Crossing The Wire: One Woman's Unlikely Journey To The Afghan War, And Her Surprising Revelations About The Dangers We Face ~ AnnaMaria Cardinalli

The Human Terrain System is group of individuals hired by the United States Army. I include their definition here to ensure the best understanding possible.
"The Human Terrain System develops, trains, and integrates a social science based research and analysis capability to support operationally relevant decision-making, to develop a knowledge base, and to enable sociocultural understanding across the operational environment."

The Human Terrain System (HTS) has piqued my interest for several reasons since its inception. I was in my second year of sitting anthropology and we debated the topic twice in one my classes. The first time in terms of ethics (i.e. an institution with strong biases hiring people who should be unbiased to collect and analyse cultural data), the second time in terms of safety for the social scientists, the communities being analysed, the military and the insurgents. We knew that the debates were flawed as we only had a portion of the information needed to comprehensively argue any point. What we had were journalistic accounts and opinion pieces, and our own thoughts on ethics and biases. What we were missing were the thoughts and opinions from members of the HTS and members of the communities being researched. I don't know if there are any English offerings about the latter, but this book deals with the former.

Set mostly in a diary format, with narratives of the author's pre-HTS history, AnnaMaria Cardinalli gives us a glimpse of what being a female member of the HTS was like, particularly after a member had succumbed to burn injuries after being doused with petrol and set alight. Cardinalli begins by explaining that one of the motivations for writing the book was to clarify information she felt was either misrepresented or taken out context by the press and some government institutions. What she ultimately discovers is that when wanting to dominate, a society will redefine acts (in this case sexual) and abuses to justify the subjugation of women and the young.

While it takes a while to get to her conclusions, she is able to relate nearly all of her own experiences to her revelations. This might seem odd initially, but how women are treated in male dominated areas within Western societies (i.e. the military, media and within the law) are not so far from those she uncovered in Afghanistan. I'm not sure if she meant to actually note this implicitly or if it's accidental, but while the dangers are couched as a way of understanding the cultural situation in parts of Afghanistan, it seems quite the allegorical statement for our own part of the world.

I didn't always agree with some of her opinions on the justifications for the HTS, but her well balanced arguments and documented conclusions are hard to argue. For that reason, I'm thankful for having been given the opportunity to review Cardinalli's work, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for information on gender issues generally, but of parts of Afghanistan specifically, or for those seeking the perspective of a member from the Human Terrain System.

This is the part where I disclose that I was awarded a copy of this e-version of the novel by the publisher through Netgalley.

Review originally appeared on the now defunct Paternoster Row Legacy blog.