Imperial Anthropology? America in Afghanistan

Counter-insurgency, scholar-soldiers and the failure of the Human Terrain System (2005-2014)

The kinetic phase of the war ended. Soldiers and Marines found themselves immersed in an alien culture unable to differentiate friend from foe. Today, the enemy's motives often remain a mystery, and the constant casualties due to the inability to understand the enemy and to predict his actions have been tragically too great… In the late 19th century, the British army developed a habit of sending bright young officers to different regions of the world to study the cultures and live with the local leaders and learn their habits. Names like China Gordon, T.E. Lawrence, I think all testified to the wisdom of that custom, a custom that the British Army continues today.

Think about a culture-centric approach to future warfare that creates a cadre of what commonly now has been called global scouts, officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs), well-educated with a penchant for language and comfort with strange and distant places. These soldiers should be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them… Our intelligence specialists must be formally—and leaders must be formally educated in the deductive and inductive skills necessary to understand and interpret intelligently the information and the insights provided by the global scouts in the field. I believe they should all attend graduate schools and study disciplines that relate to human behavior, military art, and history, as well as science.

- Major General Robert Scales. Army Transformation: Implications for the Future. Testimony before the US House Armed Services Committee. 15 July 2004

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The 2003 - 2011 Iraqi insurgency may well be the most intellectualised conflict of the last century. As the casualties began to mount, the American military and its accompanying thinktanks turned away from a pure war in the classic sense, and opted for a cerebral-intelligence approach which tried to incorporate every aspect of Iraqi life into its purview. Nothing would be off-limits, full-spectrum dominance - how people spoke, how they dressed, the content of their religious beliefs, their kinship structures, communal celebrations, how they interacted with medical professionals, gender relations and more. In removing the Ba’athists and attempting to demilitarise the whole country, the American armed forces became aware that nation-building would involve far more military-civilian organisation than previously thought. Tribal divisions, sectarianism, religious factions and ethnic splits suddenly came to the forefront, catching the Pentagon off-guard.

How the US responded was with a ‘cultural turn’. As General David Petraeus wrote:

Knowledge of the cultural terrain can be as important as, and sometimes even more important than, the knowledge of the geographical terrain. This observation acknowledges that the people are, in many respects, the decisive terrain, and that we must study that terrain in the same way that we have always studied the geographical terrain.

Petraeus became the godfather of a new type of warfare, and exemplified the type as a new kind of soldier - ambitious, intelligent, high-energy. He earned a PhD from Princeton on the lessons of the Vietnam War, and earned his combat experience by leading the 101st Airborne Division during the drive to Baghdad. His skill at pacifying the city of Mosul helped create a legend of the man, even while he was still actively working to suppress the insurgency. Petraeus’ reputation for a softer, more intelligent response landed him the task of re-writing the official manual of counter-insurgency: the Field Manual (FM) 3-24. This was a document with unusual influence and with unusual origins. Typical American counter-insurgency doctrine was drawn from Vietnam, itself with roots in colonial military experience. But this time Petraeus included human rights officials, civilian academics, administrative officials, even journalists, in its construction. The manual was downloaded 1.5 million times within a month, published as a book, and even reviewed by the New York Times.

Petraeus and his entourage had set out to redefine the scope of American counter-insurgency warfare, and in doing so had cemented the role of ‘expert knowledge’ within military practice. His acolytes fanned out through the corridors of power, and by 2007 Petraeus had been appointed as commanding general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq - the Petraeus Doctrine was about to hit the road.

His top guys were cut from the same cloth as himself: Col. Mike Meese, head of the Social Sciences Department at West Point; Col. H.R. McMaster, another Vietnam War PhD, and most famously - Lt. Col. David Kilcullen of the Australian Armed Forces. Kilcullen perhaps more than anyone else has gone on to exemplify the warrior-scholar, bolstering the hubristic image that ‘Counterinsurgency is the thinking man’s warfare’. Kilcullen’s books and interviews have been widely read and examined, shot through as they are with the academese of ‘complexity’, ‘hybridisation’, ‘swarming’, the anthropology of conflict and metaphors such as ‘dragons and snakes’.

Wider Voices: the IDF and Human Terrain

Although US strategy had begun to shift towards the new doctrines of counter-insurgency by 2007-8, the concepts and ideas behind this ‘thinking man’s warfare’ were already decades old in many cases. David Galula’s seminal work on counter-insurgency had been published in 1964, and those basic principles were being rehashed again for a modern audience - gaining the support of the population, isolating the insurgents and so on. What often sounded new though was the layer of intellectual jargon laid on top. Take for example an excerpt of this 2006 piece by Eyal Weizman, entitled The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defence Force:

Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General, directs the Operational Theory Research Institute… He summed up the mission of his institute, which was founded in 1996: ‘We are like the Jesuit Order. We attempt to teach and train soldiers to think. […] We read Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational architects”.’[4] In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as ‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari.

