Encircling Empire: Report #13—Revolution, Intervention, Anthropology

Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period. They are intended to be useful for those interested in: ● contemporary and critical political anthropology ● public anthropology ● imperialism and imperial decline ● militarism/militarization ● the political economy of the world system ● hegemony and soft power ● counterinsurgency ● revolution ● rebellion ● resistance ● protest ● activism ● advocacy ● critique.

This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE.

In this report, first two maps of social media penetration in the Middle East and North Africa, in relation to ongoing revolts; then, a long overdue catalogue of anthropologists writing online about the revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa; then a series of opposing items, those dealing with rejections of any foreign military intervention in Libya (a position best articulated by Fidel Castro), followed by statements by what would otherwise be willing interventionists, in the U.S. government, who find multiple problems with imposing a no-flight-zone, and then those articles and statements  that strongly favour intervention, and the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P); finally, we end with notes on empire at work in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Given that this is our longest report yet, here is a minor short cut—our top recommendations in no particular order:

1. “The narcissism of the iPad imperialists who want to invade Libya,” Brendan O’Neill, The Telegraph (blogs), 25 February 2011
2. “High Risks for Acting Now,” Kori Schake, 02 March 2011
3. Security Council–SC/10187–Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York: Security Council, 6491st Meeting: “In Swift, Decisive Action, Security Council Imposes Tough Measures on Libyan Regime, Adopting Resolution 1970 in Wake of Crackdown on Protesters”
4. “US defence secretary Robert Gates slams ‘loose talk’ about no-fly zones” – The Guardian, 03 March 2011
5. “In one of final addresses to Army, Gates describes vision for military’s future,” Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, 25 February 2011
6. “The militarization of aid and its perils,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 22 February 2011
7. “All-American Decline in a New World: Wars, Vampires, Burned Children, and Indelicate Imbalances,” by Tom Engelhardt, 25 February 2011
8. Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution , byGastón Cordillo

MAPPING SOCIAL MEDIA AND REVOLUTION

Libya Crisis Map – “The CrisisMappers Standby Task Force has been undertaking a mapping of social media, news reports and official situation reports from within Libya and along the borders at the request of OCHA. The Task Force is also aiding in the collection and mapping of 3W information for the response. UNOSAT is kindly hosting the Common Operational Datasets to be used during the emergency. Interaction with these groups is being coordinated by OCHA’s Information Services Section.”

Technology and Revolution—How Wired are the Middle East and North Africa? – surprisingly little, it turns out, which makes one wonder why some call Egypt the “Facebook revolution” when 5.49% of Egypt’s population uses Facebook. What is astounding, and either understated or ignored altogether, is the vast range of cell phone users.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND FIELD REPORTS ON THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS

The following are listed in no particular order, and each one is a highly recommended resource/essay.

Essays:

From Canada’s newest blogging anthropologist, Gastón Cordillo at the University of British Columbia, two essays on the embodiment of revolution, a thought provoking series on “resonance,” taking political agitation to the physical level:

Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution

“What has coalesced as a powerful, unstoppable force on the streets of Egypt is resonance: the assertive collective empathy created by multitudes fighting for the control of space. Resonance is an intensely bodily, spatial, political affair, materialized in the masses of bodies coming together in the streets of Egyptian cities in the past thirteen days, clashing with the police, temporarily dispersed by teargas and bullets, and regrouping again like an relentless swarm to reclaim the streets, push the police back, and saturate space with a collective effervescence. Resonance is what gives life to this human rhizome and the source of its power….”

The Speed of Revolutionary Resonance

“The current wave of revolutionary insurrections seems to be the fastest in history. Revolutions always come in waves, but insurgent shockwaves that once expanded across continents over years or months are now making states crumble, one after another, in a matter of weeks. As the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are rapidly followed by widespread rebellions in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and now Oman, it is clear that these are not just events but nodes of acceleration, which shoot out high-speed resonances in all directions and make millions of bodies fight oppression in myriad places at the same time. This political whirlwind is a distance-dissolving machine. It is also an evolving constellation that shifts its form and pulsation because of the striated nature of the global terrain, one day creating moments of joyful exhilaration on Tahrir Square and a few days later facing unrestrained state violence in Libya. In these mutating territories, we seem to be witnessing an epochal clash between new revolutionary velocities and the old, increasingly eroded supremacy of the state in controlling means of speed-creation….”

“Power, realpolitik, and freedom: Egypt and US Ideals about Freedom” – Ryan Anderson, Ethnografix

“Democracy, it seems, only applies here at home. When it comes to a distant population like the people of Egypt, it seems that many people are willing to sidestep all of the rhetoric about political freedom and openly advocate supporting a repressive policy state, all in the name of ‘our interests’….”

“Democracy or Extremism? Political Ideals and Egypt” – Ryan Anderson, Ethnografix

“The US has a pretty confusing–if not outright contradictory–history of foreign policy. On the surface, we supposedly are the champions of democracy, human rights, and freedom. Right? Those are the ideals that the nation was founded upon, and they continue to play a primary role in the political rhetoric and overall idealism of its people. However….”

“Autocrats, democracy, and pragmatism” – Ryan Anderson, Ethnografix

“Over on a political blog that I check every now and again, one of the respondents to this post argues that the US should keep supporting Mubarak (despite that fact that he’s a SOB), and that they would be perfectly content if the conditions of the last 30 years continued unabated. This is one strain of realpolitik that has been pretty common in certain circles the last few days, one that is akin to a long-running foreign policy philosophy that has reigned in the US for decades….”

“Events in Egypt (everything is fine love the Egypt government)” – Ryan Anderson, Ethnografix

“One of the most blatant moves of the Egyptian government was the decision to close down social media (internet access, cell phone use, etc) to attempt to control popular unrest. Not a good decision–and this speaks to the power of these tools when it comes to political organization and expression. Of course, this whole story is developing as we speak, so it remains to be seen how things will play out….”

Reports from the Field:

The Egyptian Revolution: First Impressions from the Field - Mohammed A. Bamyeh, Portland State University, Sociology of Islam and Muslim Societies

“Everyone I talked to echoed similar transformative themes: they highlighted a sense of wonder at how they discovered their neighbor again, how they never knew that they lived in “society” or the meaning of the word, until this event, and how everyone who yesterday had appeared so distant is now so close. I saw peasant women giving protestors onions to help them recover from teargas attacks; young men dissuading others from acts of vandalism; the National Museum being protected by protestors’ human shield from looting and fire; protestors protecting captured baltagiyya who had been attacking them from being harmed by other protestors; and countless other incidents of generous civility amidst the prevailing destruction and chaos.

“I also saw how demonstrations alternated between battle scenes and debating circles, and how they provided a renewable spectacle in which everyone could see the diverse segments in social life converging on the common idea of bringing down the regime. While world media highlighted uncontrolled chaos, regional implications, and the specter of Islamism in power, the ant’s perspective revealed the relative irrelevance of all of the above considerations. As the Revolution took longer and longer to accomplish the mission of bringing down the regime, protestors themselves began to spend more time highlighting other accomplishments, such as how new ethics were emerging precisely amidst chaos. Those evidenced themselves in a broadly shared sense of personal responsibility for civilization—voluntary street cleaning, standing in line, the complete disappearance of harassment of women in public, returning stolen and found objects, and countless other ethical decisions that had usually been ignored or left for others to worry about….”

“‘You’ll be Late for the Revolution!’ An Anthropologist’s Diary of the Egyptian Revolution” – Samuli Schielke, Jaddaliya

“On 28 January, as millions went out all over the country, I booked my ticket to Cairo for a short visit, with the aim of making myself an idea of the atmosphere, of the sensibility of life of an uprising that had completely taken me by surprise. As an anthropologist, my work in the last years has focussed on the aspirations people have, the frustrations they experience, and the ways they try to find to live a life of dignity under constantly frustrating conditions. But I had not taken seriously the possibility that there would emerge a sudden collective consciousness that it is actually possible to change these conditions. Just days before 25 January, a friend asked whether there could be a revolution in Egypt like there was in Tunisia, and I said no, I don’t think so, because it seems so difficult to mobilise the people in Egypt, and for decades people have expected a revolution to break out in Egypt, but it hasn’t. Well, now it has, and much of what I thought I knew about Egyptian society has to be revised. But much more than revising academic knowledge is now at stake, and the short week I spent in Egypt from 31 January to 6 February also has changed me and my priorities….in the course of a week I transformed from an anthropological observer sympathetic with the events, into an activist committed to the sake of revolution even at personal risk. Personal and political transformation often go hand in hand….”

“The Egyptian Protests: A View from the Ground (The Beginning)” - Gregory Johnsen, Big Think

“…one of the doormen leads police to us.  They separate the Egyptians from the foreigners.  The foreigners they escort out to the street and tell us to go home.  The Egyptians they take away.”

“The Egyptian Protests: A View from the Ground (Neighborhood Watch)” - Gregory Johnsen, Big Think

“It became clear to me what was going to happen.  Mubarak was going to make a play for power essentially attempting to convince people that a police state with him was better than chaos without him.  And that is exactly what happened. There were three groups of looters – undercover thugs from the regime, prisoners that escaped/were set free and other elements looking for free stuff….”

Roundups:

“A wonderful development” – Anthropologists on the Egypt Uprising (updated 6.2.) – antropologi.info

One of Lorenz Khazaleh’s excellent overview essays of a range of anthropologists writing about the Egyptian uprising.

“Saba Mahmood: Democracy is not enough – Anthropologists on the Arab revolution part II” – antropologi.info

Lorenz does it again, his second overview essays featuring many excellent essays, reports, and other resources produced by anthropologists.

Martijn de Koning at CLOSER (Anthropology of Muslims in Europe) is continuing a weekly series of roundups of essays, news, and other documents on the ongoing protests and uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa—see for example:

• “Closing the week 8 – A need to read list of the uprisings in the Middle East”
• “Uprising – Music, Images and The Tunisia and Egypt Revolution on Youtube”
• “Closing the week 5 – Featuring the Tunisia & Egypt Uprising”

“Tunisia and Egypt uprisings – selected bookmarks” – John Postill, media/anthropology

A very useful collection of some of the essays and reports dealing with the role of the broadcast media, as well as social media, and Wikileaks, with reference to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

AGAINST FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION IN LIBYA

Fidel Castro—Reflections from Fidel: NATO’s Inevitable War, Part 1

“Imperialism and NATO – seriously concerned about the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, which produces a large portion of the oil sustaining the consumer economies of the rich, developed countries – could not miss the opportunity to take advantage of Libya’s internal conflict to promote a military intervention. The statements formulated by the United States government from early on were clearly in this vein. The circumstances could hardly be more propitious….”

Fidel Castro—Reflections from Fidel: NATO’s Inevitable War, Part 2

“We totally abstained from expressing any opinions concerning the concepts of the Libyan leadership. We can clearly see that the fundamental concern of the United States and NATO is not Libya, but the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, which they wish to prevent at all costs. It is an irrefutable fact that relations between the United States and its NATO allies in recent years were excellent until the rebellion in Egypt and in Tunisia arose. In high-level meetings between Libya and NATO leaders, none of the latter had any problems with Gaddafi. The country was a secure source of high-quality oil, gas and even potassium supplies. The problems which arose between them in the early decades had been overcome….”

Fidel Castro—Reflections from Fidel: NATO’s plan is to occupy Libya

“One can be in agreement with Gaddafi or not. The world has been invaded with all kind of news, especially through the mass media. We shall have to wait the time needed to discover precisely how much is truth or lies, or a mix of the events, of all kinds, which, in the midst of chaos, have been taking place in Libya. What is absolutely evident to me is that the government of the United States is totally unconcerned about peace in Libya and will not hesitate to give NATO the order to invade that rich country, possibly in a matter of hours or a few days.”

USA Today, Editors: “Our view: No-fly zone in Libya holds more risks than rewards,” 04 March 2011:

“When a crisis like the one in Libya arises, replete with barbaric actions by a dictator against his own people, calls for U.S. military action follow like a spasmodic reflex. Americans see people in trouble, want to help and look to the military to deliver a quick, effective, cost-free blow. But that impulse rarely produces the desired result, which makes the chorus calling for a no-fly zone over Libya sound gratingly off-key, despite the good intentions and notable credentials of some of the advocates….”

“Chavez proposes talks for Libya: Venezuelan president calls for mediation to end crisis while the US and other powers weigh military options,” Al Jazeera English, 01 March 2011: “ ‘We want a peaceful solution … We support peace in the Arab world and in the whole world.’…Chavez said it was better to seek ‘a political solution instead of sending marines to Libya, and better to send a good will mission than for the killing to continue.’ Al Jazeera’s Dima Khatib, reporting from Caracas, said the comments come from ‘Chavez’s ideology that the south can come up with solutions for the south.’… Chavez repeated his warning that the US wanted to invade Libya to get oil, a view that has been voiced by both Cuba and Nicaragua. ‘He is worried that the United States is after the Libyan oil, just like they were after the Iraqi oil. He says that they have gone mad because of the Libyan oil; it’s driving them crazy,’ our correspondent said. ‘He also wondered why doesn’t the world condemn the massacres in Falluja, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’…”

“Chavez says he won’t condemn Libya’s Gadhafi,” Christopher Toothaker, Associated Press, 01 March 2011: Hugo Chavez: “We must be prudent. We know what our political line is: We don’t support invasions, or massacres, or anything like that no matter who does it. A campaign of lies is being spun together regarding Libya.”

