[R-G] Occupying Hearts and Minds

[Anthony Fenton]

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/occupying-hearts-and-minds

Occupying Hearts and Minds

by Dahr Jamail
May 1st, 2009 | T r u t h o u t

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.