http://www.counterpunch.org/price02032009.htmlCounterinsurgency, Anthropology and Disciplinary Complicity
By DAVID PRICE
During the spring and summer of 2007 word began circulating of a new military program designed to draw upon anthropological theory, field methods and personnel in theatres of military battles and occupation. As anthropologists' concerns over the program grew, mainstream media outlets availed themselves for a cascade of fawning uncritical personality profiles and news pieces selling the American public on the idea that more culturally nuanced forms of military occupation would lead to victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. While different branches of the military have a number of anthropologically informed programs, the Human Terrain System (HTS) has become the most visibly controversial program because of the ethical and political problems it creates (and ignores) by embedding social scientists with battlefield troops. Since it was conceived in 2006, the Pentagon has allocated nearly $200 million for HTS.
When the details of the HTS first became publicly known, Roberto González, associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, wrote a series of articles appearing the Royal Anthropological Institute's journal Anthropology Today, CounterPunch, and Z Magazine critically analyzing the political, ethical, and military problems with Human Terrain. González is a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and has been at the forefront of debates on Human Terrain within the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He has also introduced AAA resolutions denouncing the Iraq War and the use of anthropological knowledge for coercive interrogations and torture.
González's book, American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, has just been published in Marshall Sahlins's University of Chicago Press Prickly Paradigm Press series; it is a timely hard hitting critique of Human Terrain Systems and the dangers of social science subservient to counterinsurgency. This past week Professor González gave CounterPunch an exclusive interview.
David Price: How did you come to write American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain?
Roberto González: I decided to write "American Counterinsurgency" because I was concerned about growing connections between the military and the social sciences, and how these connections might threaten the lives of Iraqis, Afghans, and others. For more than two years, a group of military planners has been involved in a scheme to whitewash counterinsurgency-to clean up the image of anti-revolutionary warfare, which is always a dirty business. Even though the US military has more than a century of experience in counterinsurgency warfare (going back to the "Indian Wars" of the 1800s and the cruel campaign against Filipino revolutionaries in the early 1900s), General David Petraeus and other battlefield technicians have portrayed the method as a "gentler" means of fighting, while recruiting political scientists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to create the tools to do this. The Human Terrain System, which embeds social scientists in combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, is among the most visible new counterinsurgency programs, and this became the focus of my work.
Price: Where did the idea of human terrain come from?
González: The idea of human terrain-euphemistically defined as the local population in a theater of war--is not a new concept. Although one could go back centuries to find similar metaphors, its contemporary roots stretch back to 1968, when it appeared in a report by the infamous US House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. (HUAC was responsible for witch hunts of suspected communists during the 1950s.) The report was about the perceived threat of the Black Panther Party and similar groups within the US, and it warned that such militants "possess the ability to seize and retain the initiative through a superior control of the human terrain." From the beginning, discussions of human terrain were linked to social control in the context of domestic counterinsurgency. Keep in mind that all of this was happening as the FBI's nefarious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)--which brutally repressed political dissent within the US--was in full gear.
The human terrain concept resurfaced decades later, in 2000, when retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters--a hard-boiled neoconservative pundit who advocates using American armed forces for a "cultural assault" upon non-Western societies--published an influential article that was circulated widely. In the article, Peters argued that in urban combat operations, "human terrain. . .the people, armed and dangerous. . .will determine the success or failure of the intervention." Over the next several years, Peters' ideas spread quickly and eventually entered the military's lexicon. The Human Terrain System cleverly incorporated the term, perhaps in order to capitalize on the buzzword's popularity within military circles.
Price: This history linking notions of human terrain with social control and suppression of domestic political movements strikes me as being very different from normal anthropological research undertakings designed to understand rather than control or subvert other cultures. How does this past history of human terrain as tool to suppress domestic political movements align with Human Terrain Systems today and with normal anthropological research or practice standards?
González: Today's HTS program is aligned with past incarnations of human terrain in at least two ways. First of all, it is clear from early descriptions of HTS (published mostly in military journals) that its architects envisioned it as an intelligence-gathering program along the lines of Vietnam War-era efforts such as the US Army's CORDS (short for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support). An essential part of CORDS was the collection of ethnographic data on Vietnamese civilians, which was then passed on to paramilitaries working for Operation Phoenix, a secret branch of CORDS. As a result, the paramilitaries eventually assassinated more than 26,000 Vietnamese with alleged ties to the Viet Cong. If we take descriptions of HTS seriously, then political suppression of Iraqis and Afghans appears as a very real possibility.
Another similarity between HTS and the 1960s human terrain concept has to do with its uses as a tool for suppressing domestic dissent. HTS supporters from John McCain and Robert Gates on down have used it as a way demonstrating to Americans that we're involved in a culturally sensitive occupation. It offers us the illusion that we're fighting a kinder, gentler war, a war that we can feel good about supporting. I think it's revealing that HTS-though still an experimental program-has employed a well-connected, full-time public relations specialist to help groom this public image. Dozens of puff pieces have appeared in the corporate media, which has had the effect of winning over liberals who might otherwise be opposed to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Using anthropologists for these kinds of objectives-for political suppression and propaganda purposes-runs completely against normal anthropological research practices. For many years, American anthropology has typically been used as a means of understanding other societies, not as a way of controlling them more efficiently. It's useful to think of anthropology as a field that is similar in many ways to the fields of medicine or psychology. The knowledge in each of these fields can be used responsibly, in ways that improve the human condition, human health, human self-awareness. But the same knowledge can be used to harm people, to make their lives more miserable rather than better.
