Anthropologists working with troops and civilian populations in Afghanistan
From The Scotsman, today
DAVID ROHDE IN SHABAK VALLEY
IN AN isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are deploying a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations: a softly-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon programme that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to US combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team's ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations - in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe - has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the Allied invasion of 2001, and the beginning of a military commitment which has cost British and American forces dear in terms of both manpower and resources.
But Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists, said that the unit's combat operations had been reduced by 60% since the social scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.
"We're looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist's perspective," he said. "We're not focused on the enemy. We're focused on bringing governance down to the people."
Last month, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates authorised a $40m expansion of the programme, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 US combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, military officials are scrambling to find more scholars willing to deploy to the frontlines. Last month, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area alone.
Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the programme as "mercenary anthropology" that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the US military.
Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists, are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.
"While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world," the petition says, "at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties".
In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the US military's strength in the area it patrols, the country's east.
A smaller version of the Bush administration's troop increase in Iraq, the build-up in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy, where US forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.
Since General David Petraeus, the overall US commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent US military operation in Afghanistan offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.
US officers lavishly praised the anthropology programme, saying that the social scientists' advice has proved to be "brilliant", helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations.
The eventual aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade local tribesman to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.
Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new US military approach, but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fuelling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.
"My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognise they won't succeed militarily," said Tom Gregg, the chief UN official in southeastern Afghanistan. But they don't yet have the skill sets to implement a coherent non-military strategy, he added.
Deploying small groups of US soldiers into remote areas, Schweitzer's paratroopers organised jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls "armed social work".
"Who else is going to do it?" asked Lieutenant Colonel David Woods, commander of the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. "You have to evolve. Otherwise you're useless."
The anthropology team in Afghanistan also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 US soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan's most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on US troops and local governors.
In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Woods said. The widows' lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy's advice, US officers decided to develop a job training programme for the widows as a step toward easing their financial burdens.
In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban's goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan's largest tribes. If Afghan and US officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.
"Call it what you want, it works," said Woods. "It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms."
In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said her goal was to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. "I can go back and enhance the military's understanding," Tracy said, "so that we don't make the same mistakes we did in Iraq."
Along with offering advice to military commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a detailed database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.
During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and a team of Army medics held a free medical clinic.
US civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between divided factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a new $100,000 school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountainside covered with lucrative timber.
After six years of US promises, Afghans appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills.
At a "super jirga" set up by Afghan and US commanders, a member of the Afghan parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.
"Operation Khyber was just for a few days," he said. "The Taliban will emerge again."
It's so crucial, to my mind anyway, to first know and then understand the history of peoples where they live. Where is it that things are for them, how is it that they perceive things got that way? And how/where is it they expect things to be, now and in future?
Good questions to ask ourselves, whether Brits or Americans, Israelis or Palestinians, religious or not, immigrants or 6th generation or 60th generation.
My current reading includes Assembling California by John McPhee, a look at the intersection of geologic time and human time, specifically (though not explicitly until very late in the book) the 1989 "Loma Prieta" Earthquake in Northern California. To get there Mr. McPhee takes us up and down California, back and forth from San Francisco to Tahoe, via Cyprus (Sri Lanka) and Pangaea, the courses of rivers and the movement of tectonic plates, until not only the current geography of California is formed in our minds but to the extent possible the events and activities prior that have created the California I lived in that day, the day of that earthquake.
In this book he references Leonardo Seeber's use of the idea of the "Principle of Least Astonishment":
"Our direct view of geologic phenomena has been severely limited by the relatively short span of history and by the relatively small vertical extent of outcrops. ... In many respects we only have a two-dimensional snapshot view of the geologic process. Moreover, the interpretation of geologic data was probably influenced by the psychologic need to view the earth as a stable environment. Manifestations of current tectonism were often perceived as the last gasps of a geologically active past. Thus, subjected to the principle of least astonishment, geologic science has always tended to adopt the most static interpretation allowed by the data."
on page 279, quoting from a 1983 paper by Leonardo Seeber titled "Large Scale Thin-Skin Tectonics"( From a Zhurnal.net review, which also references that this book can be slow reading- another example of geologic time intersecting with human time, right in the little bark of these pages.)
How does that tie in with this article about anthropologists in Afghanistan? It seems to me that we, or at least I, follow the principle of least astonishment when relating to others: are they not now, here and now as I meet them, as they have always been? whereas to themselves they are where they have gotten to at the moment with all their pasts, lived and unlived, behind them.
What right do I have to be astonished if someone is not who I imagined them to be? well, the astonishment may be a mechanism of how human beings are, but any consequent anger, fear, outrage, disgust, etc. need to be measured against what I know about them, these other people, not what I imagine.
Thus, anthropologists working with the military: take a deep breath, soldier, and wait one more moment before you shoot, and let's see if this is a threat, a risk, a situation, or a person.
