http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5867
Foreign Policy in Focus
A New Era in U.S.-Iranian Relations?
William O. Beeman | February 12, 2009
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
Iran is in the middle of celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution that ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and with him, the extraordinary influence the United States had on Iranian life. According to many right-wing pundits, the revolution was the start of an era of hostility between the United States and the Muslim world — an era that they see as still underway.
President Barack Obama, however, has inaugurated a new rhetoric on Iran. The United States doesn't assume an automatically hostile posture toward Iran or the Muslim world but will base its actions and reactions on deeds rather than perceptions of ideology. That Obama's mere willingness to talk to Iran comes across as earth-shattering in some quarters reveals the depths of our past mutual hostility.
After the Revolution
The Iranian Revolution wasn't anti-American, but an anti-colonial revolution directed at all outside control of Iranian affairs. Americans forget one of the great slogans of the revolution: "Neither East nor West." The United States unfortunately inherited the mantle of Great Britain and Russia, who oppressed the Iranian state for more than 150 years before Ayatollah Khomeini began to rail against the Shah. Iran was just as upset with those powers as with the United States, and still remains distrustful of all European influence in its affairs.
Even after 1979, Iran sought not simply to oppose the United States, but rather to chart its own course as a regional power, an industrial leader, an economic force in the region, and a diplomatic broker for its neighbors. Although its revolutionary ideals drove many of its early policies — such as the founding support for Hezbollah in Lebanon — these ideals soon proved to have little currency in an Islamic world that viewed the Iranian Shi'a with suspicion.
The original revolutionary ideals, initially hailed throughout the Islamic world, now have little practical force, and Iran has changed in turn. Today Iran's politics are less ideological and religious than practical. It has good diplomatic relations with all of its neighbors, and despite the fiery pronouncements of its largely powerless president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, operates with caution in the region. It no longer has any effective control over Hezbollah and never had much direct influence over Hamas or other regional oppositionist groups.
Better Weather Ahead?
There are now many possibilities for building ties with the United States if Americans can only wake up to them. The United States has common cause with Iran on many fronts. In political terms, the United States and Iran both oppose Islamic extremists like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Despite attempts by the Bush administration to tie Iran to these groups to frighten the American public, Iranians oppose these extremist groups because the latter utterly reject Shi'ism — even to the point of sanctioning the murder of Shi'a believers, such as the Hazara minority in Afghanistan.
Like the United States, Iran favors stability in the region. Contrary to the Bush-era accusations, Tehran's leaders aren't pleased with the militarism of individuals like Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and have worked to quiet his opposition groups in Iraq in the name of a more comprehensive stability for the Shi'a community, which will eventually rule Iraq. Tehran's leaders also want stability in Afghanistan. Iran hosts millions of Afghan refugees. It would like most of them to go home, and that can't happen until Afghanistan is quiet once again.
Other areas of potential cooperation include prevention of drug trafficking, environmental protection, health care, trade stabilization, and international transport. Iran also has a strong stake in culture and tourism. The whole world travels to Iran to see the astonishing historical and archaeological sites — except for Americans.
It's no paradox that Iranians love Americans and American culture. Iranians prioritize independence and nationalist sentiment over opposition to the West. As long as the United States doesn't try to dominate Iran, treating the Islamic Republic with "mutual respect" (to quote Obama), Iranians have no problem with Washington. Iran's youthful population now has a majority of citizens who have no experience of the original revolution, or remembrance of Ayatollah Khomeini or other revolutionary leaders.
Washington won't likely offer Iran congratulations on the anniversary of its revolution. But stopping the U.S. invective will be congratulations enough. It's time to realize that a generation has passed since the hostile U.S. reception of the revolution. With a new generation comes a new opportunity. With luck we'll see the mood of Washington change. It was always permissible to denigrate Iran in American politics. A good first step toward a "breakthrough with Iran" would be for the Obama administration to declare such cheap political rhetoric no longer acceptable.
Foreign Policy In Focus contributor William O. Beeman is professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is president of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the author, most recently, of The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Afghanistan. Show all posts
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
US professor William O. Beeman: Obama transition team has no expertise on Iran [IRNA]
US professor William O. Beeman: Obama transition team has no expertise on Iran
New York, Feb 11, IRNA -- William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota said that Obama transition team has no expertise on Iran, but, the fact that President Obama called for dialog with Iranians was a huge development.
He said that in a new American administration it takes some time to confirm new officials, and to get the new organization in place. Also, right now the priority of this administration has been on domestic economic matters.
Q. In the past three weeks, the new US Administration has just made a series of statements, threats, judgments …etc on Iran. Do you see a resolve on part of the US to have direct dialogue with Iran?
A. It is too soon to tell what precise actions the Obama administration will be taking with regard to Iran. In a new American administration it takes some time to confirm new officials, and to get the new organization in place. Also, right now the priority of this administration has been on domestic economic matters. Nevertheless, there is reason for caution. The Obama transition team has almost no expertise on Iran. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is a prominent neoconservative organization supported by AIPAC. Former Ambassador Dennis Ross is an important member of this and several other anti-Iranian groups. The White House has said that he will be “special envoy” to Iran. This is a mistake, in my opinion. Moreover, the influence of WINEP should be severely curtailed if relations with Iran are to be improved. WINEP favors military action against Iran, and has been instrumental in spreading false information about Iran’s nuclear program.
Q. Aside from sugar coating the same nature of rhetoric that we’d heard from previous administration, is there any move or gesture by this administration that proves such tendency?
A. It is important to remember that attacking Iran has been a common political activity for both Democrats and Republicans. The American public now believes that Iran is a danger to the United States thanks to consistent negative publicity on Iran. So, any administration official that expresses any kind of sympathy toward Iran is going to be in a dangerous political position. For this reason we should expect the Obama administration to go VERY SLOWLY in approaching Iran. The mere fact that President Obama called for dialog with Iranians was a huge development, and it created a lot of criticism for him.