Price: In reading public statements and published articles from Human Terrain personnel and leaked documents like the recently surfaced Human Terrain Manual I'm struck by the crude efforts to harness specific forms of anthropological theory for the program. It seems that the program only wants to use certain types of anthropological theories and methods; what do you see as the key elements of Human Terrain System's efforts to apply anthropological theory?
González: HTS personnel tend to use outdated anthropological concepts, theories, and methods, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s. For example, Montgomery McFate (the Pentagon's senior social science advisor for HTS) has recently published articles and given presentations in which she relies heavily upon the concept of "tribalism," functionalist theory, and data collection methods developed for the Human Relations Area Files. Others have sought to incorporate social network analysis as a research method. Each of these elements was either created or elaborated at a time when many anthropologists were employed by colonial governments to more effectively control indigenous populations. It's no accident that these are precisely the tools advocated by HTS's architects.
In the past, when military planners and colonial administrators sought the counsel of anthropologists, they looked for a social science stripped of ambiguity, meaning, and context. They wanted simple analytical tools that might help them accomplish short-term objectives: to put down an uprising, to manufacture propaganda, to conduct psychological warfare, to divide one ethnic group or religious sect against another. Today, anthropologists commissioned by the Pentagon as counterinsurgency consultants use the same tools as instruments for manipulation and social control-not as a means of humanizing other people. Some of this work is published in army journals with titles like, "The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture" and "Operational Culture for the Warfighter." These kinds of articles tell us a great deal about a principal aim of militarized social science: transforming culture into a weapon.
Price: There are indications that AFRICOM is interested in using Human Terrain, or Human Terrain-type programs. What is your read on how the Obama Administration will approach Human Terrain Systems or other efforts to adopt cultural forms of "soft power" to control and occupy other cultures?
González: Recently, a military contract firm called Archimedes Global posted a recruitment ad for "socio-cultural cell" members within the newly-established AFRICOM (US African Command). The ad calls for specialists with "human terrain" expertise, among others. It's a clear example of how human terrain has become a much broader phenomenon, now embraced by the military, industries, and research universities. Beyond the army's HTS program, human terrain has become a growth industry.
After Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, there was a boom in funding for projects focused on human terrain research and "culture-centric" warfare, and this attracted dozens of companies from the military-industrial complex-BAE Systems, Aptima Corporation, MITRE, the RAND Corporation, Wexford Group, MTC Technologies, NEK Advanced Securities Group, and Alpha Ten to name a few. Unfortunately, President Obama has asked Gates-a staunch supporter of HTS-to continue serving as Defense Secretary, while simultaneously calling for an escalation of the Afghanistan war. I think that HTS and similar programs are likely to flourish as long as the US military continues to occupy other countries.
Price: The journalist John Stanton has written a detailed series of investigative reports indicating widespread financial mismanagement, lack of accountability and programmatic conditions indicative of a military-contract-without-accountability gone wild. Last month, the British journal Nature reversed its earlier support for Human Terrain Systems and called for an end of the Human Terrain program. While most anthropologists and even members of the intelligence community have come to recognize Human Terrain as a rouge program, do you foresee either the ethical, political or financial problems bringing any sort of investigation to Human Terrain Systems?
González: A great deal of evidence points to extreme waste and fraud in the Human Terrain System-something that is typical of many other Pentagon programs farmed out to military contractors. Former HTS employees told me that millions of dollars were routinely wasted on ineffective and inadequate training exercises, useless software programs, and incompetent staff members. They reported that an expensive "Reachback Research Center" located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas was rarely used for research, but instead functioned as a warehouse for employees who weren't "deployable assets." Zenia Helbig, a former employee of the program, has stated that "the program is desperate to hire anyone or anything that remotely falls into the category or 'academic'." To make matters worse, HTS has not had any independent reviews or assessments. In fact, the only assessments that have been conducted were carried out by evaluation teams consisting of people with a vested interest in the program's continuation.
Despite this overwhelming evidence pointing to a program run amok, the US Congress has not shown much interest in investigating HTS. In fact, when a joint session of the House Armed Services and Science Committees held hearings in April 2008 to discuss the Human Terrain System and other social science programs, House representatives did not ask Steve Fondacaro (director of HTS) any tough questions. Since that time, three HTS social scientists-Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd-have been killed in action, an HTS employee has been charged with murder for a revenge killing in Afghanistan, and yet another has been charged with espionage. These scandals, along with persistent pressure from academic groups, may yet lead to HTS's demise. But remember that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been a staunch supporter of HTS and counterinsurgency warfare, and he will continue his term as a member of the Obama administration. We can't rely on the new administration to bring an end to these programs. It will be left to citizens of conscience to demand the abolition of human terrain teams-and the imperial wars that employ them.
David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, just published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu
Roberto J. González is author of American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008) and Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2001). He can be reached at roberto_gonzalez@netzero.net
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Any mention of anthropology and counterinsurgency must include the history of Project Camelot in the early 1960s.
Project Camelot was Pentagon/CIA effort to computerize psyops planning in Latin America, not the UFO website of the same name.
Some academics were horrified and the project was hidden away to carry on secretly.
Social sciences have been becoming more and more a weapon of military government since WWII.
Look up "5th generation warfare."