“Venezuela: US, allies fomenting Libya’s violence,” Christopher Toothaker, Associated Press, 25 February 2011: “Venezuela’s top diplomat on Thursday echoed Fidel Castro’s accusation that Washington and its allies are fomenting unrest in Libya to justify an invasion to seize North African nation’s oil reserves. Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro claimed the United States and other powerful countries are trying to create a movement inside Libya aimed at toppling Moammar Gadhafi. Maduro did not condemn or defend the violent crackdown on Libyans participating in the popular uprising against Gadhafi’s long rule. He called for a peaceful solution to the upheaval in Libya and questioned the veracity of media reports on the bloody uprising, which has crept closer to Gadhafi’s stronghold in Tripoli. ‘They are creating conditions to justify an invasion of Libya,’ Maduro said. ‘Libya is going through difficult times, which should not be measured with information from imperial news agencies,’ Maduro added, referring to Western media. Gadhafi has been a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Chavez’s political opponents have strongly criticized those close relations. In a Twitter message Thursday, Venezuela’s leftist president said: ‘Viva Libya and its independence! Gadhafi is facing a civil war.’…”

“The narcissism of the iPad imperialists who want to invade Libya,” Brendan O’Neill, The Telegraph (blogs), 25 February 2011: “In a modern political sphere that has its fair share of narcissists and ignoramuses, no one is quite as narcissistic or as ignorant as the liberal interventionist. From the comfort of his Home Counties home, possibly to the sound of birds tweeting on the windowsill, the liberal interventionist will write furious, spittle-stained articles about the need to invade faraway countries in order to topple their dictators. As casually and thoughtlessly as the rest of us write shopping lists, he will pen a 10-point plan for the bombing of Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or Iraq and not give a second thought to the potentially disastrous consequences. Now, having learned nothing from the horrors that they cheer-led like excitable teenage girls over the past 15 years, these bohemian bombers, these latte-sipping lieutenants, these iPad imperialists are back. This time they’re demanding the invasion of Libya….”

“Stop the War Coalition statement on Middle East revolutions,” Stop War UK, 25 February 2011: “There must be no US or British intervention in Libya: the future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen. must be determined by the people of those countries alone. The uprisings sweeping the Middle East deserve the support of all progressive people. They are directed against autocracies which have denied their people basic rights and the possibility of a decent life. These autocracies have also, for the most part, depended on the self-interested support of the big powers, the USA and Britain first of all. Western governments have prioritised cheap oil, arms sales and support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians above the rights of the Arab peoples…. The future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and all the other states facing popular uprisings must be determined by the people of those countries alone. Solidarity with those fighting for their democratic and national freedom is our obligation. We can best discharge it by demanding that the government at long last takes its hands off the Middle East and its people, leaving them to settle accounts with their own rulers.”

Canadian Peace Alliance: “Support the Libyan people. Yes to freedom and democracy across the Arab World! No Military Intervention in Libya”: “The Government of Canada has announced that it will send HMCS Charlottetown to Libya to join the US aircraft carrier fleet led by the USS enterprise. This is part of a much larger NATO led buildup in the area. The Canadian Peace Alliance is opposed to any military intervention in Libya or in the region as a whole. If the western governments were genuine in their desire to help the people of Libya – or Egypt or Tunisia for that matter – they would not have supported the dictators and their regimes. That support for the dictators is a chief reason why the situation is so violent for the people rising up. Western military deployment to Libya is a bit like asking the arsonist to put out their own fire. Far from being a shining light in a humanitarian crisis, western intervention is designed to maintain the status quo and will, in fact make matters worse for the people there.”

“Gadhafi’s LatAm allies show solidarity, caution,” Andrea Rodriguez and Alexandra Olson, Associated Press, 22 February 2011: “The bloody upheaval in Libya is creating an uncomfortable challenge for Moammar Gadhafi’s leftist Latin American allies, with some keeping their distance and others rushing to the defense of a leader they have long embraced as a fellow fighter against U.S. influence in the world. Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said Tuesday that the unrest may be a pretext for a NATO invasion of Libya, while Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega offered support for Gadhafi, saying he had telephoned to express solidarity. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, on the other hand, has stayed mute. Bolivia came closest to criticizing the government in Tripoli, issuing a statement expressing concern over ‘the regrettable loss of many lives’ and urging both sides to find a peaceful solution….”

FROM WASHINGTON AND THE UN: PROBLEMS WITH FOREIGN MILITARY INTERVENTION

“US defence secretary Robert Gates slams ‘loose talk’ about no-fly zones” – The Guardian, 03 March 2011: While UK Prime Minister David Cameron appears eager to impose a no-flight zone, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who seems intent on exiting office by covering his tracks with a series of very sober and critical assessments), stated:

“There is a lot of, frankly, loose talk about some of these military options. Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya to destroy the air defences. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. Then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. That is the way it starts. It also requires more aeroplanes than you would find on a single aircraft carrier. It is a big operation by a big country.”

“Senator: Army could train Libyan opposition in anti-aircraft defense,” Adam Levine, CNN, 03 March 2011:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

“We are working to understand who is legitimate, who is not, but it is premature in our opinion to recognize one group or another. I think it’s important to recognize that there is a great deal of uncertainty about the motives, the opportunism, if you will, of people who are claiming to be leaders right now.”

Senator John McCain’s response to Gates:

“McCain seemed to take offense at Gates’ comment Wednesday that there has been a lot of ‘loose talk’ about military options, including the no-fly zone. ‘May I just say personally, I don’t think it’s loose talk on the part of the people on the ground in Libya, nor the Arab League nor others, including the prime minister of England, that this option should be given the strongest consideration. The perception of Libyan pilots who now take off and land and attack pro-revolutionary forces might prove rather cautionary to them if they think that we will stop them and shoot them down if they carry out those missions’….‘Deterrence is always one of the options that we should have available to the national command authority,’ Dempsey agreed. ‘I will say, of course, that my own personal experience is sometimes the way our potential adversaries interpret our deterrent actions is not exactly as we’ve planned it. But deterrence is a valid option’.”

“US signals caution about Libya military intervention,” Lachlan Carmichael, AFP News, 02 March 2011: “In testimony to the US Senate, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that any US intervention to help opponents of Moamer Kadhafi would be ‘controversial’ both within Libya and the broader Arab community. She has said that Washington understands the Libyan opposition wants to ‘be seen as doing this by themselves’ as they seek ways to dislodge Kadhafi and his forces from the capital Tripoli and other areas they hold. In a speech on Wednesday, Kadhafi warned that ‘thousands’ would die if the West intervened to support the more than two-week old uprising against him.”

From The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” series, “Should the U.S. Move Against Qaddafi? What are the dangers for the U.S. and the international community in intervening in Libya?”:

“What We Should Know by Now,” John Mueller, 02 March 2011: “But there are a couple of cautions. One is that the experience of the last decade or so does not lead one to be confident that launching military force with woefully inadequate intelligence solves more problems than it creates or that, on balance, it actually ends up saving lives.

The other is that there is danger in posturing dramatically (or sanctimoniously) from outside about supporting an embattled side and then failing adequately to follow up with quick and effective action, which is often impossible to put together. The danger of coupling vast proclamation with limited action is that it can encourage people desperately to hold out in hopeless situations waiting for the promised, or seemingly promised, deliverance from outside.”

“No Clear Playbook,” Camille Eiss, 02 March 2011: “But deciding to act requires understanding where our leverage with Colonel Qaddafi and his henchmen lies. Do assets matter against power? Beyond the challenges of establishing a no-flight zone, will one prevent murderers from fighting on the ground? The sad reality in the case of Libya is that we have no clear playbook. So far, the best strategy may be the administration’s approach to other recent uprisings: focus on nonviolence and let Libyans be the primary players. With international partners who share this responsibility, the U.S. should intervene as necessary to promote these goals and to fulfill our responsibility to protect civilians and to end the violence. More extensive U.S. involvement might only muddy the indigenous democratic process, undermining our long term efforts to support free societies and a more stable region.”

“First, Define the Goals,” Steven Simon, 02 March 2011: “…armed intervention in an unfolding civil war would pose far greater risks. Again, the issue would be, what are we intervening for? If it is merely to put our thumb on the opposition’s side of the scales, by, say, intercepting regime aircraft, as the rebels have requested, or even staging air raids on airbases under the regime’s control, the risk to U.S. forces would be limited. The Navy, or Air Force if staging from NATO bases, could do this without breathing hard. But even for these limited missions, the U.S. would probably want to make sure that Libyan air defenses are unable to hinder U.S. air operations, which would mean a wider range of ground targets, with all the risk of collateral damage and loss of aircrews to accident or a lucky Libyan shot. And the mission would have to continue, perhaps for a long while, especially if Qaddafi’s air forces stood down, to wait out the U.S. presence. At that point, the U.S. would risk losing the battle for public opinion.”

“What Military Force Will Require,” Bruce W. Jentleson, 02 March 2011: “Intervention will require more than the United States and NATO. For reasons of history, power and politics a strictly Western intervention would be highly problematic. U.N. Security Council authorization is crucial. Russian and Chinese opposition has to be overcome. Efforts should continue to get African Union support. So, too, is support from the Arab League, though the opposition by the Organization of the Islamic Conference makes this unlikely.”

“A Logical, but Difficult, Step,” Richard Fontaine, 02 March 2011: “But, as General James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, said at a Senate hearing, taking out Libyan air defenses, ‘wouldn’t be just telling people not to fly airplanes.’ It would also imply risking American lives and possibly shooting down Libyan aircraft. The effort is even tougher at the diplomatic level. The administration would surely prefer to proceed with any military action under a United Nations mandate, which would require Russian agreement. But Moscow has already rejected the idea of a U.N.-authorized no-flight zone. NATO could carry out the mission outside U.N. authorization, as it did during the Kosovo war, but France has said that such a mission could go forward only with U.N. approval — and it’s unclear where other members stand. So the United States might be stuck, unable to get U.N. or NATO authorization, witnessing continued aerial bombings, and having to choose between doing nothing or pulling together a coalition of the willing.”

“High Risks for Acting Now,” Kori Schake, 02 March 2011: “we ought to be very cautious about actually using American military force to affect the rebellion in Libya, for four reasons. First, it is difficult to see what practical measures, short of removing Colonel Gaddafi ourselves or sending military teams into Libya to assist rebel forces, would affect the fight…. Second, we have not had an ambassador in Libya for months, and we have evacuated our diplomats; we ought not overestimate how much we understand what is occurring in the country or the shape Libya’s rebellion will take…. Third, debate over the Security Council resolution suggests it is unlikely the Chinese and Russians would authorize the use of force (they had to be assured the resolution that passed would not), and NATO would not be an alternative without a U.N. mandate…. Fourth, military force is sticky — once the president commits American military forces to involvement, even tangentially, he commits the nation. It is difficult to disengage if the limited force committed doesn’t achieve the president’s objectives….”

“Top powers split over Libya options: Amid calls for a no-fly zone, Russia and France caution against military intervention without UN authorization,” Al Jazeera English, 01 March 2011: “Russia has however described the no-fly zone idea as “superfluous” and along with France cautioned against moving militarily against Gaddafi without UN authorization….”

CALLS FOR INTERVENTION: ON THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT (R2P)

“Obama’s Choice: To Intervene or Not in Libya,” Mark Landler, The New York Times, 05 March 2011: “Mr. Obama’s blunt call last Thursday for Colonel Qaddafi to leave office, coupled with a threat to leave all military options on the table if he doesn’t, made it clear that the president believes the United States cannot stand by while Libyan jets bomb civilians. But his reluctance to talk about the most obvious measure — a no-flight zone over the country — reveals his qualms about thrusting the United States into a volatile situation in a region where foreign intervention is usually viewed as cynical neo-colonialism….The fact that protesters in Egypt and Tunisia were able to drum out their leaders without the help of American F-16s is viewed inside the White House as a big victory. Making sure that young Arabs feel “ownership” of their political movements has been a central piece of the administration’s strategy, even if it has exposed Mr. Obama to criticism that he is not doing enough to stop violence when it occurs….He won’t lack for impassioned advice: Among his staff members is Samantha Power, a human-rights expert who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book chronicling American foreign-policy responses to genocide.”

New “Libyan Transitional National Council” calling for air strikes–Rebels in east Libya set up crisis committee | Reuters: “The council repeated its call for foreign air strikes to help dislodge the man who has been in power for 41 years and has used warplanes and helicopters against rebel forces….Speaking at a news conference, the head of the national council, ex-Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, said the body did not want foreign troops on Libyan soil and had sufficient forces to liberate the country….‘Our people have the numbers and the determination toliberate all of Libya, but we will ask for air strikes to help us do this in the shortest possible time’.”

