Armed Humanitarians (38 page)

McFate suggested that the military units turn Iraq's traditional tribal patronage system to their advantage, bribing sheiks to buy their temporary loyalty and assistance: “In so doing, they [coalition forces] should be careful not to offer money as a ‘reward' for divulging the whereabouts of explosives, but as a show of goodwill to the sheik, combined with a humble request for assistance.”
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This idea of using social science to further military aims was intriguing, but cultural expertise could not simply be procured the same way the Army might buy a new radio or the Air Force might upgrade the camera on a spyplane. The government would need to enlist anthropologists and social scientists with serious professional expertise for this kind of effort. In 2006, the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, part of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, launched a pilot program called the Human Terrain System, or HTS. The program grew directly out of the Pentagon's effort to counter roadside bombs. In December 2005, Army Colonel Steve Fondacaro, who headed JIEDDO, received a laptop loaded with ethnographic data and social network diagrams. The laptop was designed, in part by McFate, to help military commanders better understand local cultures they encountered in Iraq. Fondacaro concluded that the computer alone was useless. “I threw that shit out of there,” he later told a
Wired
reporter, Noah Shachtman. “The last thing these guys needed was another gizmo … They needed a person, someone with knowledge of the society. An angel on their shoulder.”
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The brigade commanders needed social scientists to provide advice, not a library loaded with ethnographic data. McFate helped come up with a revised plan for providing useful insights.
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The idea was to set up five-person Human Terrain Teams, or HTTs, that would be embedded within the headquarters of brigades or regiments deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. The civilian social scientists on the HTTs would provide cultural analysis for the commander. Able to link back to a “reachback center” at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for customized social science research, they would build a repository of local knowledge—customs and traditions, social network diagrams, economic data—as a lasting resource for commanders. Building up a database was a particularly important point. When a brigade rotated out of theater and a new unit arrived, the outgoing unit took a mountain of information with it, scribbled in notebooks, folded up on wall charts, and stored on memory sticks. A Human Terrain Team devoted to one area would provide “institutional memory,” sparing military units the painful process of relearning everything from scratch.

Five teams were scheduled to deploy from Fort Leavenworth to Afghanistan and Iraq in the fall of 2006, as a “proof of concept.” If all went as planned, HTTs would eventually be assigned to each deployed brigade or regimental combat team. McFate, then on staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses, was appointed as the senior social scientist for the program. She would be responsible for making the public case for this new, anthropological approach to winning the war at the September 2006 counterinsurgency conference in Washington.

It was a striking debut. Among the panelists in military dress uniform and Brooks Brothers suits, McFate stood out with her severe pixie haircut and stylish attire. Her professional biography described her as a “native of Marin County, California, where she grew up on a WWII naval ammunition barge that had been converted into a houseboat.” It made an interesting contrast to the other panelists, whose biographies listed the usual bureaucratic highlights: service on bipartisan commissions, memberships with the Council on Foreign Relations, operational deployments, arms-control negotiations. She looked every inch the grown-up Goth punk, and her presentation and her style were meant to provoke. The U.S. military, she told attendees, had a “staggering lack of knowledge” about other countries and other societies, and in Iraq, the military's ignorance of local customs, traditions, and power relationships had been near-catastrophic. The national security establishment, too, needed the potent tools of social science that could help it understand its adversaries.

In “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship,” published in
Military Review
in 2005, McFate argued that the military's lack of cultural mastery was a strategic weakness:

Once called the “handmaiden of colonialism,” anthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power, which ended suddenly following the Vietnam War … The curious and conspicuous lack of anthropology in the national-security arena since the Vietnam War has had grave consequences for countering the insurgency in Iraq, particularly because political policy and military operations based on partial and incomplete cultural knowledge are often worse than none at all.
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To save the enterprise in Iraq from failure, McFate was arguing, the military needed to forge a new alliance with anthropology.

The rich history of anthropology as an instrument of national power can be traced back to the era of “high colonialism,” when ethnographers, archaeologists, and cartographers traversed the globe to catalogue imperial possessions. As McFate noted, ethnography evolved as a practical tool for understanding and administering “native” societies during the heyday of imperialism:

As early as 1908, anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudanese civil service. This relationship was quickly institutionalized: in 1921, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures was established with financing from various colonial governments, and Lord Lugard, the former governor of Nigeria, became head of its executive council. The organization's mission was based on Bronislaw Malinowski's article, “Practical Anthropology,” which argued that anthropological knowledge should be applied to solve the problems faced by colonial administrators, including those posed by “savage law, economics, customs, and institutions.”
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But collaboration between anthropology and the state had a mixed record. In World War I social science research was used as a cover for espionage. In perhaps the most famous example, the Office of Naval Intelligence recruited Sylvanus Morley, a scholar of Mayan archaeology, to survey two thousand miles of remote Central American coastline in search of German submarine bases. Morley also produced almost a thousand pages of intelligence reporting and helped recruit several other archaeologists for clandestine missions.
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The practice of spies using social science research as a cover was condemned by the prominent anthropologist Franz Boas, who saw it as a serious breach of professional ethics. In a letter published in the
Nation
in December 1919, Boas wrote, “A person … who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.”
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According to David Price, a historian of anthropology and a critic of the Human Terrain System, the Boas affair “marked the beginning of American anthropology's public debates about the propriety of mixing anthropology with military and intelligence operations.”
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During World War II, however, many of those professional concerns were set aside as anthropologists joined in the war effort. Boas's most famous student, Margaret Mead, contributed to the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits, where she applied anthropological methods to food distribution and preparation in war-torn countries. She also published
And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America
, a patriotic volume on the American national character.
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Mead's husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, served with distinction in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
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In the one and a half decades after World War II, the military and academia once again became estranged. In December 1964, however, the Special Operations Research Office, a federally funded research institute at American University in Washington, wrote to scholars with an interest in social science research on conflict in the developing world to announce Project Camelot: “Project Camelot is a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.” The main objective of Project Camelot was to find ways to measure a country's vulnerability to “internal war,” and come up with ways to counteract it.
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In the national-security jargon of the time, “internal war” was shorthand for Soviet-backed wars of national liberation fought in postcolonial societies. But the authors of a briefing paper prepared by the Army, which was providing the funds for Project Camelot research, put the objective in broader terms of nation building:

The problem of insurgency is an integral part of the larger problem of the emergence of developing countries and their transition toward modernization … The indicated approach is to try to obviate the need for insurgency through programs for political, economic, social, and psychological development. Military support of such programs can be a significant factor in the nation-building process.
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Carefully applied U.S. assistance—sometimes economic, sometimes military—could influence the outcome in weak or endangered states, and prevent them from falling into the Soviet sphere. For this enterprise to succeed, however, the U.S. government needed to better understand the current cultural context of insurgency. The first Project Camelot field research was to be conducted in Latin America, but the main focus was Vietnam, where the United States was becoming ever more deeply involved. Seymour Deitchman worked on Project Camelot as special assistant for counterinsurgency programs under Harold Brown, the director of Defense Research and Engineering. Project Camelot had originated in Brown's office. It duplicated some efforts being undertaken by the military services and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the science arm of the Pentagon that was created after the Soviets launched Sputnik. Deitchman explained the rationale of Project Camelot in his memoir of the program,
The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and Bureaucracy
:

Historically, western nations in colonial times had a lode of data deriving from and relevant for the master-slave relationship between governors and governed. Such data were often not germane, and the learning problem was much more severe, in the more egalitarian relationship we had undertaken with the Vietnamese. We had insufficient knowledge to do the job as well as we wanted to, and while this may be typical of the international efforts of all nations, growing awareness led to a strong feeling at the highest levels of American government that we would have to do better.
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That sentiment—not
whether
the job should be done, but
how
to do it better—could easily describe the policymaking elite's discussions about Iraq forty years later. In essence, the Army wanted a new Project Camelot, but planners and policymakers conveniently overlooked the program's abject failure. When the left-wing press in Chile got wind of Project Camelot in mid-1965, lurid stories began to appear about U.S. “interventionism” and “espionage” under the guise of social-science research. To make matters worse, Project Camelot was seen as encroachment by the military on diplomatic turf: The State Department saw foreign policy and social science research as its domain, but the Pentagon was getting all the money.

A furor in Washington ensued after a front-page story by Walter Pincus of the
Washington Star
on July 27, 1965, “Army-State Department Feud Over Social Science Research in Chile,” in which Pincus broke the news of the growing feud between the State Department and the Pentagon over the research the Army was conducting in Chile under the auspices of Project Camelot. Pincus's reporting probably drew on a deliberate leak from Foggy Bottom (Deitchman noted that Pincus's story was based on a classified State Department cable). The controversy had as much to do with bureaucratic turf battle as it did with conspiracy theories: Project Camelot's Chilean study had been started without the knowledge of the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, who called for cancellation of the program. Press coverage was key to bringing Project Camelot to an untimely end, Deitchman noted:

It brought the Camelot fiasco to the public's attention and stimulated the interest of members of Congress in DOD social research. It fed, if it did not trigger, the bureaucratic conflict between the State and Defense Departments. When all was over it could claim much of the credit for having brought the DOD's supposed misbehavior to public account.
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In many ways Project Camelot foreshadowed the controversy that followed the Human Terrain System from its inception. Like Project Camelot, the Human Terrain System arose from the intense frustration of military officials and policymakers with their inability to defeat relatively primitive insurgents. The United States was deeply engaged in giving aid to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it understood little about local antagonisms and local cultures in these and other countries. Washington policymakers rarely understood those dynamics, and any of the knowledge acquired during a twelve- or fifteen-month Army rotation (or in the case of a diplomat, a one-year tour) often had to be relearned when a new unit or a bureaucratic replacement arrived.

The Human Terrain System took things a step further than Project Camelot by embedding social scientists within military units. When the program became public, it almost immediately sparked controversy. Part of the problem was McFate's persona as an intellectual bomb thrower. As McFate saw it, anthropology had beaten a retreat to the Ivory Tower, where anthropologists' professional embrace of postmodernist theory led the discipline to continue a long slide toward irrelevance. In the 1960s and 1970s, she wrote, the anthropological community “refused to ‘collaborate' with the powerful, instead vying to represent the interests of indigenous peoples engaged in neocolonial struggles … Armed with critical hermeneutics, frequently backed up by self-reflexive neo-Marxism, anthropology began a brutal process of self-flagellation, to a degree almost unimaginable to anyone outside the discipline.”
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