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http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Should_anthr...ngside_soldiersShould anthropologists work alongside soldiers
December 8, 2008
By Dan Vergano and Elizabeth Weise (USA TODAY)
SAN FRANCISCO — The military for years has enlisted anthropologists, depending on their expertise to write up analyses of distant places and cultures.
But debate is growing among those scientists over whether it is appropriate for them to be involved in actually working alongside soldiers in combat or to contribute to the growing field of counterterrorism research.
At the just-concluded American Anthropological Association meeting here, the question of whether anthropologists should take part in military operations took the stage, though not for the first time. In 2007, the AAA's executive board expressed "disapproval" of anthropologists' work in Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that they helped in "identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations."
The debate is more than academic. Two social scientists with the U.S. Army Human Terrain System (HTS) were killed in bombings this year in Afghanistan and Iraq.
HTS researchers are essentially the Army's polling force, surveying local sentiments to, among other things, increase the security of the area and facilitate aid and rebuilding efforts and to ensure those efforts are culturally sensitive, according to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, which runs the program.
Anthropology, military go way back
Ties between anthropology and the military are old ones. The science originated as a "tool of colonialism" in the 19th century to understand British Empire subjects, says historian David Kaiser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, field anthropologists study culture, kinship and networks in societies, "particularly key" factors in the insurgencies, according to the Army's counterinsurgency manual. For example, in these countries it is considered reasonable to put family ties above the needs of society, and nepotism is seen as positive, not negative. That's something young soldiers raised in the USA, with our veneration of the rugged individualist, may not immediately understand.
Is this right or wrong? A necessary tool in the defense of the nation and the world? Or a misuse of science to advance warfare? Arguments are raised on both sides. And the anthropologists, recruited from universities and making from $81,093 to $124,010, plus combat pay, are in the middle of the debate.
"The idea of militarization of anthropology alarms people," says Robert Albro of American University in Washington, D.C. For one thing, anthropologists don't want to be viewed as spies, he says, and military financing could bend the field's purpose away from the study of cultures.
Anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez of San Jose State University posed questions at the meeting for those working with the military:
•What safeguards prevent human terrain data being used to target individuals?
•How do you ensure the information isn't used for war crimes?
•How can embedded anthropologists get informed consent from civilians?
Gonzalez says use of information from human terrain teams to unleash lethal force is at odds with the core values of anthropology. A group Gonzalez helped create called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists submitted a "Pledge of Non-participation in Counterinsurgency" signed by 1,056 anthropologists.
Working to make the world a better place
On the other hand, Phillips Stevens of the State University of New York-Buffalo said it became clear to him from the first moment U.S. troops entered Iraq that "the implementation of some cultural advice would have saved lives and dollars."
"All anthropologists are working to make the world a better place," said panelist Brian Selmeski, a professor of anthropology at the Air Force's Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. He quoted an infantry officer who told him, "We don't need your help to break things. We need your help so we don't have to break things."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates agrees.
"It is an unfortunate reality that many people believe there is this sharp divide between academia and the military — that each continues to look on the other with a jaundiced eye," he said in May. "Challenges facing the world require a much broader conception and application of national power than just military prowess."
What social scientists bring to the military "is in some cases a deep perspective on the specific area of interest," Montgomery McFate, senior social scientist for the HTS program, says by e-mail.
Anthropologist Kerry Fosher of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University believes that the training in understanding the complexities of culture that anthropologists receive is vital to saving lives during conflicts, and that anthropologists shouldn't be afraid of putting their training to work.
"If we were a little bit less terrified of somebody harming themselves or the world with the knowledge we share," she says, "maybe the world would look a little bit different than it does."
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http://www.counterpunch.org/price04072009.htmlCounterinsurgency's Free Ride
By DAVID PRICE
Like a mad scientist’s slime monster that will not die in a 1950s B Movie, the Human Terrain System’s counterinsurgency teams not only somehow remains alive in the face of extensive devastating criticism, but the program’s existence remains firmly publicly boosted by a seemingly endless series of uncritical mainstream news and features stories that frame the program as America’s last best hope to win the hearts and minds of the occupied peoples of Iraq and increasingly Afghanistan. If this were a B monster movie, such prolonged survival would be due to remarkable adaptive abilities, but Human Terrain has no such extraordinary power; its success has been guaranteed by the support it receives from the corporate media as it fawns over HTS in a flurry of glowing formulaic profiles ignoring the program’s fatal flaws. If this were a 1950’s B monster movie, this situation would like finding those we depend on to open fire on the monster shooting blanks (and feeding it table scraps) while abundant cases of live ammo lay at their feet.
The Human Terrain program embeds social scientists, such as anthropologists, with troops operating in battle theatre settings as members of Human Terrain Teams. These teams are part of counterinsurgency operations designed provide military personnel with cultural information that will help inform troop activities in areas of occupation. Since the first public acknowledgement of HTS two and a half years ago, it has been criticized by anthropologists for betraying fundamental principles of anthropological ethics, as being politically aligned with neo-colonialism, and as being ineffective in meeting its claimed outcomes. For the most part, the mainstream media has acted as cheerleaders for the program by producing a seemingly endless series of uncritical features highlighting what they frame as kind hearted individuals trying to use their knowledge of culture to save lives; while misrepresenting the reasons and extent of criticism of the Human Terrain program.