Q. In your view how is Obama going to be able to create stability in the Middle East using Iran’s assistance as it is in the view of some analysts.
A. I am not sure that the Obama administration appreciates how much help Iran can be in stabilizing the region. Iran can help in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Gulf region. Iran has no control over Hezbollah or Hamas, but they can be used as intermediaries for these groups. The sooner the United States sees Iran as a partner and not an enemy, the sooner progress will be made toward peace in the region.
Q. Some share the view that Israel is extremely worried about the improvement in US Iran relationship and by creating obstacles is trying to prevent such improvements. Do you agree with that view?
A. Israel has ALWAYS been worried whenever Iran and the United States seem to become friendly. Whenever talks start, Israelis put out report, directly and through organizations like WINEP and AIPAC, about Iran supporting terrorism, attacking Americans in Iraq or elsewhere, or developing some non-existent weapon. Israel will DEFINITELY try hard to sabotage any rapprochement between Iran and the United States. This is absolutely certain. I only hope that the Obama administration and more sober foreign policy specialists can help expose these tricks. Mostly it is important to get to the American public to tell them that these accusations are not real, that they are designed to torpedo movement toward normal relations.
End News / IRNA / News Code 350244
New York, Feb 11, IRNA -- William O. Beeman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota said that Obama transition team has no expertise on Iran, but, the fact that President Obama called for dialog with Iranians was a huge development.
He said that in a new American administration it takes some time to confirm new officials, and to get the new organization in place. Also, right now the priority of this administration has been on domestic economic matters.
Q. In the past three weeks, the new US Administration has just made a series of statements, threats, judgments …etc on Iran. Do you see a resolve on part of the US to have direct dialogue with Iran?
A. It is too soon to tell what precise actions the Obama administration will be taking with regard to Iran. In a new American administration it takes some time to confirm new officials, and to get the new organization in place. Also, right now the priority of this administration has been on domestic economic matters. Nevertheless, there is reason for caution. The Obama transition team has almost no expertise on Iran. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is a prominent neoconservative organization supported by AIPAC. Former Ambassador Dennis Ross is an important member of this and several other anti-Iranian groups. The White House has said that he will be “special envoy” to Iran. This is a mistake, in my opinion. Moreover, the influence of WINEP should be severely curtailed if relations with Iran are to be improved. WINEP favors military action against Iran, and has been instrumental in spreading false information about Iran’s nuclear program.
Q. Aside from sugar coating the same nature of rhetoric that we’d heard from previous administration, is there any move or gesture by this administration that proves such tendency?
A. It is important to remember that attacking Iran has been a common political activity for both Democrats and Republicans. The American public now believes that Iran is a danger to the United States thanks to consistent negative publicity on Iran. So, any administration official that expresses any kind of sympathy toward Iran is going to be in a dangerous political position. For this reason we should expect the Obama administration to go VERY SLOWLY in approaching Iran. The mere fact that President Obama called for dialog with Iranians was a huge development, and it created a lot of criticism for him.
Q. In your view how is Obama going to be able to create stability in the Middle East using Iran’s assistance as it is in the view of some analysts.
A. I am not sure that the Obama administration appreciates how much help Iran can be in stabilizing the region. Iran can help in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Gulf region. Iran has no control over Hezbollah or Hamas, but they can be used as intermediaries for these groups. The sooner the United States sees Iran as a partner and not an enemy, the sooner progress will be made toward peace in the region.
Q. Some share the view that Israel is extremely worried about the improvement in US Iran relationship and by creating obstacles is trying to prevent such improvements. Do you agree with that view?
A. Israel has ALWAYS been worried whenever Iran and the United States seem to become friendly. Whenever talks start, Israelis put out report, directly and through organizations like WINEP and AIPAC, about Iran supporting terrorism, attacking Americans in Iraq or elsewhere, or developing some non-existent weapon. Israel will DEFINITELY try hard to sabotage any rapprochement between Iran and the United States. This is absolutely certain. I only hope that the Obama administration and more sober foreign policy specialists can help expose these tricks. Mostly it is important to get to the American public to tell them that these accusations are not real, that they are designed to torpedo movement toward normal relations.
End News / IRNA / News Code 350244
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Interview with Roberto Gonzales, author of "American Counterinsurgency" (Inside Higher Ed)
Interview with Roberto Gonzales, author of ‘American Counterinsurgency’
(University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Commentary by William O. Beeman: The Human Terrain System of the U.S. military, where social scientists are embedded with combat troops to give cultural and social advice has created controversy in Anthropology and other disciplines. The central issue is the potential for violation of professional codes of ethics that dictate that social scientists do nothing to harm the people among whom they live and learn from in the course of their research. Roberto Gonzales provides great insight about this problem in his new book and in the interview below
The Human Terrain System, a program which embeds social scientists with brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, is billed as a mechanism for improving the U.S. military’s knowledge of culture and local populations — heretofore perceived as sorely lacking. “It’s a chance to change the military; it’s a chance to change the Army,” one HTS member said at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in November. The HTS Web site states that the program “does not collect intelligence or have a role in targeting.” However, AAA’s executive board has formally opposed the program, citing a number of ethical issues including the potential misuse of anthropological information for targeting purposes — which would violate the bedrock principle that those studied should not be harmed.
One of the leading critics of HTS has been Roberto J. González, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University. In American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, forthcoming February 1 from Prickly Paradigm Press, and distributed by University of Chicago Press, González strongly critiques the human terrain concept in its historical and contemporary contexts. He answered some questions for Inside Higher Ed.
