Adding Women to the Afghanistan War Strategy

Submitted by Taylor Wiles on March 11, 2010 - 12:23pm
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U.S. soldier speaks to Afghan women

General Stanley McChrystal, by way of his civilian-centric strategy for the war in Afghanistan, is experimenting. Thirty-nine female Marines are poised to deploy as "attachments" with an all-male infantry for the express purpose of gaining the trust of Afghan women. After training at Camp Pendleton, located just south of Los Angeles, the Marines will travel to rural villages in Afghanistan's most violent province.
 
Traditional Muslim culture in Afghanistan has consistently prohibited American troops from interacting with local women, but officers hope this new deployment will have better luck. The female Marines will work in five-person units called Female Engagement Teams (FETs), and will gather information about local political climate and how international troops can most effectively provide aid and protection in the area. In addition to undergoing a combat refresher, the female engagement teams have been trained on how to interact in safe zones; for starters, they will wear headscarves once they remove their helmets in women's homes.
 
This new deployment comes with a recent history. Ad hoc female units have been periodically thrown together for the past year, and have been hugely successful in gaining the trust of both male and female Afghans. In a New York Times op-ed last fall, former U.S. Army officer Paula Broadwell wrote, "Afghans purportedly view these American women as a 'third gender'—female marines are extended the respect shown to men, but granted the access reserved for women."
 
Still, these teams will likely face significant obstacles. The Small Wars Journal has published an essay (pdf), in which Captain Matt Pottinger, who co-founded the first FET, and two cultural advisers—one, a Pashtun-American who’s been at the job for two decades—lay out challenges for the future of FET deployments. Here, they say, are the most important limiting factors to their success:

  • Die-hard presumptions by battlefield commanders that engaging local women will pay no dividends.
  • Hackneyed hypotheses that female engagement will offend most Pashtun men.
  • A failure to involve FETs in the planning stage of operations, leading to poorly conceived missions.
  • An unwillingness to establish full-time FETs made up of volunteers who are given the resources and time to train as professionals should.

It’s old news that our military culture has sufficient faith in technological superiority—$780 billion of faith, to be exact—and not much in low-tech problem-solving. A little ironic when we consider the impact of the IEDs, which are made from scraps, that have killed nearly 1,000 coalition troops so far. This FET movement comes as a welcome challenge to misconceptions that have kept coalition troops from making sustained progress against the Taliban.
 
And this Afghanistan war strategy certainly seems more relevant when a Marine commander says that Afghan women “know who is doing what, who should and should not be in the area. They talk around the well or while they are collecting firewood about the news they have heard from their husbands [and their kids].” And female American units have already gained access to “important information about local personalities, economics, grievances, as well as about the enemy,” writes Pottinger.
 
Kudos, McChrystal. Now if we could just get some more people who speak Pashto.
 
Read more on the evolving Afghanistan war strategy here.
 
(Photo credit: Spc. Christopher Nicholas/U.S. Army)