I was intrigued to read in today's Seattle Times that the Marines are forming and training "Female-Engagement Teams." These will be teams of four or five enlisted women Marines (WMs) whose mission it will be to try to win the hearts and minds of Afghan women living in traditional villages, which bar women from speaking with men outside their families. As part of their cultural sensitivity training, these WMs are being told to allow their pony tails to stick out from behind their helmets, so that the villagers will be able to tell that they are women; to wear head scarves under their helmets, or to don them upon removing their helmets; and to make small talk (through an interpreter, of course) and to play with the children before asking direct questions. According to the article, the main question they are to ask is what the village most needs.
Talk about "deja vu all over again," this was the very same question that we in Combined Action were supposed to ask in an effort to ingratiate ourselves with the people in traditional Vietnamese villages. As I recall, when we asked this question at Papa Three, the answer was "nothing." The village chief couldn't think of anything the village needed that we could provide.
I wish the dedicated women Marines volunteering for this endeavor well. I really do. But I do have to wonder about two possible impediments.
First, is the traditional Afghan culture as xenophobic as the village culture of Vietnam in the 1960s? If so, Afghan women are not likely to open up to young American women, especially women who have embraced roles essentially alien and perhaps unimaginable to Afghan women.
Second, I wonder if Afghan villages have a well-entrenched enemy infrastructure largely invisible to us, such as we faced in Vietnam? Even if they don't, these Female-Engagement Teams, and the grunts accompanying them, are only passing through. They're not settling in to say. ("Clearing and Holding" is the phrase for it.) Hence, the village women may be afraid to open up to these WMs, knowing that the Taliban could soon return to punish even the appearance of collaboration.
The article also mentions that these WMs will be armed with M-4 rifles, a shortened version of the standard M-16s carried by the men. The subtext seems to be that the smaller M-4, in this case, is gender appropriate. Should they also be pink?
Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. But, on a serious note, I see a mixed message that may undercut the mission here. On the one hand, these women are supposed to be putting a kinder, gentler face on our presence. On the other hand, they are dressed and armed like warriors. Can these two roles really be reconciled? It occurs to me that this was essentially our liability in CAP. We were supposed to be both warriors and ambassadors in green. But in our case, at least, the disconnect was not accentuated by gender.
I worry that our cultural overtures in Afghanistan are grounded in the same naive presupposition that led to our defeat in Vietnam--namely, that, deep down inside, people everywhere are just like us. It's just not true. You'd think we would have learned that by now. --EFP