“Senator: Army could train Libyan opposition in anti-aircraft defense,” Adam Levine, CNN, 03 March 2011: Senator Joseph Lieberman—“While we’re considering the no-fly zone, and I hear all the concerns about how it would be … another alternative I’m raising is that we might provide the Libyan opposition with the capacity to defend themselves from Gadhafi’s aircraft.”

“Opposing view: A moral obligation to intervene,” Jamie M. Fly, USA Today, 04 March 2011: “A no-fly zone enforced by the U.S. and key allies does not require the approval of the United Nations Security Council. The no-fly zones over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and NATO’s 1999 war with Serbia over Kosovo did not have the council’s explicit blessing. It is in our interest to see the Libyan people free themselves from Gadhafi’s brutal reign. We should thus explore all possible options to do so, including arming the opposition so they are not slaughtered by regime forces. Gadhafi’s days are over. It is just a matter of time until he is forced from power. The question is whether we will stand on the sidelines and continue to watch thousands be killed in protracted fighting or whether we will ensure that his departure is hastened and casualties minimized. Intervening is a moral obligation for the United States — a moral obligation we’ve all too often ignored in similar cases in the past, with disastrous consequences. This time we need to get it right. It’s time for President Obama to lead.”

“Libyan ambassador: The U.S. must do more to stop Qaddafi’s massacre,” David Kenner, Foreign Policy, 04 March 2011: “Libyan Ambassador to the United States Ali Aujali, who joined the opposition in the early days of the crisis, issued an urgent plea for the United States to take more aggressive eactions against the Libyan government in an interview with Foreign Policy today. Aujali strongly supported the implementation of a no-flyzone over Libya, calling it ‘a historic responsibility for the United States.’ He also criticized the arguments about the risks of no-fly zone, which have been made by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military officials. ‘When we say, for example, that the no-fly zone will take a long time, that it is complicated — please don’t give this regime any time to crush the Libyan people,’ he said.”

“Gaddafi bombs oil areas, Arabs study peace plan,” Mohammed Abbas, Reuters, 03 March 2011: “Opposition activists called for a no-fly zone, echoing a demand by Libya’s deputy U.N. envoy, who now opposes Gaddafi. ‘Bring Bush! Make a no fly zone, bomb the planes,’ shouted soldier-turned-rebel Nasr Ali, referring to a no-fly zone imposed on Iraq in 1991 by then President George Bush. But perhaps mindful of a warning by Gaddafi that foreign intervention could cause ‘another Vietnam,’ Western officials expressed caution about any sort of military involvement including the imposition of a no-fly zone….”

“Arabs may impose Libya no fly zone: International concern grows over violence in Libya with Arab state ministers saying they could impose a ‘no-fly’ zone,” Al Jazeera English, 02 March 2011: “The Arab League has said it may impose a ‘no fly’ zone on Libya in co-ordination with the African Union if fighting continues in Libya. Wednesday’s Arab League ministers’ meeting in Cairo rejected any direct outside military intervention in Libya…”

“ICC to launch Libya probe: The ICC probe will look into the killing of civilians by Gaddafi’s forces during Libya’s uprising,” Al Jazeera English, 02 March 2011: “The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has said he will open a formal investigation into possible crimes against humanity in Libya….The announcement was an unprecedentedly swift reaction to the violent crackdown on anti-government protests by Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, and his supporters. Prosecutors often take months and sometimes years to decide whether to open an investigation into possible war crimes….”

“Are sanctions enough? We ask what the international community can do to protect the Libyan people,” Inside Story, Al Jazeera English, 01 March 2011: “On Saturday, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose financial sanctions on the regime of Muammar Gaddafi and to refer Libya to the International Criminal Court. And in an attempt to strengthen this decision, foreign ministers met in Geneva on Monday at a UN Human Rights Council to discuss the future of Libya. But also on the agenda – what action should be taken against Gaddafi and his regime for human rights violations against the Libyan people. But with Gaddafi threatening to cleanse the country house by house, are words enough to protect unarmed Libyan civilians?”

“Britain considers Libya no-fly zone: David Cameron says military intervention including arming rebels could be needed to stop Gaddafi ‘murdering’ his people,” Al Jazeera English, 01 March 2011: “David Cameron, the British prime minister, has said the international community cannot let Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ‘murder’ his own people, as he justified considerations for a no-fly zone over the riot-torn country. ‘It’s not acceptable that Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people, using aeroplanes and helicopters gunships … and we have to plan now to make sure that if it happens we can do something to stop that,’ he said on Tuesday. If he starts taking that sort of action we might need to have a no-fly zone in place very quickly’….”

“Exile an option for Gaddafi: White House—Nothing is off the table against Gaddafi: Clinton,” Al Arabiya, 28 February 2011: “…The United States had said it was prepared to offer ‘any kind of assistance’ to Libyans seeking to overthrow Gaddafi as his opponents piece together a transitional body comprising representatives from the liberated cities….”

“EU approves wide sanctions against Libya,” John Heilprin and Bradley Klapper, Associated Press, 28 February 2011: “The European Union slapped its own arms embargo, visa ban and other sanctions Monday on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, part of an escalating global effort to halt a bloody crackdown on his critics in the North African nation. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came to Geneva on Monday to press EU diplomats, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, for stronger action against Gadhafi’s regime….”

“Libya quashes protest in Tripoli; West to aid east,” Maggie Michael, Associated Press, 28 February 2011: “ ‘We’ve been reaching out to many different Libyans who are attempting to organize in the east and as the revolution moves westward there as well,’ Clinton said. ‘I think it’s way too soon to tell how this is going to play out, but we’re going to be ready and prepared to offer any kind of assistance that anyone wishes to have from the United States.’ Two U.S. senators said Washington should recognize and arm a provisional government in rebel-held areas of eastern Libya and impose a no-fly zone over the area — enforced by U.S. warplanes — to stop attacks by the regime. But Fillon said a no-fly zone needed U.N. support ‘which is far from being obtained today’.”

“Security Council imposes sanctions on Libyan authorities in bid to stem violent repression,” UN News Centre, 26 February 2011: “The Security Council today voted unanimously to impose sanctions against the Libyan authorities, slapping the country with an arms embargo and freezing the assets of its leaders, while referring the ongoing violent repression of civilian demonstrators to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In its Resolution 1970, the Council obligated all United Nations Member States to ‘freeze without delay all funds, other financial assets and economic resources which are on their territories, which are owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the individuals or entities’ listed in resolution. The Council imposed a travel ban on President Muammar Al-Qadhafi and other senior figures in his administration, including some members of his family and other relatives. ‘All Member States shall immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, from or through their territories or by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related material of all types, including weapons and ammunition,’ according to the arms embargo clause of the resolution….”

United Nations Webcast: “Security Council Meeting,” 26 February 2011: Peace and security in Africa and other matters including the situation in Libya. Adoption of Resolution 1970 imposing sanctions on the Libyan regime.

Security Council–SC/10187–Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York: Security Council, 6491st Meeting: “In Swift, Decisive Action, Security Council Imposes Tough Measures on Libyan Regime, Adopting Resolution 1970 in Wake of Crackdown on Protesters”: “Many expressed hope that the resolution was a strong step in affirming the responsibility of States to protect their people as well as the legitimate role of the Council to step in when they failed to meet that responsibility…. Recalling the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population….

“Libya needs a multilateral response,” Michael O’Hanlon, Politico, 25 February 2011: “One thing that both Iraq and Afghanistan have again demonstrated is the potential for war not to go as planned — even when we think all major factors line up in our favor…. With Libya, there is a considerable possibility that if we were to impose no fly zones and no drive zones, Qadhafi would not only threaten any Americans still in Libya, but he would intensify — rather than scale back — the pace of killing of his own citizens…. So we would have had to consider the possibility of needing to put forces on the streets of Tripoli to defeat parts of the Libyan army; the African mercenaries and thugs whom Qadhafi cultivated over the years….”

“NATO to hold urgent talks on Libya,” Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press, 25 February 2011: “NATO’s main decision-making body holds an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss Libya’s unrest, and the alliance may discuss deploying ships and surveillance aircraft to the Mediterranean, officials said. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who chairs meetings of the North Atlantic Council, has said the alliance does not intend to intervene in Libya, that it has received no such requests to do that, and that such an action would require a U.N. mandate….”

“NATO Secretary General’s statement on the situation in Libya,” NATO, 24 February 2011: “I do not consider the situation in Libya a direct threat to NATO or NATO Allies, but, of course, there may be negative repercussions. Such upheaval may have a negative impact on migration, refugees, etc., and that also goes for neighbouring countries….”

“Crisis alert: The Responsibility to Protect in Libya,” 23 February 2011, responsibilitytoprotect.org: An extensive collection of calls for action in Libya from a wide range of human rights organizations.

“It’s Time To Intervene: What the international community can do to support regime change in Libya,” Shadi Hamid, Slate Magazine, 23 February 2011: “What can be done? This is a time for bold, creative policy-making. For starters, NATO should quickly move to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, both to send a strong message to the regime and to prevent the use of helicopters and planes to bomb and strafe civilians. The United States and European allies should freeze the assets of senior Libyan officials and consider other targeted sanctions. Meanwhile, the international community should also let it be known that any individuals involved in perpetrating atrocities will be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court, while regime figures who defect to the opposition will be granted amnesty. If the conflict threatens to spill over into outright civil war, and the death toll reaches into the tens of thousands, the United Nations will need to consider more advanced measures, including authorizing the deployment of peacekeeping troops to protect civilian populations in the eastern part of the country….The ‘responsibility to protect’ provides further grounds for action. During the 2005 U.N. World Summit, member states unanimously affirmed that ‘each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.’ In Paragraph 139 of the summit outcome document, states affirmed their readiness to take collective action ‘in a timely and decisive manner’ if nations ‘manifestly fail’ to protect their populations from crimes against humanity….”

“On Libya we can’t let ourselves be scarred by Iraq: The international community must get over the foolishness of the 2003 invasion, and take swift action against Gaddafi,” Ian Birrell, The Guardian, 23 February 2011: “It is like an apocalyptic Hollywood film. There are even rumours of systematic male rape in this elegant city of jacaranda trees and Italianate buildings. Who knows what is true and what is false, only that there is a whirlwind of terror amid a media blackout as the people of Libya try to overthrow the despot who has ruined their country these past 41 years….The international community may be forced to make a choice: does it sit back and prevaricate while people are massacred, as it has so often in the past. Or does it refuse to be scarred by the foolishness of the Iraq invasion and show that it can act when there is unacceptable barbarism….”

Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect: “Open Statement on the Situation in Libya,” 22 February 2011: “United Nations (UN) member states must uphold their 2005 commitment to the responsibility to protect (R2P) and take immediate action to protect the population of Libya from mass atrocities….”

“24 rights groups urge US and EU to confront Libyan massacres in UN Security Council and Human Rights Council,” UN Watch, Global Post, 20 February 2011: “The letter asserts that the widespread atrocities committed by Libya against its own people are ‘particularly odious’ actions that amount to war crimes, requiring member states to take action through the Security Council under the responsibility to protect doctrine….”

EMPIRE AT WORK

“Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters,” Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi, The New York Times, 02 March 2011: “Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains were killed by NATO helicopter gunners who mistook them for insurgents, according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO, which apologized for the mistake. The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old, were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces. The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.”

“Egypt, Serbia, Georgia… The History of US Sponsored ‘Democratization’,” Eric Walberg, Global Research.ca, 03 March 2011: “Central to Egypt’s revolution was a tiny group of Serbian activists Otpor (resistance), who adapted nonviolent tactics of in the late 1990s and successfully forced Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to resign in 2000. Egyptian youth in the 6 April Youth Movement even adopted their clenched fist symbol, bringing Otpor…”

“Angelina Jolie visits schoolgirls in Afghanistan,” Ann Oldenburg, USA Today, 03 March 2011: “Jolie visited families and presented education materials to local schoolgirls in Qala Gudar village, where she will fund a new girls primary school, outside Kabul. The lack of a proper classroom means most girls now can’t study beyond fourth grade. Jolie also paid for a school in the remote returnee settlement of Tangi in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, according to the UNHCR.”

“In one of final addresses to Army, Gates describes vision for military’s future,” Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, 25 February 2011: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

“The militarization of aid and its perils,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 22 February 2011: “…For the International Committee of the Red Cross, the question is not whether the military can contribute to humanitarian efforts; it, for example, has an obligation under international humanitarian law to evacuate wounded civilians. Aid becoming part of counter-insurgency strategies, however, is much more problematic. I have never forgotten a press statement issued by international forces in Afghanistan a couple of years ago emphasizing that humanitarian assistance was helping them and Afghan forces win the ‘fight against terrorism’….”

“Business as usual for David Cameron and merchants of death,” John Kamfner, The Guardian, 22 February 2011: “When Robin Cook tried to tighten rules on British arms sales to dodgy regimes in 1997 he was told by Tony Blair’s team to grow up….This is one area where the boardroom and the unions are in harmony, and one that does not change whatever the government. Britain is a market leader in fighter jets, electric batons, sub-machine guns and teargas. Why add to the jobless total for the sake of morals? If we don’t sell the kit someone else will….”

