Female Engagement Teams: Informing operations today
POLICY BRIEF
Dr Hannah West EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Female Engagement Teams (FETs) remain a tactical asset on UN and NATO Human Security operations today. Under the remit of Human Security Advisers, the British Army continues to train Troop Contributing Nations in their implementation, deploying them on the UN missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali. Since their introduction in Afghanistan, they have become an international model for practising gender perspectives on the ground and satisfying the Women, Peace and Security agenda set out in UNSCR 1325. And yet, there has never been a strategic pause to review their long history and ask the question of why as well as how. Not only this, but FETs provide a case study in Human Security operations, the lessons of which have direct application to Human Security Advisers training and operating today. The FET mission in Afghanistan was to ‘directly engage Afghan men and women, build trust and influence the Afghan population in order to support the battlespace owner’s intent’ (Land Warfare Centre, 2011, p.2). At an important juncture in the debate surrounding Women in Ground Close Combat (WiGCC), women soldiers were deployed on patrol, wanted there for being women. The seemingly positive rhetoric surrounding the British Army’s decision to introduce them can be attributed to two arguments directed at different audiences. For an internal audience, the British Army employed the argument that they contributed to operational effectiveness bringing military utility in terms of understanding, influencing and intelligencegathering. To an external audience, the British Army justified the introduction of FETs as protecting and empowering Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s treatment of women, thus reinforcing political rhetoric and media narratives used to justify the intervention in Afghanistan nearly a decade earlier. On both counts the British Army were visibly reinforcing a message that they welcomed the introduction of FETs. However, this research argues that FETs were set up to fail or ‘invisibly undermined’ by a British Army, uncomfortable with increasing the presence of servicewomen on the ‘front line’ and the threat this posed to the masculine heart of the Armed Forces embodied by the male infanteer. Institutional resistance manifested in giving them unclear objectives and inadequate training and resourcing that put lives at unnecessary risk. Applying a discourse of exceptionalism to a few servicewomen enabled the remainder
to be dismissed, surrounded by an enduring narrative of incompetence. And yet, in order to attempt to fulfil their assigned roles, female counterinsurgents negotiated to get themselves out on patrol, presenting themselves in ways that downplayed their ‘female engagement’ credentials and foregrounded their military utility as medics and linguists. Driven by the interest of a number of senior officers in their new weapon system, exposure and reporting increased but without understanding and analysis. The British Army have constructed an enduring story of FETs in Afghanistan as a failed concept, at best ‘a good idea that didn’t really work out’. This is not based on their performance because attempts to measure their effect were limited, compounded by insufficient operational record keeping and a failure to retain a repository of these records, resulting in an over-reliance on limited sources. Fundamentally, the employment of FETs by the British Army failed to acknowledge the implications of implementing an operational practice, underpinned by understandings of gender, without looking internally to critique the gendered character of the institution trying to deliver it. This policy brief outlines how FETs were established and employed. The findings are structured in terms of the contrast between their visible welcoming and the ways in which they were invisibly undermined.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (United Nations, 2000) The words of Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair were influential in painting a picture of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ (Wiegand, 2007, cited by Syed and Ali, p.358, Clinton, 2001), ‘”backward”, “traditional” and expectantly waiting to be saved’ (Manchanda, 2020, p.177), simply ‘someone in need of saving’ (Abu-Lughod, 2002 p.788). 1
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Female Engagement Teams
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