Anthropologists in a War Zone: Scholars Debate Their Role

In 2002, Britt Damon was an Army reservist assigned to guard detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station. At the time, he had eight years of experience as a military police officer, and he was slowly piling up credits toward a bachelor’s degree in criminology.

Guantánamo changed Mr. Damon’s plans. While most of his fellow guards treated the detainees in a way that he describes as “professional but cold,” Mr. Damon, a pensive, slightly built man, often fell into conversation with them. “One of the Afghans would sit down and recite the poetry he had written,” he recalls. “We both knew that I couldn’t understand its verbal meaning, but you could understand the emotion and the context.”

Mr. Damon wanted to comprehend the cultural forces that had helped lead him and his prisoner to this remote place in the Caribbean. Before he left Cuba, he decided to switch his major to anthropology.

Four years later, Mr. Damon was working as a bar bouncer and taking courses at the University of Kansas when he saw an online notice: The military wanted reservists with social-science backgrounds to join a new program known as the Human Terrain System. The program would give brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan detailed information about local customs, kinship structures, and social conflicts. In the military’s jargon, the idea is to assist with “cultural preparation of the battlefield.” As Mr. Damon sees it, that means providing military leaders with information to help them make better decisions, and, especially, to help them avoid needless violence.

Early this year, Mr. Damon landed in southeast Afghanistan as a member of one of the first experimental Human Terrain Teams. He also landed in the middle of a debate that has roiled his adopted field of anthropology.

Critics of the Human Terrain System say that armed anthropologists in military uniforms cannot possibly be getting voluntary informed consent — a principle at the core of the discipline’s code of practice — from their research subjects. They also worry that the program will directly or indirectly help the military select particular neighborhoods or people for attack.

David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University who is one of the program’s most visible critics, says he fears that the new program might someday help the Iraqi or Afghan government conduct immoral scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaigns. (In 1970 several American anthropologists were accused of assisting the government of Thailand with such campaigns.)

Some critics go further, arguing that the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is illegitimate and that the Human Terrain Teams are helping prepare the countries for neocolonial rule, in an echo of the imperial-flavored anthropology of the early 20th century.

At this week’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in Washington, a special committee is expected to release a set of ethical guidelines for scholars who work with military and intelligence agencies. The association’s executive board has already released a statement formally disapproving of anthropologists’ participation in the Human Terrain System, and the association has — at least temporarily — stopped accepting recruitment advertisements for the program.

But despite the intense scrutiny, many elements of the human-terrain effort remain little-understood. How do brigade leaders actually make use of the teams’ analyses? How will the data be used over the long term? And what exactly is the social-science component of the program? If the Human Terrain Teams are establishing rapport with local populations and learning about social conflicts, doesn’t that simply replicate the traditional work of the army’s civil-affairs and intelligence teams?

At a workshop this month at Kansas’ Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, three members of Mr. Damon’s team joined three social scientists to discuss the human-terrain program’s future. Their meeting suggested that the program is still rapidly evolving, and it may be years before the public has a full picture of how the military is attempting to put social-science knowledge to use.

Anthropology on the QT

“Our goal was to look at the culture of the military and at the culture of the Afghans, at how they see themselves,” says Mr. Damon, who now works at Fort Leavenworth, 35 miles from the Kansas campus, as a civilian contractor recruiting and training members of the Human Terrain Teams. His employer is BAE Systems, an aerospace company that holds a major contract to support the Human Terrain System. He is also still taking courses at Kansas and expects to complete his bachelor’s degree in May.

Mr. Damon and his colleagues have a lot of work ahead of them: By July the Army plans to deploy 22 nine-person teams in Iraq and another four teams in Afghanistan. Only six teams are on the ground today. Each team will have a leader with extensive military experience, two social scientists with at least master’s degrees (one anthropologist and one regional specialist), and six lower-level data analysts (some of whom are Iraqi or Afghan citizens hired in part for their language skills).

Of those nine people, the idea is to have a roughly equal split between military personnel and civilian contractors. Almost all of the social scientists recruited so far have been civilians.

Some of the program’s social scientists have chosen to keep a low profile. Most notably, the lead anthropologist on Mr. Damon’s team has been identified publicly only as “Tracy” — and she did not attend the Kansas workshop.

Others, however, have publicly promoted their work. Marcus B. Griffin, an anthropologist at Christopher Newport University who is serving in Iraq, maintains a blog with near-daily updates on his activities. He has also written an essay for this week’s issue of The Chronicle Review.

