[R-G] Engineering "Trust of the Indigenous Population": How Some Anthropologists Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Army

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.truthout.org/051609Z

Engineering "Trust of the Indigenous Population": How Some  
Anthropologists Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Army

Saturday 16 May 2009

by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

photo
Social scientists in the Human Terrain System teams embed with the  
military, ostensibly to improve cultural awareness of the populations  
in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, this "cultural awareness" is used to  
formulate strategies for killing and destruction. (Photo: David Axe /  
Wired.com)

     Anthropologist Audrey Roberts works for Human Terrain System  
(HTS), a Pentagon program. Referring to the information produced by  
HTS scholars, she says, "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. 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. I'd rather they did not operate in a vacuum."

     In a recent article on this site I have described HTS as  
comprising American scholars, primarily in the field of anthropology,  
along with sociologists and social psychologists, embedding themselves  
with the US military in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Their  
brief is to enable the military to make better decisions by helping it  
to understand the social mores and customs of the cultures it is  
occupying.

     As a program that is likely to have a long tenure, it deserves  
further examining. The US military would like the US public to believe  
it is a benevolent program, but it does not require a crystal ball to  
recognize the insidious reality. HTS teams actively engage in  
targeting the "enemy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Team members often wear  
military uniforms and body armor, and even carry weapons. Like Ms.  
Roberts, they are not overly concerned about the fact that the  
"intelligence" they produce is instrumental in capturing and killing  
people. The social scientists who choose to employ themselves within  
HTS clearly are not having a moral struggle with the fact that they  
are allowing their knowledge to be used as a weapon of war.

     The military's benign description specifies that HTS will  
"improve the military's ability to understand the highly complex local  
social-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed."  
Proponents of the program go as far as to claim that its goal is to  
help the military save lives.

     Those who know better, like US Army Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, will  
tell you, "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."

     The two highest ethical principles of anthropology are protection  
of the interests of studied populations, and their safety. All  
anthropological studies consequently are premised on the consent of  
the subject society. Clearly, the HTS anthropologists have thrown  
these ethical guidelines out the window. They are to anthropology what  
state stenographers like Judith Miller and John Burns are to journalism.

     I consulted David Price, author of "Anthropological Intelligence:  
The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second  
World War" and a contributor to the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual,  
a forthcoming work of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, of  
which he is a member.

     According to Price, "HTS presents real ethical problems for  
anthropologists, because the demands of the military in situations of  
occupation put anthropologists in positions undermining their  
fundamental ethical loyalties to those they study. Moreover, it  
presents political problems that link anthropology to a disciplinary  
past where anthropologists were complicit in assisting in colonial  
conquests. Those selling HTS to the military have misrepresented what  
culture is and have downplayed the difficulties of using culture to  
bring about change, much less conquest. There is a certain dishonesty  
in pretending that anthropologists possess some sort of magic beans of  
culture, and that if only occupiers had better cultural knowledge, or  
made the right pay-offs, then occupied people would fall in line and  
stop resisting foreign invaders. Culture is being presented as if it  
were a variable in a linear equation, and if only HTS teams could  
collect the right data variables and present troops with the right  
information conquest could be entered in the equation. Life and  
culture doesn't work that way; occupied people know they are occupied,  
and while cultural knowledge can ease an occupation, historically it  
has almost never led to conquest - but even if it could, anthropology  
would irreparably damage itself if it became nothing more than a tool  
of occupations and conquest."

     The Handbook for the HTS offers the Human Terrain "toolkit" for  
the US military to understand subjects living in militarily occupied  
areas. It states:

     "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." (Emphasis added.)

     The mission of the Human Terrain social scientists gains  
legitimacy and credibility when expressed in terms of engineering the  
"trust of the indigenous population."

     It is obvious that for the neo-colonialist, the HTS is a form of  
"soft power." In addition to dropping 2,000-pound bombs in civilian  
areas, occupation forces now see fit to use HTS to get into the minds  
of the people of the occupied country.

     Price avers, "The problem with anthropology being used in  
counterinsurgency isn't just that anthropologists are helping the  
military to wear different cultural skins; the problem is that it  
finds anthropologists using bio power and basic infrastructure as  
bargaining chips to force occupied cultures to surrender."

     Although he says it is too soon to gauge [a] possible increase in  
HTS operations since Obama took office, Price is convinced that the  
president is falling for the claim that a smart counterinsurgency can  
lead not just to easier occupations, but to victory.

     For the military to find regionally competent anthropologists to  
work for them is unlikely. Price is convinced that, "most (American)  
anthropologists understand the obvious ethical problems in working for  
HTS. The real risk lies in the likelihood that anthropologists will be  
seduced by arguments to support soft-power projects tied to occupation  
and counterinsurgency - especially when these projects are  
increasingly being presented as "helping" the occupied.

     "Those favoring soft-power forms of counterinsurgency are going  
to need anthropologists and other social scientists," Price said,  
"Narratives of aid and assistance, of building hospitals and schools  
will replace the strategic narratives of soft-power counterinsurgency  
manipulation of occupied people by occupiers. When you add to this the  
grim job prospects many anthropologists face in this economy, you can  
see how easy it is for the US administration to sell these soft-power  
programs."

     As the new administration adopts less-violent manipulations of  
the environments and peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, Price is  
concerned that anthropologists will fail to see the distinction  
between military coercion of occupied peoples and publicized acts of  
"humanitarianism."

     As in most matters related to the occupation, the corporate media  
are squarely responsible for selling the HTS program to the American  
public. Price has written, "... 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 troops 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."

     Corporate media coverage of the program conveniently does not  
indicate that HTS ignores basic anthropological principles of ethics,  
such as voluntary informed consent, issues of secrecy, and doing no  
harm, among others. Most anthropologists concur with Price that HTS is  
also part of a domestic propaganda project, "that tells the Americans  
that wars for the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq and  
Afghanistan can be won. History argues against any such outcome, but  
HTS becomes part of a lie to the American people that helps keep us  
fighting these already lost causes. It is so poorly designed that HTS  
has no hope of actually working as advertised, yet both the Bush and  
Obama administrations have sold us a false hope that such  
counterinsurgency programs can lead to an eventual victory."

     As Price wrote recently, the media stance does not bode well for  
the future, or for President Obama. "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 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 anthropologist Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother,  
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?"