[R-G] First Read of a Leaked Handbook: The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

[Anthony Fenton]

http://counterpunch.com/price12122008.html

Weekend Edition
December 12 / 14, 2008
First Read of a Leaked Handbook
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

By DAVID PRICE

Human Terrain Systems, one of the U.S. military’s key  
counterinsurgency efforts to stabilize the occupation of Iraq, appears  
to suddenly be under serious attack by groups that once offered it  
support.  This latest round of attacks comes not from progressive  
anthropologists like me or my fellow members of the Network of  
Concerned Anthropologists; these attacks come from groups with far  
more centralized power and access to documents and media than any of  
us  academic critics.  I don’t know who is behind these attacks but  
they may be coming from within the belly of the Pentagon or within  
Human Terrain itself.

On Thursday December 11, two apparently separate attacks were  
launched.  One attack came in the form of publication of a fierce  
editorial in the pages of the British scientific journal Nature. It  
declared that the “the US military's human-terrain programme needs to  
be brought to a swift close.”  This position is all the more  
devastating when contrasted with an editorial supporting the  
principles of Human Terrain and other forms of military-funded  
anthropological work published by Nature just five months ago.  A  
second attack came the same day with the leak and web distribution on  
Wikileaks.com of the UNCLASSIFIED Human Terrain Systems Handbook.   
These two attacks, whether coordinated or independent, further  
destabilize  already shaky support for the poorly designed Human  
Terrain Systems program.

I don’t pretend to understand why these attacks are now converging  
now, but it is no secret that some divisions in the Pentagon oppose  
the “hearts and minds” strategy of counterinsurgency, and it is  
possible that some of these actors are working to undermine Human  
Terrain by leaking this document and sewing seeds of discontent in  
public discourse for their own reasons; reasons quite separate from my  
own and having to do with their favoring the use of brute military  
force over soft counterinsurgency.

The Human Terrain program is the brainchild of anthropologist  
Montgomery McFate, whose longtime interest in supporting the  
suppression of insurgent groups through the adoption of  
counterinsurgency tactics led to the formation of Human Terrain  
Systems based at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas and run through BAE Systems  
contractors.  Human Terrain Teams (HTT) are designed to supplant or  
complement roles that Civil Affairs units have traditionally played in  
assessing the needs and conditions of occupied populations.  As the  
recently leaked Handbook states, “Human Terrain Teams bring another  
aspect of the population: the average persons’ perspective, when the  
HTT incorporates the “grass-roots” perspective with government and  
tribal perspectives.”  These Human Terrain Teams are designed to  
incorporate military-embedded anthropologists and other social  
sciences who interview members of local populations in war zones,  
often with armed Team members, sometimes wearing uniforms.

Because of the complex ethical issues involved in conducting  
ethnographic fieldwork for occupying military forces in war zones, the  
Human Terrain Program is viewed by most anthropologists as being   
highly problematic. In November 2007, the American Anthropological  
Association’s Executive Board produced a statement condemning the  
Human Terrain program for its inattention to basic anthropological  
ethical concerns for voluntary informed consent and the well-being of  
studied populations.

In the last half year, American journalist John Stanton has written a  
series of damaging exposés published here on the CounterPunch site, in  
Pravda and elsewhere detailing a failures of Human Terrain management  
and the program’s overall inefficiency in the field.  Stanton’s work  
draws largely on unidentified disgruntled Human Terrain personnel and  
paints a picture of fiscal mismanagement, poor field supervision, lack  
of training before sending social scientists into life-threatening  
situations, and a non-working “reach-back system” that was supposed to  
connect deployed field Human Terrain personnel with personnel located  
at HTS headquarters at Ft. Leavenworth.

Nothing seems to be working right at Human Terrain.  During the past  
year two Human Terrain social scientists have been killed and last  
month saw an attack on,  and severe burning of, a third Human Terrain  
social scientist. Murder charges were recently filed against Human  
Terrain Team member Don Ayala. Ayala is accused of executing a  
detained  man believed to have attacked and burnt his Human Terrain  
Team colleague).  Many have tried to dismiss John Stanton and his work  
because it appears in alternative press sources but bastions of  
mainstream journalism have been giving the Human Terrain program a  
free ride since its inception, so I would not look to these sources to  
publish critical reports.  That Nature has turned against Human  
Terrain is big news.

Inside the Leaked Handbook

The recently leaked (unclassified) Human Terrain Team Handbook  
(September 2008) reflects Human Terrain’s vision that by aiding in the  
more sensitive occupation of populations, Human Terrain Teams are  
reducing violence.  The Handbook states that, “the end-state of Human  
Terrain Team support is to provide the unit the reasons why the  
population is doing what it is doing and thereby providing non-lethal  
options to the commander and his staff.”  This statement expresses the  
Handbook’s internal logic that: anthropologically based non-lethal  
subjugation = good; lethal subjugation = bad.  The Handbook ignores  
more traditional political and ethical considerations of  
anthropologists’ responsibilities following a logic more aligned with  
notions that subjugation of other cultures = bad.  Such traditional  
anthropological considerations are outside the logical scope of the  
Handbook; it takes anthropologically aided subjugation as an  
acceptable goal from the outset.

