Commenting on this site has been closed. If you need to reach me, please email me at maxDOTforte[AT]openanthropologyDOTorg. However, as I will also be taking a break from email, please do not expect a fast response. Any announcements, such as for the next edition of The New Imperialism, will be posted on the Facebook and Twitter extensions of ZA. Brief commentaries–if any at all–will appear in Facebook alone. I am sure that I will also have the pleasure of meeting some of you at the upcoming AAA conference in Montreal where, if the sessions are approved, I will be on two panels.

Even while not posting here, new posts, updates, documents, and videos will appear on ZA’s pages on Facebook, Twitter, Box.net, and ZATV. You can also follow Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, where the majority of new articles will appear for the next 18 months and which will be the focus of online efforts in that period.

In addition, here are some alternative sites that I warmly recommend, in alphabetical order, and they will point you to other newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.:

• Anti-war.com
• The Angry Arab News Service
• CLOSER (Martijn de Koning)
• The Cynical Arab
• Empire Strikes Black
• Investigating the New Imperialism
• Jewbonics
• Lenin’s Tomb
• Molly’s Blog
• Monthly Review
• P U L S E
• Quotha (Adrienne Pine)
• Tom Dispatch
• Truthout
• Wikileaks (WL) Central
• World Socialist Website (WSWS)

Finally, not even if the following were to happen will this site be reactivated before SEPTEMBER 2012:

1. Montgomery McFate takes the presidency of the AAA in a rigged election, imposes lifetime censure on everyone who signed the petition against the uses of anthropology in counterinsurgency, and convenes a commission to investigate the work of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists as not a legitimate exercise in professional anthropology.
2. The war in Libya ends up being such a failure, that NATO itself is dissolved in the immediate aftermath.
3. That the war in Libya is such a success for NATO, that “humanitarian” invasions and occupations are launched against Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria.
4. Obama is pushed out by his own party, and is replaced by Dennis Kucinich.
5. Canada has 10 more elections, each one with the same result: the Conservatives win a minority government.

If I were to continue in this line, I would need a longer break.

Those who might be interested in writing for ZA once it revives, please contact me at the email address above. In the meantime, many thanks to everyone, until soon.

A report by the Center for Naval Analyses, as mandated by Congress last year as a precondition for releasing further funds to the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, declares that HTS is a success, and at worst, a victim of its success. The report is primarily focused on management structure (not managers), organization, recruiting, the “metrics” of success, and policy and regulatory issues (p. 1). It now seems more than likely that the report was a formality as part of a public, political window-dressing act where Congress ostensibly “responds” to criticisms and controversies surrounding HTS, but with every intention of continuing the program. Indeed, that is a fitting conclusion, considering that the report came on the eve of the announced resurgence and expansion of the program.

It’s a Success, and a Victim of its Success

While “success” is the overarching theme of the report, at no point do we find a CNA explanation of what it means by “success,” and indeed it remains the big mystery word of the entire report, even when the CNA investigators themselves note that HTS also lacks a formal understanding of success and how to gauge it. Here is the first declaration of success, appearing right up front in this report, which serves more as a justification for continuation of the program than an in-depth analysis of the many criticisms of the program:

“First, the HTS program has been, in many ways, a success. It is a unique and dynamic program, and its leadership and staff have been able to generate a new and innovative capability within a bureaucratic environment that is not always open to such initiatives. In our interactions with HTS personnel and staff, we consistently came across individuals who were deeply committed to the mission, which most likely has also contributed to its successes. The program also has support within the Army leadership. General David Petraeus, who recently became commander of International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, is a staunch supporter. There are some indications in the data we collected for this assessment that this capability fills a gap for the war-fighter and therefore has made an important contribution to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan” (p. 2)

The CNA does note that there have been criticisms of the program—largely muffled—but argues that they are rooted in “misunderstandings” and that they tend to focus on issues of decision-making and specific incidents (which, as critics of HTS, we know is an entirely deceitful characterization):

“the program remains the target of criticism. Part of this appears to stem from specific incidents and poor decisions that have occurred within the program, such as sending unqualified personnel into combat zones. Our analysis suggests that poor internal communications and the absence of an overall outreach or communications strategy may also be contributing to a misunderstanding of the program’s goals and operations. This may also account for some criticism” (p. 2).

Given the immense, and usually favourable, media coverage devoted to HTS and often stage-managed by HTS, one has to wonder how the CNA came to the conclusion that HTS lacked a communications strategy, or in which ways the program’s “goals and operations” were misunderstood. Since the very report itself was mandated at the culmination of a wide range of critical opposition, one would be justified in expecting some more detailed and careful treatment of these points. Instead, we have vague and obscure generalizations.

Some Anthropologists are Opposed to HTS

“For numerous reasons,” we are told, but without going into any detail, “some anthropologists are opposed to the program. To learn more about the nature of these concerns, we recommend the reader refer to the ‘AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) Final Report on The Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,’ Submitted to the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, October 14, 2009.” At no point in this report does the CNA simply lump a major theme under a single reference and tells the reader to go elsewhere—usually there is an attempt at a summary. “In addition,” they continue, “there is also an active blog community made up of a variety of outspoken individuals who oppose the program” (fn. 4, p. 2)—but no links, because the understanding is that Congress should not be made aware of any of our criticisms. Indeed, the CNA explicitly prefers to avoid them: “we do not directly wade into the broader debates surrounding the HTS program that are currently taking place on various websites and blogs” (p. 11). Somehow missing the lead role played by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists—which is never mentioned even once in the report by name—the CNA states: “A key stakeholder in this debate is the academic community, most prominently represented by the American Anthropological Association” (p. 12). We will return to what the CNA says about academics’ criticisms, and relationships with universities, further down.

The problems the CNA found/chose to examine were these:

1. Recruiting/hiring of unqualified team members
2. High rates of attrition among HTS team members
3. Contract ceiling being reached, halting HTS operations
4. Timecard problems
5. Frustration over permanent duty station assignment for Department of Army Civilians who rotate or transit through Fort Leavenworth
6. HTS program management (p. 8).

The Assessment

The CNA does acknowledge that there were limits to what it could assess and how:

“A significant portion of HTS activities and operations take place in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, given the 90 day time-frame we were allotted to conduct this assessment, the CNA assessment team was not able to travel to either theater to conduct our research. As a result, we relied mostly on information we could gather within the United States” (p. 10)

Relying on assessments from HTS’ own Program Development Team, the CNA reports that past PDT documents reveal “‘pockets’ of brigade commander feedback on the program—some positive and some negative” (p. 60), but also notes that there is a reason why there would be less negative feedback: “It was also voluntary for a unit to participate in the survey, thus units who were positive about their HTTs tended to participate, while those that had not had positive experiences with their HTTs were not” (p. 61). On a positive note, and unlike the mainstream media, Appendix B of the CNA report has detailed comments from brigade commanders who were critical of the HTTs assigned to them and did not find them useful.

Interestingly, while judging the program to be a success, the CNA devotes many pages to describing the partial, incomplete, halting, inconsistent, uneven, and often confused nature of internal HTS self-assessments. Our question should be: if HTS judges itself to be a “success” (and secures CNA’s agreement on this front) then what do they mean by success and how do they assess success? There is no clear and consistent answer. Indeed, even as the CNA explains at length that there were no consistent attempts to define or measure success, or that certain standard military assessment measures were never put in place, and that it is unclear who was the intended audience of the “mixed bag” of HTS assessments, and how the assessments resulted in decisions to change practices (if they did)—nonetheless, in spite of all of that, the CNA still begins its report with its primary conclusion: HTS is a success, and it’s the one basic, recurring term that it is consistently unable to define. Here are some examples of its findings:

“HTS has not relied heavily on metrics as part of past assessments procedures. Those that have been used have evolved over time, and have not been used consistently….In 2008, an effort was launched to develop a more formal assessment process similar to those in other military organizations. As part of that process, metrics have been developed, but apparently have not been employed….There has never been a permanent, fully-staffed component responsible for assessments within the HTS structure” (p. 69)

“It is unclear over time, what the exact purpose and goals of past assessments have been and who the intended audience is….Using the current approach it is difficult to do any trend analysis of the program because the tool used to assess the program’s performance and the final product has changed from year to year” (p. 70)

“There does not appear to be a formal process for implementing the suggestions/conclusions reached in the various” HTS internal assessments (p. 71)

“absence of clearly defined tasks and standards” (p. 71)

Even though they are unable to determine what success is, in the section following their detailed overview of the problems of HTS assessments, the CNA nonetheless continues with this line: “The HTS organization has been both blessed and cursed by its own success” (p. 73)

After charting poor recruitment, training and high attrition rates, the CNA still insists on concluding as follows:

“That HTS has succeeded at all (and it has had some notable successes [unspecified]) is a tribute to the hundreds of men and women who have dedicated themselves to making it happen. Many of the people we interviewed, including the most critical of HTS, indicated that HTS teams are performing a vital function. They contend that even if only a few of the teams are successful [meaning what?], the good work that the successful teams do is so important that it makes the whole enterprise worthwhile” (p. 109)

Stirring words.

Desperate and Unscrupulous Recruits, Optimism about Management

In the CNA investigators’ view, the most significant and persistent problem plaguing HTS has been recruiting (p. 3)—which is not to say that even with this limited scope they do not produce some interesting findings.

When speaking of recruitment and training, the CNA describes the work of the private defense contractor, BAE Systems, and its selection of candidates as ranging from “loose” in 2009 to “moderately selective in 2010—in the case of 2010, 60% of the total 1,342 applications received was rejected (p. 87). Interestingly, in speaking to a CNA interviewer, “BAE would not characterize recruiting as either good or bad but as ‘involved’” (p. 88). The CNA was not moved by this evasive non-explanation, and concludes:  “the quality of the personnel supplied under the BAE contract is substandard and is at the heart of most of the problems in the program….The government seems to have to take whatever BAE provides” (p. 106).

If this seems like it will take us on a journey through a maze of corrupt contractor practices and incompetent management, it would occasion disappointment, as the report spends more time outlining the unsuitable quality of recruits, and the bad economy that sends them to BAE Systems. As BAE itself told the CNA: “The weak economy had brought in some recruits….The weak economy has caused some of them to make the decision” (p. 89). The CNA says that the managers themselves found the recruits to be of poor quality: “Throughout HTS, managers comment on what they consider to be the poor quality of many of the recruits” (p. 90)—in some months, as many as 56% of trainees either resign and/or are dropped by the program. Again, the question persists: where in this do we see “success”?

What is an interesting revelation is that those in charge of recruiting and management suspected that many recruits are merely using HTS training for purposes other than serving HTS:

“Equally problematic is an apparently recent trend noticed by trainers of substantial numbers of recruits resigning at the very end of training—see for example the data of November 2009 and January 2010. The trainers tell us that many of these recruits seemed to have had no intention of actually deploying and were only there to collect pay for 4.5 months and get a security clearance….the substantial amount of pay collected during this interval may well be attractive,  particularly during this economic downturn. With the 4.5 months of training and a security clearance the recruit may also be able to get a lucrative long term job with another contractor” (p. 93)

As for the instructors, the CNA determines that 69% are from backgrounds that are “not relevant” to the stated requirements of the program (p. 96). As for the research managers, 76% are from educational backgrounds that are “not relevant” (p. 97) Of the deployed social scientists, 40% are from “not relevant” training backgrounds (p. 98) As for team leaders, 88% are from “not relevant” backgrounds: “On balance the team members’ academic specialties all too often lack real relevance to the behavioral and social science research backgrounds that the teams appear to need and is referenced in the position descriptions and the associated knowledge, skills, and abilities” (p. 100).

The CNA outlines what we already knew, that there has been a consistent lack of recruits with the necessary language skills, so much so that the requirement has been dropped (p. 101).

What is perhaps much more astounding, and never mentioned by the media, is the extremely high number of those being fired or resigning once they have already been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan: “we estimate that about 8 deployed team members are relieved from duty each year and about 80 team members resign while on deployment” (p. 102)—then, by its own reported numbers of persons deployed (157), that would mean about half of all deployed HTS team members either resign or are relieved of duty.

Even though the CNA did say that as many as 76% of all managers come from irrelevant backgrounds, the CNA is more positive in its commentary about managers. The CNA writes: “In general, there is reason for optimism about HTS internal management. The management structure has greatly improved in the last 12 months. Of note, there has been the addition of a Chief of Staff, several key replacements in directorates, and the organization is in the process of converting all remaining contractors that currently head directorates in government civilian status” (p. 5).

The CNA did assess the quality of the recruits. Did it do the same with respect to managers? No: “It is important that the reader understand that we were not asked to assess the quality of the managers, but only to comment on the adequacy of the structure” (p. 41). Even when it seems that the CNA might take a critical turn—“Given media reports (at least some of which we believe to be substantially correct) of inappropriate behavior on the part of some team members, it is reasonable to question whether the management is, in fact, adequate to the task” (p. 44)—the CNA pulls back: by inadequate management they mean management structure, and they proceed to recommend that there be more managers, following models that include those of management gurus like Peter Drucker. The problem with the managers is…there are not enough of them. As for management problems, the CNA concludes there is “reason for optimism” that all of the necessary changes to improve HTS management are well underway (p. 48).

Quite aside from the issues raised above, and included only because it supplements the photos provided by former HTS employee John Allison, what is interesting are the CNA’s notes about the HTS training facility:

“The physical plant for training at Fort Leavenworth can be described as Spartan. Until recently, training has been conducted in a group of trailers. The facility has been ‘upgraded’ and now occupies the basement of a small shopping center. The space consists of classrooms for students and cubicles for instructors. When we visited each of the classrooms was occupied with 15-25 students. Many of the classrooms are noisy due to the nature of the air conditioning system—making it very difficult to hear the instructor. During our visit, the instructors were experimenting with a headphone system to enable students to hear them over the air conditioning. This was the first day with the system and it was not working well” (p. 91).

Anthropology and Academic Outreach

First, it is important to note that, contrary to the ways HTS tried to distance itself from anthropology in the U.S. mainstream media when it could no longer counter overwhelming criticism and rejection, the CNA does note that anthropology is a cornerstone of HTS’ preferred identity: “HTS emphasizes the use of tools and approaches commonly associated with the academic disciplines of anthropology and sociology in its efforts to collect and analyze data about local populations” (p. 1).

To overcome criticisms, the CNA recommends more academic outreach, but notes “HTS also faces negative attitudes within some academic circles. For example, some universities have been reluctant to work with HTS” (p. 6). This is repeated on page 122:

“HTS also faces the challenge of negative attitudes within some academic circles towards the HTS program overall. In some of its outreach efforts, HTS has already faced an unwillingness on the part of some institutions or individuals (in particular some within the Anthropological community) to work together.”

Yet, as we know already, HTS has been successful in gaining the cooperation of at least four universities, as charted by the CNA:

How to get around the lack of subject matter experts and persons with relevant qualifications? The CNA notes that “in a resource-constrained environment, seeking opportunities to leverage the expertise, programs, and work of outside organizations is a worthwhile endeavor” (p. 121).

The CNA proposes a simple, awful solution—that all of us become silently enlisted into training HTS recruits:

“An alternative for the long term is for HTS to ‘grow its own.’ Promising young officers could be selected for training program in social science and sent to an appropriate university for advanced degrees….One downside to this approach is that the military officer trained as a social scientist might have more difficulty gaining the trust of the local population than a civilian social scientist” (p. 121).

They still want anthropologists and academics for their legitimacy and credibility in being able to penetrate local communities—assuming those communities have no access to these debates, and some do. There is no consideration of the likelihood that once the association with military training has permanently burnt the reputation of anthropologists, they will then get about the same welcome as the military gets.

An alternative that the CNA points to, and we shall have to look at whether this materializes in the future, is for HTS to work with any of “a number of Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs),” or “other public research institutions such as the center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Brookings Institution,” which, “may also be appropriate partners for HTS” (p. 122).

It is peculiar that the CNA chose to blame the overwhelming criticism on HTS lacking a strategic communications plan for outreach to academic organizations, noting that HTS also lacks a directorate or individual within HTS who has the assigned responsibility for pursuing relationships and partnerships with academic organizations (p. 121)—yet we do know that Montgomery McFate attended anthropology conferences specifically with the aim of recruiting people, and that she featured herself in numerous articles about HTS.

More than One Human Terrain Program

With the assistance of an officer in U.S. military intelligence, we already posted some information on other human terrain capabilities in the U.S. military, as well as similar functions of SCRATs, and we identified multiple human terrain programs. The CNA charts some of these, but does not address the question of why HTS is therefore needed when its capabilities have been multiplied across several domains.

Also of Interest, Some Facts and Figures:

Number of Human Terrain Teams Deployed:

• Number of deployed Human Terrain Teams in Iraq is 10, or 92 personnel
• Number of deployed Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan is 17, or 65 personnel
• Total persons deployed 157–for May 2010 (p. 19)

In addition, there are a further 7 Human Terrain Analysis Teams in Afghanistan, and 3 in Iraq (p. 21)

In Afghanistan, HTTs are deployed with the U.S. Army, Marines, NATO, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, Task Force Phoenix, and “3 other unspecified units.”

Of 555 employees in total (as of 18 June 2010), 101 were military personnel, 206 were private contractors, and less than half (248) were civilians (p. 76).

Funding:

“HTS was not able to provide us with a detailed budget” (p. 43) – instead, all they have is a general funding plan. From that (p. 43) we learn of the funding provided to HTS in the following fiscal years:

• 2008–$144,000,000
• 2009–$92,541,000
• 2010–$159,729,000
• 2011–$154,822,000

TOTAL = $551,092,000

* the program began in 2006, and no figures are supplied for 2006 and 2007

From those amounts, the following was spent on deployed teams:

• 2008–$77,950,000
• 2009–$72,061,000
• 2010–$125,752,000
• 2011–$112,261,000

The CNA judges the level of funding to be inadequate (p. 43).

The BAE recruitment contract, renewed in September 2009, is $380 million, over five years (p. 86).

Anthropologists in the Military:

Some interesting data on the total number of all civilians with degrees in anthropology employed by the Pentagon, as of September 2009 (pps. 113-114):

• US ARMY: 285 (160 with a BA in anthropology, 95 with a MA, 30 with a PhD)
• US NAVY: 119 (68 with a BA in anthropology, 30 with a MA, and 21 with a PhD)
• US MARINE CORPS: 15 (8 with a BA in anthropology, 6 with a MA, 1 with a PhD)
• US AIR FORCE: 70 (47 with a BA in anthropology, 17 with a MA, and 6 with a PhD)
• OTHER DoD CIVILIANS: 43 (39 with a BA in anthropology, and 4 with a MA)

TOTAL = 532 (322 with a BA in anthropology, 152 with a MA, 58 with a PhD)

[The following consists of the speaking notes for a presentation delivered by Major Maria Vedder of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, from 23 February 2010, as a "strategic intelligence update." The original file can be accessed here as a PPT file and here as a PDF.]

SPEAKING NOTES: OPTION 1

Good Morning Sir, It’s not who I am but what I am that brings me here today.

I am a soldier with an identifier that enables me to garner information and build relationships with the population that is not accessible by some others – that identifier is my gender.

But it’s my training as a civil affairs officer and human terrain member that enables me to conduct the engagements in a manner to garner information in a proscribed manner and to understand the importance of capturing that information in such a way to disseminate it and share it with others. I’ve been in Helmand for 5 months working on female engagements.

SPEAKING NOTES: OPTION 2

Good morning, Sir.

I am Maj Maria Vedder, a civil affairs officer and member of the Human Terrain System. I worked 5 months in Helmand Province with RCT 7 before transferring to ISAF HQ to write a report that provides background, detailed methodology, and tactical employment considerations for female engagement teams.

NOTES:

Author: P. Maria Vedder, MAJ, Civil Affairs, US Army Reserves, ISAF HQ, Human Terrain System Theatre Coordination Element (HTS TCE)/ Civilian ORSA for TRADOC

Primary Contributor and Advisor: MSgt Julia Watson, Civil Affairs, US Marine Corp, Female Engagement Team (FET) OIC, 2nd MEB

USMC FET Program Advisor: COL Edward Yarnell, US Marine Corp (USMC), MEB, FECC

Tactical Employment Advisors: COL Randall Newman, USMC, Commander, RCT 7; LTC Mark Dietz, USMC, Commander, 2-2

Teammate & Research Methodology Advisor: Ms Kristin Post, Social Scientist, HTS, RCT 7, Human Terrain Team 7

Supplemental contributions and oversight by:

Dr. Montgomery McFate, HTS, Senior Social Scientist (Topic: Relevance)

Rebecka Bell, Independent consultant (Topic: Triangulation)

Christopher King, HTS TCE, Social Scientist (Topic: Convergence)

Capt. Matt Pottinger, CJ2x (Topic: Purpose)

Ms. Jali Jalani (Topic: Translator Responsibilities)

Maj N.J. Karczewski, TFL G-3 Assessments Deputy OIC (Topic: Assessment)

LTC Dave Hudak, TRAC Monterey (Topic: Assessment)

Mr. Jack Jackson, TRAC Monterey (Topic: Assessment)

Mr. Tim Perkins, TRAC Monterey (Topic: Influence; Assessment)

MAJ Major Cameron Grams, 2D MEB ANSF OCC-P (Topic: Influence; Information)

SPEAKING NOTES:

I am recommending that you issue ISAF guidance for female engagement containing the specific elements listed. Such guidance will ensure consistency in reporting that is gained through quality training and engagement methods…the consistency is to ensure that we don’t end up doing more harm than good with unintended culturally offensive mistakes and to gather information in a concise manner.

NOTES:

Sir – you signed an order in November directing units to “create teams to build relationships with Afghan females” but there is little consistency in the programs across the country… with varying degrees of success in contributing to the information repository on the total Afghan population that we seek to understand as part of the COIN environment.

As such, the recommendation is to develop ISAF guidance for female engagement teams to ensure consistency in reporting that is gained through quality training and engagement methods…the consistency is to ensure that we don’t end up doing more harm than good with unintended culturally offensive mistakes and to gather information in a concise manner.

BACKGROUND NOTES:

ISAF guidance for tactical employment of female engagement teams

Dedicated military females to engage the populace, focusing on Afghan females

Minimum 2 per battalion operating at company level

Task organized under civil military operations

Training Standards and Recruiting Protocol

Establish Assessment Tool

Defined mission

Measures of Performance and Effectiveness

Guided Question sets to inform the LOOs

Reporting standardized (CIDNE)

SPEAKING NOTES:

Many still question why we should single out females as focus of effort.

This stick guy represents the entire population.

In Afghanistan, you’ve got about half males, and half female.

But in Afghanistan, the culture segregates by gender. So the appropriate operational response that is culturally sensitive to that segregation is to interact male to male & female to female.

We want to understand 100% of the community by engaging them directly.

By doing so, we get the insight that we need, while being respectful of the culture, yet building the fundamentally essential social contracts founded on trust and established in a cooperative environment.….that social contract needs to be with the male and female population…both of whom are making decision about the future of this country, whether publicly or privately.

BACKGROUND NOTES:

Cultural Sensitivity:

The Afghan culture segregates by gender.

“Population is Center of Gravity”

The appropriate operational response to be respectful of the cultural norms is to enable female members of the coalition force to interact with the Afghan female population directly.

SPEAKING NOTES:

A question posed was why must military females be responsible for female engagement…why not others?

In non-permissive environments, the majority of information is collected by military members because of the high threat levels. So if we are to get information from the female half of the population, then military females will be the one’s getting the information because they are the only females operating in high threat areas.

The initial information gathered in the clear and initial hold phases of operations informs all future operations and sets the stage for non-lethal effect packages.

Long term, would hopefully find total transition of responsibility to GIRoA and the international community supporting sustainable development, pursuing economic prosperity , and human rights.

But the groundwork is done in those critical moments from the clear to hold phases….first impressions matter and the set stage for all future efforts. And women in this society must be considered because limited mobility creates constraints in their access to the needed support.

NOTES:

Because military females are the only females with access in a non-permissive environment when first impressions matter and when the commander’s critical information requirements are being gathered to determine the sustainment phases of the operation.

There are near term and long term value in all information collected on the battlefield.

The information collected by patrols in the battle space build the picture for future operation decisions such as how and where to apply CERP funds, how to develop IO packages, and where to focus security assets. Again, to know how to best use distribute our non-lethal resources for maximum gain in influencing the whole population, we must know what will appeal to the females too…particularly in consideration of their limited freedom of movement which requires more creative IO/CA/Medical response.

As security improves, the expectation would be more joint efforts with governance teams and R&D experts who have the money and the expertise to start making large scale improvement in the region.

Long term, would hopefully find total transition of responsibility to GIRoA and the international community supporting sustainable development, pursuing economic prosperity , and human rights.

But the groundwork is done in those critical moments from the clear to hold phases….first impressions matter and the set stage for all future efforts.

