Conference

Making Sense in Afghanistan: Interaction and Uncertainty in International Interventions

Friday-Saturday, April 9-10, 2010
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
1501 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43201

Organizers
Dorothy Noyes, Associate Professor of English, Comparative Studies, and Anthropology
Margaret Mills, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Overview
The counterinsurgency doctrine set forth in U.S. Army-Marine Field Manual 3-24 has prompted continual debate since its 2006 publication. The manual prescribes a focus on the civilian population rather than combatants, with stabilization and nation-building deemed central to the defeat of insurgencies.

The manual has received extensive media coverage in the United States, influenced parallel efforts among allied militaries, and been elaborated and extended in the broader reshaping of U.S. military operations. Leaders both political and military disagree on the viability of the approach, whether it serves the national interest, and whether it strengthens or weakens the military as an institution.

Scholars, while often sympathetic to the manual's goals, have been wary of the "conscription" of academic knowledge in the Human Terrain System, raising ethical, political, and intellectual concerns that most deem insurmountable. Particularly visible in the debate has been Field Manual 3-24's invocation of culture as a component of conflict and a necessary competency for intervention forces.

The starting point of this conference is not FM 3-24's proposed solution, but its unusually forthright statement of the problem. In asymmetrical warfare with nonstate actors, the tools of the modern state are inadequate or counterproductive. Conflict takes place with imperfectly known actors on their own imperfectly known terrain. Their reliance on hybrid, localized tactics, unpredictable by standard models, leaves the dominant actor paradoxically vulnerable.

The unfolding of the Iraq and especially the Afghan conflicts has opened the question of whether the intervening powers can reasonably expect to gain military, political, or even intellectual control of the situation. And their dependence on others – local authorities, civilians, and even insurgents -- in attempts to achieve any of these goals has become overwhelmingly clear.

A workshop held at Cambridge University in July 2009 examined the attempts of militaries in the United States and United Kingdom to draw upon academic expertise in implementing the counterinsurgency strategy. Mars Turns to Minerva: The Military, Social Science, and War in the 21st Century, organized by Tarak Barkawi and Josef Ansorge, identified a rush to establish both epistemological and on-the-ground control through the revival of colonial policing methods enhanced with sophisticated technologies and typically less sophisticated adaptations of social-scientific frameworks.

In this paired conference, we turn to the uses of uncertainty and informality, looking at interactions in the field through the eyes of NATO combatants, Provincial Reconstruction Teams, contractors, and diplomats; NGO workers; and, not least, Afghans themselves.

We explore how all of these actors strive to make sense of one another and of an evolving situation. We consider how their modes of improvisation and their ambivalence over appropriate strategy redound upon the conflict itself, organizational and personal choices, and the larger context in which international relations take shape. We ask what can be learned from vernacular perspectives and methods that are not amenable to codification.

Conference Outline

I. Precarity, Uncertainty, and Sense-Making in the Field

A. The interveners
This panel looks not at the makers of policy but at the interveners on the ground: field officers and combatants, NGO workers, diplomats and NATO officials. How do they prepare for contingencies, how do they react to surprises, to what unofficial channels do they resort for gathering information or communicating it? What kinds of flexibility open up -- or are shut down -- in interacting with local people? How do operations alter and missions creep? How do minds get changed in the field?

B. The intervened-upon
Here we consider how Afghans, accustomed to precarity and uncertainty, evaluate the NATO presence. We look at decision-making about the risks and opportunities of interacting with NATO forces as well as broader efforts to make sense of the situation, including information-gathering and the circulation of rumor, historical and geopolitical interpretations of occupier intent, and the impact of specific military actions.

II. Institutional Recuperations
How do militaries, IGOs, NGOs, and other organizations and their members attempt to recover a sense of predictability and control in situations where indeterminacy has become routine? How is the ideal of a "learning organization" realized in practice?

A. The paradigm shift
Incorporating collaboration, consultation, and local knowledge into intervention; how and why norms and doctrines of intervention change.

B. Translating field learning
How do interveners attempt to recapture experience in stable form? What is lost in translation? Is this loss inevitable? How does the informal reproduction of organizational knowledge differ from the formalization of "lessons learned"?

III. The Ohio State Veterans Learning Community: A Progress Report
This project responds to the State of Ohio GI Promise, which has contributed to the presence of more than 1200 veterans in the Ohio State undergraduate population. Susan Hanson, academic program coordinator for the Ohio State Veterans Learning Community, will discuss the project's approach to translating between field experience and academic modes of inquiry.

Student participants will talk about their experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. They will discuss how their habits and ideas were unsettled as they encountered military discipline and bureaucracies, foreign countries and people, and combat situations; their strategies for collecting information and making sense on the ground; their strategies for making sense of the larger experience after the return home.

IV. Destabilizations and Opportunities
How has the course of post-9/11 conflicts and nation-building efforts opened up organizational identities and foreign policy thinking?

A. For organizations
As the purpose, legitimacy, and viability of interventions -- military, humanitarian, developmental, and otherwise -- become ever more open to debate, how do interveners address internal divisions of opinion regarding both particular missions and organizational identity? What are the effects of deep-seated, and relatively public, differences within the U.S. military regarding appropriate doctrine? What are the effects of changing patterns of communication (or non-communication) between militaries, civilian interveners, and the general public? And, conversely, how have the Taliban regrouped themselves as an organization able to take advantage of uncertainty?

B. For foreign policy and international relations
How can policy makers and policy analysts learn to live with the "unknown unknowns"? Is the loss of predictability qualitatively different from the past? Is intervention still susceptible to cost-benefit analysis? Are other bases for decision-making emerging? Has the calculus of state power changed?

Dorry Noyes
Associate Professor of English, Comparative Studies, and Anthropology
The Ohio State University

Margaret Mills
Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
The Ohio State University