Chapter Eleven: Problems with Counterinsurgent Anthropological Theory - or, by the Time a Military Relies on Counterinsurgency for Foreign Victories it has Already Lost

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.

— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Culturally informed counterinsurgency categorically pres-ents three types of problems for anthropology, these categories are: ethical, political, and theoretical. The ethical problems concern voluntary informed consent, transparency, manipulation of studied populations, and the likelihood of harm befalling those researched; while the political problems most obviously concern using anthropology to support neo-colonial projects of conquest, occupation and domination.

The ethical and political problems associated with using anthropology for counterinsurgency operations are significant enough to prevent most anthropologists from applying their disciplinary knowledge to support American counterinsurgency efforts. Most anthropologists are justifiably concerned enough by the prospect that counterinsurgency operations violate basic anthropological ethics standards; but these reactions can change quickly, especially as military operations give way to counterinsurgency operations (such as building hospitals, schools, micro loan programs, etc.) that can easily be confused with humanitarian aid operations. Likewise, many anthropologists have strong political objections to supporting the military occupations of foreign nations.

Thinking beyond the vital political and ethical questions raised by using anthropological methods and theories for counterinsurgency, I want to consider how militarized counterinsurgency operations are imagined to work within the universe of anthropological theory. While no single strain of anthropological theory provides a basis for today’s counterinsurgency theory, the contradictory range of latent and manifest assumptions and claims about how culture works informs us not only of the poor intellectual base underlying these efforts, but of the apparent impossibility of counterinsurgency programs ever working in the ways they are being sold to the military. I want to consider very basic questions of how counterinsurgency in foreign cultures is supposed to actually work given the claims of the statements made in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and a broad range of anthropological theoretical understandings of culture.

In this chapter I use two different means to identify the epistemology expressed in US counterinsurgency theory: the first method examines a draft document that makes unusually manifest links to anthropology’s theoretical literature; the second method examines the latent assumptions and principles expressed in the writings and statements of American counterinsurgency doctrine.

How to Make Occupations and Influence People

It is clear that some simple forms of counterinsurgency are not only possible, but are common military practice. These forms are exemplified by the minor ways in which occupying military forces succeed in reducing conflict by adapting their policies to create less friction by such practices as acknowledging local cultural practices/beliefs, or delivering government services and enforcing laws (and there are other more economically coercive means through the sort of USAID-type development schemes that I have discussed elsewhere (Price 2010)). The importance of recognizing local culture has long been taught to troops by military Cultural Affairs Officers, and generally is part of training for local theatres. These forms of counterinsurgency can be just thought of as “simple counterinsurgency”.

I do not find the claims for “simple counterinsurgency” to be controversial, but I reject the more remarkable claims made by Counterinsurgency’s anthropology aggressive public salesmen and women. The most visible of these public salespeople are militarized social scientists like Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen, who are thrust forth in the media making extraordinary claims that counterinsurgency (COIN) can be used to accomplish military victory in Afghanistan. McFate, Killcullen and others on this American “COIN Team” are trying to sell the military on the possibility that regionally-competent cultural specialists can coordinate forms of cultural engineering designed to exploit local cultural features not just to reduce conflict, but to defeat insurgents.

The COIN Team’s theory asserts that cultural manipulation is something that cleaver people can undertake through a certain level of attentive understanding of the beliefs and practices of the culture one wants to control. They claim that well informed, culture savvy operators can play culture — pulling the cultural strings in a given cultural setting to move and drive the culture in ways advantageous to Occupiers. But these claims are at odds with most past and present anthropological notions of culture. I don’t expect the military to have the social science expertise to question the social theory behind the COIN Team’s extraordinary claims, but anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists do — and social scientists need to publicly demand answers.

Method One: Manifest Expressions in the COIN Manual

A brief examination of some of the manifest, explicit theories found in the Field Manual demonstrates a damagingly inconsistent mixture of social theories being paraded about to justify counterinsurgency tactics. After I published a November 2007 CounterPunch article documenting the extent of the sourcing problems in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, some unidentified person provided the Small Wars website with a document reporting to be the first draft of sections of the COIN manual from which many of the problematic sections appeared (see: COIN Draft n.d.). This document answers none of my indentified concerns, but it likely is, as claimed, an original draft of theoretical sections of what would become the final manual (complete with extensive citations and quotes), and as such it provides an invaluable glimpse at the raw theory informing those cooking-up anthropologized counterinsurgency theory (COIN Draft n.d.).