SPEAKING NOTES:

The population is “center of gravity” in COIN operations.

The whole purpose of engaging members of the local community is to understand what this enigmatic population is thinking and perceiving as we conduct operations.

The Human Terrain is composed of men, women, and children that must be targeted to gathering information.

In Afghanistan, we observe rather consistent themes

Men = interpret information and tell you what they think you want to hear

Women = see and hear what goes on behind the walls

Children = the children run free in the community; they see and watch and are involved in nearly every activity in the community

The population must determine whether to support EF or GIRoA

To understand which direction they are leaning, we must get feedback from all 3 entities

By doing so, we:

Corroborate what each entity is saying

Clarify what was meant by information gathered

Get convergence on the common theme that resonate with the population

And the overall caliber of the information we are gathering increases

Of note, the children are a delicate engagement endeavor as we do not want to put them at risk. However, approximately 45% of the population is under the age of 16…impressionable and vulnerable…prime target for enemy force recruitment. The future of Afghanistan rests with the children. If we don’t engage, then the enemy will so they need to be considered in our human terrain targeting construct.

BACKGROUND NOTES:

Post-Conflict Sustainable Stabilization:

In order to develop a population capable of self governance and internal security, the future generations of Afghans need the basic tools for development

To include but not limited to education, an active economy, basic sanitation, and infrastructure. Females are responsible for nurturing this community

The concept of triangulated engagement was presented by Rebecca Bell, an Independent Consultant on Governance, at a meeting arranged by MAJ Rice, Australian Major, Chief Instructor/Training and Learning Development Officer at the

Counterinsurgency Training Centre – Afghanistan Camp Julien, Kabul in December 2009.

The concept has been adapted by MAJ Vedder to represent female engagement in a tactical scenario and to describe the benefit of the 4 C’s. The adjustments are not the responsibility of Ms. Bell nor does the credit of this idea infer her support of the application of this technique in this environment.

The Marines employ their females as military teams. As such their missions are guided by standard military decision making process.

FET is useless if the information gathered doesn’t support the unit mission and if the work is not operationally relevant.

and properly rehearse.

This is NOT a good will mission.

Interaction to build good will is beneficial but as a military unit, there is a more important security responsibility that should be supported with guided purpose and intent for employing tactical units like FET.

Starting with the commander’s guidance and creating a plan with a concept of operations. This is particular critical so that the receiving units Know how to support the FET mission…to include understanding time on station requirements and named areas of interest. This makes it easier for the patrolling units to prepare for the operation

But the column on the far right is particularly critical. Likewise, if the information is to be captured for trend analysis, there must be guidelines and reporting requirements for topics discussed during engagements to Create a collective pool of knowledge from which can be extrapolated broader Conclusions applicable to the entire ISAF community

Background Notes:

Caliber of information is only as good as the interviewer, so training on how to Properly engage matters. But again, what comes OUT of the engagements, must go IN to a central repository for dissemination.

This concept brief was originally designed for the Human Terrain Team 7, RCT 7. It was adapted to FET because of the similarities in team employment.

SPEAKING NOTES:

Respecting the male role in conservative Afghan society is the most effective manner to enable female engagements.

When the elders are involved, the community supports, and they take responsibility for protecting the gathering of their females or opening homes to allow for military females to visit.

A military male leader requesting Afghan males to support female engagements has consistently been the most well received of the methods to organize female engagements.

NOTES:

Respecting the male role in conservative Afghan society is the most effective manner to enable female engagements. A military male leader requesting Afghan males to support female engagements has consistently been the most well received of the methods to organize female engagements. When the elders are involved, the community supports, and they take responsibility for protecting the gathering of their females or opening homes to allow for military females to visit. “Utilizing the tribal and government leaders incorporates them into the process and gives them ownership of the effort. If they believe that value exists in altering gender roles, then they illicit change in the community, not outsiders. If they bring the change, they will own it and we can leave.” (MSgt Watson)

Honoring conservative values protects the female engagement team members from unintentionally offending Afghan males. To do so enhances mission effectiveness by incorporating the males into the process which earns their support and ensures a welcomed reception by the females after the male leader of the household invites the military females into the home. By showing respect to the traditional values, the FET and the partnered military males demonstrate a cultural competence that is well regarded. The men maintain their honor publicly and privately while the women earn the freedom to engage in open dialogue with no feeling of threat. With the proper type of introduction, better information is garnered from both the male and female conversations with no offense to either.

Pictured is the district governors of Nawa. In each KLE, the battalion commander and I developed an approach for speaking with each individual before we departed on the patrol. Then the BN CDR (Male Military Leader) made introductions to the Male Local Leader asking permission for me (Military Female) to speak with the Local Male Leader about military females meeting with local females. In each instance, the topic was well received and EVERY Male Leader offered specific guidelines and suggestions on how, where, and when the best FET engagements should occur. No two were the same, but each was appropriate for that district and all have been followed through by either the USAID Representative, Gail Long in Garmsir or by the MEB’s FET teams. Particular now that FET members are being assigned for prolonged duty in the same area, which facilitates long term relationships and acceptance garnered by familiarity.

SPEAKING NOTES:

(Picture should be on the screen)

The female you see here is approximately 28, on her 8th pregnancy, 4 living children, 3 that you see here,

The eldest female aged 13 who is is off to the side is pregnant with her first child, married to an ANP member.

The father is employed by the ANP as a cook.

The 3 dead children died before their 8th month, not from disease, but from mal-nutrition because of the mother’s inadequate breast milk.

Why do you care what she has to say? Because EVERY female engagement informs the lines of operations and adds a different dimension to understanding the total population picture.

(Next click should bring up chart)

This chart shows the dimensions used by the MEB for district assessments. When comparing male responses and female responses some elements were similar while others were significantly different.

*Governance paralleled with the men’s findings.

*ANSF was similar but more dynamically informed because of the family relations with the ANP.

*Security showcased as a distinct difference in definition. Men defined security in kinetic terms, while women were more concerned for the household and children’s safety.

But one area showcased as an opportunity to support improvement quickly. (link to next slide)

NOTES:

* Security was a major concern because the father feared for the women and even his son, because they were the only women within about a mile with no other families nearby; only single, young men of the ANP and road construction crews.

* Contributing to the enemy threat capability, the father discussed having been a prisoner of the Taliban in the past, which no one at the ISAF base knew.

*The wife’s health and daughter’s first pregnancy was an immense concern for the husband. This differed from the male military assessment.

* Assessment Tool

In the military, we gage unit success with assessment tools that are generally based off of measures of performance and measures of effectiveness that are linked to Individual and collective tasks. FET should be no different.

Use of Assessment Tool

guide female engagements

collect data on the female population

inform the command regarding the female population in the battle space

Nest with the ISAF Assessment Technique

Model after MEB Assessment Tool

Nests with the ISAF assessment metrics

Derived from the Sub-National Assessment Model

Assesses along the lines of the LOO’s

Security

Governance

Reconstruction &Development

ANSF

Establish MOEs and MOPs

Provides Topical Guides for Engagements

Information Collection Initiative for Trend Analysis

SPEAKING NOTES:

Taking what we learn from assessments and responding to the concerns when we can makes a tremendous contribution to the social contract we desire.

The primary income of the family was cooking for the ANP. The women cooked and the father took the food to the camp where he served meals with his son’s help. As such, the women were directly contributing to the economic stability of the family. Improvement in the family quality of life is directly impacted by their ability to produce more in the home. This was not capture as an economic indicator by the male assessment

More importantly, a small effort of buying a tea pot tripled there ability to produce tea to sell to the ANP and improve sanitation for the family. This small effort demonstrated that the concerns were heard, helping build confidence in the population that ISAF is present to assist GIRoA in taking care of them.

NOTES:

(Next Click brings up photo of tea pot and “Make No Promises” box.

During engagements, FET can not make promises, they can only listen. But when possible, answering a few needs can make a tremendous impact. An $8 tea pot bought in Golestan bazaar, flown on a CH57 back to main base, and put on a convoy back to Bakwa….meant that the family doubled their bread production and ability to serve more tea, faster to the ANP. Simply by asking for the commander’s support at the request of the father, the local translator started teaching the son. And a USO care package put socks on the youngest children. Simple, cheap and quick solution that endeared this family to the local base. We’ve been drinking 3 cups of tea, now let’s help them start making the tea.

SPEAKING NOTES:

ANSF is growing its female representation. As the capacity grows, FET can help inform the recruiting effort and garner information about how the public percieve females in ANSF. And then partner with them for training and development.

NOTES:

A senior civilian asked, why are ISAF females engaging local females, why aren’t ANSF females engaging the local females. Excellent point…ultimately, ANSF taking care of ALL security needs is the endstate…to include female engagements.

But the problem of recruiting for ANSF is systemic. Recruiting males is difficult at this, presenting a myriad of hurdles impeding military age males from joining the force. These include low literacy, dishonorable reputation, low pay, separation from family. These exist for women too but in addition, a layer of difficulty specific for women is present to include traditional attitudes of negativity to women in the work place, association of women in the police force being disreputable, and perception of women being socially alienated from the community. These comments came from a focus group with ANSF males regarding their female colleagues.

The professionalization of ANSF is occurring in part through partnership with and mentorship from ISAF. CSTC-A has recruitment goals for both male and female ANSF members. But reaching these goals will require both partnership for both genders and understanding of the recruiting barriers and negative public perceptions.

FETs help to inform recruiting by asking women what would motivate them and their families to allow them to be in the ANSF. Likewise, FET can garner the female’s perceptions of other females in the ANSF because there is likely a substantial influence on the eligible females from the elder females.

Partnership would be similar to the males partnership efforts, both at the academies and in the units which support training and professional development.

SPEAKING NOTES:

Females sometimes think to ask questions that males will not.

With this doctor, discussion topics included abortions, birth control, female hygiene, vitamin deficiency leading to child malnutrition from inadequate breast milk, and sexually transmitted diseases.

NOTES:

None of these topics had been broached by the male corpsmen at the COP out of concern for being culturally rude in questioning the doctor. Likewise, they had made the assumption that no females visited the clinic because they never saw them. The doctor laughed at this suggestion, saying that the corpsmen never visited before 1000 and all women were seen prior to 8AM so that they could tend to their children and responsibilities at the home…therefore, he saw them first.

SPEAKING NOTES:

FET are engagement teams. While distinguished by their ability to engage females, they can also engage males.Males will interact differently with females, providing different insights.

NOTES:

Many males are very comfortable speaking with military females; finding them an anomaly, intriguing, and less threatening than male service members…particularly the adolescences who also happen to be the most impressionable for recruitment by enemy forces. Allowing for the natural instincts of young males desiring to impress females would be naïve, so using that desire to interact to our advantage is wise when done respectfully to both the female service member and Afghan males.

Females will generally get different and sometimes more in depth information from males than will other males. For instance, the men on the right are security guards for a construction company. When asked if they would join the ANA, they said yes. When asked if they would join the ANP, they said no because it was not honorable and paid poorly. This was reiterated in another village, going even further to say that the dishonorable ANP job would hurt their ability to marry as well. With wealth and marriage being a key tenant to Pashtu “nang” or honor…the statements provided unique insight into why recruiting for the ANP was so poor.

The kids and young adults in the picture on the upper left had never seen a female service member. In this photo, we are teaching each other how to count one to ten in English and Pashtu respectively. Their recurring request was for a school for their village. One young man stated that he wanted to be a pilot. Small statements on the surface but poignantly indicative of the desire for education and future employment in a professional occupation. Having educated youth who desire to be pilots will achieve more for long term security because at this point, their other options are limited, making them easy recruitment targets for the enemy.

In the time of Xerxes, it is documented that the king took advice from his queen which significantly impacted a political issue and prevented mass genocide.

We are still in Persia. Conversations still go on between men and women behind closed doors.

To understand those conversations and more importantly, how we may be able to influence them, we must be able to access the females.

FET is a proven concept that demonstrates that effective, culturally respectful engagements can support the mission and help build confidence with the entire population. The Marine’s are doing this well and they have a model that should be replicated.

To garner the full benefit of FET through out the country, comprehensive ISAF guidance needs to be issued to maintain persistent engagement with systemic information collection.

2010 has been a great year for Zero Anthropology, with so much to celebrate that it’s difficult to know where to begin (and when to stop). From July onward we witnessed a steep comeback in terms of the number of our on-site readers, eventually breaking all of our records to the extent that now for the past three months we average more than 1,200 on-site views per day, and often (depending on the post and where it was most circulated) we can get twice that number from off-site views in addition. We have now passed 525,000 on-site views since this site began three years and two months ago, with more than 1,000 posts published, and more than 6,000 comments on this site. We have also spread and diversified across media, to the extent that we can no longer really know how many people are watching, that belongs to the ZA assemblage. This year we added ourselves to MySpace and Facebook, with our Facebook page gaining more than 200 followers in just a few months (and as I like to say, some of the best followers we could ever hope for, anthropologists and not, students and professors, journalists and activists, people from all over the world). Our collaborative efforts have increased markedly this year, even if only the product of the collaboration is all that is visible. We have doubled our number of bloggers, making this now a group blog more than the one-man show it has been. Via Twitter and email, our correspondence has led to several pieces that resulted from conversation and collaboration, with the help of people as diverse as a journalist in Malaysia and another journalist in South Africa; an artist in Milan; a computer hacker in Germany; a party activist in Venezuela; a Maori writer in New Zealand; anthropology students in Canada, France, and the U.S.; Egyptian workers’ rights activists; and some current and former members of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Earlier this year, Zero Anthropology was featured in an article in the American Anthropologist, available here. And then there is one of our most important collaborations to date, with Wikileaks, in setting up a mirror site, providing financial support, and advocating in defense of Wikileaks.

Then there are the successes that are relevant and sometimes related to ZA that deserve mention. One was the March launch of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace (AJP), to which I belong, an exciting collaboration all on its own, with much more to come from that. Another was the creation of Alert Press and the release of The New Imperialism, Volume I, which also reflects my changing academic practice, thanks in part to the New Imperialism seminar (about to start again in a few days). Then there is the fact that I have begun to write articles as a paid columnist for Al Jazeera Arabic (only three so far this year), and freely for CounterPunch (also three articles), with all six of these different articles being about Wikileaks. As I discuss below, 2010 was the Year of Wikileaks, and it is a gift that keeps on giving. In addition, John Stanton wrote a multitude of articles that appeared in newspapers around the world, and I gave several media interviews this year as well. Also somewhat related, perhaps minimally, was this year’s release of Indigenous Cosmopolitans.

Back to this site, 2010 also saw the beginning and/or completion of a number of special series, dealing with the Human Terrain System, empire and anthropology, Wikileaks, and Afghanistan. Features of ZA that have virtually disappeared are the spontaneous blogging and essays about music–in favour of almost rigidly planned series. I expect to continue/renew our Encircling Empire Reports in the new year, while it is more likely that the “Zero Series” (originally meant to bring the blog to a conclusion) may be left incomplete…until a future time in another format (hint, hint). EE Reports has been important for various reasons, one of them being that you cannot have an “anthropology against empire,” let alone “after empire,” if you never write about empire, do not engage in public debates, and immerse yourself in the ideas and discussions surrounding current events. Some might call this “blogging about the news.” I call it anthropology, which is supposed to be about us being “out there,” participating and immersing ourselves with others, answering to others. That is perhaps the greatest success of ZA, in that only a minority of those who follow it with sustained interest and commentary (here and elsewhere) are anthropologists themselves. I do not think that blogging about anthropology is anthropology; it is institutionalism, professionalism, and disciplinary rarification and objectification that is conducted in the name of anthropology. In less charitable moments, I would call such a stance orthodox and reactionary. It sometimes seems to be an impossible task to get anthropologists to realize that anthropology is supposed to be about something other than itself. Simply “communicating anthropology to the public” (which always ends up being public communication among a small circle of white American academics), is not only often boring, and an arrogant principle, but is simply not anthropology except as a hollow formalism. More importantly, it reinforces the backward trend of anthropology as a form of consumption. But hey, this is a celebratory post, and here I am doing the usual…when there is all of 2011 for that.

2010, the Year of Wikileaks. Now we get to our top posts on this blog for this year–yes, some might have been placed higher, but they were published recently and have not had chance to get more views. Our top ten posts, from this year’s 201 posts, based on on-site views and feed reader views (email subscribers and others not included), were:

 
1. “Wikileaks: Defend Julian Assange“ (10,168)
2. M. Jamil Hanifi’s “Is TIME’s Afghan ‘cover girl’ really a victim of mutilation by the Taleban?” (3,067)
3. “Continued: Debating the Pros and Cons of Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary” (2,822)
4. “Collateral Murder: U.S. Soldiers Killing Civilians in Cold Blood” (2,751)
5. “Torturing the Whistle Blowers: The Case of Vance and Ertel in Iraq, Substantiated by Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs” (2,720)
6. “Wikileaks and the Moral Dualism of the U.S. State Department” (2,013)
7. “Mapping the Terrain of War Corporatism: The Human Terrain System within the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (1,914)
8. “Professor Tom Flanagan: Glib about Murdering Julian Assange” (1,697)
9. “Multiplying Human Terrain Dreams of Victory and Fortune” (1,690)
10. “Human Terrain Teams in Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary: Raw Data” (1,316)

 

Other essays and reports that deserve mention, if anything for being unique contributions, are John Stanton’s several scoops in 2010, including: “Human Terrain System Under Investigation: HTS Link to JIEDDO & US Death Squads;” “The New Face of the Human Terrain System;” “Human Terrain System Criticized by U.S. Congress;” and of course the pair, “Human Terrain System Program Manager Dismissed: Georgia Tech Wants Out” and “Montgomery McFate: Gone from the Human Terrain System.”

Jamil Hanifi’s articles about Afghanistan get wide distribution, many reprinted in whole or in part on other sites, and quoted by journalists. In addition to this essay (at #2 above), other memorable essays included: “The ‘Dirty Secrets’ that Purify a Dirty War: A Colonial Tale of Dancing Boys, a Journalist, and the Human Terrain System in Afghanistan” (which we recently followed up); “The Killing Fields of Marja;” and, of course, “The Loaded Goat: Revisiting Pine Cone Anthropology in Afghanistan.”

In addition to the above, I would include the following as other large efforts on my part: “Bibliography and Archive: The Military, Intelligence Agencies, and the Academy (with special reference to anthropology) – Documents, News, Reports” which took months to prepare, and is even now continually updated; “Time Line and FAQ for the Human Terrain System and Responses by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association;” and, most important of all my HTS essays (in my view), “Revealing the Human Terrain System in Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary.” I also enjoyed preparing three satirical items: “U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM): Commemorating Columbus Day 2010,” “Burlesque Afghanistan: Pulp Fiction from an Embedded ‘Reporter’,” and still my favourite, “Counterinsurgency: It’s Bloody Horrible.”

It has been a privilege and an honour working together with Jamil, John, and Eliza. I wish them, you, and all of our new readers a very…exciting 2011.

Now, if you want to leave 2010 in the laughing critical spirit of ZA, you must see our friend Guanaguanare’s post featuring “Judge 1000 Years” (Mutabaruka) putting “post-colonial” independence sellouts on trial (you can read along there too). There’s also a wonderful Part II, on religion, Judge 100o Years still presiding.

“If the expansion of the Human Terrain System gains traction at TRADOC it could kill any efforts to develop a cultural expertise construct by the Civil Affairs community, specifically the Civil Affairs Proponent at USA JFK SWCS.  Everybody is looking to get as much money as they can for their organizations as the Defense budget begins to get squeezed. Naturally there could be a potential dog fight between TRADOC and any other Army organization making claims for HTS-like capability. Once something becomes institutionalized in the military it is difficult to change the new status quo.”

Major Brad Striegel’s (US Army Reserve) paper titled “Civil Affairs Functional Specialty Review” is an exceptional study of the US Army’s Civil Affairs past and present. Initially written in March 2008–and updated in December 2009–it’s a must-read for Civil Affairs students and military historians. U.S. Army leaders focused on cultural analysis/stability operations should—if they have not already–spend time with the paper. **

There is also an excellent reading list that includes the title Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors written in 1961 by Albert Weinberg and Harry Coles. A fantastic read, the 900 page book focuses on U.S. military Civil Affairs activities in World War II. Adding support to the cliché “What is Past is Prologue”, there is this gem in the introduction:

“Because of the ideological aspect of the struggle and because the United States acted as a member of a coalition of Allies, U.S. military leaders sometimes had to add to their traditional roles as soldiers those of the statesman and the politician. They were beset by the problems of resolving conflicting national interests and of reconciling political idealism and military exigency. On another level–in feeding hungry populations, in tackling intricate financial and economic problems, and in protecting the cultural heritage of a rich and ancient civilization-they had to exercise skills that are also normally considered civilian rather than military.”

In 2009, 47 years later, Edward Burke’s “Leaving the Civilians Behind: The Soldier Diplomat in Afghanistan and Iraq” would examine the same subject.

So it turns out, writes Striegel, that  U.S. Army Civil Affairs has been at the type of tasks performed by the Human Terrain System and Provincial Reconstruction Teams in various forms since 1847. According to Striegel (citing FM 41-10, 1/93),

“In the conduct of military government in Mexico in 1847, General Winfield Scott demonstrated that properly conducted CMO saves the combat commander problems with the civilian populace. He maintained that CMO saved lives, money, and supplies and often guaranteed military success when no other factor was effective. General Scott exercised the specialized functions of CA that we know today as the CA functional specialties. In using these functions under military control, he used reliable native personnel in existing civilian agencies of government in support of his military control over the populace.”

Canaries in a Coal Mine

“We had this [Human Terrain System] in World War II” writes Striegel.

Striegel believes that the Human Terrain System is a forgotten Civil Affairs competency.  He writes that new civil affairs like constructs such as U.S. Army TRADOC’s Human Terrain System and Provincial Reconstruction Teams are

“canaries in a coal mine that warn of the capability gaps of CA FX SP. Concepts like targeted recruiting and providing direct commissions to produce functional specialists, much like the specialist branches of today, have not been implemented since WW II, although a recent initiative a USA JFK SWCS now proposes such direct commissioning. No real overarching plan was ever implemented for CA FX SP training after World War II.”

Since that time, Striegel writes that the Civil Affairs community has been sleeping at the wheel while the rest of the Army was filling capability gaps that Civil Affairs should have nurtured, developed and updated.

“The same thing is happening with Agricultural Detachment Teams run by the National Guard. These are both Civil Affairs functional specialty capabilities and we are supposed to have them in our formations but we don’t. The community was blinded and distracted by its Special Operations moniker for decades until it was divested from Army SOF in 2006.”

Striegel writes that more people in Civil Affairs cared about jumping out of airplanes (a costly exercise) and tactical Civil Affairs than the Operational and Strategic Civil Affairs capabilities that Civil Affairs Functional Specialists (like those in HTS) now provide.

Human Terrain System Growing? Allies Joining?

Tony Bertuca of Inside the Army recently interviewed Colonel Sharon Hamilton, program manager of the HTS. In “New Director Makes Changes: Army Increasing Number Of Human Terrain Teams”  Hamilton claims that HTS is expanding and cites a CENTCOM request for more Human Terrain Teams and that the HTS program is cooperating with “allies” although she would not name them.

Five of those allies are Germany, Israel, the UK, Australia, and Canada.

The fact is that the world’s major military powers already have their own versions of HTS.  Many of them will be at the Defense Geospatial Intelligence Conference in the UK in January 2011. A feature of the conference is the Human Terrain Analysis Focus Day. An American company SCIA will be leading a seminar on GIS and Human Terrain Analysis according to the program bulletin. Dr. Swen Erik Johnson, senior social scientist at SCIA—who claims to have developed the first HTT for DOD in 2005—will likely be in attendance. The US Army Corps of Engineers and an element of the US Marine Corps will also be in attendance.

HTA Day features this:

“This day will focus on the need for every defence intelligence organisation to develop a human terrain analysis strategy. Most intelligence and geospatial organisations in defence forces around the world are or will soon be tasked with developing and implementing a human terrain strategy. This means you will have to learn about human terrain analysis, set goals and implement an effective strategy in your organisation. Join this focus day to learn from the pioneers, who have already implemented an HTA strategy and who have run programmes and projects in Afghanistan. Build your strategy based on ideas, mistakes and successes of the pioneers. Learn from the experts in HTA about the best solutions, technologies, strategies and implementation processes.”

No doubt, Colonel Hamilton has done some excellent work while at the helm of HTS. Bertuca’s article cites some of the changes Hamilton has forced: bringing work in-house, jettisoning incompetent personnel, creating oversight, reaching out to academia, etc.

Those actions are arguably the result of the US Army AR 15-6 investigation; the Center for Naval Analysis report; some good people in the media, DOD and the U.S. Congress; plus the 100 or so “sources” speaking through the 47 article HTS series written over the past two years. Those sources have been vindicated on just about every level—they deserved better than they got. And those killed and wounded while with HTS? It’s tragic and a shame.