Q. Would you summarize the magnitude and mission of the Human Terrain System, as you understand it, today?
A. The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a $200 million U.S. Army program that embeds anthropologists and other social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program’s building blocks are five-person “human terrain teams” that include armed personnel. Approximately 25 teams have been deployed since the program began in 2006, mostly in Iraq. According to the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s budget justification, the goal of the program is “to collect data on human terrain, create, store, and disseminate information from this data, and use the resulting information as an element of combat power.” In other words, HTS is designed to help the military gather ethnographic information — intelligence data about Iraqis and Afghans — in order to improve its war fighting capabilities. Human terrain team members are employed by BAE Systems, a British firm awarded the contract to manage the program.
A revealing description of HTS was published in Military Review. In it, the authors state that the program is designed to “understand the people among whom our forces operate as well as the cultural characteristics and propensities of the enemies we now fight.” They also note that HTS is a “CORDS for the 21st Century” — a reference to a Vietnam-War era counterinsurgency initiative (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support). CORDS gave birth to the infamous Phoenix Program, a secret operation in which ethnographic data on Vietnamese civilians was collected and turned over to CIA-funded paramilitary troops. In the end, Phoenix operatives assassinated more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong sympathizers. The possibility that HTS might be used for such purposes deeply concerns me, and it’s what inspired me to write American Counterinsurgency.
Q. You write, “The way in which HTS has been packaged — as a kinder, gentler counterinsurgency — is completely unsupported by evidence.” Instead, you argue that HTS was created “primarily as a tool for espionage and intelligence gathering.” Could you summarize the evidence you rely upon in making this argument?
A. To fully understand HTS, we should place it in the broader context of what might be called today’s “cult of counterinsurgency,” which centers around the personality of General David Petraeus. For several years, he and a loyal group of advisors — many with Ph.D.s in the social sciences — have been involved in an effort to whitewash counterinsurgency. In other words, they have tried to clean up the image of counterguerrilla warfare, which is always a dirty business. The U.S. military has more than a century of experience of this kind of warfare (going back to the bloody “Indian Wars” of the 1800s and the cruel campaign against Filipino revolutionaries in the early 1900s), yet Petraeus and others have portrayed it as a newer, gentler method of fighting — “the graduate level of war” in the words of one enthusiast. HTS was developed as a central component of this “new” old method.
Many sources indicate that HTS was designed primarily as an intelligence-gathering program. As I’ve mentioned, government budget documents and military journals describe the program as means of collecting ethnographic intelligence to boost “combat power.” In the Department of Defense’s 2008 Global War on Terror Amendment, human terrain teams are described as military intelligence assets which “have proven invaluable in identifying and tracking threats.” The statements of brigade commanders are also revealing. For example, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile recently wrote that “these human terrain teams, whether they want to acknowledge it or not ... contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy.” This fits the military’s definition of human intelligence.
Q. In your book, you trace the term “human terrain,” prefacing the chapter on the term’s origins by writing, “When I first heard the term ‘human terrain,’ a nightmarish vision came to mind.” If Webster’s asked you to write a definition of the term, what would you write?
A. I’ve always felt uneasy about the Orwellian juxtaposition of the words “human” and “terrain.” Linguistic anthropology tells us that in military contexts, such a term will tend to objectify and dehumanize people, because it implies that they are geographic space to be conquered. Personally I wouldn’t want to give “human terrain” the legitimacy that goes along with a spot in Webster’s Dictionary! But if I had to provide a definition of the term, it would probably be something like: “a euphemism referring to civilians living in a war zone, or under military occupation.” (Last year, the American Dialect Society declared “human terrain team” the most euphemistic term of 2007!)
In conducting research for my book, I learned that human terrain appeared more than 40 years ago in a report by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee — the same committee responsible for whipping up anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s. The report (Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States) evoked images of a country threatened from within. It warned that militants like the Black Panther Party might possess “superior control of the human terrain.” From these beginnings, human terrain was linked to domestic counterinsurgency campaigns at a dark moment in U.S. history, when the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) — which brutally repressed political dissent within our country — was in full gear.
Q. The Human Terrain teams themselves have been in the headlines. But you write of human terrain as a much broader phenomenon, one that’s being embraced by the military, industries, and research universities. How so?
A. HTS has indeed been in the news, especially since three of its social scientists have been tragically killed in action over the past nine months. In American Counterinsurgency, I wanted to go beyond the headlines, to examine the development of the human terrain concept and how it has been transformed over the years. I discovered that the concept was reborn in the early 21st century, when influential people like retired Lieutenant Colonel (and neoconservative pundit) Ralph Peters, Major General Robert Scales, and Senator John McCain embraced the concept. It diffused quickly across the armed forces and into the private sphere and university research labs. After Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, there was a boom in funding for projects focused on human terrain research and “culture-centric” warfare, and this attracted dozens of companies from what Dwight Eisenhower once called the “military-industrial complex” — BAE Systems, Aptima Corporation, MITRE, RAND Corporation, Wexford Group, MTC Technologies, NEK Advanced Securities Group, and Alpha Ten to name a few. Today contract funds connected to human terrain dwarf funds allocated by the National Science Foundation for basic anthropology research.
Modeling and simulation programs and dynamic social network analysis are the latest fads in human terrain research. Engineers, computer programmers, and social scientists seek to integrate ethnographic data into predictive computer programs. Each year the Pentagon spends tens of millions of dollars in a quest to find a technological holy grail that forecasts political hot spots — organized protest marches, riots, or full-blown terror attacks. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Purdue, and other universities are competing with private corporations for these funds. It’s become a real growth industry.
Q. You write of parallels between HTS and anthropology’s historical role in helping colonial powers retain control of their empires. In your opinion, are there any ways that social scientists can productively engage with the U.S. military, without binding themselves in that colonial legacy?