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […] Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’[5] When I asked him if moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood urban fighting as a spatial problem. [...] Travelling through walls is a simple mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’[6]

In 1972 the historian and journalist Robert Moss wrote a now-forgotten book called The War for the Cities, arguing that the era of the urban guerilla was already here. Drawing on examples ranging from Ulster, Quebec, the Black Panthers and the Uruguayan Tupamaros, he pointed to the growing tendency for modern warfare to be small-scale insurgencies, focused on the city and acts of terrorism, asymmetrical conflict and a cross-over between criminal, ideological and military powers. Forty years later, Kilcullen published one of the his best known works - Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla, arguing that urban warfare will be the future of global conflict, set in the slums of the third world, presenting an immense challenge to conventional military forces and would require thinking men like himself to help contain it. Plus ça change.

One idea which had percolated through from those post-war concerns about urban insurrection and pacification, was the notion of the human terrain. It was not enough the control the physical space, rather the strategy for dealing with small-scale, irregular combat should be to control the human terrain, or at least understand it enough to predict and counter the enemy.

The concept was later pushed by the neoconservative hawk and retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel, Ralph Peters, in his 2000 piece - The Human Terrain of Urban Operations. This found influence as analysts and generals struggled to make sense of the ballooning War on Terror. Did Al-Qaeda want control over the human terrain? How do we train Afghans and Iraqis to recapture the human terrain?

The stage was set for an anthropological intervention inside the military, one capable of providing, as Scales stated in the opening quote - a culture-centric approach to future warfare. That intervention came in the form of two women - Montgomery ‘Mitzy’ McFate and Andrea Jackson. McFate was the child of a hippy houseboat community-turned anthropological conflict scholar. She wrote her PhD thesis on the culture of insurgent groups, with a focus on the IRA. Jackson’s background is more murky, working in Bosnia during the 90’s and then for the notoriously opaque Lincoln Group by the early 2000’s. Together they wrote a short paper called An Organizational Solution for DOD’s Cultural Knowledge Needs in Military Review (2005).

The Human Terrain System: Anthropologists in Afghanistan

By the time the Human Terrain System ended, in 2014, it was the most expensive social science project in human history. A cool $725 million had been spent on deploying anthropologists to assist in the War on Terror. But back in 2006 nobody knew this of course - an optimistic Foreign Military Studies Office, based in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, estimated that just $6.5 million would be needed to kickstart the project. The aims of the new Human Terrain System were:

• ‘on-the-ground ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation)’ on the Middle East, Central Asia, and other strategically important regions;

• ‘pre-deployment and advanced cultural training…[and] computer based training on society and culture’;

• ‘sociocultural studies of areas of interest (such as North Korean culture and society, Iranian military culture, and so on)’;

• ‘cultural advisers for planning and operations to commanders on request’ and ‘lectures at military institutions’;

• ‘experimental sociocultural programs, such as the cultural preparation of the environment—a comprehensive and constantly updated database tool for use by operational commanders and planners’

(Andrea and Jackson, 2005)

It would run like this:

Each team was to consist of an HTT leader (major or lieutenant colonel), a cultural analyst (civilian MA/PhD cultural anthropologist or sociologist), a regional studies analyst (civilian MA/PhD in area studies with area language fluency), an HT research manager (military intelligence background), and an HT analyst (military intelligence background)

-Ethnographic Intelligence: The Human Terrain System and Its Enduring Legacy (2017) Roberto J. González

Even without the benefit of hindsight, much of this seems practical and necessary. Understanding what would cause offence, what religious observances were required, even what simple hand gestures meant, are all important for a sustained counter-insurgency program. Being able to speak the languages, make sense of kinship and marriage, how businesses were organised and run, how prices of basic commodities were fixed and so on, this layer of cultural knowledge gives the military access to the terrain of their enemy. This mentality was fast becoming the golden ticket to career success in the age of Petraeus, and McFate’s articles on war anthropology were singled out as critical examples of culture-centric thinking.

As Petraeus’ new counter-insurgency manual was being published, the first Human Terrain Team was on its way to Khost, Afghanisation. The team’s anonymous anthropologist, nicknamed ‘Tracey’, became a quiet hit within the region for her precise and intelligent work in undermining insurgent attacks. Her recognition that Haqqani network fighters were largely drawn from a pool of young men with fatherless families prompted the Army to provide a widow’s job training scheme - added to this was her insight that a local clan could be made to act as a bulwark against insurgency forces, simply by helping to rebuild mosque facilities. Within a year American combat forces had seen a 70% reduction in operations around Khost.

