[News] When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/gonzalez09272007.html

September 28, 2007


Pledging to Boycott the "War on Terror"


When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents

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 <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822333384/counterpunchmaga>
[]
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 
<mailto:concerned.anthropologists at gmail.com>concerned.anthropologists at gmail.com 
or visit our web site at 
<http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home>http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home.

Roberto J. González is author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0292728328/counterpunchmaga>Zapotec 
Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra 
of Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2001) and 
editor of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0292701691/counterpunchmaga>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 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822333384/counterpunchmaga>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: 
<mailto:dprice at stmartin.edu>dprice at stmartin.edu




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