A. Many people have written about anthropology’s support of colonial governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Oceania — not to mention its role in the subjugation of Native American peoples — but it’s a much more complex picture. History tells us that anthropology has occasionally played an essential role in resisting imperialism. For example, in the 1930s a young Kikuyu man named Jomo Kenyatta from British East Africa (today Kenya) arrived in London and attended seminars led by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In 1938 Kenyatta published a stirring ethnography of Kikuyu life, Facing Mount Kenya, which inspired many people by examining the painful consequences of British colonialism from an insider’s perspective. He used anthropology as a tool for challenging — not supporting — colonial rule. Kenyatta became a revolutionary leader and eventually the first Prime Minister and President of independent Kenya in the 1960s. His experience illustrates how students of the human sciences are as capable of challenging imperialism as they are of serving it.
With respect to working with the U.S. military, I think that there are many anthropologists who have consulted for the armed forces ethically — that is, without violating professional codes of ethics established over the past 60 years. For example, medical anthropologists such as Genevieve Ames have conducted research on the way that U.S. “military culture” might contribute to excessive drinking and tobacco use. Others, like William Beeman, have addressed officers at the Naval Postgraduate School to explain why many Iraqis are revolting against the U.S. in a way similar to the revolts against Great Britain in the 1920s. These social scientists are doing fine work that bears no resemblance to neo-colonial counterinsurgency projects such as HTS.
Q. Is there a way for HTS to fix itself — and if so, where would you start — or is it, in your opinion, fundamentally flawed?
A. Some argue that HTS is suffering from poor management and lack of oversight, and that if these problems could be corrected then it would be successful. I disagree. Conceptually, the entire program is flawed because human terrain team members are thrust into an impossible situation in which they are torn between conflicting interests. I’ve interviewed current and former HTS employees who have expressed serious concerns about this. On the one hand, they must be loyal to combat brigades — in fact, the Human Terrain Team Handbook stipulates that the teams “belong to the [brigade] Commander.” On the other hand, the teams’ social scientists are expected to respect and trust Iraqis and Afghans who they are interviewing. One can imagine all sorts of situations in which team members might confront grave ethical dilemmas: What should team members do if a commander requests field notes or targeting information in preparation for an attack? Are human terrain teams obliged to identify Iraqis or Afghans suspected of having ties to insurgents? How is it possible for embedded social scientists to obtain informed consent if they are attached to armed units conducting door-to-door searches? Each of these situations demonstrates basic flaws with the HTS concept. Like all counterinsurgency projects, it is designed to control or suppress popular movements. This runs completely counter to normal anthropological approaches which seek to bridge societies by promoting cross-cultural understanding. You can be a counterinsurgent, or you can be an anthropologist, but you can’t be both.
(University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Commentary by William O. Beeman: The Human Terrain System of the U.S. military, where social scientists are embedded with combat troops to give cultural and social advice has created controversy in Anthropology and other disciplines. The central issue is the potential for violation of professional codes of ethics that dictate that social scientists do nothing to harm the people among whom they live and learn from in the course of their research. Roberto Gonzales provides great insight about this problem in his new book and in the interview below
The Human Terrain System, a program which embeds social scientists with brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, is billed as a mechanism for improving the U.S. military’s knowledge of culture and local populations — heretofore perceived as sorely lacking. “It’s a chance to change the military; it’s a chance to change the Army,” one HTS member said at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in November. The HTS Web site states that the program “does not collect intelligence or have a role in targeting.” However, AAA’s executive board has formally opposed the program, citing a number of ethical issues including the potential misuse of anthropological information for targeting purposes — which would violate the bedrock principle that those studied should not be harmed.
One of the leading critics of HTS has been Roberto J. González, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University. In American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, forthcoming February 1 from Prickly Paradigm Press, and distributed by University of Chicago Press, González strongly critiques the human terrain concept in its historical and contemporary contexts. He answered some questions for Inside Higher Ed.
Q. Would you summarize the magnitude and mission of the Human Terrain System, as you understand it, today?
A. The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a $200 million U.S. Army program that embeds anthropologists and other social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program’s building blocks are five-person “human terrain teams” that include armed personnel. Approximately 25 teams have been deployed since the program began in 2006, mostly in Iraq. According to the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s budget justification, the goal of the program is “to collect data on human terrain, create, store, and disseminate information from this data, and use the resulting information as an element of combat power.” In other words, HTS is designed to help the military gather ethnographic information — intelligence data about Iraqis and Afghans — in order to improve its war fighting capabilities. Human terrain team members are employed by BAE Systems, a British firm awarded the contract to manage the program.
A revealing description of HTS was published in Military Review. In it, the authors state that the program is designed to “understand the people among whom our forces operate as well as the cultural characteristics and propensities of the enemies we now fight.” They also note that HTS is a “CORDS for the 21st Century” — a reference to a Vietnam-War era counterinsurgency initiative (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support). CORDS gave birth to the infamous Phoenix Program, a secret operation in which ethnographic data on Vietnamese civilians was collected and turned over to CIA-funded paramilitary troops. In the end, Phoenix operatives assassinated more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong sympathizers. The possibility that HTS might be used for such purposes deeply concerns me, and it’s what inspired me to write American Counterinsurgency.
Q. You write, “The way in which HTS has been packaged — as a kinder, gentler counterinsurgency — is completely unsupported by evidence.” Instead, you argue that HTS was created “primarily as a tool for espionage and intelligence gathering.” Could you summarize the evidence you rely upon in making this argument?
A. To fully understand HTS, we should place it in the broader context of what might be called today’s “cult of counterinsurgency,” which centers around the personality of General David Petraeus. For several years, he and a loyal group of advisors — many with Ph.D.s in the social sciences — have been involved in an effort to whitewash counterinsurgency. In other words, they have tried to clean up the image of counterguerrilla warfare, which is always a dirty business. The U.S. military has more than a century of experience of this kind of warfare (going back to the bloody “Indian Wars” of the 1800s and the cruel campaign against Filipino revolutionaries in the early 1900s), yet Petraeus and others have portrayed it as a newer, gentler method of fighting — “the graduate level of war” in the words of one enthusiast. HTS was developed as a central component of this “new” old method.