At any rate, skeptics within DOD are not sold on HTS. They say it is too early to tell how HTS will evolve from this point on: the new system has only been in place for a heartbeat.  Many in academia believe that HTS has such a bad reputation that highly qualified social scientists will never apply for work in the program.

Others believe that the comments made in Bertuca’s piece are little more than a public relations gimmick engineered by Maxie McFarland to gain scarce funding from the US Congress. In this view, the Inside the Army piece is just the beginning of a strategic communication effort that will find its way into the MSM.

Whatever the case, it is unclear why U.S. Army Civil Affairs—rich with history and lessons learned—is being left to wither away. HTS-type functions always belonged in U.S. Army Civil Affairs as has been stated throughout this HTS series.

**Inside the Army – 12/13/2010

New director makes changes: Army Increasing Number Of Human Terrain Teams; Advising Allies

The Army is ramping up its controversial Human Terrain Systems program and will be sending more teams to Afghanistan this summer while simultaneously working with allied nations seeking to develop their own HTS capabilities, according to the program’s director.

The HTS program operates by embedding anthropologists and social scientists with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help provide commanders with a sense of cultural understanding when making decisions. It has been controversial among some in the anthropological community who question its value and ethical practices.

But the program continues to grow, despite various criticisms from academia and government. Col. Sharon Hamilton said in a Dec. 8 interview that U.S. Central Command has issued a requirement for 31 HTS teams in Afghanistan – an increase of nine teams — by this summer.

“I use that definitely as a metric for the success of our teams,” she said.

“The fact that Central Command increased the requirement for the number of teams they would like on the ground says a lot. CENTCOM has a limited amount of resources it has been allocated, so any time they request a human terrain team, it’s a zero sum, there’s something else they cannot request.”

There are now 10 HTS teams operating in Iraq and Hamilton said the Army has decided to keep them there as long as American forces remain in the country.

“The fact that we have 10 teams there when many of the enablers and support elements have been withdrawn from country — the human terrain capability is one they want to keep as long as U.S. forces remain,” she said.

Hamilton also said her program has been working with allied nations that want to develop their own HTS programs. She would not say which countries were interested, but noted that a Canadian general was said to be very impressed with the program.

“We directly support six allied nations and they are all very interested,” she said. “Several of the allies have approached the Department of the Army wanting to develop their own capability because they have our teams with them in Afghanistan. We’re doing knowledge exchanges [and] we’ve have several representatives from other countries visit our training, visit our teams on the ground in Afghanistan.”

The program, however, has been marked by controversy for several years, with troubling reports in academia and the media culminating in a House Armed Services Committee decision to direct a review of HTS earlier this year.

Shortly thereafter, HTS director Steve Fondacaro was released and replaced with Hamilton, who began serving as interim HTS director in June. Hamilton said the program is also no longer advised by Montgomery McFate, the once-celebrated social scientist who was instrumental in the development of HTS.

Hamilton said a new chief social scientist, Chris King, had been named to replace McFate and would begin in January once he returned from working with an HTS team in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the congressionally mandated report was conducted by the Center for Naval Analyses and presented to the House Armed Services Committee and the Defense Department in September. The report has not been cleared for public viewing, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

Hamilton said she could not discuss specifics in the report, but said its overall message was that the government needed to be more involved in the administration of the program and rely less on contractors.

“There were definitely some assessments we needed to respond to,” she said.

“Previously, we had very few government personnel in the structure of HTS and not a good situation as far as government oversight. I think it validated the fact that we needed to have processes and standards in place.

What it really reinforced was that we truly were an organization that needs to switch from an entrepreneurial approach to a more established institutional approach, which means you put standards and processes in place so that you do have recurring actions, so that you do have normalcy with how you handle administrative processes.”

Hamilton said several administrative changes had been made since she took the helm and brought on more government personnel. She has hired a senior civilian to oversee administration and logistics support of teams in theater, brought on an information technology director and hired a civilian training director and assistant training director.

“These are all new positions and all positions that were previously done by contract personnel,” she said.

Hamilton said she also has stepped up the program’s engagement with the academic community by attending conferences for relevant groups, namely the American Anthropological Association, an organization that has remained steadfastly critical of the program.

Robert Albro, a professor of international communication at American University and a member of the AAA commission that authored a 2009 report criticizing HTS, called the program a “non-starter.”

“If you’re going to say that you’re bringing anthropologists to bear, then you have to allow the people you’re calling anthropologists to work in ways that meet their own professional obligations,” he said in a Dec. 9 interview. “Human terrain teams operate in a context where it’s very hard to understand how ethical considerations aren’t made deeply problematic. It’s hard to do ethnography at the point of a spear. It’s done over long periods typically measured in years, not even months.”

A congressional source who had knowledge of the CNA report told ITA that it mainly criticized the program for managerial issues.

“In reality, the program office until very recently was pretty thin and that actually accounted for a lot of the problems,” the source said. “The HTS management office didn’t have a great interface with TRADOC and that resulted in not having a lot of the back office support you would have expected. The Army is going back now and professionalizing it. It brings it more into the TRADOC fold.”

The source also said the report identified many problems with training HTS personnel, mostly the high number of candidates who “washed out” late in the process because they were not properly evaluated by the Army.

“The problem with using that [Army evaluation system] with a brand new specialty is that it has a high false-positive rate,” the source said. “They were kicking out a lot of people who subjectively appeared qualified.”

– Tony Bertuca

The Leavenworth Diary:
Double Agent Anthropologist Inside the Human Terrain System

by John Allison

Don’t be afraid. I’m from the government, I’m here to help.
I am Juliet Alpha, Cultural Anthropologist, GG-15 Social Scientist for US Army HTT-AF-X, reporting for duty, Sir!
[“David! It’s me, Juliet Alpha. Hombre, I’m on the Inside!”]

View across the Parking Lot at “The Landing” Human Terrain System training facility, looking at the back of the commercial buildings in downtown Leavenworth. The entrance to the training facility is at the door below the small “Mall Entrance” sign, above the white car – one of the rental cars provided, with gasoline paid, to each HTS candidate.

The only entrance into The Landing. These two outer doors open into an entry foyer and, straight ahead, are the two inner doors shown in the following photo. Inside the foyer, stairs lead up left to the first floor including Tampico Mexican Restaurant and a hall lined with small businesses, such as an European pottery shop, the quilt shop, and other quaint places that you’d expect in an upscale tourist town that receives international guests. Fort Leavenworth brings international visitors to Leavenworth, Kansas, for the many cutting-edge military programs that are developed and incubated here in the intellectual center of the US military. When these guests go shopping at the little businesses upstairs, little do they know that the really big business is in the basement, underground, out of sight.

In the foyer, we are confronted by these dark-tinted glass doors into one of the most controversial cutting edge programs coming out of the Department of the Army. All ye who enter here: be ye civilian or soldier, You’re in the Army now! Forget your Job Description! Stay with the herd! Follow the Chain of Command! One then has the option of continuing forward through these intimidating, tinted glass inner doors with warning signs such as, “No Personal Computers Allowed in this Facility!!!!!!!”, or, wisely, turning left and going up the stairs to the charming first floor shops, or to the Tampico Mexican Restaurant and Bar, to contemplate what you just saw.

“I first came into contact with cultural anthropologist Juliet Alpha a couple of years ago when she invited me to join a session of a global organization of archaeologists presenting innovative papers at the World Archaeology Congress in Dublin, including themes related to military uses of anthropology and archaeology. I couldn’t make the conference, but we corresponded occasionally after that. I hadn’t heard from Juliet in a while, and then last November I suddenly got an email from her telling me that she was writing me from inside the Human Terrain System’s training program in Leavenworth, Kansas. My initial inclination was to wonder if this was a gag, or … whether someone was setting me up.” (David Price, http://www.counterpunch.org/price02152010.html)

Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 5:51 PM
To: Price, David
Subject: Fort Leavenworth and the insurgency

David,
Talk to me!
I am inside HTS. Have ordered a copy of the counter counter
[footnote Network of Concerned Anthropologists, 2009, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society. Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago.]
Seeking ideas to organize my focus.

Juliet Alpha

From: David Price
Subject: RE: Fort Leavenworth and the insurgency
To: “‘j. a’”
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2009, 6:23 PM

Hi Juliet,

What do you mean you’re inside HTS?

How is the view from the inside?

Here is an idea to organize your focus: domestic counterinsurgency is theoretically possible (e.g. the FBI’s COINTELPRO) because one doesn’t have to struggle for legitimacy among the local population; successful counterinsurgency in foreign settings is so historically rare (and where arguably present, it takes over 20 years ) that we can assume it will all but always fail.

Peace, David

Now, I sit here with all that I have learned in my Year of the Military. I am trying to reduce it to the essence of these experiences and the resulting understandings and provide you with the detailed quotes and descriptions that I harvested from this fieldwork:

And, at this time, late in 2010, trying to get this manuscript ready for the meetings in New Orleans, it looks like HTS might soon be defunct, the charade being no longer necessary with the resurgence of the right wing in US politics. Still, the insights gained by this experience stand me in a higher perspective on all this.

But, first: My name isn’t really “Juliet Alpha”. My name is John Allison. I chose that code name because it gives a military flair to things. That was the military alphabet name I used out on the battle ranges at Fort Irwin National Training Center; the military way of saying “J.A.” if one is, for example, a Special Forces undercover operative and one doesn’t want anyone to know one’s true identity. A leavening of humor in this serious cake.

Now for a few paragraphs in the way of conclusions drawn. Admittedly, these are sweeping assertions; but also they are my personal opinions and epiphanies that came from the experiences themselves or from the research they stimulated.

Most General Insight: US Military culture is in an international cultural stream that goes back at least to the days of the Roman Army’s occupation of Europe; probably much earlier. The rules inside the US military are different than the rules for the civil society of the USA; above and beyond. There are fire-walls, just as there were between the Vatican in Rome and the Roman Army occupying England two thousand years ago.

Indigenous peoples don’t establish themselves as “nations”. Empires create new nations. Their armies conquer peoples, draw national boundaries around that group and divide indigenous peoples to the colonial ruler’s advantage. The colonizing powers define and implement a “democratic government” and a capitalist economy and establish a National Army, funded, trained and overseen by the invaders.

Military culture is like a computer virus that is introduced into the basic program of the “nation”.

The armies don’t really belong to the people of the nations, they belong to the Empire. Nations are created and “recognized” by and for the convenience of the Empire. The military and “the church” are the stick and the carrot of the Empire. As in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir, both offer opportunity to the ambitious and compliant.

The entire issue of governing armies, even in today’s global organizations, remains a discourse among modern heirs of Roman Imperial Law and the caste of hereditary military officers. And here, I intentionally use “governing armies” in the syntactically ambiguous sense.

In the end, I felt that the military mind – and its product, the Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy and the Human Terrain System – has not a clue about the nature of cultural differences; their professional staff and contracted anthropologists notwithstanding.

There is neither grasp of nor interest in sustaining cultural integrity in societies outside the Euro-American zone of direct governance – or even within, for that matter. In private conversations, the great majority of them would solve the problems with forcing Afghans to be like USans by “carpet-bombing them back into the Stone Age”.

“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride their horses and sleep on the white bellies of their wives and daughters.” – The Mongol Warlord Genghis Khan, Conqueror of Afghanistan. From T. Royle (1989). A Dictionary of Military Quotations, New York: Simon and Schuster.

“War is a Blast!” – Another Old Warlord, a retired US Armored Officer, is returning for his one last tour in battle, this time reincarnated as a Human Terrain Team Leader for Afghanistan.

Background

This document is from something that is still growing in me. This article arises from field notes that I call my Leavenworth Diary, a few words jotted to remind me of a complex thought, quotes from classroom presentations or comments in the classroom written on scratch paper or in the notebook that I carried while training.

I was training to be deployed to Afghanistan as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) Social Scientist. I participated in the “November Cycle” training class from October 18, 2009 through February 10, 2010. As a cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, I always keep a journal, recording my day’s observations, thoughts and reflections, transcribing notes from scratch paper or the notebook, that I carry with me, into the larger notebook in my study or into the computer transcription that I regularly update. I do this no matter where I am, at home or “abroad”, talking to my family or talking to a family of Inupiaq people in whose village I am a guest. That’s what cultural anthropologists and poets do; fieldwork.

That is what I was doing in Kansas, accidental, incidental fieldwork.

Old Adage: “All’s fair in love and war.”

This all began when I had responded to an internet advertisement on Yahoo! Jobs, asking for anthropologists to work in Afghanistan, where I had done my doctoral research forty years earlier.

I posted my curriculum vitae, and sat back thinking I should hear from them in a few weeks.

Interlude in the Mojave Desert

I was sitting in an apartment in Barstow, California, in the Mojave Desert. Like many of the non-military HTS trainees, whom I was to meet in Leavenworth, I was out of work. I had been terminated from my position with the U.S. Army as Cultural Resource Manager and Post Archaeologist at Fort Irwin, the premiere training facility for final force-on-force exercises before going to war in Afghanistan or Iraq.

I had been terminated for consulting with the State Office of Historic Preservation (described as “going outside the chain of command” even though it was a major duty in my position description) and for proposing that the Post Command obey US law – that Fort Irwin brings its training programs into compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act, Section 106, a stated responsibility in my position description.

I brought a Whistle Blower Protection case against them, and they settled with me out of court; giving to me substantially what I had listed as acceptable ‘relief’ in my lawsuit, a tacit confession that my claim was just.

I came away from the Fort Irwin with the impression that the US Army does not really intend to obey the law, but only continuously delay compliance until the values of the archaeological sites have been entirely destroyed and compliance is no longer required. The Indian tribes gave up on the Army and US law some years ago; just receiving pro forma NEPA letters, sending no replies.

I should have seen in my experience at Fort Irwin as a dark omen for what was coming.

There I sat in my Barstow apartment, “I wonder what anthropologists are doing in Afghanistan with a war going on all around?”

Less than 10 minutes after posting my curriculum vitae, my phone rang. It was the sub-contractor, Command Languages Inc. (CLI Solutions, in Tampa Florida, which has nothing to do with languages. And, likewise, BAE (British Aeronautics Engineering), their prime contractor, from which CLI was artificially and opportunistically spun off, has little to do with that aeronautical engineering in relation to HTS. Both are seeking qualified social scientists and doing personnel management for trainees in HTS.)

CLI was calling me to say they were excited with my application; that I was their “dream candidate”. They requested that I report to Kansas City to begin my training October 18; two weeks!

Swept off my feet with flattery and the promise of extremely high pay (above $100K/year plus a paid residence, a paid rental car and gasoline, and per diem payments that would allow one either to live high off the hog or save even more money; I licked my finger, stuck it into the air to tell which way the winds blew, and I said. “I will be there.”

On September 30, 2009, I began loading my 1989 Dodge Dakota pickup with the furnishings I had acquired living in my apartment in Barstow, in the Mojave Desert.

I then drove to New Mexico and dropped off my load at my family’s home and then drove two days to Kansas City to report for the Human Terrain System training program. I arrived to a fully furnished bachelor apartment and a 2010 Chevy Cobalt with gasoline paid by the contractor as well; meaning by you, USA citizens.

Getting Up-Close with the Military: Becoming One with All That You Can Be

November 5, 2009, Thursday. I am now finishing my third week in the program. As I write, I sit in a classroom in the basement of those old brick buildings, downtown Leavenworth, code name “The Landing”. Today, the US newspaper headlines state that “Pakistan Has No More Control of Its Rogue Army”, and an American Muslim US Army Major has shot 11 people dead and wounded 31 others at Fort Hood, Texas, the largest military base in the world.

We sit in a long, white walled, windowless room at folding banquet tables, a Dell laptop chained to the table in front of each of 36 trainees – who are not chained to the tables; a tangle of cables snake across the floor.

“Islam is a cult!” exclaims the Colonel sitting next to me, loud enough for the entire class to hear. He, like about half the 36 people in the November Cycle, is in his fatigue uniform, a “green-suiter”. [Note: Later information leads me to think that this person was not really one of the trainees, but rather a TRADOC observer and, perhaps, an agent to sound-out any “Section 8” cases and dissidents.]

Getting only silence from me, sitting at his left at the far end of the room from its only door, he casts the bait again, “I am only here to save lives of US troops in Afghanistan.” He makes his contempt very clear for the “foreigners” that he will be serving among – in the land of those foreigners.

The colonel is very sensitive to signals of ideological differences, and he already has me pegged.

If he and I were to go to Afghanistan on the same Human Terrain Team, this Colonel would be my Team Leader, my supervisor, my “superior officer” in the Chain of Command. After hearing me say such things as, “I would like to see the US military performing a role more like the Peace Corps in Afghanistan”, three weeks into the program we already know where we stand in relation to each other.

Strangely enough, from these different starting points – his being that ‘the war is unwinnable and not worth winning’, and mine that ‘it is immoral and un-American’ – Col X and I come to the same conclusion: the US should get out of Afghanistan.

Over the next few months Col X and I had some good exchanges, sometimes calm and reasonable; other times not; being rather characterized by masculine posturing and loud-shouting angry outbursts during class discussion. We also had off-duty time together, including a ride at night on solid ice Omaha streets and boulevards returning to the hotel after dinner as guests of an Afghan family. The colonel had to show me his Jaguar’s road-handling as well as his own skillful daring.

A man among men is always challenged to meet the manliness of the other – mad or not, the pseudo-macho No Fear! I sit silently aware of my seatbelt, projecting unflustered calm as the Jag slides at a canter across two lanes of the ice-coated, busy boulevard that we have turned onto.

Indeed, both in Omaha and in Kansas City, HTS was a wild ride. I was among old professional soldiers, commanding officers, girding up for one last war,

“C’mon, Juliet, hang in there!” says the former armoured battalion commander. “Stick with us Juliet, you will love it! I guarantee it; you’ll have a blast! I was in Kosovo, living in a tent, out in the battlefield; it was a BLAST! War is a Blast!”

“Yes,” I replied “It is that blast, that one you never hear. That is the one that I worry about.”

Candidly, I’ve never been a zealous seeker of blasts, except for like jumping into a cold lake from a rock, because it will soon feel warm and you can enjoy swimming; but a blast that leaves my leg hanging in shreds of bone and white ligaments with clinging meat, I’ll pass on that blast.

These sharings of our feelings and of our convictions – polarized as we were – stand among the more important rewards of participating in the HTS training program. Being inside HTS as a member, a legitimate participant-observer gave me a relatively unguarded view into the inner world of the career military society. I had to question my assumptions and examine the value of the military to civilian life, to “national security”; and I had to question their assumptions, and to question the source of their authority.

I had served an enlisted man in Korea. The officers lived in a different world from me, only coming to the enlisted men’s formations to make formal presentations or comments. They lived, ate, drank and played in different places than did we enlisted men – the working class of the army. Fraternization was sanctioned; don’t get too familiar!

In Leavenworth, I shared my entire weeks with the officers, 8am to 5pm. After the class-days, we each drove – each in his or her separate rental car furnished by tax dollars – thirty minutes to our hotel apartments, where we formed something like a Glass Bead Game or a Magic Mountain community – I also flashed on Aztec sacrifice victims. Each HTS trainee lived anonymously and separately among the other guests at the apartment hotels. But we HTS cadets shared the knowledge of who we were; we recognized each other by something in our stage presence.

Chase Suite Hotel, in the woods along the periferico at the growing fringe of Kansas City, Missouri, where I lived in the lower apartment, on the left, behind the stairs, in building 12. About 50 other HTS candidates also lived there, scattered through the complex. There was another such residence hotel for HTT candidates on the Kansas side of the Missouri River, where half my classmates lived also alongside candidates in other current cycles and an occasional HTT returnee who was transitioning to either another tour of duty or to a role in the HTS training faculty. The management sponsored nightly community dinners and occasional holiday celebrations in the community hall, where they kept a small bar and also a community television and dining room.

I found myself a participant in the inner world of the military officers’ society – with its own protocols and etiquette, its formal and informal social structure, the caste division of officers and enlisted men, the chain of command, the subtle verbal and non-verbal cues and the language of acronyms.

Equally as important were the daily explorations into the inner world – individual minds – of the career military people with whom I spent my days, and sometimes my evenings. At break times or during change of instructors, we conversed about the universe from the perspective of our different realities.

This crossing of wires also allowed my career military classmates a privileged view of my world, my mind. It gave them privileged audience at my performances in those classrooms or in the hallways between classes where I freely gave them my own alternative analyses of the contractors’ presentations and their prevailing view of world history and current events and I even attempted to introduce Edward Sapir’s notion of “culture”, differentiating for them the genuine from the spurious.

In the beginning, I had hopes that I could reframe the HTS program.

However, the military had a conscious agenda for reframing the civilians’ consciousness and perception. Part of the cognitive restructuring was overt, as in the classes that made it clear that the HTT member will be ‘embedded’ in the military structure, just as are news reporters; “harnessed” would be an apter description. Repeatedly, the Stockholm Syndrome was brought up to make clear the “shaping” function of the classes; shaping the consciousness and opinions of those who could be so influenced; building a consensus among the class against those who could not be so influenced, to (r)eject them from the group in the secret, written peer evaluation process that recurred monthly.

I began to see that I was enclosed by those I opposed; and my options were limited. This is addressed in Dell Hymes’ anthology, Reinventing Anthropology (1972, Random House, New York, Vantage Books edition, 1974).

In this view…, one should accept present American life as the best of possible worlds, and there could be no responsible disagreement over ends. Today many view alternative conceptions of what society can be as essential. The threat of totalitarian control in the name of a conception of the future is to be answered by open participation in formulation and criticism of what goals constitute genuine progress, what conditions for the realization of goals are acceptable costs. … Every government, every political force, has some avowed philosophy of the history it seeks to realize. Are those intelligent enough to analyze philosophically to withdraw from civic life or become mindless or cynical servants of powers that be? (p. 16)

If I accepted their assumptions about “reality”, I would have had to agree with their conclusions about patriotic responsibilities; the call to action, The Mission, The Chain of Command, the value of lives of Afghan people compared to USan people, et cetera.

I do not accept the military’s internally shared assumptions about the nature of reality and history, and I do not agree with their conclusions about patriotic responsibilities over-riding human responsibilities – as was the case in Nazi Germany, nor do I agree with their definition of “patriotic”. I am patriotic. They were betraying “American Values”.

I suppose it could be said that I have encountered a limit to my cultural relativism. The military culture was being judged by a civilian anthropologist – a foreigner – as analogous to a cancer, an aggressive computer virus or a saprophytic parasite.

In the end, I think that we – they and I – clearly saw a great gap, a great divide in our distinct and conflicting constructions of fundamentally different realities. Looking at the same scene, they saw one thing and I another. I increasingly realized that I was looking at a truly distinct, ancient cultural system that is separate, independent, but inserted deep into the US society and participating aggressively in promoting values, defining national identity, and interpreting history and current events, with deep allies in government and industry.

In the end, I felt that the military mind – and its product, the COIN strategy and the Human Terrain System – has not a clue about the nature of cultural differences; their professional staff and contracted anthropologists notwithstanding. There is neither grasp of nor interest in sustaining cultural integrity in societies outside the Euro-American societies proper – or even within, for that matter.

In private conversations, the great majority of them see the goal – forcing Afghanistan into the pattern that the US has been forced into – “democratic” government and free-enterprise capitalism, open to do business with the world’s corporations – as a hopeless case. “Carpet-bomb them back into the Stone Age” was their candid solution.

Col X, like someone with Tourette syndrome, said aloud the things that they were all thinking. But, as I said, he might have been simply acting a role as a TRADOC provocateur.

We are worlds apart, the humanist anthropologist and the career soldier.

Each of us in his own way, Col X and I and a few of the other officers communicated – from one world to the culturally Other world – her or his acknowledgment of the worldview differences, recognition of the separate realities from which each viewed the Other, while each was feeling and showing respect for, acknowledging the validity of that difference, live and let live … for now; but watchful, andexpecting that anything could happen.

Be prepared! That’s the Boy Scout © Marching Song.

And, that watchfulness sharpened, remained in my own heart and mind and remained reflected in their eyes, in their words, and in non-verbal signs and vibes, that underlying tension, that distrust, was there even in the more relaxed moments that this anthropologist shared with these Old Warlords as we camped together on the banks of the Missouri River.

Our relationship was written.

Entering the Modern Global Enterprise of Warfare through Human Terrain

The Human Terrain System (HTS) in 2009 was central to the US Army’s publicly-fostered image of today’s US WarFighters in action. HTS, including all its Human Terrain Teams (HTT) and the many contracted private corporations that provide materials, training and other services to HTS are part of the new way that warfare is packaged for sale to the tax-payers and investors world-wide. It is a trillion-dollar business.

The new package is sold as Counterinsurgency Strategy (COIN) at media outlets near you, disguised as “news”.

