Synopsis
Human Terrain is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. militaryinitiates ’Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. The film takes the viewer into the heart of the war machineand a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military. The other story is about a brilliant young scholarMichael Bhatia. In the course of conducting research on military culturalawareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. At some point, he makes the decision to mediate an intertribal dispute.