Mike is a authority on Afghanistan, conflict and strategy. He regularly writes and speaks on these matters.
Dr Mike Martin
Dr Mike Martin is a former British Army officer trained to fluency in Pushtu who pioneered, designed and implemented the British Military’s Cultural Advisor programme. This programme took Pushtu-speaking British officers and trained them to build relationships with local national notables and then leverage those relationships to understand and influence the society in which the UK military was operating. During this period, he also worked as an advisor to four commanders of the UK’s Task Force Helmand, advising them on local national population dynamics.
Mike subsequently read for his PhD at King’s College London in Conflict Studies (his undergraduate degree was Biological Sciences at Oxford). He wrote an oral history of the conflict in Helmand province, Afghanistan from 1978-2012, which he later turned into a critically-acclaimed book, An Intimate War (published by Hurst/OUP).
An Intimate War tells the story of thirty-five years of conflict in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of the Helmandis and describes how the UK and the US completely failed to understand the socio-political environment in Afghanistan.
Since leaving the army in 2012, Mike worked in Somaliland and Burma/Myanmar for a risk management company as Research Director. There, he set up a new division for the company that focussed on helping multinational clients understand and navigate the social, political and cultural environments in emerging markets and develop and hence develop the requisite strategy.
In-between times, he conducted the first crossing of the Congo River basin by LandRover since the 1960s.
Dr Mike Martin currently works as Global Communications and Marketing Director for Common Purpose, a leadership development not-for-profit organisation. He also consults and speaks on defence and security Issues, and comments in the international media, mostly on Afghanistan. Mike lives in London, where he is writing his next two books: one a history of the use of ideology in conflict, and the second: an account of his crossing of the Congo.