COIN is a marketing strategy for products of the warfare industry – including trained personnel, known as “human capital” or “human resources” – and for war in general as a solution to international cultural diversity; a stumbling block for capitalist “democracy”.

You will know this mating of government, military and the warfare industries as the Military Industrial Complex. It ripples its effects across the entire USA and the entire global economy. You probably recognize some of its brand names, like Halliburton, Blackwater, McDonald-Douglas, etc. Others of equal or greater connections with the Department of Defense (DoD) – like BAE – I had never heard of before HTS training, when I still thought I was pretty hip and that I knew a lot about the nature of government and military and had participated in protests, sit-ins and marches and even rowed a boat out in front of a nuclear submarine to protest its entry into Northwest waterways. Now I was realizing how naive I had been, and still am.

[Footnote: There is a deep dependence and interconnectedness of much of the civilian economy on Defense Department funds, and on funds that pass through other departments when performing functions related to Defense, such as intelligence-gathering. Barber shops, electricians, computer analysts, restaurants, supermarkets and many other businesses and workers in military-based industrial zones would lose their main sources of income; as would those in little towns that have grown dependent upon the hundreds of inter-continental ballistic missile sites and the myriad of other types of special military installations, in North America, Europe, and far beyond. One cannot simply cut the budget for these facilities. It is not only numbers of dollars; it is lives of people who have been made dependent upon it in lieu of an alternative livelihood; just like unemployed Social Scientists finding jobs in HTS. There has to be a new economic path for those in each DoD-dependent community to develop a new livelihood infrastructure.]

The Warfighter strategy remains the same as always, to defeat The Enemy. However, in the new human terrain framework of COIN, the military machine has new fighting technology. I am not talking about weapons such as drone killer planes and all the long-range detection and execution abilities. No, this new fighting technology is coming out of Psychological Operations (“psy-ops) and TRADOC’s Intelligence Support Operations (which comes out in mil-talk as TRISA).

Those new hi-tech weapons complicate the dangers of “collateral damage”, including killing civilians, due to “technical errors”, bad information, malicious misinformation or miscalculations. As a result, old farmers, young mothers, wedding celebrants, children at school and many other civilians are among the innocent dead. Major infrastructure, such as residences, water supplies, electrical supplies, roads, bridges and so on are destroyed.

If the war were accurately portrayed in “the media” then this violence against Afghan people would be the biggest part of what is portrayed.

If the US and the rest of the Free World see only the violence that is warfare, then people will form negative feelings toward the USA and toward funding the US military.

If the US DoD budget suffers, so does RAND Corporation, McDonald-Douglas, Halliburton and many other contractors and their employees and their profit margins and the values of their stocks, making investors uncomfortable and threatening “national security”..

So, the military wants to divert attention from the violent (“kinetic”) warfare that is most of what military units are trained for and equipped for. They want to put the spotlight on the not-violent (COIN) warfare that is the picture of the young USan woman dressed in full battle gear, sitting on the ground inside a mud courtyard wall with a group of turbaned Pashto elders, sipping tea, smiling, writing their concerns in a notebook.

Helping the Media to Tell the (Military’s version of) Truth

The Army has recognized that the image of the war as violence must get a face lift. So, the military now “embeds” media professionals; and more recently, social science professionals, all to provide a different perception of the war to those who pay the bills. Instructor said, “If you control the media, and you say it is true, then it is true.”

The mere presence of the HTT in the Area of Operations; the image of the woman in battle gear sitting with the Elders, sipping tea, that is what we want to show as the face of the USA at war.

This is all the news that’s fit to print (New York Times’ motto) or to broadcast by the embedded reporters. HTT is the new image of warfare. Whatever else the US military might be doing in the Area of Operations, this is what the US and global media will report in their daily news because this is where the brigade command will send its embedded reporters.

This will provide rebuttal to the thousands of photos of edgy US “Warfighters” in advanced battle gear kicking down doors in homes and businesses.

Obeying General McChrystal, kinetic warfare, violent warfare, will be pushed to backstage; “winning the hearts and the minds” of the people will be front stage.

In the media “news” USans and their allies will be shown the HTT having tea with the Elders and will be told, “This is what is really going on in Afghanistan.” Then, it is true.

We’re from the Government, We’re here to Help.

Here, in the projected media image, the young professional woman and the native translator are meeting with the village leaders. She is the team’s social scientist, and – like the Afghan translator – is in full battle fatigues, helmet, body armor, boots and her rifle at her side, accompanied by the rest of the military platoon. The Yanks hold their rifles at the ready, edgily jerking to face one direction, then another, darting glances this way and that, checking rooftops, guarding the perimeter and the nearby armored Humvees where the 50mm gunner sits sweating in the turret. None of this will be part of the press report.

The press report will show the tribal elders are sitting down with the soldiers in the shade of an old tree, inside a mud-walled courtyard. And the narrative for the photos tells that they are planning a joint project, drinking three cups of tea, finding common ground, moving the People out of the control of The Bad Guys, educating the women and both girl and boy children, helping the farmer get water to his fields; thinking up some infrastructure improvement project that would include temporary jobs for the men..

That is the way Human Terrain Teams are portrayed by the US Military to the US public and to the Federal Government. P.R.

What Human Terrain Teams actually do contrasts sharply with the Public Affairs image of HTS. This contradiction is the underlying reason for the constant cultivating of the Stockholm Syndrome pressure, both among the class members and by the contracted instructors. They kept massaging our viewpoints, shaping of our reality, making it clear what our actual roles would be once embedded.

Here are two groups of excerpts from my class journal to illustrate this mind-shaping. The persons quoted are subcontractors working for Develop MentalLabs, Inc. (Yes, that is really their corporate name.) who are all retired officers of the rank of Colonel or above, and all are now making more money by far that their military pay. The military takes care of its own brothers in arms.

Monday, 10/26 (beginning second week of training)

Afternoon – Team Composition

Team leaders tend to be or to have been of the rank of Colonel, Lt. Colonel or Major. Some are retired Generals. Their job is to mould the team into the fit the military unit needs. Human Terrain Analyst, Research Manager, Social Scientist.

HTT Purpose – “to leverage non-lethal effects.”

1/12/2009

Col X stated, in one of his anti–cult outbursts, loudly asserts that “All great historic changes have been brought about by the military through warfare.” I decided not to ask him about the changes brought by Jesus Christ or by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

11/20/2009 Dr. Tom Marks – Global COIN and Analytical Methods for COIN Analysts.

Marks has been working in Colombia as advisor/contractor. There, he finds, Lack of Strategic Clarity, but also “mission creep”. He defines a civil war within Islam, between “extremists” and the accepted “good” part of Islam. (Implying that ‘we’ might exploit it.)

Also he defines “extremists” within our own USA society’s discussion – exemplified by Noam Chomsky, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda … (Zionists are, by definition, excluded), comparing them to non-Islamic terrorists in such places as Colombia, Nepal, Phillippines, Somalia …

This he calls “Mission Creep” in the War on Terror; and he sees it as opportunity to remake the world in the way “we” (the USans) want it. You just keep following and killing the Bad Guys until you’ve got them all, everywhere. Then the world will be safe for business enterprise, survival of the fittest, and we will all have jobs and security.

Simple. Not easy, Lots of tax dollars needed. Don’t expect results for a long time. It’s gonna be a long war.

In other words, the War on Terror has become the umbrella for getting the Bad Guys anywhere on the earth; guys that They – the NATO global military society, heirs of the Roman Empire and its child, the Crusades – all agree on, like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Fidel Castro, Mahmud Ahmadinajad, Daniel Ortega, Kim Jong Il, …. Muslims, socialists, communists, … they are all The Enemy; the Bad Guys.

The Bad Guys disagree with the assumptions of global capitalism and advocate a different kind of social order. Both socialism and Islam have the interest of the people and the social order as a main purpose; greedy profiteering is frowned upon; and this doesn’t set well with the Tea Party and those who are the real decision-makers in the USA.

So, it seems that COIN is really about the obliteration of all alternatives to global capitalism.

The War on Terror morphed from “terrorism” (people using violent means to achieve a political goal) to “Global Insurgency” (a global uprising of peoples). So, Global COIN arose to respond to Global Insurgency.

“Violent Extremism” then extends to Mission Colombia where “we have been doing this – intimately involved in the war against FARC for at least 40 years.” (Marks)

The US Ambassador to Colombia was recently moved to Afghanistan to apply the methods he had developed in Colombia. There, he:

• Called town hall meetings open to all in small regional areas.
• Developed “Councils of Popular Governance”, which then connects to
• “Councils of Security.”

Fundamentals of State Legitimacy

Those who attended the Councils of Governance and of Security gave legitimacy to the Regime in Control, even if only a minority of the People participated.

“Insurgency is armed politics.”

“Terrorism is armed politics that uses violence against innocent populace to shock and awe.” [Hmmm, wasn’t that what US bragged about doing in Iraq? Aren’t they also doing that in Pakistan and Afghanistan?.]

Note: Marks is on the faculty at one of a network of military universities that also merge into programs at public and private universities such as University. of Michigan, Harvard, the Naval Academy, Georgetown, University of Nebraska… etc

He takes time to redefine terms for the COIN rhetoric:

“In the ‘60s, “revolution” was used as a synonym of “insurgency”.

“Insurgents are always trying to challenge what is.” (i.e., what has been established and sanctioned by NATO and the USA, such as the current governments of Iraq or Afghanistan. Those who rise up against what the USA recognizes as the valid government are “insurgents”. They are insurgents even if the government that the people are rising up against was established by occupiers, or as with the Israelis in Palestinian Territory, where the Israeli armed forces are the effective controlling government within a state – Palestine – even though Palestine has its own elected government. For the purpose of COIN strategy, if the Palestinian people rise up against occupying Israeli troops in Palestinian Territory, the Palestinians will be defined as the “insurgents.”)

Using the “System Restore” Command in Counterinsurgency Strategy

COIN strategy is committed to maintaining the status quo when we like it. But if, as in Bolivia and Venezuela, we don’t like the status quo, we might define it by what the state was like before the socialist revolution.

The current state government becomes, or becomes defined as a (hopefully temporary) successful insurgency. Evo Morales’ government and Hugo Chavez’s government. as well as Nicauragua, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Argentina, and many others in Latin America and many others globally fit into this as portrayed in the US media and government statements, especially as revealed in WikiLeaks.

The obvious job of the US military is to remove that established government of the successful insurgents and restore the rule of the US’s preferred, prior government – as it facilitated in Honduras; though the “insurgents” were elected there – through some sort of counterinsurgency movement paid for and trained by the Good Guys. In other words, we would train an insurgent movement, but call them “counter-insurgents” because they are trying to restore the system to some past condition that the US approved of.

[Breaktime, as I logged into my computer, “an invalid argument was encountered”. Hmm, how serendipitous!]

GWOT = Global War on Terror in COIN-Talk’s acronyms.

“Insurgency is a social movement that uses violence as a tactic within a method and logic of action.”

“Terrorism is armed political communication.” (Shock and Awe.)

“A pure terrorist group attacks The People.”

Successful mobilization of a popular uprising stems from economic, social and political deficiencies in the current government/economy. Those who seek change approach the population as both the Means and the Battlefield.

Here’s a cute vignette recorded in class: In order to “debunk” any ideas that revolutionaries are heroes, Dr. Marks uses Tarzan mobilizing the animals of the jungle as equivalent to Che Guevara’s mobilization of the Cuban people, which Marks portrays as organization from the “Top down”.

Marks pounds his chest and yodels to represent the Cuban uprising as crude. He claims, “It didn’t even work in Cuba. Che cooked the records” (Marks never documents his assertion that “it didn’t work”, and that Che “cooked the books”. I see this type of Psy-Ops as HTS giving the HTS trainees the sheep-dip treatment to disabuse us of any romantic ideas about revolutionary heroes.

He classifies Mao’s strategy as “bottom up”.

Marks: “If I say it, and I control media communications, then it is true.”

[Now, I ask you, is that “bottom up”?]

Like the Canadian and other main presenters (soldier or civilian, all have had a military career previously), Dr. Marks displays erudition – including personal knowledge and experience, in a rhetoric that creates a comparison in which “our way” is inherently the end goal of proposed transformation of these “Third World” nations ranging from Nepal and Afghanistan to Latin America, the Caribbean and equatorial Africa and the entire area of Philippines, Indonesia. SE Asoa, etc.

This shows the advertised purpose of HTS as facilitating an understanding of the world of the Afghans is absurd; something doesn’t match up.

He eagerly “debunks” any positive self-image of those places, all which have insurgent potential from the US military ideological perspective.

He portrays only all the other First World nations – England, France, Spain, Germany … – as having had colonial ambition in these places, while the US was only there to provide aid/USAID. He ignores the facts that anthropologist Gerald Berreman made public in the 1960’s regarding anthropologists working for the CIA along the Tibetan border, and what Louis Dupree was doing at the time I was in Afghanistan; and what is, no doubt, going on there and everywhere today.

That is to say, counter-intelligence spying by social scientists and other professionals runs through most government and private funding agencies.

CIA personnel or operatives can be found working in most of the other non-military programs in Afghanistan, or in any nation. They hold staff positions in the USAID, or in US funded programs at Kabul University, at the US embassy, in the US Geological Survey which has an outpost in Kabul (Kabul, USA?), the US Department of Agriculture and many other places, including in-country academic research programs/grants.

Get this! Dr. Marks asserts that all idealistic goals, such as ethnic/linguistic self-determination, universal education, … etc, these are all simply to rouse and recruit the poor exploited masses to get them involved in a violent insurgency; and once the insurgent cadre has gained power, those goals will become only idle words.

That is what Dr. Marks asserts. Then, of course, there is reality! The record of social change in places like Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia stand in contradiction to this assertion. The ideals in these socialist societies serve as guidelines for the revolution that was born out of the uprising; the “war of liberation”.

The “revolution” is the actual day-to-day work of raising the standards of education and assuring it to all people; providing housing and sanitation facilities for all people; providing food to all, medical care for all; … these take over the driving force of the government from the grass root people up to the leaders, replacing the profit motive. In several of those nations who not only hold but practice their idealistic goals, the work of carrying them out is its own advertisement that rouses and recruits the masses, the people, now better educated, with more industrial skills; rouses them to respond with energy for carrying out the changes that their parents’ uprising made possible.

Are the US and NATO getting such a result with the peoples of Afghanistan?

[Note: As I read back on my thoughts then, I see it this way: This is as though I am writing out my inner dialog arising from each day’s events. The environment in the classroom allows very little opportunity to take detailed notes or to use a camera, of course. So, writing out my thoughts served as a way to contextualize the very controlled social and cultural environment that I observed as I was participating in and being indoctrinated into it.]

Marks: Metrics have been developed to measure advancement of Tangible (landscape) and Intangible (minds) campaigns. [That way, we put the metrics into our PowerPoint and use it in our pitch for increased program budget.]

[Note: This is what you will see, later, is Marilyn Mitchell’s rationale for her entire “ethnographic methods” approach – “Metrics”.]

Physiognomy reveals something about mind; especially asymmetries of the face and the eyes. This sketch of the instructor in “ethnographic methods”, which was taught by a Hollywood marketing research contractor, was done during class. I was bored and disgusted. The several weeks of class lectures were totally unrelated to ethnographic method.

Classes of Warfare:

1. Terror; 2. Guerrilla; 3. Main Force; 4. War of Position.

Assess “the glue” that holds the movement together or holds the state together.

The Peace Movement designates the government as the Bad Guys.

Insurgents/Terrorists play by “Big Boy Rules”. [And, we know who the Big Boy is.]

Dr. Marks takes the same position as Greenberg on the West Bank – Israel is the legitimate government, Palestinians are insurgents; in Palestinian Territory!

He points out that the Maoists in Nepal controlled the narrative. Marks controls the narrative. He leaves out the factor of the Military-Industrial Complex: the US government, the warfare industries, and the US military..

After having said that other nations, but not the USA, had colonial interest in the outcome in Nepal, Marks then tells us that the US had 500 troops involved – but Lost! Marks was one of the US officers on that mission.

In the end, as Dwight Eisenhower warned us, the one who wins from war is …the Military-Industrial Complex that is the warfare industries linking together both private and government sectors.

2 February 2010

Gordon Obermiller, Marine Colonel, Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Commander returned from his second AF tour, emphasizes differences from State Department personnel and USAID personnel. He portrays both USAID and State Department as irresponsible and not up to military standards. Clearly, Obermiller believes that the elected US government should obey the US military command, not the inverse. The Commander in Chief should implement the military’s desires.

This is actually because both of these compete with the Army for DoD funds for similar functions.

Obermiller, responding to an Afghan official’s comment that the US does not seem to have the Afghan people’s best interest in mind:

“It’s true that we don’t have their (the Afghan people’s) best interests in mind. What we want is a compromise between what they need and what we want.”

[Note he does not say, “… between what they want and what we want”, which would require good faith consultation to learn what they want. Rather, the US military will decide what they need and then seek a compromise on that to accommodate what the US Army wants.]

Lee Hockman, retired Colonel, Public Affairs.

“Don’t defend the HTS program; explain your motivation for being voluntarily in it.”

They want to help us to express ourselves as HTS members. They will teach us how to do that, the Army Way!.

Great Quotes by Hockman:

“In an interview, always work your response to all questions back to one key message; e.g., “We save lives.””

“Don’t memorize what you are supposed to say. Focus on your personal experience … what you know … with the left and right boundaries [within the approved script]. You will sound more authentic.

You don’t want to sound scripted.’

“The enemy doesn’t obsess over whether what they say is true or correct. We shouldn’t either.”

“The slogan, “winning the hearts and minds of the people” is just a slogan. That objective is not realistic.”

Hockman differentiates Public Affairs (PA) from Psy Ops (Psychological Operations). PA “informs” while Psy Ops “tries to influence.” But “PA helps to establish conditions [in the mind of the US public] that will lead to confidence in the Army.”

[So, Public Affairs is Psy-Ops carried out against the US population – domestic counterinsurgency. This was mentioned in David Price’s initial response (above) and comes up later in the Weston Resolve counterinsurgency war-game in Missouri and Kansas.]

“We like the embedding of (news) reporters because it forms their (the news reporters’) perspective.”

[Note: This is also why they like the embedding of the “social scientists”?]

“Truth is relative. The job is to sell your credibility.”

“Plausible deniability” is the first escape from blame for collateral damage.

[Go back and dig your bullets out of the corpses, then tell them you didn’t do it, it was Taliban.]

“Public Affairs consists of offensive or defensive Information Ops”.

Summing Up the Intent of the HTS Training

These excerpts transmit the intent of the HTS training: to download to the military worldview, values and perception into the cadet social scientist’s CPU.

With such a restructuring of the military’s image at stage front, the theme of war seems to be different. Post-Modern war stories are not stories about brutal force used to overpower or to kill resisters among the peoples whom we want to dominate.

COIN says, “No, war today is about using highly educated social scientists to help people to free themselves from tyranny, to learn how to function as a democracy, to establish a government that will interface with the US and the rest of the “civilized”, “democratic” or “free” (read “free-enterprise capitalist”) world in an acceptable manner both politically and economically, installing flush toilets and satellite TV, inviting MacDonald’s and Starbucks to open there and having tea together.”

That is the way the new COIN warfare is portrayed, and HTS is at the heart of the fostered illusion. And the fostered illusion is at the heart of HTS’s raison d’être.

Within the Counterinsurgency (COIN) framework of how to present a war to the USA and to the global public, the HTS is the face of a kinder and gentler war, a culturally sensitive war. This New Warfare is presented through the media, whether from “embedded” reporters, from TRADOC’s Public Information Officers’ official news releases; or by any of the other sophisticated methods and effective channels of lobbying and pressuring and “educating” that the US Department of Defense and its Coterie of Contractors (DODCOC) (I’m joking!) can do.

An impressive array of techniques have developed over the past century to influence the US congress, the public and the world media.

COIN is TRADOC’s masterpiece.

COIN Strategy: Dissimulating Rhetoric and Ancillary Side-Shows

To be explicit: the raison d’être of HTS is to draw media focus away from the brutal truth that the nature of the battlefield has only changed technologically, not experientially, since the time of Genghis Khan, the Roman conquest of Europe, or of Europe’s invasion of the American indigenous societies. The larger and truer story of a battle or a war is still a story of one people’s army invading another people’s homes and using lethal force in trying to dominate the peoples and to control their interrelationships, and their access to their land and their resources. “To the victor goes the spoils.”

And here’s where the “non-lethal leverage” comes in. It is trying to convince the people that what they are seeing is not what is happening.

They call this “moving the Center of Gravity” of the people who aren’t committed to the Bad Guys toward the USan side. That is what HTS is sold to the USA people as its intent and capability. But, as one of our former Colonels pointed out, “That is not realistic”.

Counterinsurgency is about how to present the war to the US taxpayer and to the world community. COIN is the US military’s explanation and sales pitch trying to put the best possible face on what they are doing in and doing to Afghanistan and doing to Iraq, with other theaters-in-preparation in Africa, Latin America, Indonesia, Malaysia and maybe even inside the USA – “mission creep”.

The final practical exercise was known as Weston Resolve. The assignment was to gather strategic intelligence on people and groups north of Kansas City – US citizens, including American Indians who had been resettled there along the Missouri River, when they were the defeated “insurgents”. Now, I finally, clearly saw COIN’s potential.

Human Terrain Teams are the poster-children of this global military campaign, the Flower Child for Global Warfare, the portavoz for the Warfare Industry Sector, both public and private.

The Human Terrain System is the Lipstick on the Hippopotamus

This HTS program and the COIN strategy of which it is but one key part, is an advertisement program for itself, to the world, by the world’s richest nation with the most powerful military in history, at a time when history is at a tipping point.

At a time when more people in the USA are following the war as they do any other TV drama or special series, tuned in to the media internationally, HTS is the Super Bowl or World Cup advertisement for this new attempt by the US and Europe to gain control of the field, or to maintain control of its “vital interests” or its “national security interests” globally, and to establish themselves as The Good Guys.

How the Toe Bone is COINnected to the Head Bone

That COIN management framework articulates the HTS within a larger military structure and chain of command. It originates within the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).

TRADOC puts the spin on the Army’s projected media reality, both for the purpose of training/indoctrinating soldiers and for “educating” or “informing” the US public and the world through the civilian news media. Within TRADOC, HTS is located under the Intelligence Support Activity division (TRISA). The Public Relations function is planned and executed by Director, formerly retired Colonel Fondacaro, Lead Social Scientist, formerly anthropologist McFate, and their staff and extensive contracted assistance.

The mix of executive civilian and military lead staff of the HTS Directorate is embedded as one Directorate among many Directorates within the Training and Doctrine Command; that is, deep within the doctrine and intelligence segment of the US Army bureaucracy.

The civilian component of the HTS Directorate, includes the Lead Social Scientist and her small staff, under the supervision of Retired Colonel Steve Fondacaro, Director, who also supervises all the other retired officers who serve as Seminar Leaders [combining mentor, counselor and host functions] for each training cycle.

The HTS Directorate is a severely subordinated auxiliary of TRADOC. They sit within the deep structure of the military’s chain of command; with little possibility of fresh air seeping down into those deep catacomb haunts housing the hidden experimental projects that the fat military budget has hatched and is incubating in eastern Kansas, at taxpayer’s expense, out of the taxpayer’s view. These are truths that most USans don’t really want to know.

The HTS Staff produces and manages Human Terrain Teams, developing contracts with private defense contractors for the training of its cadets. The prime contractor for the recruitment and training of HTT candidates is BAE Systems. The HTS executive staff also conceives and develops news releases, participates in public events and professional meetings and develops advertising and promotional materials, with approval of those above them in the Chain of Command.

Training staffs are contracted from semi-retired military officers who have formed private corporations, such as Develop Mental Labs, and Red Team. Because the people in these corporations are all Brothers in Arms, there is a lot of interchange and cooperation between them, and also including coaching from HTS both in developing proposals and in designing classes. The training is mostly aimed at the civilians in the training classes; especially the social scientists, to integrate them into the military culture, using the Stockholm Syndrome process to shape our values and perceptions.

Each Human Terrain Team is nominally a civilian unit, employed as Federal civilian employees attached as a battlefield instrument of the US military. It consists of these positions:

• a Social Scientist (preferably an anthropologist with prior field experience in the country, qualities rarely achieved),
• a Human Terrain Analyst (can be anything from a geographer to political scientist, etc., with skills to integrate information from all sources and make analyses related to the Commander’s needs);
• a Research Manager (which function was never explained, but computer spread-sheets, data bases and such are a fundamental skill); and
• the Team Leader (a military officer of rank of Colonel or above).

All these functions have the same occupational status, “Intelligence Specialist”. The Team Leader and the Social Scientist will have a civilian grade of GG-15, while the other two will have the grade of GG-13. These are at the pay levels of regional or national program officers in most Federal Civil Service positions.

