Afghanistan and Hotel Rouge

I was in Washington, DC for a computational social science conference, SBP2014, and stayed at the Hotel Rouge, which features numerous Venus statues (Veni?), cheetah and zebra robes, and a very cool restaurant, the “Bar Rouge.” I spent the week having friends and colleagues over for dinner at “The Rouge,” which is only two doors down from the Kazakhstan embassy, and generally having a great time on Embassy Row.

On Thursday night, I invited Frank Ritter of Penn State over, who I had only talked to a few times while he was on sabbatical, but we had never really had the chance to hang out and talk. On a wonderful spring evening, we settled into Bar Rouge, ordered some Stella Artois Cidre, which in my opinion is surprisingly good, and started chatting. Frank had given a great talk on the use of computerized moving targets for shooting instruction, so we talked about that for a while, and then he asked me about Afghanistan.

Two years ago I had gone to Kabul to work as a quantitative counterinsurgency (COIN) analyst for the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) based on some work I did for DARPA, which some people find sort interesting. Professionally, I’m a recovering academic because after having published my political economy thesis with a semi-reputable press, I couldn’t get a job as a professor. In the late 1990s, applying computational techniques to political problems was viewed skeptically, though now they have conferences on it. In 2011 though, SOCOM thought I could help blend politics and economics with security within a single analytic framework as required by COIN theory. After having earned two degrees in international relations, which primarily concerns the study of war, the idea of actually going to a warzone and applying what I had learned and hopefully making a difference to the war effort was exciting. People asked how I could go, but I wondered how I could not go. I have always been interested in the special operations community, so the opportunity to observe it up close was one to be taken seriously. I left for Afghanistan in August 2011 and returned in March 2012.

Fueled by Stella Cidre, I told Frank about my adventures in Afghanistan. I had become reluctant to talk about my time there not because of any trauma that occurred but because when I got back I had to perform immediately on a DARPA program and most people don’t really want to hear about what happened because it’s just so foreign and remote from their day-to-day interests and experiences. Frank though was very polite, listened, seemed genuinely interested, and he even asked questions from time to time. His encouragement and a few Cidres were all I need to tell stories for hours.  When I was done – or more accurately, when they closed the bar – Frank suggested that I write these stories down. I remember a cartoon from the ‘70s showing a self-involved and pretentious guy deep in thought with the caption, “After sailing across the Atlantic, Bill decides not to write about it,” and that’s the way I felt about my time Afghanistan. That is, everybody who comes back from war has a story, and after having read many of them, I’m not sure the world needed mine. But Frank’s enthusiasm was infectious, and he convinced me to write some of them down, at least enough to see if there’s some “there” there.