March 28, 2006
Soldiers and sexual geography
Why, after more than four years in Afghanistan, don't our soldiers speak more Pushtu?
Robert Kaplan hits the nail on the head in his latest, 
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground, regarding the intersection between language and culture, a preoccupation of 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet.
On page 235, Green Berets raid a compound near Gardez, and then interrogate one of the men living there. Kaplan reports:
As I left the compound, I noticed a counterintelligence officer interrogating one of the male inhabitants. They were both squatting against a section of mud wall illuminated by flashlights attached to the M-4s held by other Green Berets, who had formed a semicircle around the Afghan. He had a long white beard and brown hood over his pakol. He looked stoic, unafraid. The counterintelligence officer was asking him simple, stock questions in English: Had he seen anything suspicious? Who were his friends?Each question elicited a long conversation between the man and the terp. It was clear that the intelligence officer was missing a lot. He didn't speak Pushtu beyond a few phrases. Finally, all he could say to the man was "If you ever have a problem, come and see me at the firebase," as if the man would feel comfortable forsaking his kinsmen and trusting this most recent band of invaders passing through his land, invaders who couldn't even communicate with him.
Here was where the American Empire, such as it was, was weakest. With all of its technology and willingness to send the most enterprising of its soldiers to the most distant parts of the world, it was woefully incompetent in linguistic skills, especially in places and in situations where it counted the most. This was another neglected part of defense "transformation that had nothing to do with the latest weapons systems.
By contrast, U.S. soldiers training their counterparts in Colombia rattle away in Spanish, which many speak either as a native or second language. It's no surprise, of course, that many more Americans speak Spanish than Pushtu, but given the obvious benefit and necessity of getting good intelligence, we need to get up to speed on some languages that few of us know.
Kaplan's most intriguing theme is that the U.S. military has apparently decided that it is a lot cheaper and more effective to drive a wedge between groups like Al Queda and Latin guerrilla movements, and regular villagers around the world, by sponsoring dental and medical clinics and building wells and doing Peace Corps and non-governmental organization-type work. The theory is that if you have fixed a boy's broken leg, and trained a local army to provide real security, his father will never forget your help and will be loyal to you and not Al Queda.
Kaplan gives copious examples of such activities in the Phillipines, where clinics overlap with quiet gathering of intel via informal chitchat and observation, as well as in Lamu in Kenya and Mongolia. It will be fascinating to see the domain clash between the Peace Corps and NGOs over who gets to help the Third World.
"Imperial Grunts" also visits the Phillipines and identifies a number of issues relative to sexual geography. First, the obvious contrast between the burkha'd women of the Middle East and sassy Filipinas. Second, the way that sex tourism offers a viable economic alternative for poor people, a theme I explore in 
Romance on the Road. From pages 174-75 of "Imperial Grunts""
There were nearby strip joints with names like Muff Divers. Walking into them was like entering an octopus. Several sets of hands would suddenly be all over you, offering massages and more. The women were not down-and-out as one might expect. I interviewed Filipinas in their forties who looked considerably younger and had turned to sex to put children through good colleges and boarding schools. They had specific strategies for investments, future jobs, and cushy retirements. They were not strippers or prostitutes per se. The Philippines offered something subtler: "the girlfriend experience,'' it was called in Manila. There was an entire class of attractive Filipinus who made an excellent living, relative to the standards of the local economy, by becoming companions of Western men. Relationships lasted days, weeks, or months even. Couples were often loyal to each other. Such overtly sex-for-money relationships sometimes evolved into marriages. It was crude by the standards of the middle-class West, and yet quite sophisticated and discriminating by the standards of conventional prostitution.
This observation would also apply to the type of romance tourism practiced by the men in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and the world, for that matter.
Here's some more dandy observations on sexual geography, the dating war in the West and how Western men and women react quite differently to the undercurrents of Asia:
While the Philippines was an Eden without rival for Western males, for the same reason the wives of American servicemen harbored "a visceral hatred of the place," as one soldier observed. When Subic Bay and Clark Field were in operation as American bases, female spouses who came out here were often in an uproar when they saw what was going on. it led to real "morale problems," as the U.S. military would euphemistically put it: spousal screaming matches, divorces, and the like.
Now here is an observation that, while fascinating, is incomplete:
With the bases gone, soldiers interacted more with the locals. it wasn't ike the days of the old Pacific Army prior to World War II. But the situation had moved back a bit in that direction. The result, actually, was a better relationship with the immediate environment, a phenomenon which, in fact, has a basis in imperial history.In
Armies of the Raj, British military historian Byron Farwell writes that the opening of the Suez Canal, by allowing the wives of British officers in India to conveniently join their husbands, cut the officers off from native society, and became one of the contributing factors leading to the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 against British rule. "In all societies women have been the conservators of culture," Farwell explains. "When British women began to arrive in india in numbers, they brought with them British attitudes, British fashions, and British morality; they were soon imposing their ideas, standards, and customs upon their new environment." Consequently, British soldiers, many of whom had preferred to be orientalized themselves rather than to Christianize the Indians, now no longer went native, and a new divide opened between them and the locals.
This is excellent research on Farwell's part regarding an aspect of sexual geography. It reminds me of how Sir Richard Francis Burton extolled the virtues of learning a language via an area's prostitutes. Again, we see the importance of language to learning a culture, and the importance of sex (!) to learning a language! Given the devolution of the Indus Valley (modern-day Pakistan) and its regional neighbors from areas of wild sensuality during Burton's time to the burkha today, it doesn't seem our soldiers will be learning Pushtu from prostitutes, or even everyday women.
Yet OK, one quibble here. It was not the arrival of British "women" that inconvenienced the British officers in India -- it was the arrival of their wives. Plenty of British women arrived in areas of the Commonwealth -- India, Burma, South Africa -- and began carousing with locals, especially royalty. In fact, these women traveled during the Raj era to escape the domination of men at home, and would only feel constrained when British colonial men meddled in their freedom.
So Mr. Farwell -- what you describe was a two-way street!
- posted by jbelliveau at 7:31 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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