In just a few pages, this draft manuscript cites and quotes from such diverse sources as: Evans-Pritchard’s 1940 definition of “social structure” from The Nuer (COIN Draft n.d.:1, n3), Gramschi’s 1930s Prison Notebooks on dominant hegemonic culture (COIN Draft n.d.:1, n2), Raymond Firth’s 1955 “Principles of Social Organization” (COIN Draft n.d.:1, n4), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s 1952 vision of social structure (COIN Draft n.d.:1, n5), Ralph Linton’s 1940 conception of social organization (COIN Draft n.d.:2, n8 & 9), Anthony Giddens on ethnicity, ca. 1993 (COIN Draft n.d.:2, n18), Malinowski on social institutions, 1945 (COIN Draft n.d.:3, n23), Geertz on cultural interpretations, 1973, (COIN Draft n.d.:5, n26), Chagnon on cross-cousin marriage (COIN Draft n.d.:6, n29), Paul Ricoeur on cultural narratives, 1991 (COIN Draft n.d.:7, n41), Victor Turner, 1968, on rituals and symbols (COIN Draft n.d.:7,n44-47), Pierre Bourdieu on social capital (COIN Draft n.d.:9, n48), and Max Weber on traditional power and authority (COIN Draft n.d.:10, n51).

The resulting mishmash of inconsistent social theory conjured by this swampwater version of culture supporting the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is instructive. The clumsy surgical joining of such divergent works creates something misshapenly Frankenstinean. The Field Manual’s quick conjoinings produce unlikely grafts where we find: Evans-Pritchard’s segmentary view of social structure stressing idioms of alliances combined with Gramsci’s hegemonic cultures and sub-societies struggling for contested meanings (meanings that COIN operators dream they can manipulate like puppet strings). Firth and Radcliffe-Brown’s attention to the structural articulations of these groups reveals limits to the ways that meanings and behaviors can be negotiated. Linton’s notion of “status” alerts COIN operators to specific roles that can be manipulated to COIN’s advantage, just as Gidden’s distinctions between ethnic groups can be played against one another. Ricoeur’s attention to subtleties of cultural narrative combines with Turner’s grasp of rituals and symbols promising an ability to read and hijack local meanings for counterinsurgent ends. Bourdieu’s cultural, social and economic capital combine with Weber’s understanding of Traditional Authority to reveal hidden power alliances that can be manipulated. This contradictory conjoining of seriously divergent theories betrays not only an amateurish and uncritical approach to social theory, but it betrays a sloppy effort to sell the military claims of cultural manipulation that would not survive ten minutes of scrutiny in an undergraduate anthropological theory seminar.

While the COIN Team glossed over the profound epistemological differences inherent in these cannibalized theoreticians work, it behooves anyone interested in thinking through just how these vague counterinsurgency plans are supposed to work to stop and consider, before awakening with a quagmire hangover, just how incompatible the different elements of this hastily concocted cocktail is. Obviously, the military doesn’t get why it is problematic to indiscriminately mix Evans-Pritchard, Gramsci, Riceur, Bourieu, Geertz, Radcliffe-Brown and the rest of these folks together. Given the historical problems between two the most theoretically similar from this mix (e.g., the hyphenates: Radcliffe-Brown & Evans-Pritchard), it is an inconsistent, incoherent, theory that mixes say, Clifford Geertz and Napoleon Chagnon together as if they were theoretical kindred brethren whose world views were separated only by differences in vocabulary.

To understand the ends to which the Manual imagines applying this amalgamation of culture theory, consider this brief passage that appears in a Manual section following this sampling of theory. The Manual observes that, “tribal and religious forms of organization rely heavily on traditional authority. Traditional authority figures often wield enough power, especially in rural areas, to single-handedly drive an insurgency. Understanding the types of authority at work in the formal and informal political system . . .will help counterinsurgency forces identify the agents of influence who can help or hinder the completion of objectives”(COIN Manual 3-64). Through such logic Max Weber’s distinctions of authority types can be used to select tactics and targets. The logic of counterinsurgency is that those who “hinder” occupations are eliminated, while those who “help” are supported. And in theatres of operation dominated by over 14,000 drones, anthropologists are increasingly needed at ground level to sort the “hinderers” from the “helpers” and to divine the landscape of culture and symbols that the drones cannot decipher.