A few early boosters of Human Terrain Systems (HTS) have now called for its closure (most notable, the British journal Nature), and some journalistic coverage has shifted from uncritical fawning to more reserved critical writing (e.g. Noah Schachtman‘s writings on Wired’s military Danger Room blog). But most media coverage remains uncritical in its thinly veiled support for a program that has never had to answer to the fundamental critiques of its critics, and Human terrain continues on its trajectory of counterinsurgency domination.
The press has moved beyond its initial scandal-instincts feeding off the human interest generated by the controversy and disciplinary outrage over anthropologists assisting military occupations and in its refusal to hold Human Terrain Systems answerable for the questions and critiques launched by its critics, the media has become a key supportive enabler of HTS. In the last two years I have probably spent twenty to thirty hours speaking with journalists from NPR, Elle, USA Today, Newsweek, Time, AP, New York Times, Wired, Harpers, Washington Post, etc. patiently explaining what the critical issues for anthropologists are when a program like Human Terrain Systems embeds anthropologists with troop engaged in counterinsurgency operations in occupied battle settings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes portions of these critiques show up along the way in the final stories, but in most cases, the arguments and critiques against the efficacy, ethical, neocolonial politics as well as the practical impossibility of HTS working as advertised are ignored, or worse yet, they are presented as absurd caricatures.
Alternative press journalists like Amy Goodman at Democracy Now or Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times or foreign journalists in Holland, Finland, Germany, Spain or the UK have had no problems describing the fundamental problems for their readers, but the mainstream American press seems committed to keeping the story one-sidedly simple and manifestly jingoistic.
Over the years, Human Terrain’s saleswoman, anthropologist Montgomery McFate, has a adopted a policy of not answering the academic critiques of her many critics regardless of the documentation upon which these critics base their work. This policy has allowed Dr. McFate to avoid answering some pretty serious questions; questions about her reported involvement in the surveillance of an American gun control group; questions about the unattributed writings of other anthropologists appearing in the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual; Questions about why, rather than acknowledging that Human Terrain Teams raise complex ethical issues to be negotiated, she has instead moved forward without even trying to publicly address these issues. And while this approach works well in the political environment of Washington, D.C., where accountability and memories are short, this is the most non-academic approach imaginable—academics engage with each other when disputes arise, they answer critiques with data and arguments rather than rely on silence and professionals to spin stories in the press. Dr. McFate’s position of leaving critiques unanswered appears to have become that of HTS, and a compliant corporate media has followed this lead as it increasingly refuses to report on the problems, corruptions, and complexities of HTS, instead only providing the public with narratives that would have them believe that HTS anthropologists are good caring people trying to lesson harm, while critics are either invisible or portrayed as ivory tower America-hating kooks.
The real bad news for American foreign policy is that given President Obama’s commitment to “soft power” and his open endorsements of counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, we can only expect more of this uncritical coverage on HTS as a crucial tool needed for America’s occupations in foreign lands. I am left to wonder how Barak Obama’s mother, anthropologist Ann Dunham would have reacted to her son’s reliance on such clearly unethical anthropological means to achieve political ends so aligned with neocolonialist goals of occupation and subjugation?
Because the media’s lack of critical coverage of Human Terrain Systems has become such a key element of its continued existence, I’ve produced below a simple list of ten fundamental issues I’d like to see reporters cover in the next media barrage supporting Human Terrain Teams. Any reporter working these beat can have a real news story if they just pick up and run with a few of these points. Reporters covering HTS need to stop telling one side of the story; and here is my list of ten points reporters should address if they are ever going to move beyond functioning as an advertising vehicle for Human Terrain and American counterinsurgency:
1. Please find and identify even a half-dozen anthropologists working for the CIA, Army, Air Force, Marine Corp or any other branch of the military (not current or former HTS employees) who are willing to go on the record supporting Human Terrain as an ethical or even productive use of anthropology in the military. Good luck. I’ve spoken with dozens of anthropologists working in these agencies, and they have privately become some of HTS’s worst critiques, and raise many of the same concerns that I and other outsiders in the Network of Concerned Anthropologists raise about HTS. If journalists bother to look for military anthropologists supporting HTS, what they will find are HTS critics—though these are critics who remain publicly silent for institutional reasons, but that doesn’t mean they won’t express their deep misgivings to reporters off the record
This first point is so important that any journalist exploring this would find a real story simply in reporting the deep disdain HTS has generated among most anthropologists working in military and intelligence agencies. That’s news. Those of us who are radical or liberal critics of HTS have pretty much laid-out and documented the problems, but our voices can’t carry the weight that these insider critics can. It is time for them to be heard—after all, they have loudly been claiming that their primary reason for working in military and intelligence settings is to inject new ideas and to help steer these agencies away from flawed practices. Now is their chance to show skeptics like myself that the structural conditions of their workplace will allow the sort of institutional criticism that they have longed claimed is their institutional raison d'être.
