Below is the abstract of my essay "Terrain as Insurgent Weapon: An Affective Geometry of Combat in the Valley of Death," which I'll present at the workshop Space, Materiality, and Violence, at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, in late March. This is my most thorough attempt yet to theorize terrain, based on how the mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, affected warfare in the region. I'm really looking forward to this workshop, which will bring together among the best thinkers in the field, such as Eyal Weizman (our keynote speaker), Derek Gregory, Craig Jones, Caren Kaplan, Jake Kosek, Léopold Lambert, Catherine Lutz, and Shaylih Muehlmann.
In April 2010, a local insurgency forced the US military to
withdraw from the Korengal Valley in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan,
which US soldiers called “the valley of death.” Most accounts of violence in
the Korengal —captured in the documentaries Restrepo
and Korengal and in first-hand depictions by soldiers and journalists— highlight
that the rugged, opaque, vertical terrain played a decisive role in allowing
insurgents to locally defeat the mightiest military on Earth. But what,
exactly, is terrain? How were insurgents able to turn terrain into an effective
weapon against a much more powerful enemy? While military analysts have long
been aware of the importance of terrain in warfare, the term tends to be
discussed in vague and descriptive terms. Likewise, with a few exceptions,
“terrain” remains largely un-theorized in the humanities.
In this paper, I draw on the rich
material available on insurgent violence in the Korengal to articulate a theory of terrain, whose
departing point is that terrain’s materiality is not reducible to social
constructions and can be best understood through a geometrical examination of
bodies in motion. In particular, I conceptualize terrain through a series of
axiomatic principles: that terrain is defined by a multiplicity of forms that
are plastic and modifiable; that terrain is intrinsically opaque to human
perception (even to seemingly "all-seeing" technologies such as
drones); that the materiality of terrain is not fixed but adopts different
levels of ambient thickness related to the temporal becoming of our
planet —and its daily and seasonal rhythms— as an
object in motion; and that terrain has a three-dimensional verticality profoundly
affected by gravity. Drawing on the experience of soldiers and journalists
based in the Korengal, I analyze how the local insurgency adapted to, and
manipulated, these dimensions of terrain to outmaneuver the US military and
counter its technological superiority. I look at this spatiality of insurgent violence
through the lens of an affective geometry: i.e. an examination of how multiple
bodies, including human bodies engaged in combat, affected each other amid the
forms, angles, textures, verticality, and temporal becoming of the forested
mountains of Afghanistan.