There are other forms of intellectual bankruptcy underlying the theoretical (dis)orientation of the COIN Manual: the mental world of “culture” is disarticulated from the physical world so that culture does not include learned behaviors; while anthropologists have argued for decades over definitions of culture (and sometimes over the existence of it), choosing a definition of culture that excludes behaviors creates more problems for counterinsurgency theory. But without differentiating between ideas and practices, there is little hope of accounting for the physical-behavioral and ideational components of occupation, subjugation and resistance.

Despite fundamental claims to the contrary, counterinsurgency theory confuses the controlling of bodies with the capturing of spirits — believing that cultural nuance will get the occupied to render unto Caesar not just that which is Caesar’s, but loyalties. The COIN Team disarticulates culture into non-constituent pieces (as imagined variables) in simplistic ways that misses that anthropology’s holistic understanding that culture necessarily exists in time and place within a physical world: and that time, place, and the physical world are themselves elements of culture in ways that are not easily played by would-be culture-engineers.

As the graveside Engels reminds us, Marx cut through that hitherto concealing “overgrowth of ideology” and observed “that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics;” in the context of occupation, I would add that these physical conditions have as much to do with the conditions in which one wages Counterinsurgency as does knowledge of cross-cousin marriage practices. An environment marked by the slaughtered remains of dead bodies, broken buildings, sewer systems, roads and power grids (and twelve years of sanctions) is not easily shrouded by the sort of growths of ideology that the COIN Team promises to cultivate as part of its central plan. The Manual admits that in order for counterinsurgency to succeed, an open acknowledgement of, and corrective action towards fundamental problems must occur (3-24: I-14), but the Manual does not say what is to be done if the fundamental causes to be addressed are neo-colonialism, the installation of illegitimate governments, and illegal invasions. Counterinsurgency cannot talk its way out of this dilemma — but if you can believe the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, that’s the plan.

The Manual hides behind the elusive mumbo-jumbo of anthropology’s theoretical Tachyon Particles, but the stark physical conditions of occupation weakens the possibility that culturally appropriate propaganda messages, or targeting key individuals can defeat an insurgency.

Method Two: Latent Expressions in the COIN Manual

Let me switch my analysis from manifest themes to consider some of the latent themes in this work: while the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and the published writings of anthropologically informed counterinsurgency advocates like McFate and Kilcullen show a fond reliance on mechanistic forms of structural-functional anthropology used by anthropologists linked to British colonialism, the Manual expresses no single manifest or latent paradigm of how culture works. If one reads the Manual it is impossible to divine a consistent model of culture, much less of how one “controls” culture. The latent culture paradigm of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual finds inconsistently jumbled culture theories of a sort that play well with the non-social scientists consuming this work in the Pentagon, but appear sophomoric to anthropologists familiar with the lineages of this work.

In the Manual, “culture” is neither strictly an atavistic force of symbols or meanings beyond the awareness and control of individuals; nor is it the outcome of an infrastructural base, hidden structural forces, or political economy. Instead: the Manual’s latent notion of culture is that it is whatever it is needed to be. While it is clear that the culture of occupied peoples is something that soldiers ignore at their peril, in the “zen like” world of the Manual, the culture of occupied peoples is conceived as simultaneously being an independent and dependent variable — though most often represented as an independent variable that can be understood by savvy occupiers intent on engineering the occupied’s culture.

The Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s conception of culture views it as an isolatable variable in a larger human and environmental equation. Culture is presented as a variable that is to be understood and manipulated:

1-124: “Successful conduct of COIN operations depends on thoroughly understanding the society and culture within which they are being conducted. Soldiers and Marines must understand the following about the population in the [Area of Operations]:

· Organization of key groups in the society.

· Relationships and tensions among groups.

· Ideologies and narratives that resonate with groups

· Values of groups (including tribes), interests, and motivations.

· Means by which groups (including tribes) communicate.

