Anthropologists Debate Working on War Effort

Oct 08, 11:51 PM

Current Headlines: By Scott Canon

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - U.S. Army officers fighting against the insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan yearn to know what makes Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkmen, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras tick.

So they've turned to anthropologists such as Felix Moos at the University of Kansas.

He falls with a small cadre of anthropologists insisting that wars could be less violent and more successful if Americans in uniform better understood whom they're up against, and arguing that social scientists should team up with the military.

That attitude horrifies some anthropologists, who know of past links to espionage and colonialism. They fret that it will undermine the success and safety of colleagues in the study of humans. They ask: Who will talk to us once we've teamed up with soldiers in an unpopular war?

"These anthropologists talk about it saving lives," said Hugh Gusterson at George Mason University. "But the military can use this knowledge to be more lethal. ... You start out with one thing that evolves into quite another."

Gusterson is part of the ad hoc Network of Concerned Anthropologists circulating a pledge - part anti-war, part purity of the profession - promising not to work with the military on counterinsurgency.

The argument involves a creed central to the profession - that only people willingly playing along should be the subjects of research.

Critics insist that no truly informed people would freely share insights with a potential enemy who, after all, is still a combatant or occupier.

Those working with the military respond that no one is being tricked into talking to them and that they can speed the way toward compromise and reconciliation. Anthropologists on both sides, however, agree that the invasion of Iraq was begun with surprising ignorance about Iraqis that has made the conflict more intractable.

Cultural understanding lies at the heart of the new counterinsurgency doctrine crafted under Gen. David Petraeus during his command at Fort Leavenworth and aggressively put to battlefield tests. Commanders increasingly turn to anthropologists to navigate the pecking orders of tribes and clans, to identify local taboos and to minimize resistance.

"Everybody from about lieutenant colonel on down, what they've known in their careers has been low-intensity conflicts - Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans ... Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jim Greer, a retired Army colonel now with the Army's Human Terrain System at Fort Leavenworth. "They see this kind of expertise as highly valuable."

At the University of Kansas, anthropologists Moos and Bartholomew Dean regularly consult with officers studying counter-insurgency at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. To sit out the wars, they say, misses chances to help end conflicts.

"I want to live in a stable world," Dean said. "I'm passing on knowledge that makes the world more able to reach compromises."

For instance, working with two soldiers, he's finishing up a paper now that aims to reduce the threat of improvised roadside bombs. It studies "Operation Turkey Stomp," where U.S. soldiers threatened to shut down Iraqi shopkeepers if Americans continued to get hit by blasts near their stores.

Dean said the tactic got short-term results, but its effectiveness waned over time and threatened to spark long-term resentments.

That sort of work typifies the real-world work that contrarian anthropologist Montgomery McFate contends is too rare.

"The discipline," she wrote in a paper provocative partly because it appeared in the Army's Military Review, "has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower."

McFate today is the senior social science adviser to the U.S. Army Human Terrain System and says it's a mistake for the profession to back away.

"War is always going to happen," she said.

In its infancy, anthropology was derided as the "handmaiden of colonialism" because it so often involved intellectuals studying native inhabitants of some territory freshly acquired by an imperial power. They often unwittingly drew a road map for control of local populations.

During the world wars, anthropologists worked as spies or propagandists. Gregory Bateson, one of Margaret Mead's husbands, worked against the Japanese with U.S. intelligence units and helped create deceptive radio broadcasts for Burmese consumption. He later regretted his partisanship and damage to the credibility of the discipline.

Similarly, the collaboration of scientists in Vietnam with the military also outraged some in the profession and fueled a movement for greater distance.

Yet anthropologists today are teaming up with commanders in Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere. Those with the U.S. Army, although still civilian, sometimes carry guns and regularly talk with locals before briefing military officers.

That makes other anthropologists jumpy.

"Already, when I'm traveling in Latin America, in areas where there are guerrilla groups, when I introduce myself as from the United States, there is suspicion," said Roberto Gonzalez, an anthropologist at San Jose State University. "So if I decide to send a student doing a graduate project out to somewhere where U.S. anthropologists are doing counter-insurgency work, his or her physical safety is compromised."

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Some in the profession warn that anthropology may be an oversold tool to the military - one wrote that it "risks replacing strategy with stereotypes," that it is becoming engrained in modern war.

Patrick Porter, a lecturer at the British Joint Services Command and Staff College, writes bluntly: "To wage war, become an anthropologist."

Originally published by McClatchy Newspapers.

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