HTT is usually embedded within the advisory staff of a Brigade Commander, where the Human Terrain Team Leader – always a former military officer – is subordinated to another officer who is a member of the Brigade Commander’s Staff with a specific function. For example, the Human Terrain Team Leader might be attached as an auxiliary function to the “Intelligence”, or the “Civil Affairs” officers of the Brigade Commander’s Staff (both having intelligence-gathering functions).

If I am a Social Scientist on the HTT of a Brigade of about 4,000 men, and I want to communicate with the Brigade Commander, I must first discuss this with my Team Leader. Perhaps he will then talk to the member of the Brigade Commander’s Staff who is his superior officer and liaison to the Command Staff. If the staff officer decides that the Commander needs to hear this and if the Commander has an interest, he will schedule it during the Daily Briefing for a 5-minute PowerPoint presentation by the particular Staff Member who supervises the HTT. Then, the Team Leader will decide whether to include the Social Scientist in the meeting with the Brigade Commander and his Staff, or to do it himself, and what role the Social Scientist will play in the PowerPoint presentation, if any..

The new COIN focus of the military image is the context within which HTS was developed as the public face of the US Army “winning the hearts and minds” of the local civilian population; winning the innocent majority away from supporting the “insurgents’ – the Bad Guys in the Area of Operations (AO). “A Battle of the Minds” as Fidel would say.

Highly educated “social scientists” are presented as selflessly putting their lives on the line to help the US military win the hearts and minds of those Afghan peoples, turning them away from the evil force of the Taleban or other “extremists”, expediting schools for their children, providing water for household use, new crops to replace “drug crops”, opium poppies and marijuana/hashish plants.

This projected image is aimed more at the US media and NATO allies than at the Afghans.

The Afghans know the truth. They are the Human Terrain.

If viewed from the raw perspective of war, the outlook for Afghans is bleak indeed. Consequently, the outlook for a smiling outcome for the US war there looks bleak.

The tragic truth of thousands of civilian deaths has turned the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan toward a unified resistance; to consensually turn the invaders away, or simply wait them out.

But, in reality, HTS has little concern with that. As one of our instructors said, “Winning the hearts and the minds of the Afghan people is not a realistic goal.”

The Pressure is Turned Up in the Last Two Months of Training

By the beginning of the third month of training, I note a change of tone and mood to a more high-stress military culture. We are told, “You are knee-deep in what was considered the Intel Process.” (But, Sir, no intelligence gathering; you promised! … Shut up soldier!)

Listen up! This is a major point: In the new COIN-Speak, “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield” (IPB of course) has become “Cultural Preparation of the Environment” (CPE). As far as I can tell, the function is identical: gathering intelligence that has tactical value for the Brigade Commander’s “kinetic” (violent) operations against Afghan villages who resist US occupation.

HTS is an Innovative Intrapreneurial Venture.

As an entrepreneurial enterprise within the United States Government’s Department of Defense, HTS is competing for funding, and competing for Program status in the Federal Defense Budget with other such innovative intelligence-gathering ventures. All these various Proof-of-Concept “projects”, such as the Human Terrain System Project, are lined up in competition for a place in the budget and for recognition as a “program” to serve an intelligence-gathering function for the Department of Defense.

A free enterprise business atmosphere has been growing around warfare and defense during the past 50 years; and maybe since Roman days. There is an appearance of competition within directorates of the military itself and among the private contractors (exclusively made of retired military officers). Among the Department of Defense competitors and the top civilian defense contractors – offering material products, all kinds and levels of support services and staffs of retired military officers from all specialties – HTS is only one Proof of Concept project, among many Intelligence-hawking corporations, public and private.

That large pot of Defense funding is needed to do the re-fitting of the US Army to function according to the new Counterinsurgency Handbook for establishing, or preventing a New World Order. Each of these private contractors and public agencies and directorates are presenting their case for getting a cut of the intelligence budget’s pie. The intelligence budget is widely distributed and includes partial intelligence funding to such as CIA, USAID, USDA, US Geological Survey, various university programs, and even such dignified scholarship programs as Fulbright.

Of course, the HTS administration – from the Directorate down to the newest seminar leader and returned HTT member – understand this corporate business-like aspect of competing for funding. There is a large advertising effort directed at the decision-makers – the contractor who teaches ethnographic methods, is, in fact a marketing research specialist, and serves on the HTS Social Science Advisory Committee.

And this is where HTS really serves to sell the entire new COIN image of the US Army; making it more marketable to the tax payers and the politicians who must pay the bill for the related war industries and maintaining their infrastructures.

These war-dependent industries see the COIN conceptual framework and the related HTS image of “preparing the cultural environment”, as part of the military’s public relations. This military confederacy, both government and private, all cooperate in advertising the COIN image of the New Warfighter, to win the hearts and minds, and votes and tax dollars of the US Government and the US citizens.

If HTS wins Program status within the Department of Defense’s budget, its future budget will be assured as a recurring line item in the budget of one or several agencies.

HTT Cadets’ Motive?

I would venture that all HTS social scientist trainees/cadets have applied for this program because they were unemployed. They were anthropologists, historians, and other “social scientists”; in fact they were part of the population of humanities professionals who had found highly paid work in an economy that was getting worse, even though the demand for professionals in the social sciences and the humanities has been declining steeply since before 1980.

This is the same motive that leads members of US racial and ethnic minority groups, often of higher unemployment than US Anglos, join the military. They need money.

Perhaps ethically ambivalent, those who enrolled – including me – were, nonetheless, swayed by the outrageous pay they would receive. Above $100,000 per year and all living and transportation expenses paid; total value near $250,000 per year.

A fraction of the HTT candidates on some teams, including me, came to Kansas City intending to somehow influence the strategy of the command and change the role that an anthropologist would play in relation to the Command’s perceptions of the Afghan people and of the military’s role among them.

As a new cadet, I needed training in kinetic-military (killitary, not culinary) culture and in-doctrine-nation in Counterinsurgency Theory; and I got it. And I got it again, and again.

We cadets of the HTS are instructed to speak about the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and we are subject to conditioning exercises to think about this as a war of liberation, bringing “Freedom, Democracy and (especially) Education!” to the Afghan people. We – The Good Guys – are freeing them from ignorance, oppression, and violence – caused by The Bad Guys, who were originally described in US “news” media and policy statements as being outsiders – Arabs, Al Qaeda and such. They were outsiders who had surged into Afghanistan to cause problems.

[Footnote: I thought that was why the military and politicians called them “in-surgents”. That was how ignorant I was of this other ideological world inside the US, the world within the US military.]

Essentially, I wanted to change the manner and the state of mind in which international affairs are conducted. I advocated abandoning the occupying nation approach and adopting instead an inter-cultural approach and the adjustment of the military to fit this new Mission; more like a Peace Corps Exchange Mission.

I look back now, smiling at my delusion.

At this early point, [Footnote: this note was around November 5th] I could say that it has already been made very clear through a pervasive message in our training that we will be operating as instruments of the Chain of Command in a violent war of occupation.

Dark Places in Our Minds: the Underworld, The Underground, and the Insurgents

The US Government/Military coalition advertises the surface motive of bringing freedom and democracy and removing Bad Guy Outsiders by which the US justifies its military actions in Afghanistan. Under this is the motive arising from great anger against The Enemy who conducted the September 11, 2001 attacks on USA soil; and the notion that the nerve center, the brain of The Enemy, was and is based in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan.

There – in the most hidden caves under ancient mud and stone farm houses set at the base of massive granite mountain ridges and glaciated peaks above the remote valley – it is believed by the media informed by the military – are two or three of the most important Bad Guys, and the worst of them all, Usama Bin Laden. They are, in bush terms, “holed up” in a cave with all the most advanced current technology, and accompanied by the indigenous Afghan Resistance leaders, all off the radar, unfindable with the most current intelligence technology and sought by highly trained mercenary spies and guerilla fighters.

These are the leaders of the insurgents; or so the story is being constructed as the background context of news bites, artificially flavored to be consumed by the US public and provided to the international media with the US’s own translations.

The reason the occupying forces have not been able to defeat the “insurgents” is that the insurgents are not foreigners, not from the outside. It is The Peoples of Afghanistan who are the insurgents.

They are part of a historic tribal network that has arisen and then dissipated many times over millennia of history. Somehow, and often funded directly or indirectly by the US and its current allies, these few key leaders have managed to muster an army at every point where the US and NATO forces try to gain and claim control.

For the most part, there are no “outsiders”; there are only spokesmen who arise, coordinate, and speak for the real leaders who are mostly local tribal-community leaders. These leaders simply give voice and organization to the people’s desire to remove the invaders. It is these ones who rise up, leading their people to force the invading NATO forces to depart, to go home; to leave Afghanistan – again and finally – to Afghans.

Counterinsurgency Theory in a Nutshell

These indigenous Afghan resistance leaders include the leaders arising from the core of the US-overthrown “Taleban” government –accused of hosting international terrorists. These included leaders who also were part of the US-supplied Mujahideen that led the overthrow of the Soviets, or both these and something else.

By the USans, they are now also called “insurgents”. In COIN-speak this is a non-governmental organization trying to take control of Afghanistan’s now “legitimately elected, democratic government”, headed by Hamid Karzai (formerly an insurgent leader), who was installed by the US after the overthrow of the established Taleban government, which had also come to power with US assistance.

So, you see, the fortunes of leaders change from Good Guys to Bad Guys and back to Good Guys.

That is how it works: The US decides that, in their judgment, another government’s “lack of competence” and lack of public support (taxes to pay for infrastructure fitting the requirements of the US) justifies the State being called a “Failed State”. This can be brought about by other covert or overt actions to undermine that government; as is the case with the economic blockade of Cuba. In the Cuba case it has failed for 50 years.

The US State Department defines the nation as “a failed state”, then

• identifies a power faction that it can support/subvert,
• gives that faction tacit recognition and financial/military assistance as the “legitimate and democratic” government,
• labels the ruling faction the “insurgents” and then
• declares a war on the insurgents to save, or to install, an approved, “legitimate” government.

Then the US will bring “free” gifts of economic development and education, once the government is installed and secured from the forces of the insurgents – the “extremists”, by US military forces.

So, once the identities of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys are established, we go about our usual business of killing the Bad Guys. However, in order to provide the embedded media something other than the truth of the war that is where most of the action is, we make a big show of doing “research” to understand the hearts and minds – “the culture” – of the people we have occupied and dominated and are destroying.

It is this image of our bright, sensitive young social scientists out among the “tribal” foreigners, helping the military to avoid violent actions by simply winning over the hearts and minds of the “undecided”. This image of winning over what we might want to think of as “the middle class”; this is the real purpose of HTS. But, the Army does not really expect to win their hearts and minds. This image is for the US and European public.

Of course, all this is normal, main-stream USan imagery; not what’s inside the mind of the average Afghan. But, let’s not think about that.

It is the image that we are promoting. Our Public Information Officer will tell the masses of US voters what the images mean; what the reality is of this situation of the US Army in Afghanistan. “If you say it, and you control the mainstream media, it is true.”

Gazing into my crystal ball: My impression from all these classes is that there are big plans globally for the US Counterinsurgency strategy; not only in Muslim nations, but in all of Latin America, Africa and in the Malay Archipelago and Indonesia.

This is the Son of the War on Communism – the so-called Cold War; and in some places is a continuation of that war also, as in relations with Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina … and Cuba. And HTS staff are trying to elbow their way right into the middle of it.

That’s global capitalism at its best! Enterprising, cunning, aggressive, blind ambition.

Selling the New Army: a Palatable War; a Prime Time War

The military is being retrofitted, both in function and in the image of itself that it projects to the public. This retrofit is necessary in order to fill the public image needs of the Counterinsurgency (COIN) approach to the warfare of the 21st Century; specifically, one aspect of COIN, the Human Terrain System.

The HTS projects the image of a kinder and gentler war; a humane war; sensitive to cultural differences. That is a war image that the USan People can buy.

This image-remodel is presented as The New Army, the Global Army that is engaged in the Counterinsurgency War to Win Hearts and Minds, globally. But the Army is not primarily directing this advertisement at winning the hearts and minds of the population of the occupied lands.

Rather, HTS is part of the psy-ops (Psychological Operations) and Intelligence inside the USA as well as overseas. HTS is a star of the Army public affairs press releases for The Mission of winning the hearts and minds (and votes, and tax dollars) of the US public and especially their governmental funding body, the US Congress.

It is a business tactic. And, selling this New Image of The US Army is the promise of the Human Terrain System.

Yes, that is why I, Juliet Alpha, Anthropologist, am here in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Going to Kansas City: The HTS and Going Underground at the Landing

The classroom where the Colonel X and I and 34 other trainees were sitting is a windowless room in a complex of windowless rooms. The US Army has taken over the basement area of the buildings in this block of three- and four-story brick buildings facing Virginia Street, in downtown Leavenworth Kansas, located outside the gates of Fort Leavenworth and of Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary – just a stone’s throw from the Fort – which has its own prison, the Disciplinary Barracks; for serious violators of military law.

The Army has apparently bought out most of this downtown block; or developed a lease allowing all the required adaptations for its purposes. Then the Army did the necessary “remodeling” to connect the formerly separate basements into one long hallway that connects numerous classrooms and offices.

A view inside the HTS training facility, looking down the last half of the hallway through the classroom area, continuing through the next two doors to the walls at the end of the block. There are seven large classrooms and two office areas in this direction, and four more large classrooms and some office areas behind me.

This major re-model project, using Federal funds, entailed the destruction of historic walls that separated the several buildings’ basements, then rebuilding and retrofitting this entire area to accommodate this underground military intelligence university project. This military has hollowed out its place in the darkness of caves and basements, here at the outer edge of Kansas City urban area, underneath little mom and pop businesses.

Here we find a metaphor for the relationship of the New Army to the US Society. Very few US citizens realize that such an extensive and sophisticated intelligence program has been constructed just downstairs from the European Pottery Shop. Out of reach of their awareness; hidden from view, this program is in operation right downstairs in those quaint old basements. Some how it recalls Dwight D. Eisenhower’s cautionary parting statement to the US public, “Beware the Military-Industrial Complex, my son.” … well, that was about the Jabberwocky, but still ….

The entire basement area, that runs under these National Register of Historic Places-eligible buildings, has been remodeled and retro-fitted with all the modern technology needed to become the premier, joint civilian-military training center for one aspect of the military’s own retrofit. Sort of like Osama hiding in his cave; keeping a low profile but fully high-tech. [Someone should check whether an EIS was done for effects on the historic architectural qualities of these building.]

The HTS entry doors are under the cute sign “Quilter’s Quarter” atop the old, ordinary-looking “Mall Entrance” sign. From the outside, one sees only an innocent-looking set of modern, metal-framed glass double doors; hardly noticeable in the connected series of old, red brick buildings, varying from two to four stories in height, as viewed from the large parking lot that occupies most of the remainder of the block behind the old brick buildings. This parking area is surrounded by large, but not old, Sycamore trees, Hawthorne trees and flower beds.

Out here in the parking lot, in my new car provided by Avis at the expense of the tax-payer, I would often sit eating the salad I had driven to buy at Price Chopper’s salad bar.

This gave me some time to myself, to listen to some chamber music on the radio, be away from the Greensuiters and out of the generally stressful air there in the basement, an air of heady expectations and anxious uncertainty, fed by a steady flow of caffeine that animated conversations inside The Landing.

I sat in my car, chewed my salad and ruminated about a lot of things during those lunches in my car. One of these was,

The Previous Counterinsurgencies in Kansas Territory

Fort Leavenworth, a “fort”, or, on the “frontier”, a Forward Operating Base (FOB) was first known as Cantonment Leavenworth (like a COP, or “Command Out-Post”). It was located at the point where the major migration trails of European-American “settlers” entered into the lands that were reserved as Indian Territory.

This military outpost was established by a General Henry Leavenworth – descended from a military family – on the Missouri River on May 8, 1827.

Fort Leavenworth was the first settlement in Kansas territory and is the oldest active Army post west of the Mississippi River. Sitting on the bluffs overlooking the western bank of the Missouri River, the Fort initially served as a quartermaster depot, arsenal, and troop post, and was dedicated to protecting the fur trade and safeguarding commerce on the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail; colonial expansion. The commerce included necessary provisions for the settlers moving to “settle” within Indian Territory.

This place is on a millennia-old major Indian trail. It also is a place that Lewis and Clark passed through on their way along major Indian trunk trails up the Missouri River to Missoula, Montana, across to the Snake River and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean.

Fort Leavenworth provided protection over the wagon trains of “settlers” as they were encouraged to violate the US government’s agreements with the indigenous peoples and transgressed further and further into the lands of the tribes to the west, leading to battles with Apaches, Modocs, Umatillas and several other western tribes. They also provided protection for the businesses that set up shops to sell to the settlers.

The civilian town of Leavenworth is the oldest town established in this area of Kansas along the Lewis and Clark Trail (~1804). In 1806, Zebulon Pike passed through the region on his way to Pike’s Peak, and labeled it “The Great American Desert” on his maps.

This view of Kansas – as with the current image of Afghanistan and Afghans – would help form U.S. policy for the next 40 years, prompting the US Congress to set it aside as land for Native Americans. The former governments and citizens of the various indigenous nations of the eastern woodlands, the Ohio Valley and the south-east coast of North America, were at that time prisoners of war undergoing preparation of their cultural environment for another change of regime.

This area on the banks of the Missouri River near the confluence of the Arkansas River was chosen as the relocation point for Indian Tribes being removed from their traditional homelands in the eastern woodlands of what is now northeastern USA, from the Ohio River Basin and eastward. Chosen because Zebulon had labeled it “The Great American Desert”, it looked pretty good to the arriving refugees – the defeated Native American “insurgents” who had been removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern woodlands. These peoples were brought to Kansas Territory (named after one such “tribe” the Kansa, on whose traditional territory these eastern tribes were being “relocated”) via the Trail of Tears. Now they were west of the Missouri; in what was reserved as Indian Country, … temporarily.

As the Euro-American populations expanded westward during the late 1700s to the mid-1800s they set up military posts to guard the “settlers” as these opportunistic European colonists took the indigenous peoples’ lands from them by force, temptation, seduction, addiction, intoxication and coercion, under the protective, watchful eye of the US Army at places like Fort Leavenworth, registering their “homesteads” with the only legitimate authority (as seen from the Euro-American perspective), the US government.

This put the indigenous people, the Indians, in the position – using today’s Counterinsurgency vocabulary – the position of becoming “Insurgents” – that is, when they “rose up” they were challenging the authority of the “recognized” government; that of the Euro-American “settlers”, who had declared this to be a United States Territory. By challenging the established order, these Indians became dissidents, “insurgents”, and, if they got violent, they would be labeled “violent extremists”, “terrorists”, as with the Palestineans and the Israeli “settlers” today..

The settlers, always in groups and always armed, had occupied the Indians lands that were the best lands for the Indians’ horticulture, taken control of the springs and creeks and begun “farming”.

This “mixed farming” adaptation was a radical re-prioritizing of the uses of the landscape and its natural resources; changing from the way Native Americans had used the harvest of that landscape for thousands of years. The landscape was rapidly converted to support the “pastoral” way the Europeans had altered the landscape of Europe for an entirely different ecological adaptation by humans in relation to the whole of Nature. The formerly public landscape became cluttered with private ownerships, fencing off land and water, and rechannelling of water from springs and creeks to gardens and animal ponds and “cities” as they grew around the industrial investors’ factories attracting a large population of wage workers; then building and speculating for profit from sale of wage labor houses.

The former “insurgents”, now totally encircled, under government control and in the way of the “settlers” and “development”, were removed from their remaining lands to lands “reserved” for them.

The Indians there had already been force-marched from their lands in the eastern woodlands of the US on what became known as the Trail of Tears in Native American oral history. Those who were marched beyond the Mississippi were first relocated around the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Missouri River, at places like the Methodists’ Shawnee Mission. These uprooted indigenous peoples of the eastern woodlands of the continent began to relocate their lives here in the Kansas Territory

It was in this juncture of spaces and times that Fort Leavenworth was established; during that expansion of European “settlers” into the westward side of the Missouri River; into Indian Territory. The fort was located among the relocated Indian “insurgents” communities, now refugees from the eastern woodlands.

Soon, the passing “settlers” saw that the area was not a desert as Zebulon Pike had described it, but fine farmland. Then the constantly arriving invaders also wanted this land.

The upshot was that those Redskins would have to be moved on; this time to the final solution, last destination of the Trail of Tears, official Indian Territory, Oklahoma.

So, those Indians who hadn’t married into or integrated into the settlers’ communities were then uprooted again and marched south more than one thousand miles into the Indian Territory of Oklahoma.

There are many communities nearby Leavenworth that bear the names of those peoples. Some descendants of these families that integrated with the White invaders still have their own “tribal” communities in the old Indian Country.

A young Shawnee woman was brought to Kansas Territory from Ohio, part of a Shawnee insurgent group. Somehow the young Shawnee woman met and married the French Wesleyan Methodist Circuit-riding Preacher and farmer, John TeVault – part of the French history of the “settlement” of the entire Mississippi Drainage Basin, France’s former “Louisiana”.

That insurgent indigenous woman and that French settler were the parents of my father.

Geologist John Shroder’s HTS class at the University of Nebraska, Omaha

10 February 2010 First Day of MARDEX, “Weston Resolve”

Today, HTS begins its weeklong practicum mission among those communities around the Missouri River, near Leavenworth, Kansas and across the Missouri River at Weston. Part of the mission is to gather intelligence on “problem causers”, Bad Guys.

Retired Colonel Larry Rutherford is “here to he’p us”. He’s the lead for the contractor, Develop Mental Labs, Incorporated – DMLI. Like many of their staff, he is from Texas. Those who aren’t are from other Deep South states.

In the MARDEX exercise, we of the November Cycle will become the HTT for the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division.

Colonel Rutherford advises us that when HTT arrives “down range”, we will need to “elbow your way into the commander’s staff.”

He gives a review of the fictional province of “Lakeland”; and its socio-economic-political background.

The war game role-playing for this MARDEX is called Weston Resolve, because it has always been centered upon the village of Weston, a semi-rural area within the greater Kansas City zone of influence, just a few miles from Leavenworth, on the Missouri side of the Missouri River. The Lakeland area is represented by DMLI as merging into the real world drug and crime problems in the area north of Kansas City. The communities to be investigated are said to be a “permissive environment” – meaning no armed resistance.

Then, the whole purpose of the mission moves toward establishing a military state control of the local population. Col. X asks, “If it is a “permissive” environment, why are we taking it over to “reestablish” public security”? The answer is circuitous and evasive; but no further discussion of that.

The IATAN coal-fired power plant is one of the main military foci due to “contention within the community” over the environmental pollution.” Sierra Club and other, more radical groups have been active in protesting the pollution from the power plant. The Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) is one such radical group.

Even through there is an elected government and rule of law in Lakeland, there are some “insurgents” (seeming to include ELF) who are “opportunistic”. That is why the US Army has moved into this area that has broken away from US control.

Assignment: “Find our more details on the criminal activity.”

1. Find out the best conduits to pass (our public affairs supplied) “information” to the local population.
2. HTT is assigned to produce a “Research Plan” (5 PowerPoint slide limit, of course) to help the Command understand the situation at the IATAN power plant.
3. People’s concerns, desires, … [Of course, once WE know what THEY want, WE will tell THEM what they NEED, and what we WANT, and negotiate from there; as described above.]

NOTE: At this point there was a break and the teams were to re-convene in separate rooms.

I had seen that COIN would, perhaps, be more useful inside the US, answering the point David Price raised in the first citation.

At this point, I gathered up all my things, went to my Seminar Leader, JT, and resigned. JT sent me to BAE for debriefing and formal resignation (even though I was a CLI contractor, which hi-lights the phony division into “competing” contractors.).

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““

[Sitting in the BAE office lobby – BAE does all the staffing functions for CLI at Leavenworth; further bringing into question the autonomy of CLI, which was a spin-off from BAE during a suspension of BAE’s Federal contracting eligibility for ethical violations. I am waiting for Mark Solomon to debrief me. While waiting, I wrote the following:]

Listened to the opening session of the Weston Resolve”/MARDEX. Then I went in to JT’s office and told him that I am resigning. I asked him about the feasibility of talking with McFate, but, he said that she is on leave. He didn’t seem to think that I would have much luck in getting time with Jennifer Clark, second in charge. I was going to explore other options.

I told JT that HTT cannot really make use of my skills; that anyone with a high school diploma could carry out the type of “research” that Marilyn Mitchell taught; that there had been simply a cursory presentation of many, many sociological statistical techniques, but not a single one taught in enough depth for anyone in the class to actually understand and be able to apply a given technique.