“Petraeus Accuses Afghan Parents of Burning Kids to Make US Look Bad: Attempt to Downplay Kunar Massacre Sparks Outrage,” Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, 21 February 2011: “One would think that the effort to downplay the killings of as many as 64 civilians, including a large number of children, would be enough to spark considerable anti-US outrage, but apparently Gen. David Petraeus saw an opportunity to make things even worse, and took it. In a closed door meeting aimed at explaining why they had killed so many civilians, Gen. Petraeus actually accused parents in the region of burning their own children in an attempt to raise the death count and make the US look bad….”

“All-American Decline in a New World: Wars, Vampires, Burned Children, and Indelicate Imbalances,” by Tom Engelhardt, 25 February 2011: “This is a global moment unlike any in memory, perhaps in history. Yes, comparisons can be made to the wave of people power that swept Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-91. For those with longer memories, perhaps 1968 might come to mind, that abortive moment when, in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe, masses of people mysteriously inspired by each other took to the streets of global cities to proclaim that change was on the way. For those searching the history books, perhaps you’ve focused on the year 1848 when, in a time that also mixed economic gloom with novel means of disseminating the news, the winds of freedom seemed briefly to sweep across Europe.  And, of course, if enough regimes fall and the turmoil goes deep enough, there’s always 1776, the American Revolution, or 1789, the French one, to consider.  Both shook up the world for decades after. But here’s the truth of it: you have to strain to fit this Middle Eastern moment into any previous paradigm, even as — from Wisconsin to China – it already threatens to break out of the Arab world and spread like a fever across the planet.  Never in memory have so many unjust or simply despicable rulers felt quite so nervous — or possibly quite so helpless (despite being armed to the teeth) — in the presence of unarmed humanity.  And there has to be joy and hope in that alone….”

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 CNAR report vindicates, again, the stories and observations of the nearly 100 sources from inside the HTS program that were responsible for the production of a staggering 50 articles written over a two year period. It is in large measure their stories that were responsible for the severe rework of the program. Sound minds in the US Congress and within the US Army/OSD—including the AR-15 investigator should receive some sort of commendation for their efforts.

Now HTS is evolving into a program-of-record and is unabashedly an intelligence support program as everyone knew it always was. HTS teams will be a mix of information gatherers from a variety of military, intelligence and social science disciplines mixed with US Army warfighters and combat hardened contractors.

In short, the HTTs will become multidimensional teams capable of deploying around the globe with the capability to use “civilian power” but go kinetic in the snap of a finger. The Sri Lankan soldier who once said, “I fear Human Terrain Teams more than the CIA” was quite prescient.

The HTS effort will continue during Operation New Dawn in Iraq and is ongoing in Afghanistan. According to US Army FY2012 budget documents, the HTS program will expand into other combatant commands like AFRICOM.

According to the CNAR, US Army TRADOC leadership was largely ambivalent to the HTS program even as General David Petraeus, USA—and ostensibly the CG of TRADOC–aggressively supported the effort as the premier solution to the failure of American political and military to prepare the human-cultural terrain for American soldiers.

On their watch soldier/civilian casualties (KIA, WIA), a manslaughter and hostage case, and sexual harassment cases took place within HTS. That TRADOC leadership in G2 and up the chain of command in TRADOC tolerated this state of affairs is common but utterly distasteful.

And people get promoted while people and programs crash and burn around them?

Some say that the next generation HTS is doomed because the reputation of HTS is so horrid that many in the field will try to avoid getting ensnared in the social science/intelligence combination product that HTS pushes. Within the US Army’s budget documents justifying HTS and other intelligence programs, there is a note that indicates the costs have increased because more contractors are being used to perform intelligence tasks of all types–just so.

At any rate, two excerpts from the CNAR are listed below.

“It appears that HTS’s most significant problems revolve around human resourcing and the level of support provided to HTS by TRADOC. We believe that solutions to these immediate issues exist. We emphasize, however that, these issues are not new. Problems in human resourcing and support have been evident in HTS for years—and little has been done to address them to date. As a result, we conclude that a more fundamental problem may exist: there may be a lack of TRADOC institutional commitment to making HTS a success. Hence, while further exploration would need to be conducted to determine this definitively, it is possible that the HTS mission would be better served if HTS were located elsewhere, but potential alternatives are beyond the scope of this assessment.”

“It, it is unclear what the exact purpose and goals of past assessments have been and who the intended audience is. It appears that the Project Management Office was the primary recipient of HTS products and that TRADOC G2 has not received or reviewed HTS assessment products. Second, the current approach has made it difficult to conduct any trend analysis of the program’s development. Finally, there is not a formal process for implementing the suggestions/conclusions reached in the various assessments within HTS. Any organizational change that has come about due to past assessments has been the result of an informal decision-making process.”

“I recognize that this two year project, which overtly maps rural communities, trade connections and key local stakeholders with pastoralists around Hargesisa and Berbera, could be used as a resource for building Human Terrain Maps of this critical region of the Horn of Africa. We would be happy to do this in partnerships with [you]… As such there can be overt collection of Human Terrain data which opens the door to sensitively tailoring more in depth data collection. The project and Sazani Associates have a high level of buy in from the indigenous NGOs and will deliver tangible local benefits.”

“I have close personal ties to the security sector and I am aware of both the precarious nature of Somalia and the value of HTS for operationalising [a] military response. I am interested discussing the matter with an appropriate entity regarding the securing of resources for delivery of the project and would be grateful if you could forward this email on to someone within your company who may be interested. What we are look for is the funding to deliver the project and costs to support more in depth HT data collection and we are hoping that will be made easier when we finish registration as a IPVO early next month.” Sazani Associates

No wonder governments and indigenous populations around the globe are skeptical about the motives and practices of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) operating in their countries.

Take, for example, Sazani Associates, an NGO based in the United Kingdom. A representative named Mark Proctor from Sazani is looking to expand into the national security arena via the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS). They seek funding to MAP the HT in East Africa/Somalia.

Who knows how many other NGO’s have jumped on the cultural-human terrain mapping effort being funded out of OSD/TRADOC, AFRICOM or any of the other U.S. Combatant Commands. Or, perhaps, they are turning their data over, at a price, to elements the US national security apparatus to include academia.

“We are a UK based NGO who have offices in Tanzania and Belize and the majority of our work is around sustainable livelihood development and various forms of education. One of our areas of expertise is Zanzibar–our associates have a long history there, one being a fluent Kiswahili speaker. Islamic east Africa is therefore a place we are very comfortable to operate in. Having spent a little bit of time in northwest Somalia I was pleased to find the largest concentration of the Diaspora community in Europe in Cardiff, our local city (and capitol of Wales-semi autonomous region of UK). Over the years we have worked closely with this community and made the links to ensure a project could actually deliver in northwest Somalia.

This project was designed with three partners, the Universities of Somaliland (GOLLIS), Somali Progressive Society (UK) and Consortium of Somaliland Non Governmental Organizations (CONSOGO)(Somalia) all of which will be involved in delivering. The main contact for the UK Somali entity is an honorable man who is the president of the Somaliland Chamber of trade in UK, so he has access at the governmental level in Somaliland, which has proven helpful. As I said we have worked with him for a number of years. The project [called YES] is an enterprise-training and civil society engagement project developed with Somali partners by Sazani Associates. Sazani designed a $1.2M aid project with local NGO partners in Somaliland. Working with local Universities and a large Somaliland Government registered umbrella NGO, the project is aimed at supporting rural people to develop sustainable businesses, critical awareness of media and linking that to an export hub.”

The sales pitch goes on to say that the program is focused on “young people in their rural communities (pastoralists surrounding two main towns), developing businesses and creating a network of producers and an export centre. Mapping community interests, trade connections, key stakeholders and establishing relationships with them are central to the project delivery.”

Shadow Anthropology: And the Oscar Goes To…

The Human Terrain System was the subject of a play recently performed in California. “…an outstanding ensemble,” said LA Weekly.

The play is titled SHADOW ANTHROPOLOGY: A Post-9/11 Comedy. It was written and directed by Dr. Rick Mitchell of California State University, with music by Max Kinberg. There is even a song available from the show with lyrics by the playwright, music by Max Kinberg, and vocals by David Lee Garver.

Here is the story line:  As a poor Afghan family struggles to hold onto its farm in spite of a drought, a warlord offers possible solutions, including a more profitable crop, as well as an odd marriage proposal for the farmer’s young daughter. Soon thereafter, an idealistic anthropologist from Puerto Rico teams up with an opium-loving American mercenary as part of a U.S. Army Human Terrain Team. While the visitors attempt to create a more “culturally sensitive” military occupation of Afghanistan, various characters and bawdy shadow puppets battle it out for who controls not only the story, but also the land. A satirical examination of the U.S. military’s “new” post-9/11 strategy to win Afghan hearts and minds, this dark comedy features original songs, Turkish-style shadow puppetry, and Spam.

And the Oscar(s) for best ensemble performance in a drama goes to….General Martin Dempsey (USA) the new US Army Chief of Staff and his chain-of-command whilst at TRADOC. Their character acting as “leaders” was stunningly convincing even as the initial HTS program suffered casualties, mismanagement and burned to the ground on their watch.

By JOHN ALLISON

The attack on Guernica by Nazi Condor Legion fighters and bombers in full coordination with and bombing instructions from Spain’s Nationalist dictator, Generalissimo Franco, was carried out on April 26, 1937, 36 hours after my birth on the west coast of North America. This was the first major experiment in modern industrial weapons and methods of control of small dissident populations – “insurgents”; in this case the indigenous Basque people in their spiritual and cultural capital, Guernica. Pablo Picasso made his allegorical protest of this and tribute to the people who died there in his famous painting of that title. Picasso never allowed Guernica to be shown in Spain until after Franco was removed from power 12 years after Picasso’s death; then it was shown in the Prado; now it is housed in Guernica. The Basques say, “Guernica” Guernikara, “Guernica” for Guernica.

….I was the first correspondent to reach Guernica, and was immediately pressed into service by some Basque soldiers collecting charred bodies that the flames had passed over. Some of the soldiers were sobbing like children. There were flames and-smoke and grit, and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into the inferno.

In the Plaza, surrounded almost by a wall of fire, were about a hundred refugees. They were wailing and weeping and rocking to and fro. One middle-aged man spoke English. He told me: ‘At four, before the-market closed, many aeroplanes came. They dropped bombs. Some came low and shot bullets into the streets. Father Aroriategui was wonderful. He prayed with the people in the Plaza while the bombs fell.’

…The only things left standing were a church, a sacred Tree, symbol of the Basque people, and, just outside the town, a small munitions factory. There hadn’t been a single anti-aircraft gun in the town. It had been mainly a fire raid.

[http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/guernica.htm accessed February 2, 2011]

Nationalists denied Nazi involvement and claimed that Guernica had been deliberately burned and dynamited by fleeing Republican forces, which had been using the city to store ammunition and explosives; it was also claimed that reports of the extent of the bombing had been exaggerated and were atrocity propaganda. (Sound familiar?)

At that time, Amelia Earhart was preparing for her second and final attempt to fly across the Atlantic. USan’s attention was focused by the media on this spectacle and on the recovery from the Great Depression that had been moved by President Roosevelt’s socialist-like policies. In the background, the global powers were ratcheting up their military machines, and the various rhetorics were pointing to a different road than the Public Works projects as a way to raise the people’s standard of living and education. Behind the scenes, among the moguls of industry – IBM, RAND Corporation, and others – and the military leaders, a competition was already underway for global domination by one or the other as the final solution to the social and economic problems, not of the people, but of the industrial elite, connecting the framework for the global Military Industrial Complex, about which US President Eisenhower later – too late – warned the sleeping US population, which was too busy watching Ozzie and Harriet to care.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Guernica was in Vietnam, where the indigenous people had revolted against the colonial rule of the West, first against the French, and, after defeating them, against the USA (with 200 years of experience in militarized conquest – knowledge passed down by the Roman Empire – and domination of indigenous peoples of North America) whom the Vietnamese people also defeated, but at great cost in lives and in environmental damage that will continue to affect its people’s health for a long, long time.

