‘Human Terrain,’ Russian-Style
Danger Room
Noah Shachtman
U.S. forces’ use of social science to pacify war zones has become one of the hottest — and most controversial topics — in the military and academic communities. But long before the Army started embedding Human Terrain Teams in its Afghan combat units, Russia was “using social scientists to inform war policy and strategy” in Central Asia, notes the insightful Afghanistan-centered blog Ghosts of Alexander. And as you might expect, the results were often brutal.
As far back as the 1860’s, one Russian Governor-General was making “ethnographic knowledge ‘the core’ of his administrative policies in Turkestan,” Ghosts notes, in a post I’ve been meaning to flag for weeks.
In the mid-1990s, Russia used brute force, technology and massive arrests and detention in Chechnya in an attempt to subdue the separatists. Russia failed… [Then] a newly appointed nobody Prime Minister by the name of Vladimir Putin restarted the now better organized and better informed Russian army’s Chechen War efforts… [He started] allying with local traditional elites who had become antagonistic to the Islamists and foreign jihadis.
Chief among them: the thuggish Kadyrov clan, and its often-criminal paramilitary.
Akhmed Kadyrov became the President of Chechnya and ruled until be was assassinated in 2004. His son Ramzan, picture above, had been a long-time militia commander and, since the age of 30 in 2007, has been president. Again, this is a very simplistic and non-nuanced outline of events in Chechnya. But my point is that Russia made a decision based on the power realities on the ground (however distasteful) and informed by a blunt social science assessment of Chechen society.
[Photo: Photographer.ru]