I also told him that I had seen very early on that my only hope of participating would be if I could change the flow of influence from one where the Human Terrain Team was a tool of the Brigade Command to where the Brigade Command learns from the cultural anthropologist how to navigate within the framework of thought that an ethnographer finds himself or herself immersed in when he or she takes up a year-long residence in the same village that the Brigade Commander wants a report on at ten hundred hours tomorrow, in PowerPoint!

Now, I am sitting in the BAE lobby, waiting for Mark Solomon to arrive so that I can “clear” with him.

During that wait, PT (my supervisor at CLI, in Tampa) calls me on the cell phone. She had already received an email (ten minutes) from JT that I had withdrawn from the HTS program. We talked and I assured her that neither she nor CLI were the cause.

In my discussion with PT, she told of a social scientist that had returned from his HTT tour in Afghanistan. He felt that he had a lot of suggestions for changing the program and looked forward to his chance to talk with the Human Terrain System staff. However, in his “exit interview” he was blown off and rushed through and out.

They weren’t interested.

This might be the reason that, when I told JT that I’d like to talk with McFatal or Jennifer about other things that I might do in the program, he said, more or less, “Don’t waste your time.”

As I spoke with Mark Solomon, BAE Supervisor in Leavenworth, he reinforced this impression. He saw both the fixed mindset of the Army and the lack of interest in critical feedback from participants by the HTS Directorate.

Summary and Conclusions

Summarizing: the US public seems not to be aware of the dominance of the Department of Defense over all other aspects of the Federal Government and even most state governments. The dictatorship of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) has developed without public awareness due to the interweaving of the large mass media corporations and US public education with that MIC.

The cost of this public ignorance is staggering. Just the monetary cost of the HTS program, given its failure to walk its own talk, is more than you want to know. All the information you are given on mass media is to promote the HTS project to become a recurring line-item Program in the Defense budget, and the program is designed to foster an illusion about Counter-Insurgency (COIN) warfare, that it is something unlike kinetic warfare, when in fact it is a screen placed to block the view of kinetic warfare – it is the Lipstick on the Hippopotamus.

Inside the program designed for training of HTS candidates, one encounters a mind-shaping campaign not unlike that which the soldiers undergo during basic training, or captives of war in a concentration camp; but an ultra-luxurious concentration camp in the case of HTS.

The HTS training program is designed to win the hearts and minds of the trainees, to harden them to the fact that warfare is primarily kinetic violence; to prepare them to subordinate their goals to the goals of the kinetic mission of the fighting force, and to see the Afghan or Iraqi people as needing US-style education including values indoctrination and moral/ethical training.

These “shaping” efforts were embedded within all the subject-matters presented in the HTS training program; and in some seminars this was the dominant topic. It was not really subtle, but most of the trainees didn’t seem to understand what they were being subject to; perhaps because the news media and general public education in the US does not provide them with the informational context or the intellectual skill to see it happening. Or, perhaps it was because the cadets, as a group-think, project the feeling that to question the officially-projected “truth” is a sign of lack of real patriotism. After all, ‘ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die’.

As shown in (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/world/asia/04marja.html?emc=eta1), the “enemy”, which is becoming more and more difficult to discriminate from the general Afghan populace, is characterized as brain-washed, evil, enemies of “democracy” and as committing pederasty with young boys whom they train to entertain them. This nebulous enemy is characterized as “Terrorists” and evil with no redeeming qualities.

HTS is not something that I would recommend for my own children, or yours. In every sense, I would describe it as “un-American”.

Addendum/ Post Script:

Expansion into Africa

Christopher Varhola
Subject: [Mil_Ant_Net] AFRICOM Social Science Research Center [2 Attachments]
To: mil_ant_net@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, May 13, 2010, 3:48 AM

Colleagues, In January I began work as the director of the newly formed AFRICOM Social Science Research Center. When I say newly formed, I mean that it began when I started in January. This gives a lot of latitude. One of my first goals was to craft a set of guidelines that set forth a practical and acceptable relationship between civilian scholars and the U.S. Military. Attached is an information paper on our center and a draft of our guidelines. These guidelines are currently in effect for teams that are operating throughout Africa. I would invite both criticism and constructive comments. As I have said before, the U.S. Military is going to act, with or without good information. I see this center as a mechanism through which scholars can have influence over military activities through direct access to policy makers. VR, Chris Varhola

__._,_.___

Attachment(s) from Christopher Varhola

2 of 2 File(s)

AFRICOM SSRC Guidelines and Procedures.doc

AFRICOM SSRC Info Paper.doc

_ _ _ _ _ +___ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sunday, April 4, 2010 9:58 PM
From: “j. a” <johnvallison@yahoo.com>
View contact details
To: “David Price”

I just got off the phone with OM who was released a few days after I resigned. The specific incident that triggered his dismissal was that he wrote on the check-list questionnaire that he was issued as his interview guide, rather than just complying and checking the boxes provided. Any anthropologists worth his salt would have done the same.

The most relevant fact that was not already included in my notes is this: of the 5 anthropologists who were in the November Cycle, only 2 apparently made it through the training and continued on to the possible deployment phases. One of these was an unemployed woman PhD candidate who has worked in Yemen, and who speaks fair Arabic, and who is also a military veteran. The other is an unemployed anthropologist from Texas. Being a veteran and being from Texas, both seem to be the deciding factor.

The other three of the five anthropologists in the cycle – OM, a woman from southern California and John Allison – were lost souls, couldn’t be shaped..

OM thinks it is hopeless to try to cut the funding for the Lipstick on the Hippo, being that it is such a minor expenditure for something that has such a value as a smokescreen for anyone who questions the inhumanity of war.

I was very pleased to see Hamid Karzai standing up to the “Allies” today.

Appendix: My Resignation Debriefing Letter

Summary Critique of Human Terrain Systems from a Cadet’s Perspective

John Allison, Cultural Anthropologist. (Resigned from the Human Terrain System Training Program, November 2009 Cycle, effective February 10, 2010)

“I volunteered for the HTS program because I had done my doctoral research in the Hindu Kush area of Afghanistan known as Nuristan long before the train of disasters, caused by foreign forces over the past 35 years, ran through this land of diverse peoples, historic sites and monuments, and ecosystems. I had hope that I could help to save the loss of any more innocent Afghan lives. Several of my Afghan friends had died, some having been executed because of their associations with US agents there.

After beginning training in the HTS program, I was shocked when I first mentioned that this was my purpose and one of my classmates expressed contempt for that motive and said that he was only there because he didn’t want to see one more US soldier’s life lost; didn’t want to have to take the US flag to the door of an US mother and tell her that her son was killed. And, when I asked about Afghan mothers whose sons were killed by US errors of judgment causing “collateral damage” in their kinetic warfare, he responded that he didn’t ‘… give a fuck about those people. I would just drive through their village in my Humvee and throw money at those mothers.’ This was a Colonel who is a doctoral candidate in a military history program at a military-funded university; a Team Leader. Although this man was more out-spoken than most of his military colleagues, my impression now is that he expressed what almost all of them think and feel.

My experience in the program included both instruction in such things as military culture, military language, military decision-making process, Counter-Insurgency doctrine, and many other topics intended to socialize the trainees into the world as seen by the military. During this time, more than once, the majority of the class – who were either current or retired career military or those with former military service who were hoping to convert into an intelligence role such as CIA – would speak about the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. This refers to how the majority in a group can shape the values and perception of the minority. Apparently, in most ‘cycles’ (six-month long training group schedules up to deployment), the majority of the HTT candidates are such military personnel as were in our November 2009 Cycle, which actually began mid-October. It became clear that the majority saw their job as to expedite the acculturation of the rest of us – those who had the skills and credential that were needed to support the ‘soft’ warfare image that HTS advertises – an image of winning the hearts and minds of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq – to win the anthropologists over to their military culture’s world view and values; or to marginalize and force the non-compliant to resign.

In addition there were a couple weeks of ‘Introduction to Anthropology’ and three weeks of ‘Ethnographic Method’. The Introduction to Anthropology was cursory and quick. Some important terms were introduced – e.g. ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ – but not taken to enough depth in examples to drive home the deeper implications. Holt, who served on an HTT in Afghanistan and wants to return, is a cultural materialist, and limited his perspective to mostly the etic. He was the dominant voice. He soon transitioned into a scenario in which he assigned the several class teams to provide a 5-slide PowerPoint presentation (with a maximum of 5 bullet ‘points’ on each slide) to the Commander to advise him on what to do when he has troops on the ground in a village area that he has heard is ‘hostile’, based on HTT research. Of the seven teams, only one dared to suggest that the commander should wait until the HTT had done further field research before launching the assault. This was clearly the Stockholm effect of the Team Leader and others forming the behavior of the Social Scientist.

There were several weeks of ‘Ethnographic Method’, in which there was no introduction to real participant-observer methods or anything really related to ethnographic method. Instead, this was a rapid fire, cursory presentation of a myriad of methods used in sociological statistics; but not in enough depth in any one of them to really become functional if the student did not already have a strong background. It was also rooted in computer software that might not be available ‘downrange’. It gave colorful, simplistic representation of complex social facts – in US society – that fit well into the PowerPoint presentations of five slides, each with a few bullets or a single, simple graphic.

On the one hand, HTS contractors make a concerted effort to recruit and hire cultural anthropologists because these are the obviously most qualified professionals to participate as social scientists on the HTTs in the theaters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the anticipated expansion of COIN to sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and other places in the Islamic world. In the November cycle, I was the only social scientist on 5 teams who had previous experience in Afghanistan. Among those teams scheduled for Iraq, there was also only one social scientist who had such experience.

Yet, on the other hand, the prevailing military culture, and the nature of the operations at the Brigade and lower unit levels at which HTT’s are assigned, subordinate the judgment of these anthropologists and other ‘social scientists’ (which include such as historians, psychologists, and economists who have absolutely no training in cross-cultural field research) to the dictates of the Brigade or Battalion command.

The command is dominated by the military (specifically US Army) culture and the related inclination to use the HTT to aid in gathering intelligence useful for supporting kinetic operations; which is strictly forbidden in the surface representation of the HTS. Yet, it is made clear in training that this is the fact of life on the Team. Since the Team Leaders are part of the military culture, the social scientist has no recourse. One presenter from the Reachback Research Center (RRC) estimated that 30% of the HTTs become tools for such intel needs of the Brigade rather than to provide needed information for moving the population’s Center of Gravity from favoring the resistance forces’ agenda to favoring the occupying ‘Coalition’ forces and their agenda, as represented in the public representation of HTS.

There is a great distance, an effective separation, between the HTS ‘Directorate’ and the training staff and the trainees. This was emphasized in my exit interview with my Seminar Leader, XXXXXXXX. When I told him that I had only one other possibility other than entirely resigning, he told me in so many words, ‘forget it’; explaining that there was not a lot of interest at the Directorate level in talking with trainees about such things. XXXXXXXX clearly regrets this fact.

This was reinforced in my telephone conversation with my CLI supervisor XXXXXXXX when I told her of this conversation with XXXXXXXX. She reciprocated with a story from a returning social scientist who had served a tour in Afghanistan. He told her that he had many suggestions for improving the program that he hoped to communicate to the HTS Social Science Directorate. However, when he got to his debriefing interview and attempted to relate his thoughts and suggestions to the upper echelons, the interviewer (either Montgomery McFate or Jennifer Clark) simply blew him off and cut him short, not allowing him to really express himself in less than ten minutes allotted to him after a year of service.

You, yourself, Mark, told me that this was consistent with your impressions: there is not a lot of receptiveness to feedback from the rank and file if it runs against the grain of military culture – especially US Army culture, as contrasted with US Navy, Air Force or even US Marine culture, that still is the dominant kinetic perception of the purpose of deployment. Even though Generals McCrystal and Petraeus have made the transition to the “soft” strategy of modern COIN, the predominant US Army mindset is still deeply set into the kinetic approach.

Until the Center of Gravity of the brains of the US military’s ‘boots on the ground’ is moved to understand the value of a cultural anthropologist’s in-depth research to really helping the US military and civilian assistance to enable a nation such as Afghanistan to achieve self-determined stability and sovereignty, the money spent on HTS will be greatly a waste of US taxpayer money. This includes the need for the military as well as the US Department of State to understand the reasons behind the ethical concerns of anthropologists regarding this program.

This was my first of two rental cars. One wet, cold morning, after my morning run and tea, I pulled out onto the frontage road and didn’t see the giant Peterbilt tractor-trailer. The ambulance crew said they thought the driver was dead. A new rental car was delivered in less than two hours (tax-payers and the Department of Defense have deep pockets), and I walked into the classroom at 10am to a standing ovation from those who had seen the wrecked car. I should have gone home then; my warning omen and my finest hour in Leavenworth.

One might take things too seriously and expect that people who boast about mapping human terrains would at least know how to effectively and meaningfully caption their photographs, especially as they are obviously intended to function as part of a recruitment sales pitch. One can only assume then that the absence of anything beyond the vague, the playful, and the “inside joke” kind of label, was a deliberate choice.

First, it is a way to cast away all those gloomy thoughts of dead and injured teammates. Indeed, do you notice what is now missing from the HTS website? Their “In Memoriam” section, which featured glowing obituaries to Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, and Paula Loyd (only one such page survives in the Internet Archive). This is interesting, standing momentarily apart from the surrounding official culture where “honoring the fallen” is raised to an almost psychotic level of obsession. Why? Was it perhaps because the names of Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery McFate appeared beneath each one, have either written or approved of the statements, and the attempt is to remove any lingering traces of the two in the public façade of HTS? Or is it really an attempt to erase the negative?

Second, it is preemptive, self-mocking laughter. HTS wants to get in the first laugh at itself before we do–in light of stories about mission monkeys, muppet mobiles, and guitar-playing camp counselor types. HTS may or may not be conscious of the cultural template that is shaping their choice of images, but I would say that it is likely the M*A*S*H television series–except that the persons now missing are Frank Burns (Fondacaro) and Hot Lips Hoolihan (McFate).

Jokes aside, some private contractor is clearly bilking the Army in producing such an amateurish looking website. But that is not our concern. We knew, and can glimpse from the photos, that this is about making a fortune from life in the colonies, and making occupation look like paradise. For some of those people, life will never again be as good as they had it in HTS.

Within that group of 23 contractors are some that have already had extensive experience with the US Army’s Human Terrain System and its former principals Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery McFate.

Others have worked on some type of human terrain analysis contract and/or have marketed their human terrain analysis skills to various U.S. Combatant Commands.

Observers are concerned that positive changes apparently afoot with the U.S. Army HTS will be rolled back if the U.S. Army ultimately lets its business to organizations with personnel who have been in the midst of the troubles that plagued the earlier version of HTS.

A Brief Rant Due to Exposure to HTS for 2.5 Years

There is no questioning of the validity of the need for a military biased geospatial cultural analysis program that assists U.S. warfighters in their efforts to pacify local populations or improve the speed and accuracy of the kill chain. That effort does not require the use of PhD’s from colleges and universities. Further, it seems outlandish to pay $250,000 for an inexperienced (5 months training usually truncated) social scientist to operate in a combat zone.

Why push all that cash to contractors when the talent to divine the cultural landscape exists within the military itself? If after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan (and more on the way in Pakistan, Iran, Mexico—well, Hell, everywhere), the political and military leadership hasn’t figured out the human terrain they wish to control, then the questions become: Are the President and SECDEF and their subordinates that incompetent? Are the hundreds of military-university human terrain/behavioral analysis efforts simply jobs programs and a way for the military and intelligence functions to tunnel into academia (just as they have done with the new breed of war journalists in the MSM or places like Wired)?

Why the constant hue and cry that the human terrain is so complex that no one can figure out?

Hell, the good Christian folks over at the Joshua Project have one Hell of a cultural/geo-name, quasi-geospatial database. They have figured out where in the world the heathen non-Christians are and they’ve done one Hell of a job at it: ethnic tags, language, maps, etc. From that database, Christian Soldiers are sent off on their missions of conversion already understanding the human terrain. Wait! Hell! Isn’t this the mission of the USA? Is it not to convert indigenous populations to concede and to accept the American way of life or at least not get in the way of it?

Creepy People

At any rate, many observers are losing sleep over the prospects of a sequel to HTS I at the hands of some of the organizations listed in the “sources sought” list.

“McNeil and Glevum….Not going to sleep tonight! The companies listed look like various circles of Dante’s Hell,” said one source.

Syzygy’s Lett-Smith [currently not listed] was kicked out of AFRICOM for her unprofessional services. Steve Rotkoff [former DPM at HTS] while at HTS had a number of IG [Inspector General] issues.”

And then there is Glevum which apparently some find “creepy”.

According to sources, “Glevum is beyond creepy—it’s crooked. Some of its people were part of that Lincoln Group fiasco in Iraq a couple of years ago. Glevum is just another front company. They have bilked the government and especially HTS out of tens of millions of dollars. Their whole Social Science Research and Analysis/SSRA scheme [allegedly] used fraudulent data and then sold it on the street.  The sad thing is that the Gallup organization has picked up some of Glevum’s employees in Afghanistan so the same masquerade of data is now affecting U.S. policy there. Gelvum hires so-called local experts to do surveys, focus groups etc. It looks all rather polished on PowerPoint but ask any former HTT member who has seen Glevum products what they think.”

Glevum was apparently mentioned in the U.S. Army’s AR 15-6 investigation. But as one source pointed out, “Glevum has connections in high places, unfortunately.”

Other competitors on the “sources sought” list know the score.

“We are keeping an arm’s length relationship,” said one source.

Much more remarkable, and coming from a supposedly professional journalist who embedded with the U.S. Army in order to tag along with several Human Terrain Team members, is this series from The Virginian-Pilot by Joanne Kimberlin. What she loses in honesty and credibility she more than makes up for in her cheer-leading for a Human Terrain System in deep disrepute and disarray. Her work also proves why taking a “balanced” approach to our critiques is a worthless endeavor, as she cynically misappropriates certain revelations made only on this site, that she finds amenable to painting a positive lacquer on HTS. We now need to be the real balance once again, and the only way to do that is by being as skeptical and critical as possible.

PART ONE

Pulp: Framing HTS within the genre of war-related action/adventure is tried, tested, and yet still popular with American readers, if one takes the production of such fictions as answering some demand. We have seen this before with HTS, when it was written about here. Here we begin with Part 1, “New weapon in an old war:”

[Kimberlin:] “Boom! Heads snap toward the blast….No one speaks. Nothing moves – except salty trickles of sweat that seep from beneath helmets. There! From the other side of the mud-brick village, a plume of black smoke boils into an empty blue sky…. “That,” one says quietly, “was Afghanistan.”

Boom! Patriotic readers snap into formation. That was Afghanistan—a curious use of the past tense. Boom! That is not America. America makes no sound at all as it occupies what was Afghanistan.

“The idea: fewer bullets, more brains.” Brains—the zombie metaphor beckons yet again. It’s about brains, brains will save America from this morass. We need more articles about brains, to get Americans thinking about thinking, instead of ejaculating about bombing.

“The Human Terrain System embeds civilian scholars with combat units to help outsmart the insurgency….anthropologists and other social scientists delve into the population, which the military now dubs “the human terrain.”

They are outsmarting the insurgency—I see—more Afghan than the Afghans now, are they? Well not really, just license on the part of the pulp fiction writer, the reality is more mundane: “Insight into the customs and history of the people could help troops avoid the kind of blunders that make it tough to gain traction in Afghanistan.” Tour guides.

It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea… It’s a Good Idea…

The idea, that HTS is a good idea, is repeated throughout. Kimberlin writes, “for all the problems and controversy, one big question persists: In a long war short on answers, could HTS be one that works?” She then interviews Col. Steve Fondacaro for her answer, as she does consistently: asking those employed with the program, and those with personal reputations tied to the program’s public image, to speak about the value of the program. Fondacaro, for his part, cannot seem to give an answer without doing further damage: to Kimberlin he complains about President Obama firing General Stanley McChrystal, for his vulgar and public insubordination. Fondacaro thinks the firing “was really petty,” and praises his former classmate for his indiscretion: “Stan’s always been a straight shooter.” (Even, it seems, when he shoots himself in the foot.)

Kimberlin makes a plea for extending the war effort, betraying her role as military stenographer: “We’ve been here before and seen what happens when we just pack up and leave….Once the Russians were gone, we lost interest.” But, there has to be an end in sight, and here she is more careful to align herself with Obama’s foreign policy: “Still, no one wants us to stay forever. An armed occupation, well-intentioned or not, eventually wears out its welcome. Every wayward drone, every ham-fisted house search, every wrong squeeze of the trigger creates new enemies.”

News?

Kimberlin offers us very few revelations about HTS, apart from a handful scattered across the four articles. In this first one, she helps to confirm what we already understood, thanks to her interview with Fondacaro: “Funding would come from the Department of Defense, but, Fondacaro says, every dollar required a dog fight in the competition-heavy military machine.” As part of that dog fight, a media blitz, of which this series itself is a residual artifact, having been started and prepared before Fondacaro and McFate were removed from HTS.

Mystery Critics

The treatment of critics is minor and brusque, opting to render them homogeneous and nameless. Human Terrain Team members, on the other hand, get extended personal treatment, are named, and shown to have diverse views. Part of the bulk criticisms from nameless critics has been aimed at Fondacaro’s leadership—here Kimberlin writes: “Personally, Fondacaro has taken a lot of heat. He’s been called a ‘mad man,’ a ‘war profiteer’ and an ‘idiot’.” In the fourth article in the series Fondacaro says even he hated himself after reading John Stanton’s articles.

Paula Loyd: Blonde

Finally, in this first installment, a few words about those who died while working for HTS. Standing out again is Paula Loyd—and note the lead description: “Loyd was an outgoing, 36-year-old blonde with a long history of aid work.” What does her having blonde hair have to do with anything? Why even bother mentioning it, when the hair colour of the other dead HTS people is not mentioned? Because it matters to Americans, as a cultural icon, as symbolic of the superior White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. She was outgoing—she went too far. A long history of aid work—and no mention of the even longer history spent in the military. Hear that bell ring? An angel in fatigues just earned her wings.

PART TWO

In Part 2, “American muscle proves futile in land of extremes,” Kimberlin continues the main theme: “The Hampton Roads-based Human Terrain System is one attempt to wage smarter war. HTS embeds civilian scholars with troops in the battle zone, where it’s their job to decipher the complex cultural landscape that allows the militants to maintain their stubborn toe hold.” Keep these in mind: complex cultural landscape—decipher—smarter war. The value of HTS is a matter the interviewees all insist upon, never demonstrate—here a soldier says “They start from a vantage point that’s strictly about the people and what they think. That’s invaluable. Anybody who can help us get a piece in the puzzle is an add.”

Later in the article, this out of place statement, concerning “criticism that its scholars aren’t qualified to give local insight. ‘They’ve got Ph.D.s,’ Fondacaro says. ‘They’re smart people. They can learn’.” This complex cultural landscape, so complex it must be deciphered, can be apprehended by just about any foreigner who is air dropped into Afghanistan without prior experience, without facility in local languages—but they can learn, because they have credentials. Are they then saying that ordinary soldiers, some with multiple “tours” of Afghanistan, are just too stupid to learn?

Again With the Critics

About those critics—Kimberlin notes: “Anthropologists working for HTS are defying their profession. Last December, the American Anthropological Association condemned the program, wary that its scholarly findings might be used by the military to target the enemy, a breech of the field’s ‘do no harm’ code of ethics. The association also takes a dim view of its own members becoming casualties.” Even this brief element draws no direct response from anyone she interviews. Instead, we hear that

“the backlash has helped turn Fondacaro and his academic counterpart, Montgomery McFate, into lightning rods. Bloggers have vilified the pair, accusing them of all sorts of shadowy deeds, including bilking the taxpayers and recklessly endangering lives.”

Who are these mysterious, nameless bloggers? That doesn’t matter, as we are told about McFate that, “She doesn’t bother to read any of the blogs about HTS, where she’s described as a ‘hustler,’ a ‘poisonous individual’ and ‘the crazy aunt in the room’.” Too bad she doesn’t read “them” …because those are statements made from people who served in HTS.

Wait…did McFate tell Kimberlin that she doesn’t read any of the blogs?

“But her jaw sets at some of the personal attacks in journals or anthropology blogs — not the accusations of intellectual prostitution, but claims that she is motivated by greed.” (source)

Oops. Kimberlin’s research is selective: she “missed” that piece, but not another: without attribution she recycled some of the material about Fondacaro from The Men’s Journal article written by Robert Young Pelton, particularly the part (see Part 1 of the series) where Fondacaro breaks his jaw during an interview with RYP.

Meet Mac the Mercenary: Second-in-Charge

Any new revelations in Part 2? Not many, except that a former mercenary is now in charge of HTS in Afghanistan, someone who goes by the name of “Mac:” “He first came to Afghanistan in 2003 as a security contractor on the Ring Road…. He joined HTS in November 2008 and worked his way up to second-in-charge in Afghanistan.”