The Handbook claims that Human Terrain personnel produce “expert human  
terrain & social science advice based on a constantly updated, user- 
friendly ethnographic and socio-cultural database of the area of  
operations that leverages both the existing body of knowledge from the  
social sciences and humanities as well as on the ground research  
conducted by the team.”   But as John Stanton’s reporting clarifies,   
the needed software and the “tactical overwatch reach-back links” at  
the Ft. Leavenworth Reachback Research Center has never worked as  
planned with failed software systems and personnel reportedly unable  
to use the system.

The Handbook describes how a Human Terrain “toolkit” can be used to  
make subjects living in military occupied areas understandable to the  
U.S. military forces occupying them.  This toolkit is used in ways  
designed to make populations (to borrow from James Scott’s Seeing Like  
a State) “legible” and thus controllable.  The Handbook states that:

     “HTTs will use the Map-HT Toolkit of developmental hardware and  
software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data.  
HTTs use this human terrain information gathered to assist commanders  
in understanding the operational relevance of the information as it  
applies to the unit’s planning processes. The expectation is that the  
resulting courses of actions developed by the staff and selected by  
the commander will consistently be more culturally harmonized with the  
local population, which in Counter-Insurgency Operations should lead  
to greater success. It is the trust of the indigenous population that  
is at the heart of the struggle between coalition forces and the  
insurgents.”

Human Terrain social scientists’ mission is thus expressed in terms of  
engineering the “trust of the indigenous population.”  The Handbook  
clarifies how Human Terrain Systems envision its role as a tool by  
occupying military forces:, “the HTT will research, interpret,  
archive, and provide cultural data, information, and knowledge to  
optimize operational effectiveness by harmonizing courses of action  
within the cultural context of the environment, and provide the  
commander with operationally relevant, socio-cultural data,  
information, knowledge and understanding, and the embedded expertise  
to integrate that understanding into the commander’s planning and  
decision-making processes.”  Like many other contemporary  
articulations of anthropologists’ working with the military, the  
Handbook acts if its project is somehow separate from larger neo- 
imperial missions of invasion and occupation.

Consistent with claims by McFate and others supporting Human Terrain  
Systems, the Handbook insists that Human Terrain Teams should not  
engage in “Lethal Effects Targeting.”

But the Handbook remains silent on how the supposedly non-classified  
collected Human Terrain data will be protected from the “unintended”  
uses by others. It does state that “the commander has an intelligence  
section for lethal targeting; what they require is a section that can  
explain and delineate the non-lethal environment (e.g. tribal  
relationships and local power structures), as well as the second and  
third order effects of planned lethal and non-lethal operations.”   
Human Terrain Systems appears to naively believe that it can control  
the uses to which its data is put by others.  In a similar state of  
denial, the Handbook includes the admonition that personnel should:  
“avoid direct involvement in tactical questioning. Tactical  
questioning is a function of the intelligence world and designed to  
elicit primarily lethal-targeting information. It would also endanger  
relationships with the local population if HTTs are seen being  
involved with the “interrogating” of friends/family.” This statement  
pretends that the world of the intelligence community is neatly  
compartmentalized and could not possibly have access to HTT reports,  
and that by insisting that HTT personnel avoid “direct involvement”  
with the intelligence community somehow means that whatever passive  
involvement they have is acceptable.  The Handbook does not address  
the possibility that as Human Terrain Personnel collect information  
reporting identities of cooperative and compliant individuals or  
groups as “not” Taliban or “not” sympathetic to al-Quaida, those  
occupying the negative space of these composite pictures risk becoming  
targets.

The academic lineages exposed in the leaked Handbook are  
enlightening.  In particular, the Handbook draws heavily from and  
cites the work of American anthropologist and research methods guru H.  
Russell Bernard (Disclosure: I have known Russ Bernard for over twenty  
years, he was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee, I  
consider him a friend.) and anthropologist James Spradley—both highly  
regarded anthologists and research methodologists. The Handbook  
recommends several specific ethnographic tools, some of which are  
found in many anthropologists’ toolkits including: “The core software  
components (Analyst Notebook, ArcGIS, Anthropac, UCINet and NetDraw)  
allow the team to conduct network analysis, Modeling and Pattern  
analysis and geo-spatial analysis that place those people and events  
in place and time.” The Handbook includes sample interview forms that  
can be used to catalog members of occupied populations in remote  
databases.  There are discussions of qualitative and quantitative data  
collection and analysis written at a high school or middle school  
level of sophistication, describing such techniques as producing  
ethnographic field notes or conducting structured and unstructured  
interviews.  James Spradley’s 1979 “Taxonomy of Ethnographic  
Questions” and his “Elements in the Ethnographic Interview” are cited  
and reproduced in full. The Handbook includes a list of an interesting  
knowledge-tree of local concerns that military occupiers should be  
aware of—this list includes such items as knowledge of local  
archaeological resources, hand gestures, shortages of water,  
electricity and other resources.  The list provides a matrix to be  
used by anyone wishing to inventory items needed when attempting to  
establish full spectrum dominance over a given occupied people.