During the war on Vietnam the U.S. dropped the equivalent of 450 Hiroshima bombs that killed many hundreds of thousands, and left behind more than 500.000 tons of unexploded ordnance killing an additional 100.000 to 200.000 people. Yet worse was to come. Operation Ranch delivered a poisonous cocktail to Vietnam including cyanide to destroy rice fields and an estimated 49.3 million liters of Agent Orange sprayed into the forests, fields, and streams of South Vietnam. Close to 5 million people were present directly in the areas sprayed, and millions more were effected through contaminated food sources and environment. Agent Orange is the strongest poison known to man, and at least three generations of Vietnamese have suffered damages to physical health and psychological well-being. Acknowledging reluctantly that Agent Orange was responsible, the U.S. Veterans Administration has now placed 14 diseases on the presumptive list as caused by the poison. Yet despite promises made, the victims of the war in Vietnam are still ignored 40 years later. Can Western Europe be a guiding conscience to the U.S. and respond to this unprecedented crisis?…

During the war the US Airforce dropped from two to three times the amount of ordnance dropped during the entire World War 2, but on a much smaller area. It is difficult to imagine the amount of destruction and stress caused by this military strategy of annihilation. The older generation of Vietnamese had already been exposed to decades of war with the French in order to liberate the country from colonialism. That war fresh in memories and with many victims added on to the stress caused by the US during the War on Vietnam. The ordinance dropped produced 20 million large craters, and was the equivalent of 450 Hiroshima bombs. After exiting Vietnam the U.S. left behind 500.000 tons of unexploded ordinance that subsequently killed between 100.000 to 200.000 people (Bouncy, 2006).

Nixon promised billions of dollars for remediation and rehabilitation of land and people after ending the war on Vietnam. None of these promises were kept. The Globe and The Mail (2008) reported that according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4.2 million Vietnamese (2010) were exposed directly to Agent Orange, resulting in 400.000 deaths and disabilities. Furthermore 500.000 children have since been born with birth defects. The poisoning effects from Agent Orange persist today since it became part of the food chain resulting in the birth of children with multiple problems (BBC NEWS: HEALTH (2010). So while 4.8 million were present during the spraying, many more were exposed through the contaminated environment and food (Schecter, 2002; Stellman, 2003).

[Agent Orange and war related stress: Physical and psychological disorders. DR. KNUD S. LARSEN, (Professor emeritus, Department of Psychology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA) and DR. HAO VAN LE (Head of Department of Cultural Psychology, National Institute of Psychology, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, Vietnam) in ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR Sozialmanagement (Journal of Social Management), 2010 Vol. 8 | Number 2 | 2nd semester 2010]

Today is February 3^rd, 2011, the day that three Israeli planes landed in Cairo, bringing crowd control weapons for the dictator Mubarak, their consort. Today’s Guernica is Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, La Côte d’Ivoire…,while Tunisians and Egyptians are attempting to stand up to The Beast, and the insurgency seems to be spreading. However, the Zeitgeist that animated the Nazi’s and the Spanish Nationalists at Guernica and the US in Vietnam has since spread to all the  European nations and to their approved rulers of the former colonies, with its head, teeth and portavoz vested in the USA, Nuova Roma.

How did the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave fall to such depths, and what is the hope for changing course to return Power to the People from those who have usurped it and continue to solidify their gains?

One can trace the conversion of Barack Obama to the military spirit of Mars that animates this collective Beast. After my refresher course on military culture during Human Terrain System training, I recognized it in the changes in Obama’s rhetoric. Their signature phrases – like “the way forward” – began to creep into his speeches; if you know MilSpeak you will recognize it. He was coolly recasting himself as an emissary of The Mission. His Cabinet appointments demonstrated his intent, not to serve as the absolute upright, manifesting the values and goals which had seduced the US citizenry to choose him as The Way Out of this vice, this vise.

Instead of “change you can believe in”, Obama has gotten in line and traded Commander in Chief for the position of Chief Public Information Officer for the Department of Defense and the global industrial elite of the Empire.

Who knows, maybe Hosni Mubarak held some of the same ideals Obama mouthed, in the beginning, before he bargained away the rights of the Egyptian people for his own aggrandizement; or, maybe both Mubarak and Obama were always on track for their personal careers.

In Nuristan of the Hindu Kush, some of the houses in the isolated high valleys have carved into the oak planks flanking the doors, the zig-zag path of a lightning bolt. I was told that this was the house of an Aula Mətz, a Big Man or Great Man, who was or is a leader, comparable to the Latin American strongman or “caudillo”.

This lightning bolt, I was told, represents his skill at sensing the desires of The People and, in the formal, alpha dialect of the Kalasha, to state for them what they themselves could not state so skillfully; so seductively

The people turned to the Aula Mətz in time of struggle or of crisis to show them the Way Out of their situation. Once he had gained that trust, he could lead them into an entirely different path, and the people would follow his zig-zag course away from the original direction. Of course, in their world, if he fucked with them, they simply killed him and turned to another to lead them.

I was seduced by Obama. I campaigned for him. I voted for him. I had faith in him; there is no other word; maybe because he is mulatto; maybe because he was a community organizer among the down-trodden. I felt his authenticity; I thought that I did.

I’d still like to hope that he has something up his sleeve, and will turn the tables soon; but my hope is evaporating as I disregard his words and look at his actions.. Now, Barack Obama has made clear that his Way Forward is not our way; the way of The People. Rather, he is headed down a path blazed by Generals McChrystal and Petraeus (betray us) under command of the Captains of Industry. And I ain’t goin’ his way.

The Islamic world is laughing and crying over the West’s “freedom and democracy” mantra. They see how skillfully the USans are kept from seeing the truth of their leadership which has recently passed a bill making the elections of their “representatives” available to those who can buy them; the delusion that they are self-determining, represented by leaders who will take them where they want to go; will make their nation walk its talk. But, instead of fulfilling the hope of the downtrodden, they continue to look to “the news” on FOX to learn what to think about the despots.

And now, in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Jordan, Yemen, Algeria … The People are uprising – “insurging” – against the zig-zag leaders that the West has bribed the elite of their own societies to install, who will follow the path of the USans Caudillos, their Aula Mətz. They have suffered the truth of Western “democracy”.

This whole movement returns the clock to the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire into separate nations by the Western colonial powers and the preparation by the British of the State of Palestine to be usurped by Zionist invaders who now rule the colony of Israel – where I spent an entire year with six months’ indoctrination on Kibbutz Dafna, one of the earliest forts established in Palestine by the Zionists, which is what TE Lawrence said – I think it was in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – will NOT stand, cannot stand; a European colony in the heart of Arabia. That is at the core of this revolutionary struggle – the Arabs own indigenous version of Freedom and Democracy!

These people are indigenous to their lands, regardless of Israeli “scholars’” revisions of history, contradicted by many Jewish, non-Zionist scholars, who get hell for it, denied tenure and such. The Arabic and related Muslim peoples still operate as a society behind the scenes that are depicted on their media that weaves a zig-zag Western Capitalist path. They hear that if they change things to fit their own values and goals, they will “destabilize” their “region”.

The same lies have been overcome now in most of Latin America; first in Cuba, then Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile still sputtering on and off, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador …, and according to Hillary Clinton, this “destabilizes” that region.

What the USans need right now is a leader like José Martí; one who has the charisma such as Obama’s, but also the ethics, the knowledge of the ruling elite, the vision of a future to awaken the USans from their stupor, their torpor, their dreaming, and to inspire the USans with the courage to confront what they then will understand as Evil as the Nazi leaders who ordered the devastation of the small town of Guernica the day after my birth.

Of course, given the state of the US population that is so folded into the perspective of the media that is an organ of the Military Industrial Complex, that prescribes their dreams, that leads them down that Zig-Zag Path, it is The Awakening that will be difficult, since we are not an indigenous people, but people stripped of culture and re-dressed in an economic, legal, and political framework that they learn in public schools, churches, the media, who no longer share an oral history, a People’s History of the USA that allows them to independently assess and organize a response to despotism from the grass-roots level. All they have is the “news” and reports of the State of the Union by the Caudillo.

We still sometimes use “pre-literate” to describe peoples who have not been folded in to this dream. As though they will inevitably evolve to a higher state of “culture”, as the USans have. However, some of the technology that might ensnare us also has served those “preliterate” peoples to connect person-to-person, group-to-group, and the result has been shown impressively in the wars of liberation in Tunisia and Egypt. There, in those exploited populations, people had both understanding and courage and they had connections between themselves that enabled their revolutions.

A Nation of Sheep

I am just wondering, how does a herd of fat sheep, each one living in his/her private residence, protected by alarms to the security company,  comfortable, too well-fed, distracted and diverted with media and many toys, people who don’t say “hello” but divert their eyes in discomfort, maybe in fear, when you pass them on the sidewalk,  … how can they get awakened, get knowledge of a reality beyond their leaders’ isolating media, and get connected directly with one another in discussions that will lead toward a dignified and morally strong society whose government is not so much a world leader and competitor as a cooperator and compañero with good will towards all peoples?

It seems that such websites as this one are the only path open. How do we move beyond preaching to the choir, to the Awakening?

Maybe a Guernica Day Rally in place of Earth Day, and more “fun”?

But, even such websites as this might no longer be available to connect the US citizens to those of like mind in the US and globally. See http://demandprogress.org/blacklist/

If we keep criticizing, Clinton-Obama-Bush might do what Mubarak did to the internet in Egypt’s Crisis. National Security, you know? We might need a Guernica in San Francisco! to protect Freedom and Democracy.

“With notebooks and pens we will end suicide bombings and gore. Sensitivity to backward culture will help us to control the horror. They’ll learn love for American freedom through stories they’ll come to adore.”

“Anthropology will help to explain the people we wish to contain. We’ll win hearts and minds behind enemy lines by mapping the human terrain.”

“We’ll identify those we can trust to embrace the occupation. We’ll remove all the others….”

“With social science to lead us, through dark Afghanistan, we’ll blaze a path toward victory, and eventually into Iran!”–words from the song, Shadow Anthropology, see below.

Dr. Rick Mitchell, is a professor and creative writing advisor in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge who, with the support of his university’s Faculty Research Fellows Program and the Puffin Foundation, has created and launched a play that is getting a number of positive reviews: Shadow Anthropology–A Post 9/11 Comedy. This has been mentioned in previous articles that we have published, as an upcoming production. One review from Eye Spy LA tells us that “Mitchell weaves a complex story about U.S. colonization into an enjoyable, comedic romp,” one that uses “almost every form of dramatic spectacle with Turkish shadow puppets, catchy musical numbers and light Brechian flourishes.” In this play, the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, and the work of militarized anthropology are targets of criticism. We are told that “the play is critical of U.S. occupation strategies that are intended to reduce conflict, but only fuel it through ignorance.” As for HTS another review tells us that it is, “touted as a way to win hearts and minds…a devious attempt to root out insurgents through entrapment.” HTS is also referred to in one of the reviews as, “an underhanded American ploy to colonize and ferret out insurgents.”

To clarify the aims of Rick Mitchell’s project I asked him to what extent HTS was intended as a focal element, if it was. He explained that “HTS is certainly a big element, but the play also focuses on broader areas, i.e., the (ugly) US occupation of Afghanistan (and, to a lesser degree, of Puerto Rico [the anthropologist is from Vieques]), the stereotyping (and necessity) of ’enemies,’ the drug-war connection in US warfare (and espionage), the ‘occupation’ of women exacerbated by Sharia Law, etc.” The main point is that, in Mitchell’s words, ”the piece is adamantly against occupation of any kind.”

One of the HTS characters, on a Human Terrain Team, is a former Marine, Evan–described by one review as a “trigger-happy coked out junkie;” in another review in LA Weekly as “a well-paid defense operative…an unprincipled superpatriot whose sprawling ego is pumped up by his coke-and-heroin habit and his steady intake of Viagra. A practiced slimeball;” and, in a review by the Levantine Cultural Center as someone who, “shadows the Afghan population to gain insight, while remaining in relative darkness.” The other team member, Fe, is supposedly a left-leaning Puerto Rican anthropologist, “with sincere intentions for the use of anthropology,” described in another review as “unwitting.”

I asked Rick Mitchell what his main sources of information/inspiration were in creating the HTS characters, Fe the anthropologist and Evan the soldier of fortune:

I did a ton of research, not only about the HTS, but also about Islam, Afghanistan’s history, the US military, BlackWater, mercenaries, extremisms (of the Islamic, X-tian, and Free Market variety [Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms was useful here] etc., etc. Of course, a couple of early, major leaders (of the HTS and a private mercenary co.) were on my mind when I began writing. But that changed a lot as the play developed and the characters began going in different directions.

Evan works for a firm that in the play is called SwampWater, and while not modeled on any one person, nor a composite of specific persons in existence, his creation by Mitchell was influenced by some of the books he has read “about the kind of guys who were working as private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan (and by the Fundamentalist right-wing in the US).”

Rick Mitchell’s next stop is at the South Asia Center at University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, to present a reading of the play on Feb. 18 at the following conference: Popular Culture and Alternate Histories: Voices from Beyond the Security State in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.

With parody videos, critical books, online critiques, and this play, one is forced to reject one of the central premises in the sales pitch delivered by the Human Terrain System early on: that it would help to make anthropology useful and relevant, and presumably, respected.

I am currently reading through the 130+ pages of the play and a follow-up article may come in the future. In the meantime, below is the song of the play, with lyrics by Rick Mitchell, music by Max Kinberg, and vocals by David Lee Garver:

[Photos by the Son of Semele Theater]

What if Wikileaks, from the start, had announced itself as an anonymous group of hackers whose work aimed at producing an open access archive of leaked, stolen, and otherwise illegally obtained and illegally reproduced documents? Chances are that in a conflict with the U.S. or any other government, Wikileaks’ activists would have found themselves in a “catch me if you can” game.