Many sources indicate that HTS was designed primarily as an intelligence-gathering program. As I’ve mentioned, government budget documents and military journals describe the program as means of collecting ethnographic intelligence to boost “combat power.” In the Department of Defense’s 2008 Global War on Terror Amendment, human terrain teams are described as military intelligence assets which “have proven invaluable in identifying and tracking threats.” The statements of brigade commanders are also revealing. For example, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile recently wrote that “these human terrain teams, whether they want to acknowledge it or not ... contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy.” This fits the military’s definition of human intelligence.
Q. In your book, you trace the term “human terrain,” prefacing the chapter on the term’s origins by writing, “When I first heard the term ‘human terrain,’ a nightmarish vision came to mind.” If Webster’s asked you to write a definition of the term, what would you write?
A. I’ve always felt uneasy about the Orwellian juxtaposition of the words “human” and “terrain.” Linguistic anthropology tells us that in military contexts, such a term will tend to objectify and dehumanize people, because it implies that they are geographic space to be conquered. Personally I wouldn’t want to give “human terrain” the legitimacy that goes along with a spot in Webster’s Dictionary! But if I had to provide a definition of the term, it would probably be something like: “a euphemism referring to civilians living in a war zone, or under military occupation.” (Last year, the American Dialect Society declared “human terrain team” the most euphemistic term of 2007!)
In conducting research for my book, I learned that human terrain appeared more than 40 years ago in a report by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee — the same committee responsible for whipping up anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s. The report (Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States) evoked images of a country threatened from within. It warned that militants like the Black Panther Party might possess “superior control of the human terrain.” From these beginnings, human terrain was linked to domestic counterinsurgency campaigns at a dark moment in U.S. history, when the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) — which brutally repressed political dissent within our country — was in full gear.
Q. The Human Terrain teams themselves have been in the headlines. But you write of human terrain as a much broader phenomenon, one that’s being embraced by the military, industries, and research universities. How so?
A. HTS has indeed been in the news, especially since three of its social scientists have been tragically killed in action over the past nine months. In American Counterinsurgency, I wanted to go beyond the headlines, to examine the development of the human terrain concept and how it has been transformed over the years. I discovered that the concept was reborn in the early 21st century, when influential people like retired Lieutenant Colonel (and neoconservative pundit) Ralph Peters, Major General Robert Scales, and Senator John McCain embraced the concept. It diffused quickly across the armed forces and into the private sphere and university research labs. After Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, there was a boom in funding for projects focused on human terrain research and “culture-centric” warfare, and this attracted dozens of companies from what Dwight Eisenhower once called the “military-industrial complex” — BAE Systems, Aptima Corporation, MITRE, RAND Corporation, Wexford Group, MTC Technologies, NEK Advanced Securities Group, and Alpha Ten to name a few. Today contract funds connected to human terrain dwarf funds allocated by the National Science Foundation for basic anthropology research.
Modeling and simulation programs and dynamic social network analysis are the latest fads in human terrain research. Engineers, computer programmers, and social scientists seek to integrate ethnographic data into predictive computer programs. Each year the Pentagon spends tens of millions of dollars in a quest to find a technological holy grail that forecasts political hot spots — organized protest marches, riots, or full-blown terror attacks. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Purdue, and other universities are competing with private corporations for these funds. It’s become a real growth industry.
Q. You write of parallels between HTS and anthropology’s historical role in helping colonial powers retain control of their empires. In your opinion, are there any ways that social scientists can productively engage with the U.S. military, without binding themselves in that colonial legacy?
A. Many people have written about anthropology’s support of colonial governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Oceania — not to mention its role in the subjugation of Native American peoples — but it’s a much more complex picture. History tells us that anthropology has occasionally played an essential role in resisting imperialism. For example, in the 1930s a young Kikuyu man named Jomo Kenyatta from British East Africa (today Kenya) arrived in London and attended seminars led by the renowned anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In 1938 Kenyatta published a stirring ethnography of Kikuyu life, Facing Mount Kenya, which inspired many people by examining the painful consequences of British colonialism from an insider’s perspective. He used anthropology as a tool for challenging — not supporting — colonial rule. Kenyatta became a revolutionary leader and eventually the first Prime Minister and President of independent Kenya in the 1960s. His experience illustrates how students of the human sciences are as capable of challenging imperialism as they are of serving it.
With respect to working with the U.S. military, I think that there are many anthropologists who have consulted for the armed forces ethically — that is, without violating professional codes of ethics established over the past 60 years. For example, medical anthropologists such as Genevieve Ames have conducted research on the way that U.S. “military culture” might contribute to excessive drinking and tobacco use. Others, like William Beeman, have addressed officers at the Naval Postgraduate School to explain why many Iraqis are revolting against the U.S. in a way similar to the revolts against Great Britain in the 1920s. These social scientists are doing fine work that bears no resemblance to neo-colonial counterinsurgency projects such as HTS.
Q. Is there a way for HTS to fix itself — and if so, where would you start — or is it, in your opinion, fundamentally flawed?
A. Some argue that HTS is suffering from poor management and lack of oversight, and that if these problems could be corrected then it would be successful. I disagree. Conceptually, the entire program is flawed because human terrain team members are thrust into an impossible situation in which they are torn between conflicting interests. I’ve interviewed current and former HTS employees who have expressed serious concerns about this. On the one hand, they must be loyal to combat brigades — in fact, the Human Terrain Team Handbook stipulates that the teams “belong to the [brigade] Commander.” On the other hand, the teams’ social scientists are expected to respect and trust Iraqis and Afghans who they are interviewing. One can imagine all sorts of situations in which team members might confront grave ethical dilemmas: What should team members do if a commander requests field notes or targeting information in preparation for an attack? Are human terrain teams obliged to identify Iraqis or Afghans suspected of having ties to insurgents? How is it possible for embedded social scientists to obtain informed consent if they are attached to armed units conducting door-to-door searches? Each of these situations demonstrates basic flaws with the HTS concept. Like all counterinsurgency projects, it is designed to control or suppress popular movements. This runs completely counter to normal anthropological approaches which seek to bridge societies by promoting cross-cultural understanding. You can be a counterinsurgent, or you can be an anthropologist, but you can’t be both.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Brown Daily Herald: Brown, Military's Research Connections Up for Debate: Broad Range of Faculty Stances
Brown, military's research connections up for debate
Broad range of faculty stances
Alex Roehrkasse
Issue date: 11/10/08 Section: Campus News
A Human Terrain System soldier conducting interviews in Afghanistan. Brown professors have both participated in and criticized the program.