Also, the number of Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan: “Two-thirds of the 30 HTS teams are now embedded with the military in Afghanistan.”

Finally, the only HTS member I met in person, Christopher King, is now in Afghanistan: “Chris King, an anthropologist from Ohio, is on an HTS team assigned to ISAF. Reserved and bookish, King does not leave ‘the wire,’ as the perimeter of the base is known. It’s his job to supply ‘theater wide’ cultural insight to the host of generals and colonels who make up the high command.” One of the few anthropologists they get—not that he had any expertise on Afghanistan—and they have him perform in the role of armchair anthropologist. One of his valuable discoveries is that Afghans are a lot like Americans. They hate outsiders imposing on them.

PART THREE

In Part 3, “Building trust amid fear, one mission at a time,” we are introduced to a few more HTS members, most notably Amy Bursell, Patrick Flanagan, and Chris Fitz, only the first being an academic—and we are also introduced to the “mission monkey:”

Oh Goody! The Mission Monkey is Here!

“Amy Bursell climbs out of a bulletproof car in front of an Afghan police station. Strapped to the back of her flak vest: the Mission Monkey, a stuffed animal she brings along for nearly every meeting with the locals. Patrick Flanagan rolls his eyes: ‘I hate that stupid monkey. I mean hate.’ Bursell, 38, is a talkative social scientist from Alexandria. Flanagan, 43, is a conservative Army reserve colonel from Manassas. ‘The monkey helps break the ice,’ Bursell says firmly. ‘It lets people know I’m not a soldier’.”

When meeting with Afghan elders, what does Bursell do? Please tell us she doesn’t take out her stuffed toy and wiggle it in their faces! We are not told how she uses it. It seems to be her outward way of symbolizing that she is a civilian…but then again, we are told later that she carries a gun. I would like to suggest that the mission monkey here is not the one on the back of the flak vest; it’s the one wearing the vest.

It gets worse—“Radios have been synced, and call signs are being chosen for the two hardened SUVs that will carry the team into town. Bursell suggests ‘Muppet One’ and ‘Muppet Two’.” Either Bursell is having a tough time outgrowing an American infancy fed on a diet of incessant television, or, her psychological tactic involves lowering everyone else to the level of children.

One thing about Bursell, as an expert required to provide advice and insight on the basis of her sensitivity to locals, is that she has learned to tune the locals out: “All eyes watch as she and the Mission Monkey weave their way through a group of men in a garage outside the police station. ‘They’re mostly just curious,’ she says. ‘At first it makes you feel pretty weird, but now I just try to ignore it.’

Bursell “tries not to think about the fact that three HTS social scientists have been killed on the job,” Kimberlin tells us. Bursell says: “My parents thought I was crazy to come here. But I just find it really stimulating.” Really stimulating—yes, indeed, it’s all about me and my personal gratification.

European Luxury and West Virginia Savages

Camp Marmal, where this particular Human Terrain Team is based,

“is an oasis of European civilization. It features a cozy atrium with bistros and socializing. Fresh herbs grow in pots outside comfortable barracks. There’s even an indoor badminton court, earning the base the nickname of Club Med.”

Like their Soviet predecessors, this new crop of colonials has learned that the good life is to be had in the colonies. “Bursell feels fortunate to be assigned to such a cushy post.” Reports are that her mission monkey can be heard cooing with pleasure.

What about Afghanistan…beyond that oasis of European herbs and badminton? HTS member Chris Fitz “says the country reminds him of West Virginia: ‘They’re conservative, religious and they like their guns’.” But do they like headcheese sandwiches and banjos?

Take it Easy: We Just Supply the Information that Kills

Patrick Flanagan “dismisses the frowns of social scientists back home who accuse HTS of supplying ‘mercenary anthropology’ that the military could use to hunt down and kill the opposition, a violation of the field’s neutral pledge to the subjects it studies. ‘We provide information,’ Flanagan says. ‘We can’t be responsible for what the commander does with that information’.”

A remarkable statement: he confesses to irresponsible complicity, and confesses to the fact that some of the information is used for targeting.

Dishonest Use of Wikileaks References

Where any remaining veneer of honesty cracks and falls off Joanne Kimberlin is when she raises the issue of what was found in Wikileaks about HTS. As it happens, it was this very site—which she does not name—that did the research about HTS in Wikileaks, and the only site to have written about that aspect. In the first contribution we made, we extracted all of the records dealing with HTS; second, we dealt with some of the problems surrounding the records’ release, and to what extent they can be counted on as useful; third—and this is the only piece on which Kimberlin bases her irresponsible, dishonest, and deliberately propagandistic claims—we talked, ironically, about how Wikileaks’ records could be used to construct a positive gloss for HTS, not realizing anyone would be incompetent enough to single out that information and do so without question—but then again, we didn’t know Kimberlin existed back then; and, fourth, the really critical piece that Kimberlin and the rest of the media continue to choose to ignore.

Instead, Kimberlin lazily plonks down these words, again without attribution, hoping that readers are lazy and gullible and will do no searches of their own:

“The program cropped up dozens of times in the Afghan War Diaries, the reams of insider documents posted by Wikileaks this summer. According to the entries, HTS has helped uniforms understand clans and disputes, assess loyalties, and figure out that construction supervisors were siphoning off money and police were stealing from households.”

Remember 9/11 When I Run for Congress

Patrick Flanagan has political ambitions, he reveals. No doubt these factored into what otherwise seemed like a sloppy and all-too-fast invocation of 9/11: “And if it’s useful to help us win the war on terror, then that’s good, yes? Do you forget 9/11?”

No, don’t ever, ever, let them forget 9/11. Flanagan “plans to run for Congress in his Northern Virginia district in 2014.” For which party? “Republican…of course.”

PART FOUR

Part 4, “In the enemy’s lair, fighting for Afghanistan’s future,” is more interesting for what it tells us about Fondacaro, even though it contains a few notes about two HTS members, Patrick Carnahan and Brian Ericksen.

The one person finally named who is a critic of HTS management, John Stanton, gets an ironic swipe from Kimberlin: “Stanton’s articles lean on mostly unnamed sources.” That is better than using other people’s published material without even token attribution, and I know and have relied on some of those sources and they demand anonymity.

The problem, as identified by Kimberlin, is that,

“Bad press can bring heat from above. A congressional review of HTS has been ordered by the House Armed Services Committee. A senior staffer on the committee described the inquiry as mostly routine but acknowledged that it’s partially propelled by the criticism. ‘The bosses don’t like complaints,’ Fondacaro says.”

Kimberlin updates her article to take into account more recent events, speaking of what we now know was the outright firing of Steve Fondacaro: “His boss at the Training and Doctrine Command gave him 24 hours to turn in his government-issued gear and clear out. ‘I gave him a chance to resign and he refused,’ said Maxie McFarland, the man who hired Fondacaro four years ago.” McFarland says the firing had nothing to do with the detractors or the congressional review: “Steve did a great job standing up the program, but his skills are not the right ones to carry it to the next level.” Sure, we get it.

And Fondacaro gets it too: “I’m the toad in the road,” he says quietly. “In personal terms, I’m absolutely pissed off.”

Finally, the message is repeated again, in ever simpler terms (you do this when you think your readership consists of imbeciles and children): “HTS is part of a new strategy that puts as much emphasis on shoring up the good guys as it does on destroying the bad. Cultural insight is now considered as crucial as high-powered weaponry.”

The good guys, versus the bad guys. This is contemporary American journalism.

Sources report that Senior Social Scientist Montgomery McFate resigned her post with the US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) within the last ten days. Observers say the “category of resignation is similar to that of former HTS program manager Steve Fondacaro in that all assume it was a ‘forced resignation’  or ‘let go’ as is common within the HTS program when an employee is released.

McFate’s position is now advertised as vacant said sources.

Observers express concern that some individuals who were appointed/hired by Fondacaro and McFate at Oyster Point, Virginia–to act on their behalf in the Social Science Directorate—will not function in the best interests of the program.

Meanwhile, others report that in the HTS training class known as “Research Methods” some instructors have told students that it is acceptable “to distribute blank journals to Afghan villagers and to have them  note their impressions of what is going on in their country.” The problem is, according to sources, that the journal instructions are in English and, of course, most Afghans do not speak English and are often illiterate even in their own language.

Observers say Social Scientists are in such short supply in HTS, that they are being jumped ahead of their designated training classes and are being deployed early minus proper training to survive in a war zone. Uniformed military personnel who have “done the time” in country express bewilderment at command decisions that lead to “field training” conducted by inexperienced National Guardsmen such as the Texas Army National Guard.

Some in the “Guard” have done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq and have the credentials for training. But some have just arrived in-country and are not qualified for the effort

Sources say, “active duty personnel find  HTS is useless, and only serves to extend the line to the DFAC (Dining Hall).”

A modest degree of competence in the ethnology of Afghanistan leads to the conclusion that the “tribe” (recall the advisory “It’s the tribes stupid!”, The Atlantic, November 2007), the chief target of HTS and its imperial umbrella will never die. Everything the American savage killing machine encounters in Afghanistan is going to be loaded with a bomb—from the goat in the local market to cherry pie to Amy’s “provocative top” to the Kuchi camel to the turban and beard of the village leader to the Zadran boy who is cracking pine nuts. No matter how many and what kind of Callahans the HTS parades in Afghanistan and no matter what promises HTS makes and who it bribes, resistance to the contaminating presence of the freaked out American war machine will be lurking in every corner of inhabited Afghanistan.

Edward “Ted” Callahan is the newest American “authority” on Afghanistan. He claims a colorful background for himself. He must be an expert multi-tasker. Ted is or is imagined by the GIs in Afghanistan to be a spy, a detective, a member of the Special Forces, a CIA agent, a journalist, mountaineer, mountain and river guide. All or some of these he might be. He also claims to have conducted “research” and climbed mountains in northern Afghanistan. He has worked for Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, the organization bent on radicalizing women’s culture in Afghanistan. Mortenson, author of the Three Cups of Tea, also engaged in mountaineering in South Asia to prior embarking on his culture cleansing project in Afghanistan.

Ted Callahan is quite clear about his politics. He says “I consider this war to be justified.” But he is dead wrong in hallucinating: “my earlier field research of 18 months taught me that the majority (of) Afghans feels (sic) the same”. Ted Callahan, where and when did you do “field research” in Afghanistan? What and where is/are the ethnographic, social and cultural unit(s) of analysis(es) on which you base this conclusion? You claim to have visited northern Afghanistan. Take us to the specific location(s) where you conducted “field research.” Please document for us the specific dates of your ethnographic researches in these locations. You seem to have learned all the popular tricks used by many Euro-American ethnographers of Afghanistan for constructing academic, professional, and political capitals out of the concoctive mysteries of “Being There” doing research among the Afghan Others.  The only people who justify the American “war” are the rank and file members of the Northern Alliance who pimped and scouted for the occupation of Afghanistan. Were Callahan’s mountain climbing trips to northern Afghanistan hosted by the Northern Alliance? The overwhelming majority of the people of Afghanistan, the region, the Muslim World, the people of the United States and the global system believe that this war is an unjustified enterprise against preindustrial Muslim Afghanistan initiated and maintained by fascist Zionists and the weapon making industries of the United States and Israel.

Callahan, is a “pride and joy” graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. The department houses the government funded American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. Ted Callahan imagines himself as an “amateur” “ethnographer” doing “ethnography” while speaking to the ethical standards of institutional anthropology. But his competence in anthropology and ethnography is doubtful. Claiming the ability to speak Chinese and having graduate anthropology courses at Boston University on his transcript do not produce these qualifications. His claim about “research” among the Kirghiz pastoralists and other ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan lacks cultural, temporal, and spatial specificity. Let us have a close look at selected features of his ethnographic tour in eastern Afghanistan.

Dari is the lingua franca of Afghanistan. It is the language of state bureaucracy and the market. Every ethnic group in Afghanistan (including Zadran and Kuchi Paxtuns) except the Farsiwan (Ethnic Dari speakers) speak two languages—their native/mother language and Dari. Thus, a person with competence in speaking Dari will be able to engage Paxtuns everywhere in Dari. Ted Callahan claims to speak Dari. Yet he is accompanied by an interpreter named “Rex”. We are not told about the cultural background of Rex. Nor do we know the linguistic mediums used in Callahan’s interactions with the Zadrans and Kuchis.

With his Dari competence Callahan could have interacted without an interpreter with the local Zadran and Kuchi population. Why then the presence of Rex, the interpreter? Here is a stark collision between Callahan’s claimed linguistic competence and local cultural and linguistic reality. Callahan writes: “As soon as they (the Kochis) noticed that I understand, they’ll lift their hands and say: ‘Azeemat’, Well done”. But, the morpheme ‘azeemat (in Dari and Paxtu [from the Arabic root ‘azm, firm resolution, determination]) means departure, leaving, starting to leave. The accompanying body language (lifted hands) underscores this equivalent of “goodbye.” The Kuchis say goodbye, Callahan thinks he has done well! In the absence of adequate local cultural competence, especially linguistic competence, how can an ethnographer, especially an anthropological ethnographer, meaningfully and properly process the surrounding social and cultural multilayered complexity?

The pastoral nomads of Afghanistan produce sheep and goats. There are no cattle breeding pastoral nomads in Afghanistan or South Asia. Cattle is produced by sedentary agriculturalists in this region. That the Kuchis in eastern Afghanistan “move from pasture to pasture with their cattle” is a groundless ethnographic assertion.

In the early 1970s a major development project was undertaken in Paktia province (the location of Callahan’s detective work) with the help of the West German government. German social scientists connected with this project have written extensively about social and cultural conditions in the Khost area. It appears that Callahan is unaware of these writings.  The anthropologist Alef-Shah Zadran (PhD, Anthropology, SUNY-Buffalo, 1977, currently with Kabul University) wrote his doctoral thesis about  Almara, a Paxtun village, fifteen miles east of Khost. Zadran spent twelve continuous months during 1975-1976 in Almara.

Ted Callahan’s “business plan” for the marketing of Zadran Jalghoza (pine nuts) in “New York specialty shops” is somewhat lagging behind the fast moving dynamics of regional and global markets. Starting in early 1990s, Zadrani Jalghoza (and other Afghan dried fruits) have been imported to the United States. Jalghoza is packaged and marketed in Afghan and South Asian food stores in the United States from coast to coast. The importer and packager is “AHU BARAH” (telephone no. 516-396-0710). Needless to say, shelled pine nuts are a standard item is Middle Eastern and South Asian cuisine.

If Forward Operating Base Salerno near Khost includes “Amy” with “tight jeans and provocative top” who “in one and a half years…has absorbed an encyclopedic knowledge about this area which comes flowing out of her mouth,” why inconvenience a raw youth like Ted Callahan in such dangerous detective work? Why not have one of those Afghan interpreters (“terps”) get the answers for the commanding officers and/or Amy from the Zadran or Kuchi subjects. Perhaps Afghans terps are not trustworthy. Even then, why is the presence of someone with Ted Callahan’s qualifications necessary in HTS operations in Paktia?

The people of Afghanistan have not and do not “despise” the Hazaras. Yes, they are a numerical minority in the country and have been on the receiving end of individual discrimination, not necessarily institutional discrimination. However, over the last thirty years this numerical minority has become politically quite powerful at the center and in their highland periphery. Currently the Hazaras are envied in Afghanistan for their ethnic and political solidarity and outspoken presence in the Kabul government.

To close, let us ask: what is anthropological about Ted Callahan’s thinking and writing? Nothing. What is the ethnographic authority of his detective work in Paktia, Afghanistan? None. No anthropologist worth her/his salt and no properly educated and experienced student of Culture would want to be associated with the HTS, with minds like Montgomery McFate, David Petraeus, Michael Howard, and the encyclopedic woman with the provocative top even if one was utterly desperate for company.

Selected Sources:

Ted Callahan wins American Institute of Afghanistan Studies first AIAS Student Paper Prize:

http://www.caorc.org/highlights/aias/aias-2005-10-06.htm

Ted Callahan bio on Altitude Junkies:

http://www.altitudejunkies.com/tedcallahan.html

Boston University Anthropology profile of Edward (“Ted”) Callahan Jr:

http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/graduate/students/e-callahan/

Ted Callahan bio on Mountain Madness (scroll down):

http://www.mountainmadness.com/about/guides.cfm

Ted Callahan’s letter to the New York Times:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E5D81531F936A35751C1A96F9C8B63

Congressional Research Service: “Afghanistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance” (citing Callahan on page 5):

http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/139236.pdf

Of Related Interest (recommended):

Three Cups of Tea for Imperialism! Greg Mortenson’s Participatory Militarism
http://www.counterpunch.org/barker08102010.html

“Col Sharon Hamilton [acting HTS program manager], does not know what is going on here in Iraq because if she was aware of the behavior here, she would not tolerate the dysfunction that continues within the organization.”

“The rules and regulations within the HTS program only apply to minorities or other people whom the team leaders and management dislike.”

The US Army’s Human Terrain System continues to experience  personnel troubles. “Nothing has really changed”, said sources. The reasons for that appear to be due, in part, from the fallout left behind by tag team Fondacaro & McFate, and ongoing reports of hostile working environments for both women and minorities within HTS.

But before getting to that, some updates are in order.

The Center for Naval Analyses has submitted its report to the Undersecretary of Defense/Intelligence. House Armed Services Committee members will be briefed soon on the findings. The U.S .Army’s  Administrative Review findings are unknown at this time. The National Defense University is conducting a study on HTS looking into internal performance/interagency matters.

Dr. Max Forte at Zero Anthropology has scoured through the WikiLeaks Afghan War files. He found a number of entries on HTS/HTT and is currently writing a pro-con series on the subject. Among other things, the findings raise, yet again, the issue of intelligence gathering and “interviewing” wounded and suspected insurgents. And there is also credit given where due for HTT’s providing legitimate support to military personnel.

Mark Solomon, apparently in HTS program management at BAE Systems is also a real estate agent apparently picking up some extra cash in off-hours. Observers wonder how he finds the time. Solomon did not respond to questions—sent by email–on the matter.

Former HTS graduate Dr. Nancy Kobrin writes for Family Security Matters, a well funded neoconservative non-profit. This HTS graduate recently wrote that “Arab Muslim culture is so rife with deprivation and victimhood, nothing is ever enough…Saudis and other Muslims do not know how to mourn their losses. They stay glued together like a big enmeshed dysfunctional family defending their wounds and licking them. They bully to get what they want, but even then it is never enough. They avenge by the sword.”

Rotten Management/Leadership in Field

Prior to Steve Fondacaro departing from the HTS program he apparently setup one of his friends, Leslie Kayanan, with a program management position in  Iraq. Kayanan (Asian American) is described by sources as a “weak leader”.

“This  was not a good decision because Kayanan was part of the original dysfunction in the program. He was removed from the Human Resources section of HTS and sent down range where he continues to be disruptive,” said observers. “If you don’t kiss up to him and others in management, you are not part of the clique and may not get comp time.”

Job security—and staying alive–is tough enough for the best of the HTS’ers without having to worry about joining an ass-kissing fraternity.

But being part of the clique/fraternity has its rewards. “There  are  some Team Leaders in-country that don’t do anything and get paid six figures. There are Team Leaders in the program who have never been outside the wire. But they will send their teams outside the wire and expect the team to respect him or her as a Team Leader. There was a father and son team who would just show up for work and drink coffee and and  still bill for comp time.”

According to some observers, pushing program diversity is not high on management’s to do list. “The HTS program only has three African Americans in leadership positions.” Observers say that for African Americans to “get in” they have to have a PhD or be on close terms with Montgomery McFate or personnel that remain from former tag- team Fondacaro-McFate. Evidently, another African American was recently moved into a leadership position.

“Minorities and others in the program have been publicly humiliated by management. Leadership will plot with other HTS personnel to get rid of them just because of the color of their skin or they just don’t like them”, said sources. “The rules and regulations within the HTS program only apply to minorities or other people whom the Team Leaders and management dislike.  As a result this organization has a lot of disgruntled employees,”  they said.

“If you check recent statistics you will notice in Iraq that HTS management puts the white females with no military experience in Team Leader positions just because they are friends with McFate.”

There are reports of personnel vacationing to visit friends and family but disguising it as program “research”. Management appears to encourage this behavior either through ignorance or acceptance of the practice.

Sources said that some team leaders in the program do not “have a clue as to what is going on” and will not consult experienced personnel for advice because they believe they above such practices.  Team leaders have the uncanny ability to remain employed by HTS even when the client tells them to “get out.”

“A team leader at HTAT–C lied to the commanding general and was asked to leave the area of operations.  HTS management put him at an HTAT elsewhere in-country. What a disgrace.”

1. Human Terrain Teams in Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary: Raw Data
2. Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary: Problems to Note, More to Come on Human Terrain Teams
3. Human Terrain System in Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary: Searching for Evidence of the Positive

At the end of the second article, I wrote about the Human Terrain System getting its worst walloping yet as a result of these seemingly banal little records, and I added: “the [HTS] program managers should be going into serious damage control mode right now and preparing their own public statement, given evidence now in plain view right on this screen. They see it, and they know precisely what we mean.” Instead, they seem to be playing it cool, waiting to see who knows what they think they know, and who is willing to be the first to say it, instead of releasing any official statements. Perhaps current senior HTS insiders misunderstood the direction that debate would take, and decided to do this, which is to speak about civilian casualties and the impact on winning hearts and minds, but we are told that Major Robert Holbert, a member of the first Human Terrain Team to serve in Afghanistan, “couldn’t get Army clearance to answer questions Monday” –presumably that means questions beyond those he did in fact answer. It is unfortunate, because he is intimately familiar with what follows.

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In Plain View: Getting the Intelligence From HTTs

When a Human Terrain Team (HTT) is mentioned in the records leaked to Wikileaks, how does the report writer know what he or she knows about the HTT? The answer seems simple enough, in a number of instances: a HTT is embedded with a larger military unit, the report writer indicates where the HTT is, what it is doing at a given moment, and what it plans to do. As for what HTTs themselves report, none of these records are HTT reports. Their reports go elsewhere and have an altogether different form–some have been uploaded to this site’s document box (here is one recent example), and you can see new ones being released at Public Intelligence. So when a record indicates what was recorded by a member or members of a HTT, how does the report writer know that, and who are these report writers?

In some instances, the writers of the reports providing HTT information are in military intelligence. They are either S-2, where an S-2 is a battalion or brigade intelligence staff officer (in an Army or Marine Corps battalion or regiment), or they are HUMINT (Human Intelligence) operatives, and you can read about HUMINT in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and elsewhere.

Before going further, and to better understand the significance of this part, one must keep in mind here the many instances in the American Anthropological Association’s final report on HTS (by the Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities) where it was explained that,

“the [HTS] program is housed within a DoD intelligence asset…it has reportedly been briefed as such an asset, and…a variety of circumstances of the work of Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) ‘on the ground’ in Iraq and Afghanistan create a significant likelihood that HTS data will in some way be used as part of military intelligence, advertently or inadvertently” (p. 4).

In a written response to the AAA’s queries, HTS’ Montgomery McFate stated:

“Protection of informant confidentiality is strongly emphasized because insurgent groups may target local Iraqis and Afghanis [sic] if proper measures for securing identity are not maintained. HTTs code their notes, store them securely, and sanitize their information to ensure anonymity and confidentiality.” (p. 33)

Even a recent job ad for a HTS Research Manager states about HTTs: “The teams will not engage in combat missions, nor does it [sic] collect intelligence.”

The AAA report also revealed the following, and I quote from it at length because it has now received further validation from these leaked reports, as we shall see:

The suggestion is that in practice the relationship between unclassified or open data collection and intelligence collection, especially in the field or downrange, is very close and that the two are perhaps hopelessly entangled. Or, as one observer put it, “Everyone talks to everyone else out here.” (p. 38)

Insofar as we are aware, currently there is no known mechanism for “feeding” raw data from HTS to the intelligence community [MF: this must now be revised, given what follows]. At the same time…on the ground the differences between HTS-type data collection and intelligence gathering are unclear within HTTs (p. 38)

While HTS spokespersons have consistently claimed that HTS personnel and data has not been used for the targeting of enemy populations, at least some statements by HTS social scientists support critics claims that HTS data can be utilized for such ends (p. 38)

the likelihood that HTTs can work closely with both military and civilian colleagues but also remain well clear of pressures – either direct or once or twice removed – to generate any cultural intelligence appears low. In fact the HTS public account dissociating it from any and all intelligence gathering runs contrary to a number of accounts from government insiders suggesting that the initial idea for some sort of human terrain program grew out of a growing recognition of the need to build up precisely that aspect of intelligence collection and analysis. (p. 39)

At least one deployed HTS social scientist was in fact physically located in the intelligence fusion center (p. 39)

That some of the records we read were written by intelligence personnel is one issue. More important is how they obtained the information “reported” by HTTs that we read in these reports.