Instead Wikileaks has, from the start, identified a range of descriptive labels for identifying itself, and took the time to inform the press on the correct labels to use:

“WikiLeaks should be described, depending on context, as the ‘open government group’, ‘anti-corruption group’, ‘transparency group’ or ‘whistleblower’s site’.”

“WikiLeaks staff should be described, unless otherwise specified and depending on context, as ‘investigative journalists’, ‘analysts’, ‘technologists’, ‘open government activists’ or, especially in an African context, ‘anti-corruption activists’.” (source)

Beyond labeling practices, we witness the increased mainstreaming of Wikileaks, nestled within a cartel of mainstream media establishments, surrounded by lawyers, hiring a public relations firm, book deals, and soon a movie too (update: movies). Catch me if you can has become something similar, but bolder: catch me if you dare. Wikileaks is still on the run, but it’s now on a track littered with obstacles in the form of its many compromises.

(As for catch me if you dare, Julian Assange seems to have concluded that it would be “politically impossible” for the government of the U.K. to extradite him to the U.S. to face any possible criminal trial–which is why he worries about Sweden doing so instead. Prior to the sexual offense reports, he had said that he felt safer in Sweden, and he left the U.K. Assange might be misreading the political realities: Why is it politically impossible, for David Cameron? This the political leader who just privatized the U.K.’s entire higher education system, over and above massive, angry protests. What would “politically impossible” mean for the U.K., the U.S.’ leading NATO partner and close ally in Iraq and Afghanistan? What would make Assange so special that the U.K. government would not dare to touch him? Not only does it instead seem possible, but even with an extradition request already in place from Sweden, the British authorities could prioritize any request from the U.S. Meanwhile, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt “has insisted his government will play no role in deciding whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be extradited to the US.” When it comes to politics, nothing is impossible, and that includes the criminalization of entities that might otherwise be seen as respectable and mainstream. The reason there has been no extradition request yet from the U.S. may be because: a) there will never be one–the mere threat of one is an intimidating tactic; or, b) the U.S. is still preparing its case, and not just waiting for Assange to finally appear in Sweden.)

Wikileaks has undergone a very significant transformation over the past year, exemplified by the changes in its website, no longer anything like a collaborative site that until May of 2010 drew direct parallels between itself and Wikipedia (source, source, source). When it came to the prior ideal of crowd sourcing write ups of its documents, in April of 2010 Assange unconvincingly, wrongly, and harshly, declared it to be “all bullshit,” and that academics “don’t give a fuck” about writing up reports based on the leaked documents (see the video below). The launch of the Collateral Murder video was the pivotal point in this transformation, drawing the attention of the established mass media like never before, and paving the way for Wikileaks to soon develop working partnerships with several mainstream media outlets. This is what I refer to as the mainstreaming of Wikileaks. In direct response to U.S. accusations that Wikileaks was a criminal, terrorist organization comprising anarchist hackers, Wikileaks did not remain indifferent or even hostile–it became defensive, and asserted more than ever before that Wikileaks is a media organization, and that its documents were leaked from inside the U.S. national security apparatus.

We could say more about this “mainstreaming” issue–that Wikileaks has already gone to considerable lengths to become “sensible” and “responsible” as Evgeny Morozov would have it. The U.S. State Department also seems to be in cooptation mode, at least on occasion, as with Alec Ross’ celebration of “The Internet as the Che Guevara of the 21st Century” (link, link, link, plus see the video). Someone in the audience asked Ross if the U.S. would then also kill the Internet.

One of the defenses of Wikileaks has been that its material is obtained legitimately and legally, and that it cannot be sued (successfully). While most of the speculation surrounding the U.S. building a case against Wikileaks has focused–especially in the writing of Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com–on the insinuations of Adrian Lamo that Assange somehow directly communicated with and conspired with Bradley Manning in facilitating leaks from the latter, which could be read as a violation of the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917, and thus place Assange in grave legal jeopardy, it now seems that this concern was misplaced, or at least short lived. More of the speculation surfacing now is that the U.S. is building a case against Wikileaks that emphasizes that it is not due any of the protections afforded to media organizations, because it does not just receive leaked documents, it steals documents–indeed, that more than half of all the documents it ever had were stolen. If true, and given its spate of reactive compromises, Wikileaks may now be on much more perilous ground.

An article from Bloomberg on 20 January 2011 reveals that Tiversa Inc. has been conducting an investigation for the U.S. government and claims that it has “evidence that WikiLeaks, which has said it doesn’t know who provides it with information, may seek out secret data itself, using so-called ‘peer-to-peer’ networks.” Tiversa’s CEO Robert Boback apparently told Bloomberg that “it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks….WikiLeaks bases its most important servers in Sweden.” That evidence is, at best, circumstantial, but quite attractive nonetheless. As Boback explained: “WikiLeaks is doing searches themselves on file-sharing networks. It would be highly unlikely that someone else from Sweden is issuing those same types of searches resulting in that same type of information.” The article then focuses on how information about sensitive U.S. defense secrets was lifted from these networks, and posted on Wikileaks. Much of the article focuses on distancing Wikileaks’ claims to being an electronic drop box, and instead aggressively hunting for information through hacking:

The U.S. investigations could provide authorities an alternate path for prosecuting WikiLeaks and Assange, said Paul Ohm, an expert in cyber crime at the University of Colorado in Boulder….

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma in Seattle, who successfully prosecuted similar cases of unintended searching, said the systematic pillaging of computer contents through peer- to-peer networks could be pursued under federal anti-hacking statutes.

Even if not criminal, such conduct, if traced to WikiLeaks, would contradict its stated mission as a facilitator of leaked material by insiders, whose identities, Assange has said, the group takes measures not to know. The group provides an encrypted drop box on its website that it said prevents any tracing back to the source of documents.

“If their information gathering doesn’t consist simply of being a receptacle for leaks but of this more aggressive effort to go out and cull this information, then you’re moving a clear step further from anything that resembles traditional journalistic practice,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director for the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The evidence could also be used by congressional committees, which Boback said are pursuing a separate inquiry to undermine WikiLeaks’ claim that it’s a legitimate media organization with protections under the First Amendment.

“There is a difference between being given information that may have been obtained in violation of some agreement or law versus the media itself violating the law or an agreement in order to obtain information,” said Sandra Baron, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York. “The media is not allowed to steal.”

WL Central immediately posted a rebuttal to the article in Bloomberg arguing that it “belays [sic] a credulity that could only come from a lack of acquaintance with the technologies involved.” The counter-argument against the Bloomberg report is that it assumes that because the searches were done from Sweden, where Wikileaks has its servers, and the documents then appeared on Wikileaks, that does not mean that Wikileaks stole that data itself. This same counter-argument is made by Andy Greenberg at Forbes. The problem is that this purported activity fits in with a broader historical pattern.

No friend of Wikileaks, anti-secrecy advocate Steven Aftergood reported the following:

WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.

In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.

On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year [2009], without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.

Then there is this:

Some WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off of Chinese hackers’ activities.

The author of that statement is none other than Wikileaks itself.

Wired also reminds us that,

“The site published data in 2008 that a hacker obtained from the private e-mail account of then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. And, according to a New Yorker story published last year, the site also possesses a cache of more than a million documents that were grabbed by a WikiLeaks activist in 2006 after they traveled through the Tor anonymizing network. At least one of these documents was published on the WikiLeaks site, according to the magazine.”

Making matters even murkier, and no less intriguing, is a very recent and abrupt statement from Icelandic Member of Parliament, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the same person whose Twitter account has been subject to a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice–last night she declared: “Spy computer in a room next to my office – could not be placed by WikiLeaks, no one from WL in Iceland at the time it logged into network.” A spy computer? Wikileaks? Nobody from Wikileaks in Iceland? Few answers follow from Jónsdóttir herself. It appears that there is suspicion of espionage in Iceland’s parliament, Althingi, where employees found an active computer in an empty room and called the police. All identifying numbers on the computer had been removed, and when the computer was disconnected it began a self-destruct program that deleted the hard drive, and erased any information that could be used to trace it to its owner. Another report indicated that the computer was used to spy on parliamentary communications, and was housed in a room reserved for the political party to which Jónsdóttir belongs. Wikileaks was mentioned in one of Iceland’s newspapers as a possible perpetrator–the denial from the Wikileaks representative in Iceland, Kristinn Hrafnsson, was that Wikileaks is not involved in hacking, and that such claims are part of a U.S. smear campaign aimed at damaging Wikileaks’ reputation (and note again that “hacking” is cast in negative terms, as disreputable, further evidence of the mainstreaming of Wikileaks where it now ends up playing the game the U.S. wants it to play). Adding to the confusion is Jónsdóttir’s statement that nobody from Wikileaks was in Iceland, at a time that was left unspecified. Hrafnsson himself is in Iceland, but he has not been implicated. Formerly with Wikileaks, Herbert Snorasson is also in Iceland. What is interesting about his case is that he is one of those who worked with Wikileaks but who, for whatever reason, was not included in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Twitter subpoena.

Depending on one’s view of the nature and role of free news media in a democratic society, it may be that it is in the role of information trafficker, with Wikileaks forming part of a financially valuable racket, that the organization comes closest to resembling established corporate media. Recently Vanity Fair published details of Assange threatening to sue its media partner, The Guardian, after someone had leaked the diplomatic cables to it, freeing it from any agreement to publish only when Assange gave his permission. Assange reportedly asserted that “he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.” It is doubtful that the person(s) who leaked these documents to Wikileaks in the first place, did so to enable Assange’s capital accumulation. Today The Independent, with an instructive deadline, tells us that the “race is on to cash in on Wikileaks,” with now two feature films being considered for production by Hollywood. In the past, Wikileaks offered its documents for sale, putting Venezuelan government emails up for auction. Not unrelated, last year Wikileaks shut down access to its own site, until the public coughed up $600,000 for documents–intended for the public–to once again be viewable, for a time (they have now been archived). Some thus accuse Wikileaks of keeping information hostage–it uses the slogan, “it’s time to open the archives,” but never actually does so. It boasts of sitting on a vast treasure trove of documents, but the promises to release documents outnumber the times anything is released. Since August of 2010 we have been waiting for the final release of 15,000 Afghan war documents–they are not even mentioned by Wikileaks anymore. Also never mentioned again is the promised release of a video of a NATO air strike in Afghanistan that resulted in dozens of civilian deaths. As for the much vaunted release of Russian files? Who knows. One loses count now of the various promised releases that have never materialized, but that one may assume remain in Assange’s personal possession. Wikileaks released an “insurance file,” but not the encryption key, deciding if and when the public really has a right to know, a right which is now becoming a limited privilege. Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who defended the Wikileaks cable release, said he had heard that Assange and The Guardian had together decided not to release remaining cables dealing with Israel, as they are “too damaging.” “Harm minimization” –that Pentagon-style newspeak that euphemizes death, sounding like something invented by apologists for the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System–has become the new encryption key for closing access to the public (whose actions can be predicted, a public to be feared, incapable of exercising good judgment unlike the new gatekeepers). Cablegate is now just gate, through which an occasional dribble of documents can be detected, at a pace that would take 16 years to complete the full release. One unfortunate soul has committed himself to “live blogging” an event that is much like watching a snail on morphine.

I have to agree with Miriam Marks in her article in the Stanford Review (“WikiLeaks: Not Open, Simply the New Closed“) that, “the transformation of WikiLeaks from a completely user-generated and governed forum to a secretive and perhaps autocratic organization is worrisome regardless of the supposedly unchanging intentions of the site.” In the meantime, those who would call Julian Assange the Che Guevara of “our generation” may be unwittingly saying something particularly damning about this generation, its politics, and its ignorance of the values and sacrifices of a real revolutionary. Assange is still at the stage of claiming that he is neither of the left, or of the right. His theories about how information releases are like energy flows that mechanically trigger political reforms, would not pass the smell test either with social scientists or revolutionaries, in spite of Assange’s claim to have crushed a Swiss Bank “like a bug,” revealing that its CEO committed suicide, boasting of the “scalps” Wikileaks has taken, and now taking credit for the Tunisian revolution (and, strangely, wondering why the State Department had not led the overthrow of the Tunisian regime, again betraying that familiar Eurocentric prejudice that we bring change to less capable others). Some of us continue to hope that not for much longer will we have to suffer the lectures on geopolitics by infantile techno-geeks still with the scent of their motherboard on them. It seems clearer now that for there to be a meaningful and lasting Wikileaks revolution, we will have to forget about defending Assange, and move beyond Wikileaks and the fetishizing of information.

[In connection with this article, please see the associated file uploads: COMISAF ppt or COMISAF pdf; FET pptx or FET pdf; ISAF Engagement with Females PDF; and the previous post: "Recommended ISAF Guidance for Female Engagement Teams"]

“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. Female Engagement Teams [FET] is a proven concept…The Marines do this well…To garner the full benefit of FET throughout the country, comprehensive ISAF guidance needs to be issued for Female Engagement Teams.” Combined Joint Intelligence Operations Center—Afghanistan—Strategic Intelligence Update, 23 February 2010. Briefing titled Recommended ISAF Guidance for Female Engagement Teams. Quote from slide number 13, notes.

