I had planned to blog on the subject topic last month in honor of Women’s History Month but fell behind in my planned schedule because of travel and focus on other issues. In December I participated in a Department of Defense sponsored Bloggers Roundtable on the role of Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan; and in February I participated in a Bloggers Roundtable on gender initiatives in the Afghan national security force and the role of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan (NTM-A) plays in those efforts.
Participating in the December roundtable were Colonel Chadwick W. Clark, Director, COIN Training Center-Afghanistan, NTM-A, Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) and Marine Colonel Sheila Scanlon, Adviser at the Afghan Ministry of Interior. According to an article on the NTM-A website on a lecture given by Dr. LisaRe Brooks to the Counterinsurgency Leader Course, “FETs are a culturally sensitive means of analyzing and affecting the silent fifty percent of the population that is relatively unstudied. FETs are NOT a feminist movement. FETs are geared towards studying Afghan women, figuring out how to improve their lives, and therefore improve the lives of the Afghan families.”
Colonel Clark stated there were a total of 80 trained females (as of December 2010) and a total of 40 teams deployed. Each team had a minimum of two females. They’re all volunteers with different professional skills and the training varies depending on where they will be assigned. Clark stated: “…the Marines that are employed in Helmand area go through four months of traing that includes combat skills or survivability skills to help them move, shoot and communicate. They go through classes on Pashtu culture and language, engagement techniques and phrases, observation techniques, atmospherics collection, tactical questioning, personnel searches and planning engagements. There are other FETs that are being used to partner with other Afghan National Army and police females in hospitals in Bagram. So they go through a seven day course that’s taught by the civil affairs and human-terrain team up in Bagram. ” Other nations operating in Afghanistan such as the United Kingdom have also set up FETs.
I asked what type of reaction had the FETs received from the Afghan women and did anyone ever ask why they were not at home with their children. Colonel Scanlon indicated that no one had ever asked her that and in fact she “had people thank me for leaving my husband and children back in the States and being over here. Everybody had been gracious.” Colonel Clark also emphasized “…all of the Female Engagement Teams that are employed undergo cultural sensitivity training so that they —if they’’re being employed in a village, or outside of the wire if they’re attached to somebody that’s doing a patrol, then they’re –we’re trying to do everything that is in line culturally with what’s going on here in Afghanistan.”
In an October 2009 blog in Foreign Policy Magazine, Thomas Ricks provided some valuable insights on the Fets.
“ The bottom line is that done right, this approach works surprisingly well, with benefits among the population that can’t be achieved by males. The findings run directly contrary to several assertions made in the comments reacting to my previous post on this subject.
First, Afghans don’t seem to mind the female teams. Paradoxically, “Female Marines are extended the respect shown to men, but granted the access reserved for women,” the report finds. “In other words, the culture is more flexible than we’ve conditioned ourselves to think.”
Second, the teams have been successful in reaching the other half of the population, one that carries disproportionate influence with the prime Taliban recruiting pool. “Local women wield more influence than many of us imagined-influence on their husbands, brothers, and especially their adolescent sons.”
When one patrol that took a FET with it was observed, the female Marines were invited inside several compounds, while the male Marines stayed outside. “And in each case, the FET succeeded in breaking the ice and getting women to open up and discuss their daily lives and concerns.” Nor was this an isolated event. When patrols returned, “we discovered some Afghan women had been anticipating the opportunity to meet American women. In one home, the women said they had caught glimpses of the patrolling FET through a crack in the wall and that they had ‘prayed you would come to us.'” The fact that the Afghan women welcomed return visits indicated that their men hadn’t punished them for speaking to Americans.
The women interviewed also had surprisingly diverse backgrounds. Though all impoverished now, some had once been prosperous. One group of young women reported that they had been held captive by the Taliban.
The interactions also seemed to change how some local men viewed the Marine presence. “One gentleman with a gray beard who opened his home to the FET put it this way: ‘Your men come to fight, but we know the women are here to help.'”
The blog was written in 2009 but I suspect the results of today are similar. Getting back to the Bloggers roundtable, responding to a question on if the women were involved in combat against current rules and regulations, Colonel Scanlon replied, “The women are in support of different groups that are down there. They’re not engaged in combat…I think any time any woman is near where there are bullets going off, somebody are going to make an issue about it because it goes back to the fundamental issue: do we want our women in combat?”
A recent Washington Post/ABC poll said 73% of Americans support allowing women in ground combat. Back in January CBS news put out an excellent report on the issue of whether women should be allowed in combat. There have been 2.2 million troops that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of that total more than 255,000 have been women. As of January, 134 women had died in these conflicts. The article also talks about the recommendations made by the Military Leadership Diversity Commission (MLDC). In their final report, released March 8, 2011 they concluded: “The MLDC found one overt barrier to advancement into senior leadership, the policy excluding women from combat. As such, the Commission recommends that DoD and the Services remove institutional barriers to open traditionally closed doors, especially those relating to assignments in both the initial career field assignments and subsequent assignments to key positions.” The committee had been commissioned by Congress and was made up both current and retired military officers.
Personally, I think it’s time to get rid of the last of the regulations restricting the role of women in the military. The reality is women are already serving in combat roles. What do you call women currently flying combat aircraft and serving on combat ships in support of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya? Some critics say women don’t have the strength and stamina needed for the roles. There are men who don’t have the strength and stamina to serve in the military. That is why the military sets fitness standards. No one would ever accuse me of being athletic yet while in the military during my later years I made it a point when taking the twice yearly physical fitness test to use the standards for men my age. The only time I had any problem with it was when the tests were given at the height of hay fever season. If you’ve read my blog, you know allergies are a real problem for me. I found it difficult to run while sneezing constantly with my nose running like a faucet. I passed but sometimes it got really ugly.
Other critics say inclusion of women will affect morale. That doesn’t hold water for me. Military training and practice puts out great effort teaching everyone the benefits of teamwork and unit cohesion. Others say women in combat would get raped by the enemy as well as their peers. Rape is a horrible crime but is not just a problem in the military. Additionally, women are not the only victims of rape. According to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network about 1 in 33 American men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. A total of 2.78 million men in the U.S. have been the victims of sexual assault or rape. I know of some instances during my time in the military where men were raped by other men. For some reason these cases don’t seem to rise up on the media radar.
Let’s get on with it. This is an idea whose time has come. As always, my views are my own. I’ll be following up on the gender initiatives in Afghanistan shortly.
