And here’s one really big question: can aid ever really be “neutral,” as Medicins Sans Frontieres claims? If it can, that obviously lends itself to a conclusion one should draw about the military’s involvement in humanitarianism. But if it cannot, then doesn’t that beg the question of why we should care that the military is doing this?

Another question for the queue: how do you think the non-military NGOs can regain some of their “lost ground?” What are your ideas for repairing the balance between them?

No no, I was just making sure to thank him!

Nathan, I want to thank you profusely for the chat today. I hope we all can walk away having learned something new and refined our thinking!

An honest accounting of the tasks HTTs do tells me you can probably train a small corps of uniformed servicemen to do the tasks. I can also say, however, that in many places having obvious civilians not in a uniform do this work was very helpful for us getting candid answers when speaking to Afghans.

On the analytic side… well, that’s a separate issue and probably grounds for a more detailed chat elsewhere.

In his recent testimony, General Petraeus repeated a concern SecDef Gates and Adm. Mullen have all noted before: the need for more funds at the State Department and USAID. Is throwing money at the problem really the right answer?

That’s funny! When I was in HTS, it was at the height of its dispute with the American Anthropological Association. As a result, they were adamant that we not “do intel.” In fact, calling it “white intel” (really, “green intel,” since we were supposed to focus on the “green” population, which is the civilian non-combattants) kind of distorts what we did, even if what we did amounted to gathering intelligence in the sense of gathering and analyzing information for the government.

The purpose of HTS, originally, was to figure out what the local population wants, and in a secondary or tertiary sense “unravel” the networks that supported IED facilitators. It was not originally designed to follow up on CERP projects, though in the field HTTs often reported on incidents of corruption that they witnessed or encountered.

Question to queue up for later: Paul Brinkley, the chief of the DOD’s Task Force for Business & Stability Operations, recently announced that he will resign effective June 30 as his office’s functions get transferred to State and USAID. He said humanitarian organizations cannot effectively encourage business development. But did the TFBSO do that, anyway? Was Brinkley an effective agent for entrepreneurship, and even if he was, shouldn’t that be the job of the civilians and not the military?

What’s your vision for how the civilian side of the government can get better at the humanitarian missions demanded of it? Can they ever replace the military at doing this kind of work?

Oooh, that reminds me. You have a whole section devoted to Barnett’s theories of, for lack of a better term, imperial humanitarianism. What’s your take on his influence on military thinking? Is he why we’re now intervening in Libya, because we’re connecting the “gap” back to the global system, or whatever?

I agree with Nathan’s logic, that right now Libya is fluid and there’s no indication yet that there are grand international designs for a massive nation-building effort. Frankly, I hope not, because as Nathan catalogues in his book, we are REALLY bad at this stuff.

I’ll let Nathan answer this how he sees fit. For my part, I’d place much more of the blame on the people the Bush Admin chose to do the job. Think of the passages in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran where he catalogues the ideological tests used for college students to run Iraqi ministries. There was no concern for competence, so I don’t think we can judge the merit of the idea based on an administration choosing not to even try it.

That doesn’t mean the concept is valid, mind you, just that it wasn’t really tried in the early days of Iraq.

Scarecrow, I think there’s a bit of distance between “the free market ideologues,” as you put it, and the actual behavior of a normal free economic market. The ideologues, ironically, really didn’t believe in free markets when you think about it — at least, given their reliance on no-bid contracts and a sort of anti-market mercantilism driven by nationalism.

A lot of the intentional business development work in Iraq has been in the form of U.S. companies investing in and in some cases assuming control of national state-run corporation. That’s not really free market, but it has been successful at keeping a lot of people employed.

I’ve been practicing. #Usethefierce

I think that’s a good point. So, to open an old can of worms between us, how would then gauge the creation of organizations like the Human Terrain System? Almost every Combattant Command now has a human terrain analysis shop, and each service is standing up cultural analysis centers and adding cultural understanding career tracks. How does that help or hurt our ability to do well at the task of nation-building?

This is unacceptable. Should we reschedule?

Here’s a different track: in a lot of ways, your book is the continuation of Dana Priest’s “The Mission,” which chronicled the expansion of the military’s nation-building activities throughout the 1990s. Do you see any end in sight for the DOD’s statecraft?

I’m glad to be here, and really looking forward to it.

Welcome to the Book Salon! Nathan, I wanted to penetrate right to the heart of the matter. The thrust of your book is the story of the military’s rather turgid response to the need for nation-building. Can you give us a quick one-liner of how they’re handling it in the once-again forgotten war, Afghanistan?