It is not every day that a U.S. commanding general like Stanley McChrystal (USA, Ret.) signs a directive  (dated 31 May 2010, Engagement With Afghan Females Directive) that is based in some measure on the story of Persian King Xerxes and Queen Esther. Who knew that the story would be used to support FET’s, another 21^st Century U.S. Army COIN initiative to extract information from the population in Afghanistan? FET’s target is the 50 percent of the Afghan population that is female.

And who knew that “We are still in Persia?” Perhaps the metaphor should be this: The USA is becoming like the Persian Empire and is destined for an ending that befalls all empires.

The Book of Esther tells a wonderful yet completely fictitious story of Xerxes’ Jewish Queen Esther who ultimately saved the Persian Empire’s Jewish community from extermination/genocide. In the fable, King Xerxes wife even managed to convince him to allow the Jewish community within the Persian Empire a two day window in which to take revenge against its enemies in any manner it sought fit. The story as “a historical record must be definitely rejected” according to the Jewish Encyclopedia.

So let’s cut the FET’s authors/briefers some slack and look to Xerxes’ “real” Queen Amastris. Would she have been the type of person who “behind closed doors” could convince King Xerxes to spare a hounded segment of his empire? Herodotus—not exactly objective in these matters– claimed that “Amastris was cruel and vindictive. On one occasion she sacrificed fourteen youths of the noblest Persian families to the god said to dwell beneath the earth. The tale of her horrible mutilation of the wife of Masistes [cut her breasts off among other body parts] gives us a lively picture of the intrigues and cruelties of a Persian harem.”

Hey! This is the USA! We destroy history by night and recreate it by day.

Triangulation Nation: Teenage Engagement Teams Next?

According to the authors of the briefing, men, women and children are part of the triangle of knowledge that must be targeted for information collection. “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 run free in the community—they see, watch and are involved in nearly every activity in the community.”

The briefing’s authors note that children are to be targeted but with care. That high care quotient is rather odd given that Afghan children/teenagers have to navigate cluster munitions, land mines, ordnance from air and land, and hostile occupants and locals. FET’s (and PRT’s, HTT’s, HET’s) would seem to be the least of their problems.

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

FET’s proponents even support using Afghan adolescent male’s attempts to impress/court females as a tool to extract information. In short, any and every activity is in-bounds for information exploitation.

FET’s Sponsored by the Human Terrain System

Just like the ISAF Guidance presentation referenced above, a similar briefing from HTS describing/selling FET’s was prepared by Dr. LisaRe Brooks and is dated 28 October 2010. Dr. Brooks is an HTS member located at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. She offers the rationale—minus Queen Esther’s support—for the FET’s effort.

“Female engagements are an integral component of COIN by embracing  and understanding the missing 50% of the population; building relationships with the Afghan women to earn their trust, give women confidence in GIRoA (Afghan government] and divide them from those that violate their constitutional rights; and empower them to have a voice and ownership in solutions for problems in their families, villages, country. The desired end states are these: women influence families/ communities not to support the Taliban; women influence others (women) to demand basic services from the local government (with coalition force support); women influence family and community members to support GIRoA; and women do not support/ enable the insurgency.”

Females need to be involved in global COIN, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (The Lioness Program for example) and anywhere else males are a few cans shy of a six pack when it comes to treating females and minorities like equivalent human beings. In fact, women or anyone else qualified for tooth or tail US government operations—military, intelligence, stability, diplomatic—should be in decision making or frontline positions. If the premise is “All of Government, All of Society” in the ongoing American War Effort against terror, drugs and crime—and protection of the US Homeland– then every American is needed in the cause (including 16 year olds).

Further, females are essential to the success of any COIN/collective intelligence gathering operation as is suggested by some commentary/observations in the two FET’s briefings mentioned in this article. Social sensitivity is a big part of the reason. In October 2010, “A  new study co-authored by Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Union College researchers documented the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.”  It makes perfect sense.

What makes no sense, however, is the US Army’s rush to field an inconsistently trained FET’s capability. Given its deadly experience with its own Human Terrain System–in which recruiting, training and management crippled the initial concept—it seems ludicrous to put FET’s on the fast track.

Indeed, in a 7 December 2010 teleconference interview with Colonel Chadwick Clark of the COIN Training Center in Afghanistan and Colonel Sheila Scanlon, Advisor to the Afghanistan Minister of the Interior had some choice responses for their questioners. They took pains to stress that FET’s was all volunteer and that other countries operate FET’s in Afghanistan. Training was a focus area of the interview:

“Well, right now, there is no standardized training for the FETS. The FETs receive training based on how they’re going to be employed. The Marine Female Engagement Teams that are being employed in Helmand in Regional Command Southwest go through four months of training prior to their employment. The Female Engagement Teams that are being employed in other places go through training that’s commensurate with how they’re going to be employed. I know that’s not a good answer, but really the training varies from anywhere from four months to a week’s worth of training.

We’re taking a look at is standardizing some of the training for all the Female Engagement Teams that are going to be employed in here. So probably sometime around the end of January [2011] we’ll have a program of instruction put together for all the Female Engagement Teams that are going to be employed, and it’s going to be focused more on understanding the operational environment and understanding their role in a Female Engagement Team.”

Currently, according to statements in the December 2010 interview, there are a total of 40 female engagement teams in Afghanistan with a minimum of two females per team. “So there are at least 80 trained females in the country right now, but 40 teams employed in each one of the regional commands. There are 17 in Regional Command Southwest, 5 in the South, 11 in the East, 6 in the North and 1 in the West.” A map of the FET’s locations is contained in Dr. Brooks briefing referenced above.

[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.

a) the practice is growing and is “it is the on the increase in almost every region of Afghanistan,” and not just in Pashtun regions;
b) those behind the practice are “wealthy and powerful“–so not so “widespread” that everybody can afford to pay for such boys;
c) and, that the boys are driven into this commodified practice as a result of extreme impoverishment that is directly attributable to the war: “His father died in the fields, when he stepped on a landmine…’We were hungry, I had no choice. Sometimes we go to bed on empty stomachs. When I dance at parties I earn about $2 or some pilau rice’,” which ought to also limit any claim that this is “about homosexuality,” the way HTS and the compliant war media argue.

And who helps to fuel the practice? Is it some generic “Pashtun culture”? Thanks to materials released via Wikileaks, we learn that foreign private security contractors–specifically with DynCorp–paid for young dancing boys to entertain them, and took drugs. Moreover, the scandal was situated in Kunduz, a northern region away from where Cardinalli was based. In fact, it was the Afghan government that tried to put a stop to it, and the U.S. Embassy refused to get involved. In another failure of mainstream American journalism, the Washington Post was aware of these details, and chose to minimize them in a story that appeared back in July, “which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of ‘questionable management oversight’ in which foreign DynCorp workers ‘hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party’” (source).

If the HTS “researcher” Cardinalli were producing anything other than an instrument of propaganda, proclaiming the timelessness and essential Pashtun-ness of the practice, divorced from history and context, shorn of the role played by the foreign occupation in arming and funding those paying for the practice, and adding its own personnel to those paying for the practice that employs children victimized by war…then she might have an ounce of credibility. Instead, we are treated to ignorance with her facile comments about “Pashtun culture” when, as Jamil Hanifi already explained,

“Bacha bazi (n.v., boy playing) is a Farsi/Dari construct in Afghanistan. There is no counterpart for this construct in Paxtu and Paxtun dominated parts of the country. Likewise, Bacha baz (n.v., boy player) is also a Farsi/Dari construct which does not have a counterpart construct in Paxtu.

“The phenomenon is openly marked in the popular culture of non-Paxtun areas in Afghanistan (especially in Kabul [mostly non-Paxtun], northern Afghanistan with a concentration in large urban areas like Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, Qunduz, Maimana. The Paxtun dominated city of Qandahar is the exception to this. However, the practice does occur, probably with less proportional frequency, among Paxtuns.”

But Cardinalli says, “To dismiss the existence of this dynamic out of desire to avoid Western discomfort is to risk failing to comprehend an essential social force underlying Pashtun culture which can potentially effect  [sic] the success” of the U.S. effort.” An essential social force, Pashtun culture, and avoiding Western discomfort. Interesting that Cardinalli avoids her Western discomfort by dismissing the dynamic where it is the very occupation that she supports that has enabled and fueled the revival of this practice, in areas far from the “homeland of the Taleban,” on which her dim sights are set. This would not be so problematic, if it were the only time we read crudely decontextualized, ahistorical, Orientalist and even racist blather from the ranks of HTS “researchers.” The only “good news” is that the more they write, the more they indict themselves.

[This is the third and final article in a series of three about Wikileaks. The first was “The Wikileaks Revolution” that led to a parallel article published in CounterPunch. The second one was "Wikileaks and the Moral Dualism of the U.S. State Department."]

“I,______, in the Presence of the Mighty Ones, do of my own free will and accord most solemnly swear that I will ever keep secret and never reveal the secrets of the Art…. And may my weapons turn against me if I break this my solemn oath.” –Initiation oath in modern witchcraft, from The Witches’ Way, by Farrar and Farrar (quoted in Luhrmann, 1989, p. 131)

“The man who talks too much or who does not know how to keep a secret is for the African a being without value” (Zahan, 1979, p. 112, as quoted in Piot, 1993, p. 353).

One of the first things that I learned in Trinidad was that a good secret is one worth sharing with everyone. In fact, one only knew what an important secret was only once it had been shared, and it had to be shared because the key thing about secrets is that they are resources for interaction, not data meant to be permanently occluded from everyone except the secret-keeper. Some anthropologists have a lot of insights and stories to tell about the social and political functions of “secrecy” (in quotes, because we are not really sure what that covers), derived from experiences in small-scale settings, with small groups of people, usually outside of the cultural West, almost never dealing with states. Primarily, anthropological work on secrecy involved secret societies, cults of initiation, shamanic practice, worship, the installation of priests, the socio-linguistics of secrecy, etc. Does that mean that their insights are useless? That is an open question. (One should also be open to the fact that it may be Wikileaks and what its actions have opened up that have a lot to teach to anthropologists, rather than this being made into another moment that serves institutional anthropologists’ never-ending self-justification and self-validation.)

Some of the things we learn about secrecy from past anthropological research are that secrets can help to build communal affect, and to reproduce the local in the face of the onslaught of globalization (De Jong, 2007; Kasfir, 2010)—not particularly useful, however, for analyzing something like the Pentagon, the State Department, or Bank of America. Secrets also create boundaries and alliances (Gable, 1997). What seems true despite the institution or scale of the social unit in question is that secrets include some, and exclude others from their knowing, and that creates a boundary and allegiance among those party to the secret—now this may be useful to analyzing the Pentagon, the State Department, or Bank of America, as their internal social mechanisms are ruptured by the public release of their secrets. In some cases, not like mine in Trinidad, a secret is something everybody knows, but agrees not to talk about (Piot, 1993)—think of an extramarital affair, known to everyone in the village. Again, this may not be useful to understanding the cases of the Pentagon, the State Department, or Bank of America: we do not all know their secrets, and when we do know them, yes, we talk about them. Others (Weiner, 1984; Rosaldo, 1984) examine secrecy as rhetorical play, as “indirect speech,” as “slow” and “curvy” speech – precisely because secrets are meant to be told (now more like my Trinidadian case, but again less useful to examining the Pentagon, the State Department, or Bank of America), but there is also a way of telling them. Secrecy can be a matter of initiation into a select community—certainly, even for a state, divulging the secret gets you expelled (or court-martialed). In other cases, anthropologists have spoken of secrecy as social control, which we could tie to ideas about tactical power in shaping and controlling settings (Eric Wolf, Richard Adams)—here a Marxist anthropological analysis can become useful for analyzing the likes of the Pentagon, the State Department, or Bank of America. Secrets are tied up with the power to make certain meanings stick, to create and uphold official versions of truth (Conrad Arensberg). Keeping secrets keeps knowledge on the level of the magical–keeping a secret creates the secret’s power, without it ever being put to the test (Luhrmann, 1989; Rappaport, 1979).

But what is a secret? What makes a secret a secret is not its content, but who gets to tell it (Don Brenneis, Fred Myers, Michelle Rosaldo, Beryl Bellman). The demise of the secret is the rise of public awareness: visibility and transparency arise from crisis (Wolf, 1990). In this case, what happens to the Pentagon, State Department, etc., is not that they are damaged so much by the contents of the secrets (and they have admitted as much, repeatedly), rather it is their power to determine “who will know what” that is damaged, and of course that they are being “betrayed” from the inside (which makes their attacks against Wikileaks even more preposterous, subjecting them to condemnation from the human rights rapporteurs of both the UN and the OAS, and Amnesty International).