In some cases, what we are reading is information “drawn” from actual, “raw” field notes, internally “leaked” by one or more HTT members to military intelligence. That is the mechanism by which raw data is fed to intelligence, that the AAA’s CEAUSSIC guessed about above. In case anyone is not following, we are dealing with one or more individuals in HTTs in Afghanistan who were intelligence analysts and who, without the knowledge or permission of fellow HTT members, copied their private field notes and put the information into the intelligence stream. This, I must emphasize, is not conjecture on my part, nor simply an “interpretation.” The evidence of this process has left its marks, as inscribed in various places throughout the leaked records provided by Wikileaks. HTS program managers, and their internal “leakers” to military intelligence, must have seen these reports for themselves by now, and see them in plain view, black on white. There is no denying them now, and focusing on John Stanton’s sourcing won’t cut it (and really, never did).

That such an internal spying program existed/exists, can only be with the knowledge and at least the tacit assent of both the higher ups in HTS–it is impossible that McFate and Fondacaro would not have known about it–and the military intelligence branches. This is a very grave violation of the confidentiality of HTT sources and their fieldnotes. It also suggests that the periodic noises that senior managers make about developing ethical guidelines, is meant as propaganda to assuage external critics, and to placate the consciences of its employees. Knowing this now, that this has happened and probably continues to happen, ought to tell those considering joining HTS that they are likely committing  career suicide, and that their best intentions and more noble aims will be subverted. A number of those who have been on the inside of course know about this already, and are aghast at what they are seeing online, but for some it may come as shocking news. The “line” between HTT and HUMINT is not just blurred, it is actively and surreptitiously breached.

This can have extremely grave ramifications, beyond the reputations and careers of HTT members, beyond the irreparably damaged public profile of HTS itself. As we heard already, while Col. Martin Schweitzer’s comments about HTTs helping to reduce lethal operations have received abundant air play in the media–what has apparently not been noticed (unless you watch that video) is the part at the end where he affirms that Special Operations Forces do rely on the products of HTTs. Apparently they can also rely on military intelligence partners to get them what they need, without HTT members having a chance to decide what information to convey and in what shape.

That the leaders of the Human Terrain System sit by silently, as these Wikileaks records unfold in public view, demonstrates a remarkably glacial indifference and stony demeanor.

Identifying Sympathies for the Enemy, Battlefield Interrogations, and HUMINT

On Haqqani’s Trail

“The Haqqani network may be a possible link between this town and Pakistan” was stated in a 31 July 2007 extract from HTT fieldnotes about the village of Kandaw Kalay in the Shwak District. Some will contend this is not targeting: targeting would require the name of the person, his location at a given time, how many civilians are around him, etc. It is targeting an entire village however, as a place of interest for Special Ops. In October of last year, that exact village was targeted in a raid (and one should note that the Wikileaks records did not help us to find that information). (I say “village” with some caution–it is hard to see what that place is from the record’s map location).

For U.S. forces operating in Regional Command East (RC East), tracking Haqqani and his network (noted as HQN in the records) is an obvious matter of urgent interest. Between 2006 and 2008, the Wikileaks records show at least four IED detonations targeting supply trucks in the Shwak District. On 31 August 2007 the report is that the HTT was able to gather the following information: “Hakani has a great influence in their area.” On 06 September 2007, in what is wrongly/misleadingly titled a “HTT Report,” but is instead another instance of lifting HTT members’ fieldnotes and putting them into the hands of intelligence, we read:

“ACM [anti-coalition militia] influence in Gerda Serai: Haqqani himself belongs to the Sultan Khel Tribe. Some of Haqqanis sons and many of his extended relatives are still reside in Gerda Serai. Gerda Serai is without a doubt, a Haqqani network stronghold. The Parangi tribe is also subject to strong Taliban influence, although the Parangi are not believed to share the Talibans ideology. They simply provide shelter and material support. Once OPN Khyber ends, it is believed that HQN and Taliban forces will return to the district in force.”

Channeling Information to Collection Management

“Information/intel flow from maneuver unit to CA/PRT to CMA” reads a line from a 25 August 2007 report, referring to a full team consisting of doctors, medics, a veterinarian, linguists, and a HTT, moving with members of Combined Joint Task Force 82 (CJTF-82) and a CMA team (“collection management”). Collection management is defined in the joint intelligence doctrine manual as “the process of converting intelligence requirements into collection requirements, establishing, tasking or coordinating with appropriate collection sources or agencies, monitoring results and retasking, as required” (source1, and see the US Air Force Intelligence Targeting Guide).

Locating Suicide Bombers

On 14 June 2008, a record dealing with a demonstration by Afghans in Zormat, a demonstration that is clearly causing some anxiety for U.S. forces, although we are not told what was the object of the demonstration, just that it was “non-hostile” (though that did not stop an Afghan policeman from killing a demonstrator and wounding five others). In what might have escalated into significant action, a HTT embedded with Task Force Panther is said to have “received reports of possible suicide bombers” around the area of a demonstration taking place in the bazaar.

Battlefield Interrogations

If HTTs are supposed to conduct battlefield interrogations, it’s not in their job descriptions. One wonders what training they receive for what is essentially an intelligence function, with very direct and immediate consequences for those interviewed. On 03 October 2007, Task Force Eagle (C Company) assisted members of the Afghan National Army, and their American mentors in an Embedded Training Team, in a firefight with “anti-coalition militia” that resulted in five wounded ANA troops, and one wounded ETT member. Three ANA trucks, and one ETT armoured vehicle were badly damaged. However, “later in the day, two fighting aged males showed up at FOB Orgun E with gun shot wounds.” They claimed they had been ambushed by the ANA, and apparently claimed to be non-combatants. The suspicious thing about their story is that members of the ETT and the ANA forces “reported there were no civilians at the ambush location.” These two individuals were treated for their wounds, and then escorted to Forward Operating Base Salerno for additional treatment.

What is important to note that is that an intelligence unit, “the Fury S-2 shop,” had the two Afghans interviewed by a HTT.

On 12 August 2009, a HTT found itself under direct fire, alongside combat troops of the 3-71 Cavalry Regiment “Titans” 10th Mountain Division, whose home base is in Fort Drum, New York. Fire came from a fortification that the record writer referred to as a “qalat.” Two F-16s were called in for an airstrike—which does not seem to have occurred. Two civilians, mistaken for enemy combatants, were wounded. One U.S. soldier was also wounded. There were no enemy casualties. We read: “Battle X reports 3/B is having HTT question 15 mams (MF: women?) that were in close vic (MF: vicinity) to burning qalat they took fire from. Also questioning 30-40 males in the village.” A human intelligence (HUMINT) collection team (HCT) was also present and conducting interviews. In fact, the report writes of the HTT and HCT as covering the exact same ground: interviewing the same people, in the same number.

A Revised Job Advertisement for HTS

Taking into account what we now know about the work of Human Terrain Teams, actual job ads for HTS ought to be drastically revised, in the interest of transparency, and to minimize the frequent conflicts in the consciences of their employees that have led many to walk out on the program, and quite a few to act as whistle blowers in their own right. Actual job ads have been revised, since HTS now uses a tool designed for the intelligence community, the TIGR (tactical ground reporting) unit made by Ascend Intelligence, which we previously talked about here. More needs to be said about how fieldnotes are not private and confidential, leaks are built into the program, the work of HTTs is destined for intelligence collectors, analysts, and Special Ops, and that they will be required to do battlefield interrogations, and occasionally expose themselves to grave bodily harm.

A Final Note?

Having said all of this, and speaking only for myself, I really cannot imagine how I would have anything further to write about the Human Terrain System, unless certain individuals decide to come out and speak out in public. John Stanton is likely to have more news reports, and more leaks, and those will get priority placement on this site, more than anything else I might have written. I had planned a few more posts, and have since dumped them: they were itsy-bitsy pieces of what now almost appear to be random trivia, not sewn together to amount to an explanatory and critical narrative as above, and adding little more than mass. As far as I am concerned, this is the turning point, just the beginning, as the head of the snake begins to devour its tail.

While it is true that this is largely “thanks” to Wikileaks and their source(s), there is also a great deal about this release that should provoke intense outrage, for having essentially produced a gigantic hit list, for which I voluntarily but unknowingly paid a sum. The “do no harm” principle has been utterly ignored by Wikileaks. I have much more to say about Wikileaks, not likely to appear on this site however. In the meantime, the only other anthropology blog to have discussed the Wikileaks records (that I know about), is Savage Minds, with another very good article by Zoe Wool at the University of Toronto–see: Raw and Cooked Facts in Wikileaks’ “Afghan War Diaries, 2004-2010.”

Ted Callahan, American "anthropologist," in a photograph displayed in Germany's GEO magazine this past May.

Continuing from the last item on this topic, the following are more examples of recent European press coverage of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System and its embedding of civilian social scientists in counterinsurgency missions. One thing that immediately stands out from most of these articles is the emphasis not on “civilian social scientists,” but specifically anthropologists. Still written as if this were 2007, and with the aid of people in HTS such as Montgomery McFate and Ted Callahan, no effort is made to minimize mention of anthropology–despite the fact that in the North American media the increased emphasis is now on “social scientists” in the program, and HTS itself tells the home audience that few anthropologists have actually joined the program, and in some circles, that it is not an anthropology program. Abroad, the story is different–anthropology is still being used to sell HTS. As to what the purposes behind such press coverage may be, that is open to question. If the articles are meant to sell the war in Afghanistan as “winnable” if fought in a “smart” way, then the articles are a waste of time: the majority of Europeans oppose the war, and they are still a bit too wise to be bought with little fluff pieces about American “smarts” and American “can do.” The danger might be that people just remember about “anthropologists” aiding in counterinsurgency, serving to eliminate the boundary between an independent and critical anthropology, and one that is blurred beyond recognition as a tool of military planning. No wonder then that the American Anthropological Association is keen to create as much distance as possible between anthropology and HTS. These articles suggest that they have been partly successful, even if in most instances anthropological criticisms of HTS are relegated to a minor paragraph, included as a formality, a token to “balance.” Thus far, as far as I know and recall, outside of the U.S. (many of whose media are themselves international) there has been press coverage of HTS in media outlets based in Canada, Mexico, Trinidad & Tobago, Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK, Romania, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, and South Korea.

Here is the latest batch:

GERMANY

I do not speak or read German, and therefore I am unable to offer anything more than links to the severely deficient services of Google Translate.

GEO first ran an extended magazine article on 05 May 2010, the whole of which can be viewed and downloaded from here, titled “Ein Ethnologe im Krieg.” It is a grandiose, richly illustrated piece, that seems to focus on the work of anthropologist Ted Callahan.

Online you can also see GEO‘s “Odyssee in Afghanistan” (“Odyssey in Afghanistan“), mostly part of an electronic diary by war photographer Marco di Lauro and his exchanges with Ted Callahan.

AUSTRIA

On 30 June 2010, Die Presse ran a story story titled “Ethik: Anthropologen an die Front?” (“Ethics: Anthropologists at the front?“)–and once again anthropologist, like ethnographer, is in the very title. However, this piece gives much more attention to criticisms of HTS, especially on ethical and political grounds, and benefits from the input of Roberto J. González.

ROMANIA

On 05 July 2010, the Romanian newspaper, Adevarul, published “Pentagonul recrutează antropologi pentru Afganistan” (“Pentagon recruited anthropologists to Afghanistan“). Despite being Italian, I still find that reading Romanian poses many challenges. This story seems to feature yet another HTS anthropologist (or at least anthropology is implied in the article), Patrick Carnahan– “He went from house to house, seeking interaction with Afghans. He had no weapon, and was the only American. His background is not in the military but in the social sciences….[part of] a controversial U.S. military-funded program, which proposes creating joint teams of military and anthropologists.” A minor paragraph on the ethical problems of HTS appears at the bottom of the story, fogged up by being enveloped in details of Paula Loyd’s killing. As far as short media pieces go, this one is virtually indistinguishable from countless published in the U.S. over the past two years.

UNITED KINGDOM

There have been a number of media reports about HTS in the UK over the past two years, mostly in the BBC (a radio documentary, a BBC commentary by anthropologist John Gledhill, a recent extended blog post, and other items). Most of the materials have been quite detailed, informative, and sometimes critical (at the very least, sober).

On 11 June 2010, The Guardian published James Denselow’s “Scholar soldiers in Afghanistan are on dangerous terrain” with the subheading “Using social scientists in military human terrain teams blurs the lines between independent academia and partisan militarism.” In my opinion, this is among the better pieces we have seen in the mainstream media, for its depth of context, its critical analysis, and its refusal to engage in the usual boosterism. About media coverage in the UK and US, about HTS, Denselow writes (careful not to repeat that HTS is anthropology),

One of the US military’s experiments with harnessing civilian power has been the creation of human terrain teams (HTT). This embedding of social scientists into military brigades to provide cultural understanding and intelligence has received little coverage in the UK while in the US it is seen as one of the most controversial aspects of the war.

Denselow comes to the conclusion that, “It is this dangerous blurring between independent academia and partisan militarism that is at the crux of understanding the human terrain system.” He also relies on feedback from Hugh Gusterson for this article.

Not news media as such, I should mention an “intriguing” article by the UK Ministry of Defence, “Military develops its cultural understanding of Afghanistan” published on 24 February 2010. There is a lot in there that is worthy of note, and commentary. Essentially the MOD has come up with its own answer to HTS, with what it calls the Defence Cultural Specialist Unit (DCSU). It promises to do what HTS does, and more: cultural awareness training for troops, and providing “cultural specialists” to be deployed (who appear to be, for the most part, linguists). A DCSU was involved in the recent failure, Operation Moshtarak, in the so-called “Marjah region.” The DCSU is based at Royal Air Force base Henlow, and officially came into being this past April. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Windmill, from the MOD’s Afghan specialist implementation team, set up the DCSU. The DCSU’s “cultural advisors,” deployed in Afghanistan, perform a mission very similar to that of HTS: “They…help identify and understand issues relating to the local cultural, political, economic, social and historical environment to help commanders make better and more informed decisions.” There are 25 such individuals, assigned to senior military commanders, with the intention of increasing their number to 40. Each one speaks either Dari and/or Pashto. This article makes no mention of any attempt to recruit civilian social scientists, giving the impression that all DCSU staff are themselves military. Only in one case is there a mention of a civilian: a civilian cultural specialist, Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam. Perhaps, as with Canada’s “white situational awareness teams,” the British have found more indirect ways of recruiting social scientists.

In some overdue posts, including this and the next one or two, I draw your attention to how the mass mediated propaganda for the Human Terrain System has spread to elements of the European press.

Back on 05 March 2010, one of Italy’s oldest and most prominent–not to mention right wing–dailies, Corriere della Sera, carried a flattering article of Mongtomery McFate and “her” Human Terrain System (if that link expires, the archive of the original page can be found here). The article by Raffaele Oriani was headlined as follows:

PARLA L’ANTROPOLOGA AMERICANA MONTGOMERY MCFATE
Vi svelo i veri avatar
«Mi hanno chiamata i militari. Avevano capito che non bastavano le armi per sconfiggere la guerriglia»

My translation:
Montgomery McFate, American anthropologist, speaks
I’ll show you the real Avatars
“The military called me. They understood that weapons were not enough for defeating the guerrillas”

The article mentions Danger Room‘s praise for McFate as one of the top people that Obama should listen to, and adds that The Atlantic also listed her as one of the “brave new thinkers,” which clearly amounted to authorization for the pro-American Corriere to jump in and join the round of applause. McFate basks in the glow of the widely acclaimed film by James Cameron, Avatar, the article continues,

Sì, perché l’idea di abbinare conquista e conoscenza, prove di dominio e assaggi di convivenza, su Pandora prende il volto della studiosa Grace Augustine – alias Sigourney Weaver – ma nelle guerre di tutti i giorni ha il copyright di questa quarantacinquenne laureata a Yale e specializzata ad Harvard. Non per nulla Montgomery McFate ha messo i suoi occhialini da intellettuale al servizio dell’esercito Usa: a detta dello stesso generale David Petraeus, il comandante della svolta in Iraq, la sua consulenza antropologica è stata decisiva per migliorare la situazione sul campo.

My translation:
Yes, because the idea of marrying conquest with conscience, evidence of domination and a taste  of coexistence, is what Pandora is confronted with by the scholar, Grace Augustine–alias Sigourney Weaver–but in real everyday wars, the copyright to this idea belongs to this forty-five year old graduate of Yale and Harvard. Montgomery McFate has put on her intellectual’s eyeglasses in service of the U.S. military: General David Petraeus himself, the commander of the surge in Iraq, said that her anthropological advice was crucial for improving the situation on the ground.

McFate says she experienced the reverse of the character played by Weaver in Avatar (but not, otherwise, questioning how the press casts her, McFate, as some superstar). In McFate’s case, the military came to her, she tells the Corriere:

«Nel mio caso è successo il contrario » spiega McFate. «Fin dal 2004 è stata la frustrazione dei comandanti in prima linea a convincere Washington che in Iraq e in Afganistan non c’era modo di sconfiggere la guerriglia senza conoscere la società che ci circondava». Loro ponevano un problema, lei offriva la soluzione: «Il gap di conoscenza di cui soffrono i nostri soldati» scrive McFate sulla Military Review nella primavera 2005 «è dovuto all’emarginazione quasi totale dell’antropologia da parte dell’establishment militare». Come confessava candidamente un capitano di stanza nel deserto attorno a Baghdad: «So sparare, so uccidere, ma nessuno mi ha mai insegnato come si accetta l’invito a pranzo di uno sceicco». Il marine di Avatar scopre i segreti di Pandora seguendo l’esempio della sua bella indigena, i soldati americani dal 2006 imparano a mettersi a tavola grazie a McFate e ai suoi colleghi del programma di consulenza antropologica Human Terrain System.

My translation:
“In my case the opposite happened,” said McFate. “Since 2004 front line commanders faced frustration in trying to convince Washington that in Iraq and Afghanistan there was no way of defeating the guerrillas without knowing the surrounding society.” They [the military] posed a problem, she [McFate] offered the solution: “The knowledge gap suffered by our soldiers,” writes McFate in Military Review in spring 2005 “is due to the almost total exclusion of anthropology by the military establishment.” As a captain stationed in the desert around Baghdad candidly confessed: “I shoot, I can kill, but nobody ever taught me how to accept a sheik’s invitation to lunch.” The marine Avatar discovers the secrets of Pandora by learning from the beautiful indigenous guide; U.S. soldiers since 2006 have learned how to sit at the table thanks to McFate and her colleagues in this anthropological consultancy program known as the Human Terrain System.

Then comes the predictable part: HTS has helped to save lives. How do we know? Finally, McFate confesses we cannot know for certain.

Montgomery McFate è convinta che il suo drappello di antropologi embedded abbia il merito storico di aver fatto diminuire il numero dei civili uccisi per errore. Quanti? Non ci sono statistiche. Ma si racconta che ai posti di blocco la mano aperta per fermare il traffico spesso veniva interpretata come un segno di benvenuto e buon viaggio: le macchine non si fermavano, i marine si agitavano, ed erano stragi anche là. Come conferma un comandante della 56ma brigata di combattimento: «Da quando è operativo lo Human Terrain System siamo passati dal risolvere i problemi in modo letale, ad applicare soluzioni non letali». O, per dirla con l’ingenuo cinismo di un ufficiale della 172ma brigata: «Il programma ci ha fornito uno strumento per non ammazzare la gente».

My translation:
Montgomery McFate is convinced that her squad of embedded anthropologists merits the historical distinction of having decreased the number of civilians killed by mistake. How many? There are no statistics. But it is said [reporter does not say who says this] that at checkpoints an open hand to stop traffic was often interpreted as a sign of welcome, wishing a pleasant journey: cars did not stop, the marines got agitated, and massacres happened. As confirmed by a commander of the 56th Combat Brigade: “Since the Human Terrain System became operational we have moved from solving problems in a lethal way to non-lethal solutions.” Or, to quote the naive cynicism of an officer of the 172nd Brigade: “The program has given us a tool for not killing people.”

McFate then explains how originally the program was about preparing software to be used by troops, as part of “Cultural Preparation of the Environment,” but what was really needed was “people in the flesh who understood something.” The software exists still, the reporter notes, now called the MapHT Toolkit which offers a panoramic view of customs and power structures in a given area. However, and here the reporter embellishes considerably by presenting as fact what is untrue: “in the meantime there have arrived dozens of specialists on the society, economy and religion of the Middle East,” he writes, when in fact the opposite was largely the case, that is, most HTS academics had no prior knowledge, experience, or expertise in the region. McFate tells the reporter that “we concern ourselves with everything, from archaeological consultancy [cultural resources management], to developing programs for women’s health, to monitoring in order to avoid bloody skirmishes during elections.” Not able to cite a single anthropologist for support, McFate once again tuns to her revered figure of Lawrence of Arabia, harking back to colonial domination:

«Non c’è nulla di strano in questa commistione tra scienza ed esercito» insiste McFate. «Per fare la guerra hai bisogno di sviluppare sia l’empatia sia la capacità di prendere le distanze dal nemico. In fondo se T.E. Lawrence è potuto diventare Lawrence d’Arabia è anche merito della sua passione per l’antropologia».

My translation:
“There’s nothing wrong with this blend of science and the military,” insists McFate. “To go to war you need to develop both empathy and the ability to distance yourself from the enemy. Basically if TE Lawrence was able to become Lawrence of Arabia it was due to his passion for anthropology.”

In response to anthropologists who have criticized her program, and here the article notes the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association, and names David Price in particular, McFate only says:

«La gente ha paura di ciò che non conosce. La diffidenza dell’accademia dipende dal fatto che la maggioranza degli americani non ha più famigliarità con le nostre forze armate»

My translation:
“People are afraid of what they don’t understand. The reason for academic distrust stems from the fact that the majority of Americans [or "the glorious, overweight, self-complacent American populace," as McFate said here]  have lost any familiarity with our armed forces.”

Perhaps a draft would help solve that problem? She does not say. In the end, we are taken back to the Avatar comparison:

Finirà per trovare conforto nell’esempio di Sigourney-Grace? «Augustine mi piace perché è piena di contraddizioni» ammette. «In fondo cerca una soluzione non-violenta a un imperativo economico: nel film finisce per ribellarsi e per essere uccisa, nella vita spero che il regista abbia in serbo un finale diverso».

My Translation:
Will she eventually find comfort in the example of Sigourney-Grace? “I like Augustine because she is full of contradictions,” she admits. “Ultimately she is seeking a nonviolent solution to an economic imperative: in the film she ends up rebelling and getting killed, but in real life I hope the director has in mind a different ending for me.”

We’ll see.

For a related article, comparing the Human Terrain System and Avatar, see David H. Price’s article in CounterPunch from 23 December 2009:

Going Native: Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars

Some extracted quotes:

“Since 2007, the occupying U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan have deployed Human Terrain Teams (HTT), complete with HTT “social scientists” using anthropological-ish methods and theories to ease the conquest and occupation of these lands. HTT has no avatared-humans; just supposed “social scientists” who embed with battalions working to reduce friction so that the military can get on with its mission without interference from local populations….”

and I especially liked this part (which relates to the video in the next post):

“Among the more interesting parallels between Avatar and Human Terrain Systems is the way that the video logs that the avatar-ethnographers were required to record were quietly sifted-through by military strategists interested in finding vulnerability to exploit among the local populous. Last week a story in Time magazine quoted Human Terrain Team social scientist in training Ben Wintersteen admitting that in battlefield situations “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject..There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field;” and the AAA’s recent report found that “Reports from HTTs are circulated to all elements of the military, including intelligence assets, both in the field and stateside.” Like the HTT counterparts, the Avatar teams openly talked about trying to win the “hearts, mind, and trust” of the local population (a population that the military derisively called “blue monkeys”) that the military was simply interested in moving or killing. And most significantly, the members of the avatar unit had a naive understanding of the sort of role they could conceivably play in directing the sort of military action that would inevitably occur. Sigourney Weaver’s character, the chain-smoking, pose striking, tough talking Avatar Terrain Team chief social scientist, Grace Augustine, displayed the same sort of unrealistic understanding of what would be done with her research that appears in the seemingly endless Human Terrain friendly features appearing in newspapers and magazines.”

I very much agree with Price’s conclusion:

“On the big screen the transformation of fictional counterinsurgent avatar-anthropologists into insurgents siding with the blue skinned Na’vi endears the avatars to the audience, yet off the screen in our world, this same audience is regularly bombarded by media campaigns designed to endear HTT social scientists embedded with the military to an audience of the American people. The engineered inversions of audience sympathies for anthropologists resisting a military invasion in fiction, and pro-military-anthropologists in nonfiction is easily accomplished because the fictional world of a distant future not pollinated with the forces of nationalism and jingoistic patriotism that permeate our world; a world where anything aligned with militarism is championed over the understanding of others (for reasons other than conquest).”