There may well be some military anthropologists who despise HTS for reasons related to interagency rivalries or turf wars, but most of these anthropologists despise it because the carelessness of the design and unethical core of Human Terrain Systems casts shadows of dispersion upon them and the work they do in their agencies. These anthropologists are tired of having to explain to colleagues and others that the work they do is in no way related to Human Terrain—they don’t want to be polluted by HTS’s misdeeds, but internal structural workplace conditions prevent them for vocalizing their critiques in public; but this doesn’t mean that reporters can’t find them and talk to them off the record. My colleague, anthropologist Robert Rubenstein, recently critiqued opponents of military anthropology as being worried about symbolic pollution by colleagues working for the military; I see this critique as being one that can be extended to analyze mainstream military anthropologists’ dislike of Human Terrain. This past year I heard another colleague, himself an anthropologist employed by the Pentagon described the professional stigma of being incorrectly identified as having anything to do Human Terrain as being “like having to go to a high school dance with your ugly cousin.” Any journalist wishing to find out what lies beneath this surface of silence won’t have to look very long to figure out how despised HTS is amongst non-HTS military anthropologists.
2. Most journalists find it easy to dismissively look down upon the outlets where journalist John Stanton’s investigative reports on HTS has been published (e.g., Pravda, various online news outlets), but it is not so easy to discount his findings regarding allegations of: systemic HTS sexual harassment, illegal financial practices, fiscal irresponsibility, nonfunctioning reach-back software programs, problems with contractor profiteering, poorly trained personnel working in dangerous settings, incompetence in HTS’ leadership, spy charges against a HTS member, and the circumstances leading up to charges of murder against a human terrain team member. The level of mismanagement reported by Stanton warrants congressional investigations, but so far his coverage has not really grown legs. The elements of my own work that overlap with Stanton’s work find his reporting to be credible. It strikes me as odd that other journalists are not pursuing, or even trying to disprove the scandals that his work has unearthed. Mainstream media should follow-up on Stanton’s work, if they can find information contradicting his sources, so be it; but ignoring the damning evidence Stanton reports while continuing to pump out the same old fluff HTS profile pieces goes beyond just poor journalism, and begins to function as domestic propaganda.
3. Please accurately explain to your readers why the American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board condemned Human Terrain Systems in its 2007 statement. It was not because they categorically believed anthropologists should not work for the military (they don’t believe this), it was not because the invasion of Iraq is a shameful neocolonial disaster (it is, but that isn’t why they condemned HTS): it was because the poor way that HTS was designed ignores basic anthropological principles of ethics (including trying to address issues of voluntary informed consent, issues of secrecy, doing no harm, etc.). Please ask HTS directors why the cultural educational features of HTS could not occur outside of battle theatre settings; thereby ignoring the fundamental ethical problems raised by embedding anthropologists with troops. If journalists don’t think ignoring professional ethics is a big deal, then I recommend they publicly denounce journalistic principles of ethics; or publish a flattering story on medical doctors who state that they aren’t interested in medical ethics because they’re doing important work that they claim “saves lives.”
4. Please report that claims that Human Terrain Teams engage in targeting the enemy or that HTS provides intelligence are not something made up by HTS’s critics, these claims come from HTS anthropologists themselves. In a March 8, 2009 story, the Dallas Morning News, (that otherwise followed the HTS cheerleading format) reported that: “[HTS anthropologist Audrey] Roberts does not worry about what the military does with her information, even if it is fed into the intelligence used by U.S. Special Forces for killing or capturing insurgent leaders. ‘If it's going to inform how targeting is done – whether that targeting is bad guys, development or governance – how our information is used is how it's going to be used,’ she said. ‘All I'm concerned about is pushing our information to as many soldiers as possible. ‘The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,’ Roberts said. ‘I'd rather they did not operate in a vacuum.’” As U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile, put it: “Don’t fool yourself. These Human Terrain Teams whether they want to acknowledge it or not, in a generalized and subtle way, do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy in the Civil War in Iraq.” HTS’s stance on this issue is an outrageous perversion of anthropology’s commitments to protect the interests of studied populations and should be reported as such. Audrey Robert’s stance is in keeping with Dr. McFate’s vision for Human Terrain, but it has nothing to do with anthropology.
5. Please ask Human Terrain Team members to name an historic instance of a successful counterinsurgency campaign waged by foreign occupiers? When they are unable to name one historical example (beyond possibly Malaya, which took over a dozen years to accomplish, or if one believes the British won in Ireland, 30 years), please ask them why they believe that a group of social scientists without cultural expertise in the theatre of operation will be able to accomplish this. The United States tried and failed to accomplish this in Vietnam, and President Obama seems positioned to repeat this folly today.
6. Please ask HTS managers why they are unable to get qualified regionally trained anthropologists to work for HTS. When you don’t hear the phrase “ethical train wreck” in the answer, you will know you are being lied to.
7. The recently leaked Human Terrain Handbook does not even identify the obvious ethical issues raised by embedding anthropologists with military personnel, but instead claims that HTS “research is performed in the same manner in which academic social scientists conduct their research and is similarly rooted in theory and complete with ethical review boards.” HTS’s greatest failure has been to ignore the complex ethical issues raised by embedding anthropologists with troops—rather than trying to address these issues, it simply ignores them. This is unacceptable. Please, ask Human Terrain managers and employees what they believe allows HTS to operate outside of federal legislation mandating Institutional Review Board’s clearance of their studies involving human subjects? Again, such practices warrant coverage in the press as well as congressional investigations.
8. Please inform your readers that there has been no independent assessment of data on the impact of HTS actually reducing “kinetic engagements” with occupied people in Iraq and Afghanistan. While this claim has been a central feature of friendly HTS media coverage it is entirely without basis. This claim has been recycled since Army Colonel Martin Schweitzer’s first made it in the New York Times in the Fall of 2007, but my efforts under the Freedom of Information Act to get any reports verifying these outrageous claims led Col. Schweitzer to write me (2/11/0Cool admitting that no such studies verifying these often repeated claims exist (and even if they did, they would be complicated by confounds of changes in other conditions) and that this claimed reduction is a loose estimate made by Col. Schweitzer.