Wikileaks also has its own distinctive research methodology, that is not readily comparable to anything we know of in the social sciences. It’s not fieldwork immersion and conversational interaction with informants (their informants are unknown to them)—but they learn a lot about actors through documents, and through the actors’ actions in reaction to the release of the documents (in a way that no anthropologist could achieve, given the restrictions of their chosen methods). It is not covert research—which is approved in the code of ethics of the Canadian Sociological Association (Art. 19 “Incomplete disclosure or deception may be necessary for certain kinds of research in order to penetrate ‘official,’ ‘on-stage,’ or ‘on-the-record’ presentations of reality. Deception should not be used where another methodology would accomplish the research objectives”)—Wikileaks does not send operatives into the institutions whose behaviours it unmasks. It is not scientific lab research: Wikileaks does not engage in experimentation, with controlled variables. It is neither a naturalistic nor an experimental methodology. That alone is something new for us, and it’s something quite monumental. Wikileaks does, however, share some of the methodological limitations of the classical social sciences for being largely state-centric: it does not present us with world-systemic data, but data obtained from states and banks (which of course have transnational implications). It is up to the researcher to analytically add value and take the data beyond itself.

Thus where some might speak of Wikileaks’ political practice as “Wikivism,” we can speak of its methodology as “Wikileakism.” The philosophy behind Wikileaks precedes the creation of Wikileaks, so it might not be useful to reserve the “-ism” for anything other than its methodology.

This does not mean that anthropologists are strangers to the experience of either doing research with classified state documents that they themselves obtain—most notably David Price—or with the act of controversial leaking about the activities of colleagues that are damaging to the reputation of the profession. In 1970 Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen worked with files that had been deliberately leaked from a student research assistant to Michael Moerman, and passed on to the Student Mobilization Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam (SMC) [For more on this, read this page from Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban’s Ethics and the profession of anthropology]. For their work, Wolf, Jorgensen, and others were reprimanded by Margaret Mead in her whitewash of the involvement of anthropologists in counterinsurgency. More recently, at least some anthropologists have been especially keen to use the Human Terrain System Handbook that was leaked to Wikileaks itself (and which has been archived by ZA). Anthropologists are no strangers to secrecy, obtaining secret documents, working with secret documents, respecting local secrets, and debating the unethical practice of doing secret research.

For those interested in more detail, what follows are some select quotes from works cited, or further notes, and a bibliography.

The secret as instrumental, situational, in community-maintenance

Kasfir (2010) writing about De Jong (2007), with reference to a Senegalese community (no page numbers, only the HTML version of the article was available):

“despite the fact that secrecy is by definition exclusionary, it also produces a strong communal affect among those who share the secret” (Kasfir, 2010)

“in the face of ‘large-scale social formations’ (such as nation-states), small-scale societies must struggle to ‘produce context’ to matter, to be seen and heard and taken account of by the wider world, to enable action. If you have ever been in a Jola sacred forest during initiation, ‘the secret’ will serve you well when you leave to work in Dakar or Paris. It creates a diaspora of shared experience which allows you to hold onto, and subsequently act upon, that aspect of the local which is commonly expressed in your self-perceived social identity” (Kasfir, 2010)

“ritual practices of secrecy have been able to survive colonial domination and postcolonial nationalism because they produce a sense of locality ‘from below’, as opposed to the calls for national citizenship coming from the government” (Kasfir, 2010)

[Kasfir cites Bayart (1993)—“politics at large” – and Appadurai (1996)—the “production of locality” –as useful analytical frameworks, for this case.]

“In a close-knit society, secrecy depends for the most part on convention. One should never look too hard. If one’s neighbors keep their thoughts to themselves, then a transparent sack or a roof of straw is as impenetrable as the thickest wall” (Gable, 1997, p. 227)

Secrecy as everyday linguistic practice

“quotidian occurrences of secrecy are part of a larger style of communication, a ‘language of secrecy,’ which encompasses Kpelle ritual and nonritual contexts. It is the largely neglected role of secrecy in the everyday that I address here, through an analysis of a particular West African society, the Kabre (Kabiye) of northern Togo. I argue not only that Kabre everyday life and discourse are permeated by hidden messages…” (Piot, 1993, p. 353)

“the previous analyses of secrecy in African societies….are of four general types. The first, structural-functionalist, has regarded secrecy as enhancing the educational role of initiation societies or as helping to set up cross-cutting ties among political units (Fulton 1972; Little 1949, 1966; Watkins 1943). The second, Marxist, has seen secrecy as a means of social control in a system of power relations, as a way in which elders maintain their privileged position by withholding esoteric knowledge from juniors (La Fontaine 1977; Murphy 1980). The third, Freudian, has suggested that secrecy is a metaphor for sexuality and that secrecy cults facilitate a child’s ability to deal with the anxieties and mysteries of infantile sexuality and maturation (Ottenberg 1989). The fourth, semiotic, has sought to analyze the role played by secrecy in systems of communication, describing its formal, narrative character and its use of figurative speech (Bellman 1984). While all four approaches identify important aspects of the role of secrecy in the societies they analyze, none of them adequately comes to terms with the indigenous motivations for secrecy (Bellman 1984:143)” (Piot, 1993, p. 353)

What is a secret?

“According to Bellman (1984), there is a paradox that surrounds the phenomenon of secrecy in virtually every society where it is practiced: Secrets are meant to be told. Further, the content of secrets is often known by those who are not supposed to know” (Piot, 1993, p. 357)

“Bellman concludes, therefore, that Poro secrecy has more to do with form-with excluding nonmembers-than with content. He also argues that when Kpelle secrets are told, they are often discussed indirectly, through the use of language that metaphorically alludes to, but never directly reveals, the concealed information. Thus, Bellman (1984, p. 76, 140) suggests that Kpelle culture consists of two realities–a ‘real’ one that many people know but collaborate in concealing, and another, the realm of discourse about the real, that indirectly refers, through what Bellman calls ‘deep talk’ (allusive, metaphoric speech), to the real. The existence of this second reality creates a field of varying, ambiguous, and often conflicting interpretations of the real. One never knows for sure whether one ‘got’ the message or not” (Piot, 1993, p. 357)

“the content of a secret is less sociologically significant than the way it is shared or not shared in a society. It is the formal power of secrets to create boundaries and alliances that is the source of secrecy’s social power” (Gable, 1997, fn. 7, p. 230)

The public and the private

Would “society” cease to exist without secrecy? This is an idea discussed by both Horowitz (1982) and Singer (1982), in two journals for legal studies. The assumption, unwieldy as it has become even in the post-Enlightenment West, is that the “public” (the state, its courts, the police) needs to constrain “private” choice (of individual citizens), to maintain social order.

Secrecy as power and social control

Eric Wolf (1990) presents various conceptualizations of “power,” one of which he favours being the power to shape the arena in which interactions take place, what he describes as the “power that controls the settings in which people may show forth their potentialities and interact with others” (Wolf, 1990, p. 586). He credits Richard Adams (1966, 1975) for this insight, dealing with tactical and organizational power, that is, how one unit can constrain the actions of another (Wolf, 1990, p. 586).

“How do we get from viewing organization as product or outcome to understanding organization as process? For a start, we could do worse than heed Conrad Arensberg’s advice (1972:10-11) to look at ‘the flow of action,’ to ask what is going on, why it is going on, who engages in it, with whom, when, and how often. Yet we would now add to this behavior-centered approach a new question: For what and for whom is all this going on, and–indeed–against whom? This question should not be posed merely in interactionist terms” (Wolf, 1990, p. 591)

“Power is implicated in meaning through its role in upholding one version of significance as true, fruitful, or beautiful, against other possibilities that may threaten truth, fruitfulness, or beauty. All cultures, however conceived, carve out significance and try to stabilize it against possible alternatives. In human affairs, things might be different, and often are. Roy Rappaport, in writing on sanctity and ritual (Rappaport 1979), has emphasized the basic arbitrariness of all cultural orders. He argues that they are anchored in postulates that can neither be verified nor falsified, but that must be treated as unquestionable: to make them unquestionable, they are surrounded with sacredness. I would add that there is always the possibility that they might come unstuck. Hence, symbolic work is never done, achieves no final solution. The cultural assertion that the world is shaped in this way and not in some other has to be repeated and enacted, lest it be questioned and denied” (Wolf, 1990, p. 593)

“We owe to social anthropology the insight that the arrangements of a society become most visible when they are challenged by crisis” (Wolf, 1990, p. 593)

“Secrecy is about control. It is about the individual possession of knowledge that others do not have, and from the psychological consequences of this privileged possession follow its effects in magical practice. Secrecy elevates the value of the thing concealed. That which is hidden grows desirable and seems powerful, and magicians exploit this tendency to give their magic significance. They can use secrecy to conceal their magic from scepticism and to give themselves a context in which their own scepticism may be muted. In other words, secrecy alters the attitudes of both insider and outsider toward the thing concealed, and in magic insiders seem to use this mechanism to bolster their ill-supported faith in magic’s value” (Luhrmann, 1989,p. 161)

Secrecy as magic

“Secrecy also fosters a deferential attitude toward the contents of its secret knowledge. The concealment of magical names, words, images and gestures heightens the value of what has been hidden by implying that its power is too great to be lightly shared. Magicians make much of their moral responsibility in controlling access to magical knowledge” (Luhrmann, 1989, p. 142)

“These secrets are too powerful to share, claim the morally righteous. Maybe so: but by keeping them secret one need never test their strength. To keep a secret creates the sense of the secret’s power without the need for its demonstration” (Luhrmann, 1989, pp. 142-143)

“Secrecy fills an essential function in diverting disconfirmation, but the appeal of magic lies in the way it makes its members feel, and its positive psychological help can be considerable. Insofar as magic fails, secrecy masks the failure and perpetuates the illusion. Insofar as magic seems effective, therapeutic secrecy initiates its potency” (Luhrmann, 1989,p. 162)

References:

Adams, Richard N. (1966). “Power and Power Domains.” America Latina, 9: 3-5, 8-11.

Adams, Richard N. (1975). Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Arensberg, Conrad M. (1972). “Culture as Behavior: Structure and Emergence.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 1: 1-26.

Bellman, Beryl. (1984). The Language of Secrecy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Brenneis, Donald, and Fred Myers, eds. (1984). Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific. New York: New York University Press.

Gable, Eric. (1997). “A Secret Shared: Fieldwork and the Sinister in a West African Village.” Cultural Anthropology, 12 (2) May: 213-233

Horowitz, Morton. (1982). “The History of the Public/Private Distinction.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 130: 1423-1428.

Kasfir, Sidney L. (2010). “Review of Masquerades of Modernity: Power and Secrecy in Casamance, Senegal by Ferdinand De Jong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.” African Arts, 43 (2).

Luhrmann, T. M. (1989). “The Magic of Secrecy.” Ethos, 17 (2) Jun: 131-165

Piot, Charles D. (1993). “Secrecy, Ambiguity, and the Everyday in Kabre Culture.” American Anthropologist, 95 (2) June: 353-370.

Rappaport, Roy A. (1979). Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Rosaldo, Michelle. (1984). “Words that Are Moving: The Social Meanings of Ilongot Verbal Art.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific, D. Brenneis and F. Myers, eds., pp. 131-160. New York: New York University Press.

Singer, Joseph. (1982). “The Legal Rights Debate in Analytical Jurisprudence from Bentham to Hohfeld.” University of Wisconsin Law Review: 975-1059.

Weiner, Annette. (1984). “From Words to Objects to Magic: ‘Hard Words’ and the Boundaries of Social Interaction.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific, D. Brenneis and F. Myers, eds., pp. 161-191. New York: New York University Press.

Wolf, Eric R. (1990). “Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power – Old Insights, New Questions.” American Anthropologist, 92 (3) Sep: 586-596

Zahan, Dominique. (1979). The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For those who are interested, this is just a brief note of two relevant items posted on the website of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace. One, building on what John Stanton has provided in the previous post, focuses on the continuation and expansion of the Human Terrain System, with yet another anthropologist in the lead (very interesting, for a program that began to eschew any anthropological connections; even more interesting now that there is a stated intention to reengage the anthropological community). HTS directors possibly think that they have cleaned house sufficiently to permit them to approach us without much diffidence. In addition, it seems that HTS is getting some interested attention from the Canadian military elite. See: “A Resurgent Human Terrain System: Concerns for Anthropology, Including Canada.”

The second item is directed primarily at Canadian anthropologists, though it may well be of wider interest (especially as it stems from a job advertisement that appeared on the website of the American Anthropological Association). It concerns correspondence between AJP members and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calgary, regarding their alliance with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) in creating a position in military anthropology, also explicitly open to “international” (i.e. American) applicants. We asked a series of questions, not wanting to prejudge the nature and purpose of the position, especially as colleagues who may be called upon to write letters of reference for prospective applicants. It is our job, that of referees and applicants, to learn as much as possible about a position before applying (or supporting an application). Apparently, that is an unreasonable expectation–in this case alone–and you can read the response that we received from Calgary. We therefore recommend that no one apply for the position, and that no one write any letter of recommendation for anyone applying to the program, given the obvious lack of any kind of transparency around this position. See: “Militarizing Anthropology at the University of Calgary.”

“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