Media Credit: File Photo
A Human Terrain System soldier conducting interviews in Afghanistan. Brown professors have both participated in and criticized the program.
The question of the military's support for university research has been a sticking point in ethical discourse among academics at least since World War II. Then, researchers in the physical sciences engaged in intense debates over the ethical implications of their work in developing the atomic bomb.
Now, with the recent inception of a handful of new military programs for research funding and the growth of available military research money despite dwindling financial awards from other government agencies, the debate has once again flared up. As both participants in and critics of military-supported research programs, some Brown faculty have placed themselves at the center of this debate.
On the one hand, Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz has been an outspoken opponent of the military's efforts to draw from university expertise, having published extensively on the subject. On the other hand, former Watson Institute fellow Michael Bhatia '99, who was killed this May while participating in a military research program in Afghanistan, was a strong supporter of such efforts. Another perspective on the merits and pitfalls of such collaboration is held by Brown researchers in the physical sciences, who have been less present in public debates on the ethics of military work but have received approximately $8.6 million - six percent of Brown's research budget - in fiscal year 2008 from the Department of Defense, according to University records.
An anthropological quandary
The most noticeable upsurge in the discourse on the ethics of collaboration with the military has been among anthropologists. With two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has been exploring new ways to bring ethnographers into the fold of security research and operations.
As early as 2003, the Department of Defense began hiring anthropologists to find ways to ameliorate U.S. troops' unfamiliarity with Iraqi culture and society. With a substantial monetary infusion into the program in 2007, the Human Terrain System began to reach out more broadly to American academics willing to be embedded with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through the program, participating scholars who do research in these places have the opportunity to conduct their work with the protection of U.S. security forces. In exchange, these specialists help soldiers navigate unfamiliar and uncertain terrain, serving as linguistic and cultural liaisons.
"The use of social science is necessary to and legitimate in military operations," the program's Web site states.
The Human Terrain System program sparked an intense and ongoing debate within the anthropological discipline. Many anthropologists took issue with the dangers of sharing their specialized knowledge with an organization that could endanger the people they study.
"Anthropologists are in an absolutely unique position," said William Beeman, adjunct professor of anthropology. "We're the people who really know the situation on the ground. We know the languages. We know the culture. So you really walk a fine line deciding to what degree you're going to advise people."
Beeman said he has done extensive consulting with the Department of Defense and other government agencies, and called the idea that social science researchers can and should abstain completely from military work both "unreasonable" and "unethical."
Last year, the American Anthropological Association denounced the program on the grounds that researchers could not obtain informed consent from their subjects in a combat environment and could endanger them by providing information to the military. The association also formed a commission to reevaluate the ethics of anthropologists' engagement with the military and intelligence communities.
"We do not recommend non-engagement, but instead emphasize differences in kinds of engagement and accompanying ethical considerations," the commission said in its November 2007 report.
In September, the association approved amendments to its code of ethics.
"In relation with his or her own government, host governments, or sponsors of research, an anthropologist should be honest and candid. Anthropologists must not compromise their professional responsibilities and ethics and should not agree to conditions which inappropriately change the purpose, focus or intended outcomes of their research," the revision stated.
Brown faculty enter the debate
At Brown, debates about the Human Terrain System took a more solemn turn after Bhatia's death in May. Bhatia was a graduate student at Oxford in the department of politics and international relations. He had been preparing a dissertation on combatant motives of the Mujahideen, a militant group in Afghanistan.
"The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/(International Security Assistance Force) strategy becomes better attuned to the population's concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan," Bhatia wrote about the Human Terrain System in November 2007.
The American Anthropological Association is now undertaking a much more sweeping revision to its ethics guidelines to be concluded in late 2010. Those revisions will have to tackle not only the question of the Human Terrain System program, but also a host of other issues revolving around the rising amount of proprietary research being conducted by anthropologists, Beeman said. Beeman participated in the last major revision to the anthropological association's code of ethics in the late nineties.
Beeman, a Middle East expert who has briefed both military personnel and policy makers, recalled being contacted by Army representatives for consultation before the invasion of Iraq. He said he told them the United States shouldn't do it.
"They say 'Well, that doesn't help us much because we're about to.' Then you say 'All right, look. I'll come and talk to you and I'll tell you why you shouldn't do it.' I can't refuse those sorts of invitations because it wouldn't be ethical," Beeman recounted. "We can't pass up those opportunities if we're serious academics."
The newest military program to draw on the expertise of social scientists in academia is the Minerva Initiative, a $50 million program announced by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in April. The initiative aims to channel military funds toward research on issues such as terrorist organization and ideologies, Chinese military technology and the strategic impact of cultural and religious change in the Islamic world. The first round of grants is expected to be announced this year.
"This is the first significant effort in 30 or 40 years to engage social sciences on a large scale by the Department of Defense," said Thomas Mahnken, a deputy assistant defense secretary for policy planning, according to a Washington Post article published Aug. 3.
"There was an effort during (the Vietnam era) that ended up being ill-conceived and burned bridges on both sides, and, unfortunately, these attitudes have persisted," Mahnken told the Post. "This effort is about rebuilding those bridges."
