Terrain as insurgent weapon: An affective geometry of warfare in the mountains of Afghanistan

Sensing Landscape as a Media Object

“…Esto desencadenará uno de los costos más violentos de la guerra. Las fuerzas de la coalición observarán cómo el terreno montañoso y densamente cubierto de bosques que conocían previamente mediante una experiencia remota -como un telón de fondo para la acción cinética-, se convertirá en una de las armas más letales al momento de sumergirse en el suelo durante la guerra (Gordillo, 2018). Como argumenta Gordillo a partir del caso del valle de Korengal, el terreno es irreducible a una mera geometría o superficie computable, y únicamente se vive en toda su complejidad a través de experiencias corporales, afectos y la agencia de los actores humanos que residen en él (2018).…”

“…Pese a la relevancia cada vez mayor de la fenomenología del paisaje (Tilley, 1994) en el desarrollo del trabajo en terreno, el problema de accesibilidad que generan diversos obstáculos políticos o ambientales (Franklin & Hammer, 2018) ha dado paso a mejoras radicales en las tecnologías mediales de percepción remota que buscan emular viajes desde grandes distancias. El propio hecho de que un analista habite en el terreno de una estación de control a varios kilómetros de distancia del paisaje real desafía tanto el concepto de "localidad" como el de "sitio", ya que está detectando (sintiendo) activamente they earlier knew only in remote experience as a backdrop for kinetic action, became itself one of the deadliest weapons when immersed on-theground in the war (Gordillo, 2018). Terrain, as Gordillo argues through the case of Korengal Valley, is irreducible to a mere geometry or a computable surface and experienced in all its complexity only through bodily experiences, affects, and agency of the human actors that reside in it (2018).…”

Territory incognita

“…This can be witnessed at ground level with recent studies into the volatile, intractable ‘more-than-human landscape’ of terrain, which ‘may impede or disrupt a state’s vision, navigation, or administrative practice’ (Boyce, 2016: 246). Focusing on mountain warfare in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, Gordillo (2018: 55) argues that terrain has been understudied as a textured, volumetric entity that exceeds territorial appropriation, often being ‘intrinsically opaque’ to combatants and curtailing movement and vision in unequal ways: ‘Terrain was for [Americans] a hostile and restricting materiality whereas for insurgents it was the opposite’. Gregory (2016: 5) draws on the experiences of soldiers fighting in the world wars and Vietnam to illustrate how different materialities of ‘trickster nature’ – mud, desert and rainforest – impact on conflicts in unforeseen ways, revealing the limits of state strategy.…”

“…This concerns the tangible thereness of territory as a ‘tactile’ or ‘haptic’ space (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004), which is reinterpreted as an active force impressing upon human bodies, hampering or facilitating their movement, altering their moods. As Gordillo (2018: 55) contends, the rugged, mountainous territory of Afghanistan had ‘affective power’ over combatants, instilling a profound despondency in the American troops. Similarly, Gregory (2016) distinguishes between cartography and ‘corpography’, where the latter refers in his example to the adverse embodied reaction of soldiers faced with the fatal monotony of mud.…”

Driving in terrain

“…Like American combatants in the Middle East (Gordillo ), drivers used the word terrain ( mestnost’ ) to remind each other and their (civilian and anthropologist) friends that modern controls and conveniences can disappear or be rendered useless by the world's complex, shifting, and opaque materiality. To a cartographer, Russia's interior may look flat, but the driver knows intimately the depth of its mud and the thickness of its forests.…”