I have been concerned about the Pentagon’s program to enlist anthropologists into its “Human Terrain System” (HTS) program ever since I first heard about it. The relationship between western “anthropology” (literally, in Greek, a “study of the human condition”) and various extremely exploitative colonial ventures over the past 120 years is very well-known.
Recently, I identified one of my key concerns with this latest version of the same-old, same-old attempt to use specialized knowledge about the condition of other peoples in order to subjugate and control them. It is this idea that our fellow-humans around the world could be considered, in the military sense or any other sense, to be merely “terrain” to be fought over, won, and controlled.
In military science, geographical terrain (from the Latin, meaning “earth”) is something that is to be studied, mapped, and understood– and then, that understanding is used in order to control and exploit that terrain.
So what are we saying about our fellow-humans if we say they are merely “terrain”?
Isn’t calling them “terrain” worse, actually, than using the many zoomorphic slur-words that are used to dehumanize and denigrate human “others”? Like former Israeli Chief of Staff’s infamous reference to Palestinians as “cockroaches” or “flies in a bottle,” or any other reference to opponents being merely “animals”… Other examples of zoomorphic denigration are too numerous to list.
The idea that our fellow humans in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else are merely “terrain” can be traced, most recently, to the US military’s late-2006 counter-insurgency manual (PDF here), as co-authored by Gen. Petraeus. One of the key arguments made there was that “the key battlespace is the mind of the citizens of the ‘Host Nation’.” (The whole COIN concept was built, we can note, on the key assumption that the US military would be waging its COIN warfare inside other people’s countries.)
So what the Human Terrain System program seeks to do is to provide the key cultural/sociological knowledge required for the US military to be able to control and exploit the minds of those other, non-US men and women.
Now, when a military is waging a campaign that control and exploit geographical terrain, some of that terrain may get chewed up, burned, or suffer other other non-trivial damage. How about when it is waging a campaign to control and exploit the mental “terrain” of our fellow-humans in a distant country?
The mental damage inflicted on subjugated others in the more known-of places like Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo is only the tip of a vast iceberg of damage inflicted.
Think of the million-plus children among the 2.5 million residents of Sadr City. How has their mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing been affected by the assaults the US military has launched against Sadr City over the recent weeks?
Think of the four million or so Iraqis displaced from their homes and scattered to places of distant (and always vulnerable) refugee over the past 30 months. How has their mental and spiritual wellbeing been affected?
It strikes me, though, that the people who run and implement the US military’s “Human Terrain” program are also suffering significant spiritual damage through their participation in this very anti-humane venture. They have been conditioned to believe that they have some kind of “right”, as contractors with or members of the US military, to intrude into, study, and map the lives of subjugated Iraqis, with the aim that the US military can use this knowledge to control and exploit those others.
That, to me, is what the dehumanizing term “human terrain” connotes.
How spiritually sick can a person get?
You can find a a good round-up of recent controversies around the HTS program here, on the Mind Hacks blog.
That blog post links to this recent Newsweek article on the program, and this subsequent piece on the Wired blog, in which the female anthropologist Montgomery McFate, one of the program’s main architects, defends it.
The Newsweek piece is titled “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other”, and is illustrated with a photo of a female in full military combat gear, with a helmet and body armor, who is standing in what may be the public square of an Iraqi town. She is earnestly taking notes by hand in a little notebook.
In the piece, the writers, Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring write about one HTS participant that, “Though he wears Army fatigues and carries a gun, Griffin is a civilian, part of a controversial program known as the Human Terrain System.” They also write, “For their services, the anthropologists get up to $300,000 annually while posted abroad—a salary that is six times higher than the national average for their field.” Clearly, for many newly-minted anthropologists who have heavy grad-school debts to repay, the pay would be quite a draw. As, too, might the idea that they could “study” people foreign culture, thus building up their research credentials in the fild– and get paid quite handsomely while doing so.
Last October, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the professional body of US practitioners and teachers in the field, issued a strong statement that measured the HTS program against the ethical standards of their profession and concluded that they disapproved” of the program. The statement added:
In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.
The Executive Board affirms that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation. It is in this way, the Executive Board affirms, that anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.
In general, this is a good and strong statement. Personally, I would not have put in the explanatory clause with which the first of those paragraphs starts– or perhaps, I would have phrased it differently. I believe the ethical problems they earlier identified– and in particular the impossibility of obtaining the “informed consent” of subjects of study in a context when the “anthropologist” in question is wearing the uniform of and carrying the gun of an occupying army– make the project “a problematic application of anthropological expertise”, regardless of how the war and occupation started. To believe that anyone can wear the uniform, carry the gun, be a member of a mutually supporting sub-unit of an occupation army, and be considered by anyone to be an objective observer– let alone a friendly fellow-human with whom a “native”{ person might voluntarily share one’s view of the world– simply boggles the mind.
(Why does the name of the Israeli “anthropologist” Clinton Bailey keep popping into my mind?)
The dilemma faced by many anthropologists seems similar to that faced by some humanitarian-aid workers in recent years. Back in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq., the US military made broad efforts to try to “enlist” the collaboration of many US relief agencies. At one point, Rumsfeld even openly said that the activities of such groups could act as “force mulitpliers” for the US invasion force (which otherwise might have to fulfill its own responsibilities to the Iraqi population as occupying power in Iraq.) I know that many of my friends in the humanitarian-aid community agonized over whether and how far to coordinate with the invasion force. They wanted to “be ready to help” deal with the humanitarian disasters that might accompany a US invasion of Iraq, but they also wanted to be able to do so in way that did not associate them with the policies and priorities of the invading/occupying army.
As the occupation ground on, year after year, the dilemmas continued. I have spoken to some western aid workers who strongly shunned any collaboration with the occupation forces, and who also, with great courage, refused to hire armed guards to accompany either their aid convoys or themselves. But the security situation got worse and worse. Their aid convoys became harder and harder to organize. I am not sure if any of those convoys are being organized at all these days.
This reminds me, too, of Harold Evans, the Quaker from Philadelphia who back in May 1948 had been named by UNSCOP as “municipal commissioner” of the internationally administered “corpus separatum” that, according to the 1947 Partition Plan, was supposed to be established in Jerusalem and a broad area around it. Evans reportedly got as far as Cairo, but he then refused to proceed any further until the British military who were in control there would allow him to do so without a military escort.
You could say that maybe some bloodshed could have been avoided in Jerusalem if he had gotten there to administer it? I think that to say that, would be to credit Quakers with too much power and influence!
Actually, the British were determined to stick to their timetable to take their military out of the whole of Palestine, regardless of whether (as occurred) Arab-Jewish fighting thereafter engulfed the whole of the area of Mandate Palestine, including Jerusalem. So I strongly doubt whether Evans would have had a chance to make a difference in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, though, he kept himself– and by extension, most other Quakers– unsullied from entanglement in the British military’s schemes.
In Evans’s case, and in the cases where people are trying to carry out unquestionably humanitarian aid missions, these can agonizingly tough judgments to make.
But in the case where anthropology professionals are being asked to gather knowledge about– and then, to share with a military occupation army– information about the mores and views of the “occupied” people, I don’t think the ethical judgment is a difficult one at all.