9. Frequently, the anthropologists interviewed by reporters do not have their identities revealed and are instead only identified by pseudonyms. Anthropologists routinely use pseudonyms to protect identities of studied populations, but cloaking the identities of anthropologists distorts anthropological power relations and is revealing of just how un-anthropological HTS’s mission is. Please ask HTS anthropologists if they can come up with any other historical instance of anthropologists hiding their identity for the public or those they study.
10. Please discuss the extent of criticisms originating from within the Pentagon arguing that HTS cannot work as designed and that it is making things worse in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, as with my first point, I assume that if HTS is to be stopped, it will be because people with internal legitimacy (and in this case: people with real internal power) attack it. Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile argues that Dr. McFate and others pitching the HTS radically overstate what counterinsurgency can accomplish, and HTS and other COIN projects simply cannot work as claimed. In an article entitled, “All Our Eggs in a Broke Basket: How The Human Terrain System is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence” published in the current issue of Military Review, Major Ben Connable, USMC, argues that HTS undermines existing, functioning means for cultural education (that while still linked to the neocolonial missions that HTS supports, do not create the ethical problems for anthropologists that HTS inevitably does). While some of these critiques differ from my own, the silence surrounding the existence of these internal critiques in the press’s stock HTS profiles is one measure of just how HTS friendly these pieces are.
The many problems with Human Terrain Systems have been well documented and discussed by its critics in the alternative press, within professional associations, and in academic sources, it is not difficult to find or identify these critiques. But public rebuttals from the military or from Human Terrain itself have not been forthcoming largely because the press has allowed them to ignore these criticisms. The uncritical approach played by the press has become an important part of the story and the press needs to start asking basic questions of HTS and not allowing the silence to continue.
Reporters who want to cover any of these ten points can have them as their own. But I have to believe that the continued production of the same uncritical formulaic HTS profiles that have been rewritten dozens of times stands as a measure of just how much the Fifth Estate has abandoned its critical obligations and become nothing more than a tool of militarized forces that have taken over American society. It’s time to hold Human Terrain Systems accountable, and the mainstream media can start by ending HTS’ free ride on the PR machine by holding them to account for these ten basic points—and the dozens of other points that others can generate.
David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ forthcoming Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published later this month by Prickly Paradigm Press.
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http://www.truthout.org/043009ROccupying Hearts and Minds
Thursday 30 April 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
An anthropologist and Army medics work at a medical clinic in the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan. (Photo: Tomas Munita / The New York Times)
One of the definitions of the word "occupation" is: the action, state, or period of occupying or being occupied by military force. Throughout history, areas or countries occupied by military force have always resisted, and this resistance has caused the occupier to devise more suitable methods of subduing the population of the area being occupied.
The US military has sent shock troops, which also donned helmets and flak jackets - anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists, with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.
Two years prior to this, the CIA had quietly started recruiting social scientists by advertising in academic journals, offering salaries of up to $400,000. The military's goals for the HTS was to have them gather and disseminate information about Iraqi and Afghani cultures. These embedded scholars, contracted through companies like CACI International, work in the project that is described by CACI as "designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge" among combat teams.
This new form of psychological warfare is deeply disturbing. Throughout my five years of reporting on the occupation of Iraq, when I've asked Iraqis what they feel the most damaging aspect of the occupation is, I have been told that the occupation is "shredding the fabric of Iraqi society and culture."
Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to through history as the "handmaiden of colonialism," thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become "just another weapon ... not a tool for building bridges between peoples." Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?
In an article titled "When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents," published in September 2007, and co-authored with David Price, author of the book "Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of American Anthropology in the Second World War," Gonzalez and Price wrote:
"Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win 'hearts and minds,' they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists' ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate.
"In fact, David Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas describes HTS teams as a 'CORDS for the 21st Century'-a reference to the Pentagon's Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project. The most infamous product of the CORDS counter-insurgency effort was the Phoenix Program, in which CIA agents collected intelligence information used to 'neutralize' (read assassinate) suspected Viet Cong members. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong were killed as a result, including many civilians.
"Kipp's comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. If anthropologists on HTS teams interview Afghans or Iraqis about the intimate details of their lives, what is to prevent combat teams from using the same data to one day 'neutralize' suspected insurgents? What would impede the transfer of data collected by social scientists to commanders planning offensive military campaigns? Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician? Although the answers to these questions are not clear, the history of anthropology should give us pause. During World War II and the Cold War, US military and intelligence agencies tended to use anthropologists' work to help accomplish immediate goals, and discarded all other information that was counter to their beliefs or institutional models."
Adding credence to the points made by Price and Gonzalez is the fact that one of the top ten US defense contractors, Science Applications International Corporation, which has been operating in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation, describes anthropology in its job advertisements as a "counter-insurgency related field."
Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor, while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, "I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant ... I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range ... Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon."
Nevertheless, proponents of the program attempt to dismiss any ethical dilemma encountered by the embedded scholars. Montgomery McFate, a Navy anthropologist, described HTS as an effort to anthropologize the military, not militarizing anthropology, told Time, "The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western cultural norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics."