· The society’s leadership system.” (FM-3-24: 1-124)

These six elements are thus seen as independent variables to be added to the military’s master domination equation. Most of these six elements are structural or ideational cultural elements. The Manual also identifies “six sociocultural factors” to be analyzed in counterinsurgency operations, these are: Society, Social structure, Culture, Language, Power and Authority, & Interests (FM-3-24: 3-19). The Manual instructs that “once the social structure has been thoroughly mapped out, staffs should identify and analyze the culture of a society as a whole and of each major group within the society” (3-36). This absurdly glib statement is akin to having a NASA technical manual that instructs: “add wings to space shuttle, glue on ceramic tiles; reenter earths atmosphere at correct angle”. The Manual brushes aside the difficulties of conceptualizing social structure; instead, just one quick “yadda-yadda-yadda” and presto: the “staffs” have mastered these vital independent variables for manipulation. Anthropologists can devote years to studying and then struggling to represent the social structure of a single village, yet our counterinsurgency theorists cavalierly rush past the complexities of such small scale undertakings and pretend that such operations can meaningfully and quickly occur on a societal level. That no one within the military challenges this as nonsense reveals the low level of critical analysis and skepticism within these military circles as those hawking outlandish claims of cultural engineering are heralded as making revolutionary contributions.

The Manual’s focus on Max Weber’s writings on modern legal-rational authority reveals the COIN Team’s awareness of the central problems of legitimacy (3-63); but the Manual does not examine how historically difficult it is for external occupiers to acquire the forms of legitimacy that Weber recognized. It is the centrality of legitimacy that makes domestic counterinsurgencies operations (like the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaigns against the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, socialists, communists, anarchists etc. — in these campaigns the FBI already had legitimacy with the bulk of the domestic population) so much more successful than the foreign-occupier scenarios of the Manual. The Manual argues that “Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.”  But anthropologists know the difficulties for outsiders to achieve legitimacy, and the Manual has no magic answers to this problem. As William Polk bluntly concluded in his book Violent Politics’ review of two centuries of insurgencies: “the single absolutely necessary ingredient in counterinsurgency is extremely unlikely ever to be available to foreigners” — that ingredient being: legitimacy (Polk 2007:209-210). The Manual’s focus on the writings of Antonio Gramsci betray the authors’ worried interest in how occupying forces can learn to hijack hegemonic narratives to aid in full spectrum domination.

Three macro latent themes emerge in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The first is that, the military specific definitions of “culture” view’s culture exclusively as structural and meaning based systems of knowledge (ignoring material and behavioral components). Second, culture has identifiable structural components that not only determine the nature of social life, but these can be identified, and controlled to one’s advantage. Third, crudely mechanical views of culture are presented in ways consistent with structural-functionalist anthropology’s historic links to colonial management. One implication of these three themes is that culture, or elements of specific cultures are seen as consisting of interchangeable data-units that can be managed in databases — a point linking counterinsurgency theory with Human Terrain’s plans for handheld field access to HRAF databases for interchangeable theatres of operation.

It is worth briefly mentioning some of what is not represented in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s latent culture theory: most prominent is the absence of any systemic discussion of how difficult it is to bring about engineered culture change, there is no mention of applied anthropologists failures to get people to do simple things (like recycling, losing weight, reducing behaviors associated with the spread of HIV, etc.) basic things that are arguably in their own self-interest. The Manual does not address the fact that no amount of cultural shinola can hid from occupied people the brutal facts of their situation — yet this is just what Complex Counterinsurgency seeks to do. The COIN Team thinks they can leverage social structure and hegemonic narratives so that the occupied will internalize their own captivity as “freedom”.

Sock Puppets Dreaming of Being John Malkovich

The COIN Team’s representations of anthropology to their Pentagon customers remind me of Borat’s representations of Kazakhstan. Both accentuate and exploit preexisting stereotypes held by their target audiences. Borat’s shtick depends on extant notions of Steppe peasants who might really bring live chickens in their suitcases onto a New York Subway; the COIN Team’s shtick depends upon notions of near-magical anthropological levels of knowledge of the mysteries of culture and local customs. Borat’s joke is on the unsuspecting Americans who think they are interacting with a confused but kindly foreigner; the COIN Team’s joke is on Pentagon-customers who think they’re buying the real magic beans of culture. But anthropologists know better. Even when anthropologists can agree that culture itself actually exists, anthropologists know that culture doesn’t work that way: it doesn’t matter where you side between Culture or Practical Reason: culture can’t be hacked in the simple ways the military is being told it can (cf. Sahlins 1978, Harris 1979).

