Human Terrain System

Human Terrain System

On the first of July 2002 Uruzgan in Afghanistan, the United States military dropped bombs on two unsuspecting happy families who were celebrating a recent wedding.

An Afghan man with his children who were killed during the attacks. 

The wedding party had fired two shots into the air, a custom common to Pashtun wedding ceremonies. Interpreting this as a hostile attack, the US military sent a plane to shoot and pursue villagers resulting in 89 deaths and 200 wounded.

Incidents such as this highlight the need for local knowledge and supports counterinsurgency programs such as the Human Terrain System. For so many lives to be damaged on the basis of a misinterpretation seems astounding. It raises the question; if the military had been aware of local customs and known there was a chance that shots could be fired unrelated to acts of aggression, could this incident have been prevented?

What is the HTS?

In recent years, there has been a shift in military strategy from large scale assaults to a more people centred approach, focusing on the human terrain as much as the physical terrain. The Human Terrain Strategy is motivated by the idea that by understanding the society the military is engaged with, the need for lethal force will be minimised. Their task is to provide for the military’s ‘cultural knowledge needs’ by conducting social science research. This social research is aimed ac development programs

The HTS has claimed that “they were reducing the need for “kinetic” (violent) operations that arose from “cultural misunderstandings” on the part of U.S. forces while simultaneously providing aid and services to local communities, helping to win “hearts and minds” and thus again reduce the need for lethal operations” . 

The HTS' aims are to:

• To prevent culutral misunderstandings by exercising tact, empathy and cross cultural dialogue 
• Reduce civilian casualties
• Provide research to commanders enabling them to consider the possible consequences of their  decisions for the local populations 
• Reduce structural violence  through reconstruction and basic development programs

While the first three are the most contested, the last aim of aiding reconstruction is one in which the HTS has been the most successful. The HTS, by aiding the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, has been able to help restore basic services to areas of conflict– such as rubbish collection, schools, provision of clean water and electricity. 

 PRT work with locals to build schools.

The following video highlights how the HTS is able to increase interactions with local people in Afghanistan. By asking their opinions of the problems the village faces and by presenting interactions with the military in an unaggressive context, HTS aids the tasks of the reconstruction teams.

Critics

It is important to note,  in this video the questions the HTS team asked the villagers included the ethnic make up of the village, the general feeling and who the key leaders were. These might serve as proxies to address grievances but could also be used to understand the likelihood of insurgents gaining support and who the key leaders the communities would turn to.

From this it can be seen how criticisms arise that question HTS’ claim that it is not an intelligence gathering mission. Indeed there have been a few cases which spying occurred

within the program itself through the acquisition of information from the private field notes of civilian members of the Human Terrain Teams. However, this was not intentional on behalf of the HTS programme itself. More worrying than the accidental release of information, is the HTS contribution to the overall strategy. Individual pieces of information gained can be controlled, but there is no way to assess how this information contributes to the collective knowledge which enables a commander to target an enemy.

The type of questions asked in the above video also illustrate the emphasis placed on judging the general feelings of people. No doubt this is related to anticipating frustrations that are likely to gain insurgents support. One of the biggest criticisms of the HTS is that it claims to be “population focused” and genuinely caring about the local populations but the real purpose is focused on the military strategy of knowing the enemy. Jonathan Gilmore argues that while HTS emphasises the importance of local engagement and is contrasted to the aggressive military strategy, it is not actually replacing military techniques.  Rather the war fighting is included in the wider counterinsurgency approach and is instead concealed by a human security agenda. According to Maja Zehfuss, HTS is representing the ‘human dimension’ as a knowable, objective backdrop to military operations to be manipulated in pursuit of military objectives.  However, it is important when assessing the HTS to remember that it is an army organisation. The army’s primary goal is to achieve a victory in the war it is conducting. To criticise the motivations of the HTS as using local knowledge to improve strategy seems redundant.

The criticism that holds most value is one that focuses on representing problems experienced in Afghanistan as cultural miscommunication. HTS views culture through a lens that has already assumed insurgency is the result of clashing values. It presents the problem as if only the locals understood how the foreign values would benefit them; their acceptance of the US forces would be much greater. This condenses the grievances that drive insurgencies into a straightforward miscommunication problem.

Critics have questioned the HTS’s claim that a population centric focus can help save lives. They claim that the reduced death toll is based on military opinion rather than fact. Pentagon officials have failed to answer requests for data to back up the claim. 

By the end of 2003, the US government had changed its approach from large-scale assaults to a more population centric approach. Whilst, there might not be concrete data to substantiate how HTS has decreased casualties, the below graph shows a significant decrease in the number of casualties that occurred between 2002 and 2006. Around this time, domestic support for the war in Iraq has waned and so the military was rushed to reach a decisive victory. It has been argued, that this shows that when a population focus was taken, it reduced the number of casualties. Which then increased once the military strategy changed. 

Changing the counterinsurgency approach to be more population focused did seem to reduce casualties. Even if the evidence is not explicitly linked to the HTS, it still is an organisation that helps promote the people focused approach.

These criticisms of the HTS can be addressed with one over arching question of what would be the alternative? While promoting cultural dialogue does run the risk of framing insurgency as cultural miscommunication, having no engagement with the local individuals whose lives are most affected by war would lead to more events such as the wedding ‘accident’ of 2002. The above video demonstrated the simplistic manner in which the army are trained to understand local culture, underestimates how many values are universal. However, as the FM 3-24 has stated there are many customs especially regarding religion and gender, which are not common to the US. To have troops present in a country, which have no knowledge of the customs they could be breaking, seems unethical.