Features » June 19, 2008

Anthropologists At War (cont’d)

It has begun to do so. A piece in the Jan. 1, 2007, Field Artillery Journal briefed officers on greeting their Iraqi Army counterparts: “If you are especially close, a kiss on the cheek may become commonplace. You will get used to it – it is a compliment indicating that your status has been raised to ‘brother.’ ” Marines now receive how-to pamphlets, such as “Cultural Considerations in House Occupations,” for tips “on the Iraqi human dynamics when coalition forces enter Iraq residences.”

“Normality in Kandahar is not the same as in Kansas,” Kilcullen wrote in a 2006 memo e-mailed to military officers. “Armed social work” is his pithy take on culturally aware counterinsurgency.

He posts tips from the front: “Stop your people fraternizing with local children. Your troops are homesick; they want to drop their guard with the kids. But children are sharp-eyed, lacking in empathy and willing to commit atrocities their elders would shrink from.”

Troops can also acquire “practical cultural knowledge, sensitivity and awareness” by playing “Mission to Iraq.” According to its promo materials, this $795 video game has “socially intelligent virutal humans” driven by “cultural puppets.” Alelo, the company that makes it, also sells Dari and Pashto versions for Afghan deployments.

Testifying before the 2004 Armed Services Committee, retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales proposed “a cadre of global scouts, well educated, with a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant places.”

He continued: “These soldiers should be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them,” saying that ethnographic embedees ought to “stay for extended periods within the countries, not just a few years but perhaps decades.”

Scales, a defense consultant with a doctorate in history from Duke University, has other ideas for anthropologizing the Army. He wrote this in a 2004 article “Culture-Centric Warfare” for the Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine:

The military spends millions to create urban combat sites designed to train soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. But perhaps equally useful might be urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist with and cultivate trust and understanding among indigenous peoples inside foreign urban settings. Such centers would immerse young soldiers within a simulated Middle Eastern city, perhaps near a mosque or busy marketplace, where they would be confronted with various crises precipitated by expatriate role players who would seek to agitate and incite a local mob to violence.

“War is a thinking man’s game,” argues Scales. Gen. David Petraeus, a Princeton Ph.D. and commander of the Multi-National Force, agrees, telling Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in December 2006: “Counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they’re thinking man’s warfare.”

Contested cultural terrain

Between April 25 and 27, the Human Terrain System came under fire at the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference held at the University of Chicago. Organized by John D. Kelly, chair of U.C.’s Anthropology Department, and three U.C. doctoral candidates, the conference aimed to “pursue the full implications of the connection now being sought by the U.S. military between culture and insurgency.”

“HTS is among the largest social science projects in history,” argued González, who has sparred in the pages of Anthropology Today with Kilcullen, who was invited but did not attend, and with McFate, who was not invited.

“I would have been delighted to attend,” she wrote in an e-mail to In These Times. “It’s not everyday that there’s a conference on the subject.”

“The national security structure in the U.S. needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone,” McFate urged in her 2005 Joint Forces Quarterly article.

Many of McFate’s colleagues at the Chicago gathering challenged that spin on their discipline. González told the conference-goers, “In the end, it is by sharing what [anthropologists have] learned with the general public – not political, military or corporate elites – that we might spark lasting progressive change in democratic societies.”

Another dissenter is David Price, an anthropology professor at Saint Martin’s College in Lacey, Wash., who researches the history of American anthropologists colluding with the American government.

Military planners “dream that culture can fix what thousands of tons of munitions broke,” Price said at the gathering. “We should use anthropology to keep us out of these invasion fiascos in the first place.”