The program is nothing new, neither for the US empire nor other empires throughout history. As far as the US empire project is concerned, there were two programs from the Vietnam era that involved anthropologists.
Project Camelot, in 1965, organized by US Army intelligence, recruited anthropologists to assess the cultural causes of war and violence. Despite the misleadingly benign sounding name, the project used Chile as a trial run while the CIA was engineering the election of Eduardo Frei as president in 1964 to prevent the election of Socialist leader Salvador Allende.
The second program from that era, known as CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), was formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs in Vietnam. CORDS used anthropological data to map human terrain and identify individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers of the Vietcong, who were then targeted for assassination.
It is easy to imagine HTS teams in Iraq being used to exploit existing fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, and even differences within each group, in order to invoke the classic divide-to-conquer strategy. For example, the Sahwa (US-created and -backed Sunni militia) clashing with the US-backed Maliki government in Iraq is a classic example of Iraqis being effectively turned against one another so as not to unite against the occupier.
Another example would be the effective creation and exploitation of the myth of sectarianism in Iraq, which has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and threatens to do so once again.
Documentary filmmaker Jason Coppola is directing and producing a film titled "Justify My War." In the film, an introspective Coppola explores the question of rationalization of the wars being waged by our government, from Wounded Knee to Fallujah. I asked Coppola for his perspective about the ongoing use of anthropologists by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"This seems to be the most powerful weapon against indigenous cultures today. Much more powerful than F-16s and M-1 tanks. We see how well it worked against our own indigenous culture. You need to know a people before you decide what can corrupt them, what can be used to confuse, divide and conquer them. The strongest defense against occupation is an undivided, culturally rooted people, but empires don't like that."
Commenting on experiences from his recent trip to Iraq, Coppola adds, "A country can rebuild itself after an invasion, but it is much more difficult to rebuild a culture after it has been invaded. I realized this seeing young girls walking the streets of Sadr City, on their way to school in their traditional hijab carrying their books in a backpack with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie design on it. Confusion is sewn throughout the Iraq occupation, nobody trusts anybody. And as I looked up in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City, and stared at 'Apache' helicopters flying overhead ... I couldn't help but to think - mission accomplished - certainly for the Apache people. But what about the Iraqis? We still don't know."
Price and Gonzalez, along with several other scholars, felt the problem serious enough to have formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and drafted a "Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency" to boycott anthropological work in counterinsurgency and direct combat support operations. They took their stand against "work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another."
Similarly, in October 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement that warned its members that activities such as involvement in the HTS program are likely to violate the code of ethics. As it should have, for it is impossible to imagine the lethality of a massive conventional military coupled with unconventional scholarship made into a weapon for use in combat, as it is in the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan
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http://www.counterpunch.org/lawless11062009.htmlNovember 6-8, 2009
From Malinowski to Human Terrain Systems
Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology
By ROBERT LAWLESS
In the September 30, 2009, online edition of CounterPunch in an article titled “Country of Constant Sorrow: McChrystal's Afghan Desolation,” Vijay Prashad wrote,
“Enter a war zone with the expectation that the heavy armor will coerce the population into electing a favorable head of state; if this fails, then take refuge in your anthropologists, who will find a quick way to ‘nativize’ the war and help you clamber onto the helicopters. The country you have left behind is now more of a humanitarian disaster than when you self-righteously flew in on the wings of humanitarian interventionism.”
The notion of anthropologists being helpmates in the First World conquest of the Third World seems now to have become embedded in the day-to-day understanding of the Bush-initiated Iraq-Afghanistan cultural-military fiasco. Whether political scientists, philosophers, area specialists, or whoever actually fills the “societal” expert position on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams, anthropologists apparently are to take the blame. And anthropologists themselves are not exempt from furthering this notion.
Perhaps the most notorious anthropologist associated with the U.S. military’s HTS is Montgomery McFate, who writes primarily for military publications and whose pivotal article “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” appeared in the April 2005 issue of Military Review. A hapless mix of shoddy history and misdirected anthropology, her article was, nevertheless, reprinted in the 2007 edition of Annual Editions Anthropology -- along with articles by Conrad Kottak, Richard Lee, and Ralph Linton, and in the 2009 second edition of Classic Readings in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Gary Ferraro -- along with brand-name anthropologists such as Horace Miner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward T. Hall, Richard Lee, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Why McFate deserves to be in this company is unclear; there are many other articles by respectable anthropologists that clearly explained the HTS affair. [Among them have been David Price’s path-breaking contributions on this site and in our CounterPunch newsletter. Editors.] Making McFate’s piece widely available only further sullies anthropology.
Anthropology hardly needs a renewed association with First World empires; it has obviously had difficulty living down its close association with colonialism in its formative recent past. The great British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important founders of modern anthropology who provided a model for nonjudgmental, systematic, long-term fieldwork -- the hallmark of anthropology -- was director of the International African Institute in London for a few years, and in that position he was concerned primarily with helping British colonial officials with their problems. One specific problem for Britain centered on getting the indigenes to work hard on the cash-crop plantations owned by the Europeans. In a 1929 article Malinowski wrote:
“The simplest experience teaches that to everybody work is . . . unpleasant, but a study of primitive conditions shows that very efficient work can be obtained, and the Natives can be made to work with some degree of real satisfaction if propitious conditions are created for them. . . . In Melanesia I have seen this applied on some plantations. Use was made of such stimuli as competitive displays of the results, or special marks of distinction for industry, or again of rhythm and working songs. . . . Such things must never be improvised -- an artificial arrangement will never get hold of native imagination. In every community I maintain there are such indigenous means of achieving more intensive labour and greater output.”