Like the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Initiative - named after the virgin Roman goddess of both wisdom and warriors - has sparked a new wave of controversy within the anthropological discipline.
In a guest editorial titled "Selling Ourselves?" featured in the most recent edition of the journal Anthropology Today, Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz argued that the program will distract the research of anthropologists, who should avoid military funding.
"(The Minerva Initiative) represents an important attempt to garner ideological acceptance among anthropologists for doing military research," Lutz wrote in the editorial. "This money could shape and distort our field in significant ways, as has happened with other disciplines that have been the recipients of Pentagon largesse."
The journal edition that featured the editorial was devoted to a discussion of a number of different ways in which anthropologists and the military have recently come into contact and often collaboration.
"The military as a funding source often portrays itself as an un-self-interested or a national interest centered organization, but in fact has institutional interests in getting certain kinds of research results," Lutz said.
Less concern in physical sciences
In contrast to anthropologists' sharp sensitivity to the ethical quandaries of military collaboration, researchers in other disciplines do not seem to have the same degree of concern. Beemen said that political scientists have a long tradition of collaborating in intelligence and security efforts. He added that political scientists frequently contest anthropologists' objections to such work - and even question their patriotism.
In the physical sciences, academics also seem to be more comfortable doing research with the military. This may be due to the generally detached and often exclusively financial relationship that most science researchers have with military agencies, as most military grants to universities are for elementary research that may or may not underpin future developments in military laboratories or in the private sector. On the other hand, it could be the result of the Department of Defense's strong - in certain fields almost ubiquitous - presence as a source of significant and reliable funding.
"The most successful groups in my area have military funding," said Pascal Van Hentenryck, a professor of computer science whose research focuses on optimization - a field he said the military had been funding for at least 60 years - which includes designing emergency response systems. He and other science researchers and administrators interviewed by The Herald all echoed the idea that at least in some fields, the military was a necessary source of funding for scientific research.
Public debates on the ethics of research in Van Hentenryck's field are not common, he said. But Van Hentenryck recalled ethical debates in computer science from his days as a graduate student, when he and his colleagues contemplated among themselves whether or not cooperative decisions to refrain from developing missile systems would halt their development.
Van Hentenryck said that his graduate students frequently raise the same questions, and that a responsive instructor should answer them.
He also stressed the fact that his research, like that of most other scientists, is useful in myriad fields, not just military matters, and that university researchers usually have little idea about how their ideas are eventually put into practice.
Vice President for Research Clyde Briant said that there is no ethical discourse about the sources of research funding at the university level, and that such debates would be personal ones among professors.
He said that professors at Brown tend to exhibit a high demand for knowledge about military funding opportunities, especially as other federal funding resources dry up.
Brown's principal criteria for accepting research funding are that research can be neither proprietary - there can be no restrictions on publication rights - nor classified, according to Briant.
Director of Government Affairs and Community Relations Tim Leshan lobbies on behalf of Brown with the Department of Defense to ensure that policy makers in Washington know about the University's research capabilities and that Brown professors are aware of the military funding available to them.
"While funding at the (National Institutes of Health) and the (National Science Foundation) has not kept up with inflation in the last five years," Leshan said, "Department of Defense research funding has grown."
Broad range of faculty stances
Alex Roehrkasse
Issue date: 11/10/08 Section: Campus News
A Human Terrain System soldier conducting interviews in Afghanistan. Brown professors have both participated in and criticized the program.
Media Credit: File Photo
A Human Terrain System soldier conducting interviews in Afghanistan. Brown professors have both participated in and criticized the program.
The question of the military's support for university research has been a sticking point in ethical discourse among academics at least since World War II. Then, researchers in the physical sciences engaged in intense debates over the ethical implications of their work in developing the atomic bomb.
Now, with the recent inception of a handful of new military programs for research funding and the growth of available military research money despite dwindling financial awards from other government agencies, the debate has once again flared up. As both participants in and critics of military-supported research programs, some Brown faculty have placed themselves at the center of this debate.
On the one hand, Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz has been an outspoken opponent of the military's efforts to draw from university expertise, having published extensively on the subject. On the other hand, former Watson Institute fellow Michael Bhatia '99, who was killed this May while participating in a military research program in Afghanistan, was a strong supporter of such efforts. Another perspective on the merits and pitfalls of such collaboration is held by Brown researchers in the physical sciences, who have been less present in public debates on the ethics of military work but have received approximately $8.6 million - six percent of Brown's research budget - in fiscal year 2008 from the Department of Defense, according to University records.
An anthropological quandary
The most noticeable upsurge in the discourse on the ethics of collaboration with the military has been among anthropologists. With two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has been exploring new ways to bring ethnographers into the fold of security research and operations.
As early as 2003, the Department of Defense began hiring anthropologists to find ways to ameliorate U.S. troops' unfamiliarity with Iraqi culture and society. With a substantial monetary infusion into the program in 2007, the Human Terrain System began to reach out more broadly to American academics willing to be embedded with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Through the program, participating scholars who do research in these places have the opportunity to conduct their work with the protection of U.S. security forces. In exchange, these specialists help soldiers navigate unfamiliar and uncertain terrain, serving as linguistic and cultural liaisons.
"The use of social science is necessary to and legitimate in military operations," the program's Web site states.
The Human Terrain System program sparked an intense and ongoing debate within the anthropological discipline. Many anthropologists took issue with the dangers of sharing their specialized knowledge with an organization that could endanger the people they study.
"Anthropologists are in an absolutely unique position," said William Beeman, adjunct professor of anthropology. "We're the people who really know the situation on the ground. We know the languages. We know the culture. So you really walk a fine line deciding to what degree you're going to advise people."
Beeman said he has done extensive consulting with the Department of Defense and other government agencies, and called the idea that social science researchers can and should abstain completely from military work both "unreasonable" and "unethical."
