WASHINGTON: A long-simmering problem of the US armed forces abroad is about to get worse. That is the relation of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen to local populations around the world. It stems from the insensitivity of the Americans to different cultures and habits.

This recently erupted into prominence when Lt. Col. Martha McSally, the Air Force’s highest-ranking woman fighter pilot, sued Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia prescribed an off-base dress code for Air Force women: They had to be covered head-to-toe.

The Pentagon has since caved on this issue, but not without arousing protests from Islamic clerics and Saudi Arabia’s Department of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

This kind of culture clash has been a source of friction around the world for more than 50 years. It goes beyond dress and beyond the armed forces.

In Yemen, FBI agents investigating the attack on the USS Cole alienated their Yemeni counterparts so much that the US ambassador threatened to bar the FBI agents from the country.

In Okinawa, Japan, where the local people never wanted the US anyway (America is there only by sufferance of the government in Tokyo), major incidents have been caused by Marine rapes of Okinawan girls. Marines are supposedly the best disciplined of all US armed forces; yet their commanders cannot keep a few of them from brutalizing residents.

Although some of their behaviour is deeply offensive, particularly where matters of religion or personal safety are concerned, American troops abroad also bring economic benefits. The US spends large sums on base construction, providing local employment. The troops themselves spend money on off-base entertainment, but some of this is undesirable: Unsavoury bars and prostitutes tend to proliferate around bases. Hence in some countries, notably the Philippines, attitudes toward the American military are ambivalent.

In policy statements by officials from the president down and in actions by the armed services, the United States gives abundant evidence that it is moving into Central Asia to stay.

The Defence Department has argued for years that this programme cements military-to-military relationships, but as Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently said, its “function may be more political than actually military.” This makes it all the more important that the American participants behave with due respect to the sensitivities of the population. The problem is how to ensure that troops do that. It is easy enough to expect them not to brutalize people; that should be taken for granted to begin with. But not many 18- or 20-year-old kids from Iowa or the streets of Chicago know the behaviour required by a respect for the Muslim culture.

The Army, Navy, or Air Force don’t care about that. They are interested in training recruits to fight a modern war. Now it turns out that a modern war may require the troops to know enough about alien cultures, at a minimum, to avoid offensive behaviour. So as war becomes more complicated, so does preparation for it.—Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor News Service.