Research Fellow Christopher Griffin

On May 7, Michael Bhatia was killed when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee in Khowst province, Afghanistan. The blast also killed two soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, but Bhatia was not one of them--he was a scholar, part of the Human Terrain System project that was advising the brigade in its efforts to quell the Taliban insurgency.

The Human Terrain System was established in 2006 at the behest of military commanders who recognized that a lack of knowledge about social organization in Afghanistan and Iraq was undermining counterinsurgency efforts there. Under the direction of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, the project deployed its first team to Afghanistan last year and has sent four more there and to Iraq as a proof-of-concept operation. The purpose of the project is to deploy civilian anthropologists in support of U.S. brigade combat teams (BCTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq, where BCTs provide military commanders with socio-cultural knowledge in an effort to better work with civilian populations and minimize the use of force that may undermine the counterinsurgency.

Perfect Candidate

By training and disposition, Bhatia seems to have been a perfect candidate for the human terrain system program. A 31-year-old anthropologist at the time of his death, Bhatia spent his life studying Afghanistan and published a book on post-war disarmament there a month before he died. Described by one friend as an "Indiana Jones" type, Bhatia had conducted research in Algeria, Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan before and after the fall of the Taliban. If there was any expert who could have made a substantive contribution to the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, it was him.

Bhatia's death came at a time when the Human Terrain System is the subject of a heated controversy within the anthropological community, where it is viewed as an infringement upon the field's ethics. In a late 2007 press statement, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) condemned the Human Terrain System Project, describing it as an "unacceptable application of anthropological expertise" that puts the lives of anthropologists and the people they study at risk.

This view was stated far more caustically by Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who denounced the program at an AAA meeting last year as "a form of hit-man anthropology where anthropologists, working on contract to organizations that often care nothing for the welfare of our anthropological subjects, prostitute their craft by deliberately earning the trust of our subjects with the intent of betraying it."

Given this vitriolic response by the anthropological community, the Human Terrain System program has been at risk from its inception, as young scholars who would participate risk being blackballed in their field.

According to blogs maintained by his friends, one of Bhatia's great talents was getting to the heart of any matter he was discussing, as he did in a photo essay published in August. He noted in the essay that he was compelled to write about "experiences and ideas that cannot be placed into analytical paradigms, which do not speak to theories of war or peace, to destruction or to reconstruction, but instead to daily interactions."

The American view of Afghanistan, he said, should "incorporate both realities" of the place as a war zone but also a place where normal people go about their daily lives, going to school and the market, tending to their gardens.

Saving Afghan Lives

Given his talent for seeing the heart of things, it is little surprise that even after his death, Bhatia still brings clarity to the mission in Afghanistan. Two weeks before Bhatia was killed, Col. Martin P. Schweitzer, the commander of the brigade that he served in, described the contributions of the human terrain team to the House Armed Services Committee. Schweitzer credited the team with helping to reduce the brigade's lethal operations by 70 percent, more than quintupling the number of Afghan districts that now support the government in Kabul, and cutting Afghan civilian deaths by more than 80 percent compared with the previous brigade's tour in Khowst province.

What type of knowledge could save so many lives? Schweitzer notes that after his human terrain team recommended redirecting outreach efforts from village elders to the mullahs in one village, the new approach resulted in the capture of more than 100 Taliban and foreign fighters, and a cessation of attacks from the village in question.

With the exception of the Small Wars Journal, Bhatia's death went largely unnoticed among military blogs but elicited an outpouring of grief by several civilian bloggers who knew him as a friend or colleague. When Seth Rosler, who attended college with Bhatia and now blogs from Providence, R.I., wrote about the loss, his post elicited dozens of comments by fellow mourners. Cliff Slike, a soldier who served with Bhatia in Afghanistan, deserves to be quoted at length:

"I and my fellow soldiers honor his courage and commitment. His amazing knowledge, skills and abilities. His professionalism and dedication to finding a way to reduce violence and save lives. That is why he is a hero to us. . . . He stood up when others remained seated. He stepped forward when others criticized from afar. He put into practice and helped people understand each other. Hopefully, his legacy will inspire others to take an active role in saving lives and not sit on the sidelines."

It seems unlikely that Bhatia's death will inspire the American Anthropological Association to change its assessment of the human terrain system. But as William Francis Butler observed, a nation that insists on separating its soldiers and its scholars will likely find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards. Bhatia was neither--he was a hero who died bridging that gap.

Christopher Griffin is a research fellow at AEI.