DAVID ROHDE IN SHABAK VALLEY
IN AN isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are deploying a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations: a softly-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon programme that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to US combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team's ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations - in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe - has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the Allied invasion of 2001, and the beginning of a military commitment which has cost British and American forces dear in terms of both manpower and resources.
But Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists, said that the unit's combat operations had been reduced by 60% since the social scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.
"We're looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist's perspective," he said. "We're not focused on the enemy. We're focused on bringing governance down to the people."
Last month, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates authorised a $40m expansion of the programme, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 US combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, military officials are scrambling to find more scholars willing to deploy to the frontlines. Last month, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area alone.
Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the programme as "mercenary anthropology" that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the US military.
Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists, are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.
"While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world," the petition says, "at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties".
In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the US military's strength in the area it patrols, the country's east.
A smaller version of the Bush administration's troop increase in Iraq, the build-up in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy, where US forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.
Since General David Petraeus, the overall US commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent US military operation in Afghanistan offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.
US officers lavishly praised the anthropology programme, saying that the social scientists' advice has proved to be "brilliant", helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations.
The eventual aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade local tribesman to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.
Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new US military approach, but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fuelling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.
"My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognise they won't succeed militarily," said Tom Gregg, the chief UN official in southeastern Afghanistan. But they don't yet have the skill sets to implement a coherent non-military strategy, he added.
Deploying small groups of US soldiers into remote areas, Schweitzer's paratroopers organised jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls "armed social work".
"Who else is going to do it?" asked Lieutenant Colonel David Woods, commander of the 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. "You have to evolve. Otherwise you're useless."
The anthropology team in Afghanistan also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 US soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan's most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on US troops and local governors.
In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Woods said. The widows' lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy's advice, US officers decided to develop a job training programme for the widows as a step toward easing their financial burdens.
In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban's goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan's largest tribes. If Afghan and US officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.
"Call it what you want, it works," said Woods. "It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms."
In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said her goal was to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. "I can go back and enhance the military's understanding," Tracy said, "so that we don't make the same mistakes we did in Iraq."
Along with offering advice to military commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a detailed database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.
During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and a team of Army medics held a free medical clinic.
US civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between divided factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a new $100,000 school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountainside covered with lucrative timber.
After six years of US promises, Afghans appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills.
At a "super jirga" set up by Afghan and US commanders, a member of the Afghan parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.
"Operation Khyber was just for a few days," he said. "The Taliban will emerge again."
It's so crucial, to my mind anyway, to first know and then understand the history of peoples where they live. Where is it that things are for them, how is it that they perceive things got that way? And how/where is it they expect things to be, now and in future?
Good questions to ask ourselves, whether Brits or Americans, Israelis or Palestinians, religious or not, immigrants or 6th generation or 60th generation.
My current reading includes Assembling California by John McPhee, a look at the intersection of geologic time and human time, specifically (though not explicitly until very late in the book) the 1989 "Loma Prieta" Earthquake in Northern California. To get there Mr. McPhee takes us up and down California, back and forth from San Francisco to Tahoe, via Cyprus (Sri Lanka) and Pangaea, the courses of rivers and the movement of tectonic plates, until not only the current geography of California is formed in our minds but to the extent possible the events and activities prior that have created the California I lived in that day, the day of that earthquake.
In this book he references Leonardo Seeber's use of the idea of the "Principle of Least Astonishment":
"Our direct view of geologic phenomena has been severely limited by the relatively short span of history and by the relatively small vertical extent of outcrops. ... In many respects we only have a two-dimensional snapshot view of the geologic process. Moreover, the interpretation of geologic data was probably influenced by the psychologic need to view the earth as a stable environment. Manifestations of current tectonism were often perceived as the last gasps of a geologically active past. Thus, subjected to the principle of least astonishment, geologic science has always tended to adopt the most static interpretation allowed by the data."
on page 279, quoting from a 1983 paper by Leonardo Seeber titled "Large Scale Thin-Skin Tectonics"( From a Zhurnal.net review, which also references that this book can be slow reading- another example of geologic time intersecting with human time, right in the little bark of these pages.)
How does that tie in with this article about anthropologists in Afghanistan? It seems to me that we, or at least I, follow the principle of least astonishment when relating to others: are they not now, here and now as I meet them, as they have always been? whereas to themselves they are where they have gotten to at the moment with all their pasts, lived and unlived, behind them.
What right do I have to be astonished if someone is not who I imagined them to be? well, the astonishment may be a mechanism of how human beings are, but any consequent anger, fear, outrage, disgust, etc. need to be measured against what I know about them, these other people, not what I imagine.
Thus, anthropologists working with the military: take a deep breath, soldier, and wait one more moment before you shoot, and let's see if this is a threat, a risk, a situation, or a person.