1 man’s odyssey from campus to combat in Afghanistan

1 man’s odyssey from campus to combat
Michael Bhatia loved Afghanistan, and he lost his life there — the first social scientist to die in a controversial Pentagon experiment that teams soldiers and scholars. This story is the first of two parts.
By Adam Geller - The Associated Press
Posted : Saturday Mar 14, 2009 9:44:30 EDT

MEDWAY, Mass. — On the overcast New England morning Michael Bhatia came home, nearly 400 of his colleagues, family and friends turned out to meet him.

Seven months had passed since Bhatia, a 31-year-old scholar in international relations from Brown University, hefted his pack across the tarmac at Fort Benning, Ga., ready to begin his sixth journey to Afghanistan.

Every trip had come with risks, but this one was the toughest to explain. No one questioned Bhatia’s commitment to Afghanistan, but many disagreed sharply with the way he’d chosen to pursue it.

“I am already preparing for both the real and ethical minefields,” he e-mailed friends, hours before boarding.

Bhatia was joining the Human Terrain System, a Pentagon experiment to re-engineer the battle against Afghan and Iraqi insurgents by teaming soldiers and scholars. Human Terrain set off a war of its own in the academic world: Critics, particularly anthropologists, argued that Human Terrain researchers could not serve two masters — that they risked betraying the people they studied by feeding information to the military.

Bhatia disagreed. But the only way to know, he told friends, was to see for himself.

Even skeptical colleagues looked forward to the conclusion of his journey: If anybody could thread the ethical minefield, it was Mike.
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