I suppose this leaves anthropology in the same position as the actual nation of Kazakhstan — and while the Kazakh Embassy’s public miss-reactions to Sasha Baron Cohen’s satire have easily been funnier than Borat himself (with the Embassy taking out full-page ads in the Washington Post and New York Times basically explaining that Kazakh cars have engines and are not pulled by yoked men), but anthropology’s response to McFate and Kilcullen’s claims for anthropology has appeared to many in the public as similarly odd — with some voices condemning the politics or ethics of the project, others supporting it, but few outright rejecting the theoretical possibility that this project being hawked to the military could ever work as advertised.

In an essay on “The Martialization of South African Anthropology” Robert J. Gordon documents how South African ethnographers once contributed anthropological knowledge to the South African Defense Force’s (SADF) brutal control of South Africa’s indigenous populations. While the lower ranks within the SADF were skeptical of the value of this ethnographic information, many SADF officers came to fetishize this knowledge, and with time SADF anthropologists became highly cherished experts. Some of these successful SADF ethnographers plagiarized the ethnographic writings of other scholars; others legitimated common folk knowledge about tribal populations (Gordon 1988:448). Gordon establishes that much of the “ethnographic” knowledge was little more than racist stereotypes repackaged with endorsements of anthropological legitimacy in ways that left SADF ethnographers reinforcing what SADF officers already believed. Gordon insightfully observed how the elevation of South African ethnographers as possessing unique, invaluable cultural knowledge for use in counterinsurgency operations “bolsters the status of the ethnologist as a ritual ‘expert’ since other White personnel have little chance of challenging his or her magical knowledge” (Gordon 1988:446). The hokum of claims of special “magical” knowledge of the inner workings of culture thematically connects this past South African reliance on anthropological knowledge with the current COIN Team, as both present unexamined claims about special cultural knowledge that are uncritically embraced by military personnel desperately seeking answers but who are unequipped to evaluate the veracity of remarkable claims.

The Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s approach to anthropological theory was not selected because it “works” or is intellectually cohesive: it was selected because it offers an engineering friendly false promise of “managing” the complexities of culture as if increased sensitivities, greater knowledge, panoptical legibility could be used in a linear fashion to engineer domination. It fits the military’s structural view of the world. It is the false promise of “culture” as a controllable, linear product that drives the COIN Team’s particular construction of “culture.” Within the military, the COIN Team is not alone in this folly: this is reminiscent of the absurd forms of analysis discussed in Chapter Eight’s analysis of the Special Forces Advisor Guide where military clients are drawn to simplistic, dated anthropological notions of culture and personality theories which produce essentialized reductions of entire continents as having a limited set of uniform cultural traits — a feat that finds the military embracing a form of anthropology that quantitatively tells it the world is a lot like it already understood it to be.

I’m not surprised, but remain outraged that the social scientists advising the military have been allowed to push counterinsurgency within military circles while avoiding explaining to anthropologist colleagues how counterinsurgency is even supposed to theoretically work — and without having to face up to the paucity of successful historical examples of armed foreign counterinsurgency campaigns. McFate and Kilcullen do not answer the critiques of academics; they know that the military is not concerned with the noises coming from the academy because they have cultural engineers telling them what they want to hear. The COIN Team downplays the failures of counterinsurgency’s history in a hyped cloak of “theory,” but upon closer inspection this cloak appears to be not much more than tattered scraps selectively sewn together providing little cover.

One thing this cloak is hiding is the likelihood that once a nation finds itself relying on counterinsurgency for military success in a foreign setting it has already lost. I am not arguing that insurgencies are always successful, I am instead following military strategist and historian, Edward Luttwak’s observation that: “insurgents do not always win, actually they usually lose. But their defeats can rarely be attributed to counterinsurgency” (Luttwak 2007:34). Even Kilcullen admits that counterinsurgency victories have been rare in the last half century; he just has the hubris to think that he has built a better mousetrap, a claim thwarting millennium of historical, structural, and material trends. The insurmountable problem that the COIN Team faces is that expressed by a senior French commander who told journalist Eric Walberg that: “We do not believe in counterinsurgency” because “if you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost” (Walberg 2008). Hiding behind a mess of unarticulated bits of anthropological and sociological theories doesn’t change this situation. It is a problem of history, cultural contingencies and limits of possible forms of cultural engineering. The jumbled amalgamations of anthropological theory that the COIN Team is hiding behind shows how weak are the theoretical foundation underlying the empty promises that Kilkullen and McFate are making for their Emperor’s-New-Clothes-counterinsurgency-ensemble. The inconsistencies and internal structural failures of their own articulated theory betray the improbability that the product they’re selling could ever work as advertised.