Anthropologists debate cooperating with US military
Marcus B. Griffin
Marcus B. Griffin is an assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Christopher Newport University. He is serving with the Second Brigade of the First Infantry Division in Baghdad.
When I arrived in Baghdad in August, I became the first Human Terrain System anthropologist to serve in Iraq. HTS is an innovative new program that embeds social scientists with combat brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers. I work closely with my brigade's staff officers to coordinate research efforts that give soldiers an awareness of what is happening around them. The responsibilities that go with that are significant; with every mortar round that explodes nearby, I am reminded that lives, not grades or publication records, are at stake.
My team deals with a variety of projects. Using semi-structured interviews of Iraqi contractors and local governmental officials, we identify key figures in northwest Baghdad who can help rebuild essential services like electricity, trash removal, and the provision of clean water. We also conduct research into how poverty and bonds of social obligation interact in Iraqi society. That information may help staff officers in my brigade, as well as other commanders, to better understand why certain people are willing to assist insurgent forces. Reducing aid and comfort to those intent on destabilizing Iraq will decrease violence and limit the number of civilian casualties (and loss of life generally). Reducing bloodshed is a primary motive for my participation in HTS.
HTS also acts as a cultural broker to reduce miscommunication and help Iraqis and Americans work more effectively as partners. Most of our data is collected from interviews and oral-history narratives. I do not speak Arabic, so I am forced to rely on interpreters. But I try to build rapport by demonstrating to my Iraqi interlocutors that I am sincerely trying to learn how to read and write Arabic. Many of the local Iraqis have taken an amused interest in helping teach me and my colleagues. While at first they were understandably fearful that we were in the business of gathering intelligence (in the sinister sense), we have been able to establish, over time and with great effort, a friendly, trusting relationship with the locals. We ask questions about Iraqi culture and what life is like in the neighborhoods. While that is intelligence of a sort, it is not the kind that gets people hurt.
David Vine
David Vine is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. Princeton University Press will publish his book, Paradise Stolen: Expulsion and the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, next fall.
The news-media campaign suggests that the military's recruitment of anthropologists is part of a broader strategy to rebrand the wars, putting a kinder, gentler face on occupation, both for the occupied and for those on the home front. In Afghanistan, for example, a Human Terrain Team says it's creating good will by talking to Afghans and providing medical services — though, as a Christian Science Monitor story pointed out, those efforts were undermined when casualties caused by a U.S. helicopter attack"made people angry and bent on revenge." In the United States, the program is part of an effort to change the image of the wars with feel-good stories and the softer, scholarly visage of culturally sensitive"warrior-intellectuals." Here the Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s of anthropologists offer a veneer of professionalism and humanity to the violent work of war and occupation, helping to justify keeping troops overseas.
And despite the assertions of military officials and journalists about saving lives, the true nature of anthropological collaboration appears far darker. A U.S. Army advertisement seeks anthropologists and other social scientists to work on"psyops," psychological operations. Human-terrain positions require security clearances and the ability to integrate ethnographic information with traditional military-intelligence gathering. Above all, team members provide knowledge about local populations — what is sometimes called"ethnographic intelligence" — to assist combat troops regularly engaged in battle and the work of killing. In the words of one soldier whose writing is circulating on Internet mailing lists, anthropology is helping"to better know my enemy." Indeed, U.S. Army personnel from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., home of the human-terrain program, call their brainchild"a Cords for the 21st century," referring to the controversial Vietnam War project. Intelligence operatives in the Phoenix Program, which was part of Cords (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), identified and assassinated more than 26,000 suspected Vietcong. Most chilling of all, an unclassified February 2007 presentation by Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense John Wilcox at a meeting in Arlington, Va., asserts that in the global war on terrorism, human-terrain mapping"enables the entire kill chain."
Anthropologists are being used as new military tools — weapons, as some proponents describe them — to directly and indirectly assist counterinsurgency operations and troops whose job requires taking human lives. Providing cultural-sensitivity training in a classroom or briefing peacekeepers charged with preventing violence and protecting civilians is one thing. But when an anthropologist steps onto the battlefield to assist soldiers at war, occupying another nation, engaged in regular, active, lethal combat operations, a line has been crossed. Which is what makes this kind of collaboration fundamentally unethical for anthropologists. In fact, the American Anthropological Association's executive board has recently found as much, with a statement expressing"disapproval" of the human-terrain program and"grave concerns" about what the board termed"an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise."
Steven M. Miska
Lt. Col. Steven M. Miska serves in the Second Brigade of the First Infantry Division. He is just finishing a tour of duty in Iraq.
I wish an anthropologist had served in my unit in Tikrit in 2004. I would have been more alert to the looming humanitarian crisis — more than two million Iraqis have fled the country for Syria and Jordan, and another two million are internally displaced. Back then we focused our energy on fighting a stubborn Sunni insurgency, but the added sensitivity to intertribal conflict that scholars could have provided would have warned us about the population trends, and we could have done more to avert the friction and fighting. We would have been more effective, for example, in forging new alliances like the ones that we recently established with former Sunni insurgents to protect local Sunni neighborhoods from Al Qaeda extremists.
The question of whether anthropologists and other social scientists should serve on Human Terrain System teams is not about the personal politics of those who participate. Nor is it about the initial decision to invade Iraq (which I did not support). It is about giving us the best chance of success now that we are committed to the Iraqi cause.