Early successes like these drove a positive feedback loop inside the Defense Dept, resulting in a budgetary increase from $6.5 million to $40 million. The more teams were out there, the more reports could be filed under cultural interventions, the more money could be sent to Fort Leavenworth. Human Terrain Teams started appearing all over the country, accompanying patrols, watching military interviews, asking questions about the price of bread, the local gossip on engagements and providing their commanders with details about Pashtun tribal life.

Despite this, the situation in Afghanistan was dire. Where the military had hoped to conquer, control and clear, the reality was that invisible networks of Taliban intelligence were creating huge regions of hostility, littered with improvised explosive devices. Arresting frightened young men for possessing weapons, mishandling the interrogation of female suspects and driving themselves insane battling against a foe they couldn’t see - American forces became trapped inside their bases, unable to engage with a population who in turn despised them.

The job of the Human Terrain Teams was explicitly not to create and analyse military intelligence, but rather to provide cultural insight and support for interventions based on ethnographic knowledge. As time went on however, that line began to blur, and it soon became impossible to see the difference between a military report about Taliban activities in a village and a cultural one.

Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Donald Reeves | Dr. Richard R. Boone of Wimberley, Texas, interviews local residents of the Baraki Barak District in Afghanistan's Logar province, to find out about their attitudes and daily lives, 2010

Back Home: Academia Speaks Out & Reforms Step In

The use of academically trained anthropologists in a war zone was always going to raise some eyebrows, after all, the discipline is not known for its love of American foreign policy. Shortly after the first teams began work in Afghanistan in 2007, the American Anthropological Association Executive Board issued a statement denouncing the Human Terrain System and all its works:

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.

This was surely no surprise, but what it meant was that the project was going to suffer from a such a major restriction in talent. All the best and most qualified people for the job were now locked away. A protest group called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists looked to get signatures on a pledge to never work with the military or the US government on the War on Terror.

The contract for recruitment to the Human Terrain project had been awarded to BAE Systems, who were tasked with ramping up numbers to meet the budgetary requirements. The original goal was to build five teams over two years - now the powers-that-be wanted twenty-six teams, and they wanted them now. The number of Americans who spoke Arabic fluently was small enough, but how many could speak Pashto or Dari? And of those, who would want to come work for the military? Recruitment quality fell through the floor. Applicants with zero knowledge of the region were hired, people appointed to positions with no experience or qualifications. In one case BAE sent them an 82 year old man, in another they hired a woman with a criminal record of vehicular manslaughter. Other candidates included Christian missionaries, a man who wanted to acquire funding to build a doll factory in Afghanistan and delusional special forces enthusiasts.

The Human Terrain System has been discussed and criticised endlessly from within academia, and several careers have now been made in studying how the American military had tried to co-opt the social sciences. But at the time there was widespread hostility and anger at the project, essentially knee-capping any chance of being able to recruit good staff.

Fort Leavenworth was now overflowing with the fruits of BAE’s labours, and two distinct groups were emerging. Army reservists and everyone else. These contractors were of mixed quality, but in 2008 the decision to allow Iraqi jurisdiction over all foreign contractors forced the army’s hand - everyone would become a government employee, right now. Faced with a nightmare scenario of Iraqi insurgents disguised as police officers literally walking up and arresting team members, the decision was made to convert all the contractors, resulting in months of confusion, bewilderment and incompetence. By 2009 an army investigation found the unit to be utterly dysfunctional, plagued by institutional weakness and lacking the basic structures necessary to run a government department. It took until 2012-2013 for the project to find its feet, and when it did the political landscape was not the same.

It All Unraveled

Blow after blow rained down on the Human Terrain System. In 2009 three team members - Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd - were killed in the field, opening up allegations of poor training and the bigger question of why anthropologists were being put into combat zones at all. In 2012 the Petraeus Scandal grimly annihilated the entire counter-insurgency industry, as the general resigned his post from the Directorship of the CIA and the cult of personality around him came toppling down. The COIN counter-insurgency doctrine was suddenly to be found wanting, riddled with problems and the Human Terrain System had ridden on its tailcoats the entire way. Without the patronage of even the very idea of culture-centric warfare, the project looked set to go extinct.

2012 also saw the scheduled withdrawal of troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan, taking away the arena of work for the Human Terrain units. The army didn’t want more bodies on the ground, in fact they wanted the opposite - President Obama liked Big Data, drones and technology - nobody wanted to sit around and drink tea anymore. Ultimately the incompetence of the unit made it impossible to offer anything substantial to the war effort anyway. As Vanessa Gazeri wrote:

There were bright spots, but in the end, the Human Terrain System would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence. Within a few months of my visit to Helmand, a Human Terrain Team member was fired after refusing to turn off her reading light during a night mission, attempting to reprimand a marine for what she viewed as inappropriate treatment of a troublesome Afghan, and spending three hours getting her hair braided in an Afghan compound while marines stood guard outside. One of her teammates, a Vietnam veteran, was sent home after he pulled a knife on a British soldier in a tent the men were sharing.

