Honestly, I am quite surprised that they managed to get up the memoriam page for Paula Loyd so quickly. My understanding of .mil sites is that there is usually a 3-4 week delay in any changes and that they have to be approved (usually by people with no understanding of what they are saying). It’s worse than dealing with Treasury Board here in Canada (and THAT is saying a lot)!

I’ve never really felt that the “they knew what they were signing up for” line held much water for most of the social scientists involved. There probably was an intellectual understanding but, let’s face it, most of us have never been under fire. We may “know” intellectually, but we don’t “know” in our guts and we certainly don’t have the trained physical responses to handle it. And that is only considering the immediate environment…

Honestly, I’m still mulling over the ongoing HTS story, but I think you are right that it raises all sorts of new questions (although I suspect that what those are differs between us :-) ).

In the meantime, HTS has created a story that raises all sorts of new questions thanks to its very many gaps and contradictions. They were late in putting it up, and now it seems like it was also done in haste nonetheless.

Just a quick comment on whether or not the HTS personnelle may be being targeted. I would be VERY surprised if they aren’t. Whether or not they might be considered as combatants under international law, they are certainly considered as such under the AQ / Taliban interpretation of Islamic law. More prosaicly, such strikes would have a really solid symbolic resonance with both their own potential recruits and with Western concepts. In other words, they can kill two birds with one stone by targeting HTS personnelle.

Let me start with the first part. If there is active Taliban targeting of HTS, then I seriously and sincerely fear what the next attacks might look like. The attack on Loyd was intended to be graphic and shocking, and my suspicion is that it was a mere matter of logistics that prevented the Taliban from video taping it. The next attack might see a HTS member getting kidnapped and something just as awful, or even worse (if that is conceivable), being done on video for the Internet audience. With the seemingly insatiable capacity for voyeurism in our society, you know that many would look at the video, even if just to post their comments — “these animals, slaughter them!” — to exercise their emotions and their nationalism.

Following from that is the question whether civilian social scientists on Human Terrain Teams can ever get paid enough, when they incur such risks. There is the contradiction: I have frequently criticized the extraordinary payment levels, noting this is intended to lure people to sign up. However, when an attack such as the one on Loyd occurs, the question is whether any financial compensation could ever have been “enough” since it involves pricing a human life. That would apply to any soldier as well — and if you aim for compensation that matches something invaluable as a human life, you end up with an army of one, in permanent debt. In other words, the military does not just cheapen the life of others, it cheapens the life of its own, as a matter of course.