Liam D. Murphy, an associate professor of anthropology at California State University at Sacramento, has not served on a Human Terrain Team, but he has traveled to Fort Leavenworth three times to train program participants in ethnographic techniques. He says he can understand young scholars’ reluctance to publicize their participation because he believes the anthropology association’s disapproval will stigmatize people coming up for tenure.

Mr. Murphy says many of the ethical concerns about the program are real and serious, but he believes it is a mistake for scholars to hold the program at arm’s length. “As I’ve learned more about what the Human Terrain System is intended to do, I’ve become persuaded that it’s worth exploring,” he says. He adds that he is prepared to act “as a whistle-blower” if he ever detects serious problems.

Dissidents in the Ranks

When his team first arrived in Afghanistan, Mr. Damon says, they spent several weeks on a base near Khost, working alongside local civilian employees who drive trucks, wash laundry, and perform manual labor. “I would just get up in the morning and embed with one of these workers,” he says. “I would grab a scythe and go down and cut wheat with them, or work in the apple orchard, or sit in the back of their truck, and just talk with them. This is how we built these relationships.”

Among other things, Mr. Damon recalls, he and his colleagues discovered seething resentment about the security measures that the workers faced when they entered and left the base each day. The workers would sometimes receive gifts of chocolate from Americans during the day, only to see them confiscated when they left the base.

“If we don’t start looking at how we treat people at the center of these concentric circles of relationships,” Mr. Damon says, “how are we going to expect people to trust us as we move farther away from our bases?”

In a variety of ways, Mr. Damon and his teammates clearly view themselves as dissidents within the culture of the military. During the Kansas conference, Maj. Robert Fulton Holbert, an Army reservist who served with Mr. Damon in Afghanistan, said it took three months for their Human Terrain Team to gain the trust of the brigade where they served. The human-terrain concept, Major Holbert said, “is something that the Army should have embraced 15 years ago.” It is still much too common, he said, for the Army to move into an area “like a blunderbuss” with no concern for local sensitivities.

Felix Moos, a 78-year-old professor of anthropology at Kansas who has trained several human-terrain participants, passionately supports the program. He has roughly a dozen different ways of saying “A better-educated military will kill fewer people, not more.” In conversation, however, Mr. Moos lapses every five minutes or so into severe criticism of the military. He believes the U.S. poppy-eradication program in Afghanistan is idiotic; he says it is insane that the Army hasn’t invested more resources in building officers’ language skills; he deplores the fact that the human-terrain program is run through private contractors.

Some observers say the human-terrain program is not as distinct from mainstream military culture as its proponents like to suggest. In an essay in the November 26 issue of The Weekly Standard, the journalist Ann Marlowe argued that the news media have given the human-terrain program undue credit for what is actually an Armywide shift toward better counterinsurgency tactics. Throughout Afghanistan, she wrote, Army units are interacting more effectively with the local population, and they haven’t needed fancy anthropological knowledge in order to do so.

A converse point was made earlier this year by one of the program’s left-wing critics. Roberto J. González, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, acknowledged in an essay in Anthropology Today that the Human Terrain System’s soft methods “are apparently anathema to many in the Pentagon.” But despite those cultural conflicts within the Department of Defense, Mr. González argued, the human-terrain teams should not deceive themselves that their work is actually progressive. Instead, he wrote, they are scholarly imperialists “seeking particular forms of cultural knowledge that might facilitate indirect rule over foreign lands.”

Ethnography or Banality?

Mr. Damon and his colleagues insist, however, that their work in Afghanistan has helped to save lives. Major Holbert cites an official estimate that the 82nd Airborne Division, in which his team was embedded in southeast Afghanistan, reduced its “kinetic operations” — that is, operations that require direct military force — by 60 percent after the Human Terrain Team arrived.

Nothing in the team’s work, Mr. Damon says, had to do with selecting targets for military action. If the brigade leader requested a line of research that appeared to deal with targeting, he says, the team would refuse to take it, telling the commander to send the request instead to his intelligence division. “What we would do,” Mr. Damon says, “is offer advice about the potential second- and third-order effects of a proposed operation in a village.”

During the Kansas conference, Major Holbert offered an example. “There was a particular village that was going to be searched,” he said. “And the platoon leaders were planning to go in there at about 3 or 4 in the morning. On a Friday morning. … And Britt and I pointed out that that really wasn’t a good idea. Searching these homes on a Friday morning before morning prayer. If this village was hovering between red and blue” — that is, between supporting the Taliban and supporting the Kabul government — “this would definitely push it over onto the red side.”

