My Blog

The American Anthropological Association released its report on the Engagement of Anthropology with Security and Intelligence Communities Wednesday in the midst of its annual meeting. The issue of embedding anthropologists with the military (like journalists) is not a new one but gained national attention recently with the news media coverage of the Human Terrain System. Wired wrote about it as did good ol’ Symour Hersch in The New Yorker. The issue has set off a huge debate and is at the center of the AAA’s conference in Washington with the release of the report last night and a whole day of panels devoted to the issue today (Thurs).

The report notes concludes that “there is nothing inherently unethical in the decision to apply one's skills in a security context” there are “ethically perilous” forms of involvement, including most especially the Human Terrain System. *Much of the ethical discussion revolves around informed consent, and the idea that this is practically impossible to obtain in war settings and that in any case there seems to be an inherent contradiction with the obligation of anthropologists to “do no harm”. Furthermore, the report notes that information garnered from such social science research is often only used to justify or support rather than critically assess, a problem easily enough illustrated by the misuse of intelligence prior to the start of the Iraq war (in fact this anthropological engagement is designed to get HUMINT – human intelligence). No holds are barred in the litany of crimes committed by the CIA, from assassinations to torture to election rigging, and aptly points out that general knowledge of such abuses is widespread and thus working with or connected to the agency puts the individual and the profession at risk. In addition, the perils of secrecy and inability to be transparent in a way required of the academic profession and anthropology as a discipline creates ethical problems, while the very concept of ‘culture’ encompassed by projects like the HTS is in fact a relic beyond which the academic discipline (at least) has moved. Of course, this does not mean that anthropologists on the ground can’t be a value-added asset and that their contribution can in fact be moral as would seem to be the point in the example of European anthropologists working with peacekeeping teams.

According to a Pentagon report, the Human Terrain System is “designed to address cultural awareness shortcomings at the operational and tactical levels by giving brigade commanders an organic capability to help understand and deal with "human terrain" the social, ethnographic, cultural, economic, and political elements of the people among whom a force is operating.” In other words, by embedding social scientists with operational units in Iraq and Afghanistan. (It also acknowledged the paucity of the military’s cultural knowledge and linguistic skills-perhaps this is because they are trained to kill? Just a thought…). According a description of the system, a five-person Human Terrain Team – the core – is embedded in forward-deployed brigades to provide cultural data research and analysis. It hearkens back to what the report calls one of the most successful parts of the Vietnam war – the effort to win hearts and minds. Now, I was not even alive when that war took place so what I know comes from books, articles and common cultural lore, but my understanding is that we lost that war and certainly did not succeed in winning either hearts or minds (although the article places the blame on the Vietnamese for failing to implement the program). So why, exactly, we would adapt strategies from that war to the current one I’m not clear on, but I do hope that history has provided instruction rather than a template. Anyway, the article asserts that there was a decline in enemy activity where the program was implemented effectively. (The second half of this article talks about the various components of the proposed HTT program today). I’m writing an article on this and will post more after I hear what’s said at the meetings tomorrow.