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Anthropology: Sucker for Power

Where the employment of anthropologists in HTS is concerned, this is a repeat or continuation of the long history of anthropological service to expansionist states, colonial management, and imperial domination, a history with which institutional anthropology has yet to come to terms, if the relative paucity of literature on anthropology and colonialism, or the rarity of courses on decolonizing anthropology attest. This is not say that anthropology does not contain within it a significant critical and even activist tradition, especially since the 1960s, as much as it is to suggest that anthropology has no real core, as David Price argues, with which to either align or collide with state power.

Research in the National Security State

Both HTS and the Minerva Research Initiative (Minerva or MRI from now on) are additions to an already existing array of programs that meld the national security state with academia in the U.S. These programs include the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), formed with the guidance and active support of an anthropology professor (Felix Moos) at the University of Kansas, as well as the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), and the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security (NACHOS), and an array of private think tanks that link social science research to the so-called “global war on terror” with some of these, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, housed on campuses. One could also mention the presence of ROTC on many campuses, and the fact that as far back as 1988 a CIA spokeswoman publicly proclaimed that the CIA had enough professors on its payroll to staff a large university.

One way in which this program can directly engage Canadian academics and universities is apparent from the fact that foreign universities are also encouraged to participate, as the Pentagon announced with the call for applications,

“This MRI competition is open to institutions of higher education (universities) including DoD institutions of higher education and foreign universities, with degree-granting programs in social sciences. Participation by foreign universities either as project lead or in a supporting role is encouraged”.

The Pentagon continues:

“there is an urgent need to be able to locate the points of influence and characterize the processes necessary to influence populations that harbor terrorist organizations in diverse cultures as well as individuals who identify with terrorist group figures”.

The Pentagon announcement states,

“Especially helpful…is understanding where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how to circumvent its spread. Research on belief formation and emotional contagion will provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on the local population. This research should also contribute to countermeasures to help revise or influence belief structures to reduce the likelihood of militant cells forming”.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist of military industries and national security, recently wrote a compelling overview of the many dangers of Minerva and other programs for the social role of academia. He writes:

“When research that could be funded by neutral civilian agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind. The public comes to accept that basic academic research on religion and violence ‘belongs’ to the military; scholars who never saw themselves as doing military research now do; maybe they wonder if their access to future funding is best secured by not criticizing U.S. foreign policy; a discipline whose independence from military and corporate funding fueled the kind of critical thinking a democracy needs is now compromised; and the priorities of the military further define the basic terms of public and academic debate”.

Although the idea of using the military to provide aid sounds like a good idea, it is removing the symbolic boundary that aid workers (and anthropologists) need to stay safe and which allows us to be seen by local communities as neutral. That boundary no longer exists in Afghanistan. (p. 7)

The military bid for Afghan “hearts and minds” means that there is no longer a distinction between armed and non-armed actors. Afghanistan has since become one of the most dangerous countries for aid workers. (p. 7)

Trujillo said living and working closely with the Afghans will make understanding cultural differences important. Consider Ramadan: Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the Islamic holiday. Most Afghans don't care if westerners eat or drink in front of them, but what if the paratroopers also fast with the Afghans?

Trujillo said he plans to brief his paratroopers about the holidays and they will observe the fast, too, by not eating and drinking in front of the Afghan police.

"If you are going to do it in recognition of their holiday, that is huge," he said. "Everybody has to have an understanding culturally all the way around, not just knowing how to say 'Hello' and 'Where are the bad guys?' in Pashtu."

Such at least is the position taken in the Army's new Field Manual 3-24, the Galula-inspired, Petraeus-supervised bible on counterinsurgency, which has this to say on the subject in Appendix A:

Raiding from remote, secure bases does not work. Movement on foot, sleeping in villages, and night patrolling all seem more dangerous than they are--and they are what ground forces are trained to do. .  .  . Driving around in an armored convoy actually degrades situational awareness. It makes Soldiers and Marines targets and is ultimately more dangerous than moving on foot and remaining close to the populace.

In the words of a Military Review article (September-October 2006) that described the Human Terrain System idea for a military audience:

HTS will provide deployed brigade commanders and their staffs direct social-science support in the form of ethnographic and social research, cultural information research, and social data analysis that can be employed as part of the military decisionmaking process.

The core building block of the system will be a five-person Human Terrain Team (HTT) that will be embedded in each forward-deployed brigade or regimental staff. The HTT will provide the commander with experienced officers, NCOs, and civilian social scientists trained and skilled in cultural data research and analysis.

They spoke as though they were among the Army of 1964, focused on body counts and kill ratios, rather than the Army of the Small Wars Journal, the new counterinsurgency field manual, and the endless "lessons learned" briefings. Here is a representative quotation from the Times article ("Tracy" being the pseudonym of a member of the Human Terrain Team):

In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said wanted [sic] to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. "I can go back and enhance the military's understanding," she said, "so that we don't make the same mistakes we did in Iraq."

Sadly, from what I saw, the HTT isn't ready to solve our troops' language and cultural problems. At Khost, the so-called cultural expert was an Iranian-born female officer whom I will call "Sharifa."

Sending an Iranian Farsi speaker to a Pashtun region of Afghanistan didn't seem like a great idea to me.

Then there is the issue of sending female non-Pashto speakers to bond with male village elders. "They see you as a soldier, not as a female," "Sharifa" said to me. In the Christian Science Monitor piece, "Tracy" went further:

"In most circumstances, I am 'third' gender," says Tracy, who can give only her first name. She says that she is not seen as either an Afghan woman or a Western one--because of her uniform. "It has enhanced any ability to talk to [Afghans]. There is a curiosity."

"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."

Word about the Army’s program is spreading, says Lt. George Mace of Lenexa. He was on the first Human Terrain team to Iraq and now is a spokesman for the program.

“The institutional knowledge that the teams are bringing to the units is a jumpstart to what’s happening in an area,” Mace says. “Other services are noticing and asking us now if they can join the teams too. We are looking to open this up.”

Cheryl White, 35, who has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida, shakes her head at the controversy.

She acknowledges that it did cause her to wrestle with whether to join the Human Terrain program.

She feels good about her choice now. She will be deployed next year.

Priming the Propaganda Pumps: More Sales Pitches for the Spreading Human Terrain System « OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY


Time: October 14, 2008, 5:22 pm

[...] Teams,” in World Politics Review (14 October 2008), and Lee Hill Kavanaugh’s “Human Terrain Teams: Winning Hearts and Minds,” in the Kansas City Star (14 October 2008, p. 1). Perhaps October 14 has been secretly [...]

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  The difficulty of voluntary consent in a war zone;
  
  
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  The difficultly of informed consent on behalf of the military, including full
  disclosure of risks and benefits to subjects, when the anthropologist may not
  know how the information will be used or who will consume it;
  
  
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  The collection of individual identifiers and other personal information, in a
  context where targeting is a very real possibility;
  
  
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  The explicit and open linkage of "anthropology" to "the military", and the
  potential risks that this affiliation might pose to colleagues doing fieldwork.
  

On the other hand, India insists the elections be held in May as required by the Afghan constitution.

"There is no question of India's views on this. The constitution should be respected and the aspirations of Afghan people should be guarded," said J.P. Singh, a spokesman for the Indian Embassy in Kabul.