The inclusion of these specific methodologies, toolsets, interview and  
inventory sets is an artifact of  Human Terrain Systems’ focus on neo- 
positivist notions that social control of the human landscape can be  
achieved by the recording of, and then manipulation of key variables  
in these environments.  At a theoretical level, the Human Terrain  
project is reliant on a form of social engineering where the  
anthropologists working inside the program seem to believe they are  
reducing harm for the studied occupied populations, but the program  
itself is designed to manipulate these populations as studied objects— 
objects to be controlled for what has been determined as “their own  
good.”

The most startling methodological revelation in the Handbook comes  
when the current Human Terrain project connects itself to past  
anthropological efforts to catalog disparate cultural traits in George  
Peter Murdock’s Human Relations Area File, a project with financial  
roots firmly planted in anthropologists’ efforts to catalog cultures  
during the Second World War.  The Handbook states that,

     “As part of the research, we will eventually use the Organization  
of Cultural Materials schema in order to contribute our research  
results to an existing database of cultural practices and social  
systems known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) housed at Yale  
University. This practice allows us to provide significant, abundant,  
and contemporary socio-cultural information that others around the  
world may use in their own research. This practice will also allow us  
to tie into the HRAF database and compare the existence of one social  
practice, symbolic system, or historical process in our area of  
operations with others elsewhere in the world. Such cross-cultural  
analysis enables us to get closer to explaining causation and make  
weak assertions of what will likely happen in the population in the  
near future.”

With this statement Human Terrain comes full circle and connects to  
World War II projects using anthropological data to inform military  
interactions with occupied peoples, yet there is no expressed  
awareness of the many failures of the HRAF project, or of the problems  
faced by World War Two users of Murdock’s data.  Instead, the Handbook  
blindly marches towards a high-modern world of imagined social  
engineering where handheld data units provide occupiers with the sort  
of specific data readings that Captain Kirk, Science Officer Spock and  
their red shirted human terrain ensigns had in the original Star Trek  
series.  But this project isn’t exploring where no [hu]man has gone  
before, it is only a broken high tech version of colonial projects  
that many anthropologists hoped had become part of a shameful  
disciplinary past.

In a few places the Handbook makes fleeting suggestions that issues of  
research ethics are being dealt with by someone or something else.   
Without explanation, the Handbook states that “an accompanying  
document is written outlining how the research will comply with the  
protection of human research subjects according to 45 CFR 46 to ensure  
the research falls within accepted ethical guidelines.”  The Handbook  
also claims that, “the results of our research provide non-target data  
that suggests Courses of Action to the commander and his staff. Our  
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.”  It is difficult to evaluate  
the claims of non-targeting.  In his forthcoming book American  
Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, anthropologist  
Roberto González quotes U.S. Army, Lt. Colonel Gian Gentile, scoffing  
at suggestions that such cultural data would not be used for targeting  
in active war situations, responding to similar claims by Human  
Terrain anthropologist Marcus Griffin: “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.”  That the Handbook claims  
HTT’s research is “complete with ethical review boards” is news to me,  
and I await further clarification for how this claim is actually being  
implemented. I remain skeptical that this has in fact been implemented  
in any meaningful way.

Human Terrain Systems is a failed attempt to approach problems of  
subjugation or occupation with tools and understanding of cultural  
nuance and culturally appropriate manipulation.  Many anthropologists  
like myself oppose these methods on ethical and political grounds. The  
ethical problems of voluntary informed consent, and protection of   
research participants in such battle settings are ignored by Human  
Terrain, as is the political reality that anthropology is being used  
to aid and abet the forced occupation and subjugation of others.   
Human Terrain supporters like McFate argue that it represents a  
nonviolent alternative to the use of force, but these supporters fail  
to address the larger political context of supporting conquest and  
subjugation, instead choosing poses in which they present themselves  
as if it is they who are actually “insurgents” working within and  
against the military as they try and teach the military to use less- 
lethal means of achieving conquest.  The leaked Handbook shows that  
this is not insurgency against the military; it is a betrayal of what  
might have been anthropology’s promise to represent those we study in  
ways that reflect not only who they are, but their own self interests.

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, just  
published by Duke University Press. He can be reached at dprice at stmartin.edu