[R-G] When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents

[Anthony Fenton]

September 28, 2007
Pledging to Boycott the "War on Terror"
When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents
http://counterpunch.org/gonzalez09272007.html


By ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ and DAVID H. PRICE

When anthropologists work overseas, they typically arrive with an  
array of equipment including notebooks, trowels, tape recorders, and  
cameras. But in the new context of the Bush Administration's "war on  
terror," a growing number of anthropologists are arriving in foreign  
countries wearing camouflage, body armor, and guns.

As General Petraeus and his staff push to enact new strategies in  
Iraq, the value of culture is taking on a greater role in military  
and intelligence circles, as new military doctrines increasingly rely  
on the means, methods and knowledge of anthropology to provide the  
basis of counterinsurgency practices. The Department of Defense,  
intelligence agencies, and military contractors are aggressively  
recruiting anthropologists for work related to counter-insurgency  
operations. These institutions seek to incorporate cultural knowledge  
and ethnographic intelligence in direct support of US-led  
interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Pentagon is increasingly relying on the deployment of "Human  
Terrain System" (HTS) teams in Afghanistan and Iraq to gather and  
disseminate information on cultures living in the theatre of war.  
Some of these teams are assigned to US brigade or regimental combat  
units, which include "cultural analysts" and "regional studies  
analysts." According to CACI International (one of three companies  
currently contracting HTS personnel for the Pentagon), "the HTS  
project is designed to improve the gathering, understanding,  
operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge"  
among combat teams. Required experience includes an MA or Ph.D. in  
cultural anthropology, sociology, or related social science fields,  
and applicants must obtain a secret security clearance to be eligible  
for employment.

In this environment it is not surprising that the Science  
Applications International Corporation-one of the top 10 US defense  
contractors-has begun describing anthropology as a "counter- 
insurgency related field" in its job advertisements. Prior to joining  
HTS teams, some social scientists attend military training camps.  
Recently, Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor preparing to  
deploy to Iraq boasted on his blog that "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." The lines separating researchers, subjects,  
protectors, protected and target are easily confused in such  
settings, and the concerns of research ethics are easily set aside  
for more immediate concerns.

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.

Other wars brought anthropology to the battlefield, but with mixed  
results, and lingering questions remain about the ethics and the  
efficacy of these interactions--even in wars with much broader  
support than the current misadventure in Iraq. These engagements have  
always raised deep ethical questions within the discipline. Even  
during the Second World War, a number of anthropologists were  
troubled by the use of specific cultural anthropological knowledge  
for warfare, and as Laura Thompson in 1944 worried, what would become  
of anthropology if its practitioners became nothing more than  
"technicians for hire to the highest bidder?" After the war, CIA  
operatives like Edward Lansdale tapped ethnographic knowledge for  
campaigns in the Philippines and Vietnam; and when disclosures about  
the use of anthropological data in the Vietnam War were made public,  
the resulting clash within the American Anthropological Association  
created rifts that remain evident to this day.

The fundamental problem with social scientists' involvement in  
counter-insurgency campaigns is the characteristic lack of  
transparency. Assisting counter-insurgency operations stands to  
violate relationships of trust and openness with the people with whom  
anthropologists work. If those doing counter-insurgency or combat  
support are bound by "operations security" or other forms of non- 
disclosure, they are not free to share the results of their work with  
local people who participated in the research. Such work threatens  
the well being and integrity of all fieldbased anthropological  
research. Anthropologists serving the short-term interests of  
military and intelligence agencies and contractors by carrying out  
counter-insurgency and combat support work end up harming the entire  
discipline in the long run. When they participate in secret military  
operations that taint the reputation of all anthropologists, they are  
engaging in scorched earth fieldwork, for they make it impossible for  
future researchers to establish the trust necessary for establishing  
rapport with research participants.

In response to these troubling developments, an ad hoc group of  
eleven scholars (including the authors of this piece) recently formed  
the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. Together the group drafted  
a "Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency"-a boycott of  
anthropological work in counter-insurgency and direct combat support  
operations. Its opening words unequivocally reject such cooperation:  
"We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage  
in research and other activities that contribute to counter- 
insurgency operations in Iraq or related theaters in the 'war on  
terror.' Furthermore, we believe that anthropologists should refrain  
from directly assisting the US military in combat, be it through  
torture, interrogation, or tactical advice." The statement clearly  
stands against participation in counter-insurgency operations in Iraq  
and the "war on terror" as well as "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."

The inspiration for the boycott comes from the more than 7,000  
physicists who pledged to not participate in the ill-fated Strategic  
Defense Initiative (more commonly known as the "Star Wars" program)  
proposed by Ronald Reagan. Given the fact that the Pentagon was  
offering multi-million dollar grants to university-based scientists  
for SDI research at the time, the boycott (initiated in 1985 by David  
Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund) was remarkably ambitious-and successful.  
It demonstrated that when scientists speak with a collective voice,  
they can dramatically influence the course of history.

At the height of the Cold War, C. Wright Mills cautioned social  
scientists about the perils of succumbing to "the bureaucratic ethos.  
Its use has been mainly in and for non-democratic areas of society--a  
military establishment, a corporation." He was concerned about the  
rapid transformation of scientists into mere technicians, lacking any  
sense of social responsibility for their actions. As those  
prosecuting the "war on terror" attempt to draw social scientists  
into their ill-conceived operations, we should reaffirm our  
democratic values, our professional autonomy, and our social  
responsibility by refusing to participate.

Those interested in learning more about the Pledge or signing on can  
write us at concerned.anthropologists at gmail.com or visit our web site  
at http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home.

Roberto J. González is author of Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in  
the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2001) and  
editor of Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War,  
Peace and American Power (University of Texas Press, 2004). He can be  
reached at roberto_gonzalez at netzero.net

David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and  
the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke, 2004). His  
next book, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of  
American Anthropology in the Second World War, is due March 2008. He  
can be reached at: dprice at stmartin.edu