A ragtag group of ex-soldiers, academics and one-time Afghan refugees graduates today from a little-known University of Nebraska at Omaha program with a serious, Sept. 11-related goal.
They want to help turn around the war in Afghanistan — eight long years after the World Trade Center attacks.
They want to do it using their brains instead of bombs.
For the past three weeks, these 32 Army advisers, members of the Human Terrain Team, have immersed themselves in studying the oft-misunderstood country now at the center of what the Bush administration dubbed the “global war on terror.”
They have learned about Afghanistan's peaceful golden years and about its blood-stained recent history from Thomas Gouttierre, director of UNO's Center for Afghanistan Studies and a nationally known Afghan expert.
They have discussed modern Afghan politics with a former aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, studied the Dari language with an old Kabul University linguistics professor and learned Afghan military tactics from an Afghan-born West Point graduate.
On Tuesday, they covered facial hair.
Q: Why do most Afghans have beards?
A: To honor the Prophet Muhammad and because it's a cultural norm to trim the mustache and let the beard grow.
Q: Didn't the Taliban make shaving illegal?
A: The Talibs would sometimes throw men in jail for a beard shorter than one fist long.
Q (from a graying man): Should I grow one?
A (from Raheem Yaseer, the UNO center's assistant director, who barely survived Afghanistan's Soviet-backed coup in the 1970s): “When I go to Kabul University now with my brother, they hassle us because we don't have the correct badges or passes or whatever. And then they will say ‘Because of your white beard, we will let you in.'
“Generally, anybody who has a white beard is respected in Afghanistan. Remember that.”
Soon the Human Terrain Team members will be expected to remember this and a lot more.
After completing training at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., they will deploy to Afghanistan with Army units early next year.
They'll use their new knowledge to link military leaders with local Afghan elders and explain tribal customs to troops from Texas and Tennessee.
They will try to prevent civilian casualties, which harden opposition to the U.S. presence.
The timing of graduation — on Sept. 11 — is coincidental.
But the timing — eight years after the terrorist attacks — is also distressing to Afghan experts and the terrain team's director.
A serious immersion program began just last year, raising the question: Why didn't the U.S. military begin this training Sept. 12, 2001?
“It's such a good question,” said Maj. Robert Holbert, regional director of the Human Terrain System based at Fort Leavenworth. “We're steeped in examples of how we made lousy decisions, stupid decisions, negligent decisions, because we didn't pay attention to the culture. And people got killed because of it.”
Holbert, an Army reservist who once taught history at Lincoln High School, deployed with the first Human Terrain Team in February 2007.
Soon afterward, Holbert's team convinced commanders in the 82nd Airborne that their plan to conduct a weapons search at a village's mosques early on a Friday — equivalent to Sunday morning church service — was a very bad idea.
Instead, a military unit and the human terrain team entered the village after Friday morning prayers, had tea with the village elders and explained the search.
They ended up staying for lunch, listening as the elders complained about bad schools and shoddy police protection.
As the unit prepared to roll out, a tribal elder casually mentioned that insurgents might have planted an improvised explosive device on the road just outside the village. Sure enough, an Afghan military scout soon discovered a double-stacked anti-tank mine buried in the dirt.
“If we hadn't made an attempt to build that relationship, to be respectful of their way of life . . . if we'd been disrespectful and short, they would've said ‘Hey, have a nice day.' ”
“And then — BAM!” Holbert said.
Many of UNO's immersion sessions are geared toward not repeating the mistakes of the past.
The students soaking in those lessons are wildly diverse. The class includes a middle-age man with a social sciences doctorate, a former hotel manager distantly related to Afghanistan's last king, seven Afghan-American men, five non-Afghan women, and Don Rector.
Rector, a retired Army Ranger, spent the past five years in Afghanistan as a security contractor for a U.S. company. Part of the time, he commanded a unit of up to 600 Afghan fighters who kept the Taliban at bay while his company built highways.
Rector listened during the UNO sessions, occasionally jotting down notes, as Gouttierre focused on the cautionary tale of Amanullah Khan, an early 20th century Afghan king who directed his wife to appear in public without a veil. The resulting outrage eventually ended with his abandoning the throne at gunpoint in 1929.
“Ultimately, he wasn't in touch with his population,” Gouttierre said. “You have to move at a pace so you get the people to buy into what you're doing.”
The future military advisers have learned enough words and phrases in Dari and Pashto to impress Afghans, said Esmael Burhan, the retired UNO professor who coordinates the immersion program.
“You greet an Afghan in their language, they think ‘This person is interested in me and my country,' ” Burhan said. “It's a sign of respect.”
And they've used the latest bad news as a teaching tool.
Just last week, a NATO airstrike destroyed two fuel tankers stolen by the Taliban. The bombing killed dozens of insurgents, according to news reports. It also killed villagers who had hurried toward the tankers to siphon fuel into buckets.
Rector said he could have helped the coalition forces avoid those unnecessary deaths.
“It's forcing that plane to take one more pass over those tankers,” he said. “It's being able to recognize civilians. It's understanding that stealing a little fuel is an Afghan national pastime.”
Today's graduates are under no illusion they can change the Afghan war all by themselves.
They won't be able to single-handedly improve a security situation that has deteriorated steadily since 2004: Now, no one is safe from a random car bomb or a kidnapping, even in Kabul, Yaseer said.
Even Gouttierre, a staunch supporter of continued American involvement, said the United States can succeed in Afghanistan only if it corrects its mistakes: an overreliance on technology, a lack of boots-on-the-ground knowledge, the awarding of reconstruction money to American companies instead of Afghan workers.
But what the group can do is chip away at each of these problems, Rector said. They can talk to Afghans as equals and try to find common ground.
“We can do things differently,” he said. “We can make a small difference. That's what we have to do.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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