Attempting to force academically minded people to tailor their outputs for the fast-paced and parsimonious world of the military was a constant struggle, with researchers attracted towards unnecessary verbiage and their commanders demanding to know what the utility of their findings was. That was even before the scientists could make sense of the cultural differences between the Army and the Marines, let alone the enemy. Were they soldiers, social scientists or something in-between? They never could decide. The training offered to new team members was something of a running joke, with firearms competency meant to be learnt ‘downrange’ by the military units they were attached to. With almost no decent translators, or qualified anthropologists for the task, the project fell into oblivion. In some ways the chicken-and-egg nature of the task had always set them up to fail - units of soldiers on patrol needed cultural knowledge to survive, but to get that cultural knowledge they needed to escort anthropologists on patrol.

2014 would see the termination of the program, but despite the writing being on the wall it came as a shock to many employees, who left feeling bitter and angry about the whole affair.

Aftermath

In 2014 the Islamic State rolled almost unopposed into Mosul, a shining jewel in General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency legacy. The Iraqi army disintegrated and left their weapons on the ground. In the same year Petraeus himself was memorialised by the National Geographic channel as one of America’s most legendary generals, as well as receiving an honourary professorship from the University of Exeter. For the next decade the Middle East was wracked by conflict, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and by 2021 the United States had fled Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to claim their victory. The US had spent $89 billion trying to create a strong Afghan security force, but the Taliban simply seized the hardware the US taxpayer had paid for, including over half a million rifles, mortars and machine guns.

Whilst the Human Terrain System concept lives on in other parts of the US military, such as the ‘Female Engagement Teams’ and ‘Cultural Support Teams’, the project itself is dead and buried. Trying to make sense of why it failed requires thinking about the whole architecture of US foreign policy in general. McFate herself wrote that:

“Across the board, the national security structure needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone,”

Gonzalez adds:

A great deal can be learned by examining the wreckage left behind in the wake of HTS. From one perspective, the program can be interpreted as an example of the ineptitude, incompetence, and hubris that characterized many aspects of the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, the US is an empire in denial. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that wars of imperial conquest would be couched in terms of ‘cultural awareness’ and ‘securing human terrain’

And to add the thoughts of Professor David B. Edwards:

Before accepting that it is necessarily the right direction for our military to go, we should pause a bit and consider what embracing this doctrine really means, and in considering this question, it is important to consider if it has ever actually “worked,” and if so where. The examples are not numerous, and significantly they all come from imperial contexts, including – I would argue – Afghanistan and the tribal borderland of India under the Pax Britannica. One important reason the British got it – to some extent, at least – right, and we – to a large extent, at least – have not is that the British embraced the role of an imperial power and to date, the Americans have not. In truth, the Americans do not know what their role is or should be… The United States at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century would never admit that “conquest” had anything to do with why its military is deployed around the world, and though it frequently refers to forces of darkness (“evildoers,” in the words of former President Bush), we are unsure how far we should go in opposing these forces because it is unsure what the ultimate goal of a Pax Americana should or could be.

Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System (2010)

I have argued before that archaeology is a nationalistic field, and anthropology is an imperial one. The strange mismatch here is that American imperial activities take the form of an ‘anti-empire’, which ironically explains why the academic anthropologists refused to work for the military. Trying to hide the basic necessities of conquest behind ideas like cultural sensitivity, human rights and gender equality, or the more grand narratives of ‘bringing democracy’, was always doomed to fail. Empires often consciously see themselves as bringing light to dark places, but the image of a female anthropologist having her hair braided by Afghans under a bodyguard of Marines is the reality - a sort of feel-good proceduralism. The hubris of the culture-centric counter-insurgency style of warfare is that, with the right information, we can understand and manipulate human cultures to bend them to our will - but as the above quotes point out, America is not sure what it wants. If it wanted stability in Afghanistan it simply could have entertained restoring the monarchy, a position which any anthropologist familiar with the country should have supported, but instead it chose ideology and got chaos. The lofty goal of incorporating T.E Lawrence type figures into the American War on Terror in some ways highlighted the already stark divisions between academia and US state ideology at the time. Had the Defense Dept been able to leverage the knowledge base of their nation’s universities perhaps the outcome would have been different, but instead they were forced to reinvent the discipline in the field, with predictable results.

Reference books:

• The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice - Vanessa M Gezari (2013)

• The Human Terrain System: Operationally Relevant Social Science Research in Iraq and Afghanistan - Christopher Sims (2015)

• Ethnographic Intelligence: The Human Terrain System and Its Enduring Legacy (Chapter 3, from Reconfiguring Intervention Complexity, Resilience and the ‘Local Turn’ in Counterinsurgent Warfare) - Roberto J. González (2017)