caution that they're not intelligence, at least not intelligence as we'd think of it. They're not advocating that U.S. Forces go and target someone for capture or killing. Instead what they're offering is how to play the local politics. So for example, in Baghdad the police there were having a problem with cops who were working with the U.S. during the day and then at night working for the insurgents. The Human Terrain Team there suggested that rather than accuse them of something, which they'd just deny, use shaming tactics to say what an embarrassment this would be to their families, to their tribes. There were reports that a lot of those sort of double-dealing cops wound up coming down firmly on the U.S. side.
WERMAN: And you say they're careful to say that they're not intelligence, but there have been allegations that Human Terrain specialists are spies disguised as anthropologists and sociologists. And I'm wondering, what do these murders, what do these controversies tell us about those allegations? I mean, anthropologists and sociologists tend not to be the focus of so much aggression and spies do.
SCHACHTMAN: There's a question about whether these Human Terrain Analysts were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or whether they were specifically targeted. And I don't think people know that for sure yet.
WERMAN: I mean the program costs $130 million. I'm wondering is it worth it?
SCHACHTMAN: Well, I think pretty much everybody in the U.S. military agrees that we can't go through another war without understanding the culture on the ground. That was seen as one of the major, major mistakes of the first few years of the Iraq war. Right now, the Human Terrain program is gonna keep going and there is some talk of it even expanding beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to places where the wars haven't even started yet like in Africa. You know, the whole idea of sending anthropologists and social scientists into Iraq and Afghanistan is, in and of itself, kind of controversial. I mean, can you imagine for a second if a bunch of guys from Afghanistan kind of put on cowboy hats and went to NASCAR and the malls for a couple of months and declared themselves experts in American culture? It'd be kind of silly. One of the big controversies at the heart of the Human Terrain Program is whether you need anthropologists or whether you need real experts that come from these cultures to guide us.
WERMAN: Noah Schachtman runs the Danger Room Blog for Wired online. He joined us from New York, thank you Noah.
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