The Human Terrain Team persuaded the brigade instead to approach the town’s leader in daylight and to explain why the search was necessary. “Humility and respect go a long way,” Major Holbert said.

Many of the interventions described by Mr. Damon and his colleagues — don’t confiscate chocolate, don’t raid homes before dawn on a Friday — seem common-sensical and obvious. Indeed, one frequent criticism of the program, from both conservatives like Ms. Marlowe and leftists like Mr. González, is that its insights are generally banal. What about the program requires someone with a deep knowledge of ethnographic techniques?

In the dull, brick building where the Human Terrain System is headquartered at Fort Leavenworth, across the street from the fort’s famous prison barracks, James K. Greer, the program’s deputy manager, offers an answer to that question. The Human Terrain Teams, he says, are slowly compiling detailed ethnographic histories of the areas where they operate. In a cumulative, hard-to-quantify way, he says, those ethnographies will eventually help brigade leaders make better decisions.

The Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, Mr. Greer says, “looks absolutely rectangular if you look at it on a map. But if you were to draw a picture of the tribal relationships within Sadr City, it looks very different. You start to see different fault lines. … What we’re trying to understand is, Where are the different tribes in Sadr City and how do they interact with the formal government and all the other formal things that we’re trying to do — investments in electricity and water and sewage and schools and all the rest of that?”

At the Kansas conference, an official with the Center for Army Lessons Learned offered a different analysis: Some of the Human Terrain Teams’ advice about local customs might seem banal, he said, but a culturally insensitive brigade commander is more likely to heed the advice of a credentialed social scientist than that of a 19-year-old civil-affairs soldier who might make the same point.

Getting to ‘Yes’

The element of the Human Terrain System that is most worrisome to academic anthropologists — even those who are generally open to advising the military — is the question of informed consent. No formal institutional review board supervises the social-scientific research conducted by the civilian anthropologists in the program. The program’s leaders have said that because the work consists of “interview procedures or observation of public behavior,” it falls outside the federal statute on human-subjects protection. But several critics have disputed that assertion, and the matter is reportedly being reviewed by the Pentagon’s lawyers.

David M. Hann, coordinator of the human-subjects committee at Kansas, writes in an e-mail message to The Chronicle that he believes the program should be reviewed by an independent federal board, perhaps at the National Institutes of Health.

“Allowing the Department of Defense to decide for itself whether its own research plans need review,” Mr. Hann writes, “would be a built-in conflict of interest, much like if departments within a university or hospital were allowed to decide the same question themselves, rather than submit their research protocol to their university’s IRB to decide that question.”

Despite the lack of a review board, Mr. Damon says he obtained written consent from everyone he interviewed, even if it took several conversations to explain the concept of anthropology. “The best way I could get that across,” he says, “was to tell them that I’m there to learn about their culture. They’re my teacher and I’m their student, and I want to know what they think and how they feel.” He says he told his informants that “we are going to be using them in a published study to the military commanders, but that we’ll never reveal who we specifically got the information from.”

At this week’s anthropology conference, much of the debate will concern how the Army uses the data compiled by Human Terrain Teams. That question probably cannot be fully answered for at least another year, as more teams arrive in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the meantime, Kansas’ Mr. Moos urges his colleagues to give the program the benefit of the doubt. “To defeat any insurgency,” he says, “you have to separate the population from the insurgents. If you win enough of the population, they will help you defeat the insurgency. So the real purpose of all of this is, How do you convince the people to come over to your thinking, or at least to approximate your thinking?” Only social scientists, he says, can give the military the knowledge it needs to complete that task with a minimum of violence.

Many anthropologists, however, are horrified by the thought of manipulating a local culture in the way Mr. Moos proposes, especially when the coercive force of the Army is involved. “Anthropologists on the ground with military operations, whether they’re in civilian or military dress, is just over the line,” says Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College and the former chair of the anthropology association’s ethics committee. “That’s just not what we do. At the very least, call it something else. Call it open-source intelligence. This is not something that we comfortably recognize as anthropology.”

For his part, Mr. Damon hopes that he will still be working with the program a decade from now. “I truly feel that this is a necessary part of the military,” he says. “If we can understand this sort of information even before a conflict begins, then we’ve really gotten somewhere.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 54, Issue 14, Page A1