And in further advising about the duties of the anthropologist Malinowski wrote, "He should formulate his conclusions in a manner so that they can be understood by those who carry out policies. He also has the duty to speak as the natives' advocate, without, however, succumbing to an outburst of pro-native ranting. Through comparative study he can discover and define the common factor of European intentions and of African response. . . . Knowledge gives foresight, and foresight is indispensable to the statesman and to the local administrator, to the educationalist, welfare worker, and missionary alike." Notice that it is European intentions and African response. Notice that "knowledge" and "foresight" is for the European colonialists, not for the “natives.”
No anthropologist in these early years suggested that anthropology should be used to help the indigenes throw off the yoke of colonial oppression or that anthropologists should study the contradictions and weaknesses of colonial imperialism so that the indigenes could strike at the heart of the oppressors.
Malinowski was, of course, a product of his time. And before World War II it was widely assumed in the colonial metropoles, that colonialism was beneficial in the long run to everyone; backward peoples were, after all, being civilized so that they could enjoy the benefits of modernization and civilization in the future. And these early anthropologists strove to enlighten the rulers and protect the ruled from the more brutal aspects of colonialism, such as forced labor. Today, however, most anthropologists have moved beyond this 1920s colonial version of the discipline.
Some anthropologists even at the time escaped this ethnocentric perspective. Franz Boas, the founder of U.S. anthropology, famously critiqued anthropologists involved with the U.S. military in World War I in his 1919 letter to the Nation titled “Scientists as Spies.” His student, and my first anthropology instructor, the great Melville J. Herskovits, refused government financial assistance for Northwestern University’s African Studies program and he also refused to accept government officials into the Ph.D. program. These towering figures certainly would not allow anthropology to be sullied. The discipline did, however, suffer some sullying during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Anthropologists’ activities in World War II are examined in David Price’s 2008 Anthropological Intelligence, and the Thailand part of Project Agile is examined in Eric Wakin’s 1992 Anthropology Goes to War. One would hope, however, that modern-day anthropologists have learned the lesson and that such sullying and empire-helpmate activities would no longer occur.
As Price wrote on October 1-15, 2009, however, in an article in CounterPunch newsletter titled “Anthropology, Human Terrain’s Prehistory, and the Role of Culture in Wars Waged by Robots,” “Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military’s mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives. HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross.” In October 2007 much to its credit the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association denounced HTS for its failure to follow the fundamental principles of anthropological ethics. Out of the 261 comments from members of the American Anthropological Association in the blog accompanying the statement of the executive board the vast majority overwhelmingly condemn the participation of anthropologists in HTS.
The few anthropologists engaged in these neocolonial enterprises cannot be said to represent the discipline, but they have received considerable publicity thereby sullying anthropology’s reputation. Exactly what they expect to accomplish anthropologically is not entirely clear. They are a fairly motley bunch. The ones that we have information on seem to have little if any expertise in the Middle East. And most of them are not exactly forthcoming about their activities -- nor is the U.S. military.
One who has written rather openly is Marcus Griffin, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois and who, until recently, was an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, a rapidly growing public university with an enrollment of about 5,000.
Griffin has been the subject of several articles, has written about his experiences in his own blog, and has briefly replied to criticism in the anthropological blog Savage Minds. In an article in the April 21, 2008, issue of Newsweek titled “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other” written by Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring it is pointed out that Griffin “had never been to the Middle East before he arrived in Iraq last fall,” though he had spent much of his life in the Philippines with his anthropologist father who does research on the Agta of Northern Luzon. Ephron and Spring noted that although he is a civilian Griffin wore army clothing and carried a rifle. The reporters stated, “For their services, the anthropologists get up to $300,000 annually while posted abroad -- a salary that is six times higher than the national average for their field.”
The rest of the Newsweek article is largely critical of the HTS program, which, it reported, “was handed to BAE without a bidding process.” BAE Systems is a company that apparently lives off U.S. Department of Defense contracts. According to their website, BAE Systems currently has positions open for HTS Reachback Research Center Analyst, Human Terrain Systems Analyst, Human Terrain Systems Research Manager, and HTS Team Leader.
A more critical article by Dahr Jamail in the May 1, 2009, edition of Truthout titled “An Anthropologist and Army Medics Work at a Medical Clinic in the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan” pointed out that HTS developed “into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.” Jamail reported that Griffin, “while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, ‘I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant . . . I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range . . . Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon.’”
An article meant to be favorable toward HTS and toward Griffin was datelined Baghdad and released by the American Forces Press Service on January 25, 2008. Titled “Anthropologist Helps Soldiers Understand Iraqis’ Needs” and written by Sgt. James P. Hunter, U.S. Army, it characterized Griffin as “an anthropologist working for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team” who is bringing “his knowledge and experience to the fight” and “is helping soldiers better understand the needs of the Iraqi people.” The article focuses on Griffin’s study of Iraqi local markets, which he toured accompanied by an armed escort.
In responding to questions of ethics posed by anthropologists on the popular blog Savage Minds in August 2007, Griffin wrote:
“I am deploying in a few days and time is very short. I work sixteen hour days and can expect to do so from now on seven days a week until