Last year, the American Anthropological Association denounced the program on the grounds that researchers could not obtain informed consent from their subjects in a combat environment and could endanger them by providing information to the military. The association also formed a commission to reevaluate the ethics of anthropologists' engagement with the military and intelligence communities.
"We do not recommend non-engagement, but instead emphasize differences in kinds of engagement and accompanying ethical considerations," the commission said in its November 2007 report.
In September, the association approved amendments to its code of ethics.
"In relation with his or her own government, host governments, or sponsors of research, an anthropologist should be honest and candid. Anthropologists must not compromise their professional responsibilities and ethics and should not agree to conditions which inappropriately change the purpose, focus or intended outcomes of their research," the revision stated.
Brown faculty enter the debate
At Brown, debates about the Human Terrain System took a more solemn turn after Bhatia's death in May. Bhatia was a graduate student at Oxford in the department of politics and international relations. He had been preparing a dissertation on combatant motives of the Mujahideen, a militant group in Afghanistan.
"The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/(International Security Assistance Force) strategy becomes better attuned to the population's concerns, views, criticisms and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan," Bhatia wrote about the Human Terrain System in November 2007.
The American Anthropological Association is now undertaking a much more sweeping revision to its ethics guidelines to be concluded in late 2010. Those revisions will have to tackle not only the question of the Human Terrain System program, but also a host of other issues revolving around the rising amount of proprietary research being conducted by anthropologists, Beeman said. Beeman participated in the last major revision to the anthropological association's code of ethics in the late nineties.
Beeman, a Middle East expert who has briefed both military personnel and policy makers, recalled being contacted by Army representatives for consultation before the invasion of Iraq. He said he told them the United States shouldn't do it.
"They say 'Well, that doesn't help us much because we're about to.' Then you say 'All right, look. I'll come and talk to you and I'll tell you why you shouldn't do it.' I can't refuse those sorts of invitations because it wouldn't be ethical," Beeman recounted. "We can't pass up those opportunities if we're serious academics."
The newest military program to draw on the expertise of social scientists in academia is the Minerva Initiative, a $50 million program announced by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in April. The initiative aims to channel military funds toward research on issues such as terrorist organization and ideologies, Chinese military technology and the strategic impact of cultural and religious change in the Islamic world. The first round of grants is expected to be announced this year.
"This is the first significant effort in 30 or 40 years to engage social sciences on a large scale by the Department of Defense," said Thomas Mahnken, a deputy assistant defense secretary for policy planning, according to a Washington Post article published Aug. 3.
"There was an effort during (the Vietnam era) that ended up being ill-conceived and burned bridges on both sides, and, unfortunately, these attitudes have persisted," Mahnken told the Post. "This effort is about rebuilding those bridges."
Like the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Initiative - named after the virgin Roman goddess of both wisdom and warriors - has sparked a new wave of controversy within the anthropological discipline.
In a guest editorial titled "Selling Ourselves?" featured in the most recent edition of the journal Anthropology Today, Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz argued that the program will distract the research of anthropologists, who should avoid military funding.
"(The Minerva Initiative) represents an important attempt to garner ideological acceptance among anthropologists for doing military research," Lutz wrote in the editorial. "This money could shape and distort our field in significant ways, as has happened with other disciplines that have been the recipients of Pentagon largesse."
The journal edition that featured the editorial was devoted to a discussion of a number of different ways in which anthropologists and the military have recently come into contact and often collaboration.
"The military as a funding source often portrays itself as an un-self-interested or a national interest centered organization, but in fact has institutional interests in getting certain kinds of research results," Lutz said.
Less concern in physical sciences
In contrast to anthropologists' sharp sensitivity to the ethical quandaries of military collaboration, researchers in other disciplines do not seem to have the same degree of concern. Beemen said that political scientists have a long tradition of collaborating in intelligence and security efforts. He added that political scientists frequently contest anthropologists' objections to such work - and even question their patriotism.
In the physical sciences, academics also seem to be more comfortable doing research with the military. This may be due to the generally detached and often exclusively financial relationship that most science researchers have with military agencies, as most military grants to universities are for elementary research that may or may not underpin future developments in military laboratories or in the private sector. On the other hand, it could be the result of the Department of Defense's strong - in certain fields almost ubiquitous - presence as a source of significant and reliable funding.
"The most successful groups in my area have military funding," said Pascal Van Hentenryck, a professor of computer science whose research focuses on optimization - a field he said the military had been funding for at least 60 years - which includes designing emergency response systems. He and other science researchers and administrators interviewed by The Herald all echoed the idea that at least in some fields, the military was a necessary source of funding for scientific research.
Public debates on the ethics of research in Van Hentenryck's field are not common, he said. But Van Hentenryck recalled ethical debates in computer science from his days as a graduate student, when he and his colleagues contemplated among themselves whether or not cooperative decisions to refrain from developing missile systems would halt their development.
Van Hentenryck said that his graduate students frequently raise the same questions, and that a responsive instructor should answer them.
He also stressed the fact that his research, like that of most other scientists, is useful in myriad fields, not just military matters, and that university researchers usually have little idea about how their ideas are eventually put into practice.
Vice President for Research Clyde Briant said that there is no ethical discourse about the sources of research funding at the university level, and that such debates would be personal ones among professors.
He said that professors at Brown tend to exhibit a high demand for knowledge about military funding opportunities, especially as other federal funding resources dry up.
Brown's principal criteria for accepting research funding are that research can be neither proprietary - there can be no restrictions on publication rights - nor classified, according to Briant.
Director of Government Affairs and Community Relations Tim Leshan lobbies on behalf of Brown with the Department of Defense to ensure that policy makers in Washington know about the University's research capabilities and that Brown professors are aware of the military funding available to them.
"While funding at the (National Institutes of Health) and the (National Science Foundation) has not kept up with inflation in the last five years," Leshan said, "Department of Defense research funding has grown."
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