Chapter Twelve: Working for Robots - Human Terrain, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan

War in the age of intelligent machines depends primarily on machines, rather than human beings, for the production, analysis and distribution of death. Decentralization of command and control schemes, the development of ‘smart’ weapons, video combat simulation, and other technological manifestations increasingly remove human beings from the lethality of war.

— Montgomery Carlough [McFate], 1994

As anthropologist Montgomery McFate became the public spokesperson for Human Terrain Systems, she increasingly pulled back from public discussions of the workings and implications of Human Terrain. But in her early writings on British counterinsurgency operations against the IRA, we find a model of how she (and, it appears, her military sponsors) view anthropology as a tool for military conquest.

While working on her doctorate in anthropology at Yale in the early 1990s, Montgomery McFate undertook fieldwork and library research focusing on the resistance of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and British military counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland. She was not yet married to stability operations specialist and retired army officer, Sean McFate, and her dissertation appears under her maiden name, Montgomery Carlough. She focused on the 1969-1982 period, and British army changes away from strictly tactical military responses to more culturally calibrated counterinsurgency campaigns during those years. McFate’s research was supported by a mix of fellowships including the National Science Foundation, Mellon, and several Yale-based fellowships directed toward international security issues.

McFate explained that her dissertation examined “how cultural narratives, handed down from generation to generation, contributed to war,” and “how people justify violence” (Kamps 2008:310). This resume might lead one to assume her research was balanced between the positions of the Irish insurgents and British counterinsurgents. Such an impression would be false. Her dissertation reads as a guide for militaries wanting to stop indigenous insurgent movements.

McFate’s doctoral dissertation (written under her maiden name, Montgomery Carlough) was an exercise in sympathetically understanding the internal meaning of the Irish resistance. This was not a cultural study designed to give voice to the concerns of an oppressed people so that others might come to see their internal narrative as valid; it was designed to make those she studied vulnerable to co-optation and defeat (Carlough 1994).

For her dissertation fieldwork, McFate made multiple trips to Ireland and met with members of the occupying British military and of the Provisional IRA, but when she wrote her dissertation, she made a conscious decision not only not to identify whom she had spoken with, but also not to directly quote from these interactions (Carlough 1994:iii). In her dissertation, McFate claimed that her decision to not quote from these fieldwork experiences was done for disciplinary ethical reasons.

McFate’s proclaimed concern in 1994 over the ethical protection of research participants is admirable, and stands in stark contrast to Human Terrain’s later disregard of such ethical protections. It remains unknown what happened to her notes and other records from interviews with IRA members, but given McFate’s later work in environments requiring security clearances, such past contacts and records would have raised many questions when she applied for her security clearance. It would be standard operating procedure during a security clearance background investigation to ask about the identity of her 1990s contacts with the Provisional IRA and other groups, as it would be normal to ask such a clearance applicant for field notes and other such material.

McFate’s early counterinsurgency years provide a significantly less guarded glimpse at her (then) understanding of the promise of anthropology’s role in counterinsurgency. This younger, less prudent McFate avoided soft language: she now calls her “mercenaries” of yesteryear “independent military subcontractors” (Carlough 1994:iv). While she now avoids linking militarized anthropology with killing, in her dissertation days she more openly asked if “one could conclude that ethnocentrism — bad anthropology — interferes with the conduct of war. But does good anthropology contribute to better killing?” (Carlough 1994:13-14). Though an affirmative answer to this rhetorical question is implied, McFate left this question unanswered. McFate today categorically rejects claims that Human Terrain Teams are involved in using anthropology for what she referred to in 1994 as “better killing.” But one of McFate’s own Human Terrain social scientists told the press that she was comfortable with HTS data being used by the military when “looking for bad guys to kill” (Landers 2009).

McFate’s dissertation identified two counterinsurgency elements requiring anthropological skills. The first involved psychological warfare operations, where cultural readings could be used for defining perceptions of one’s enemy because “creating a mask for the enemy to wear is essential for psychological warfare” (Carlough 1994:86). The second argued that “knowledge of the enemy leads to a refinement in knowledge of how best to kill the enemy” (Carlough 1994:110).

The desire to understand and re-humanize an enemy and the rationalizations of the enemy’s motivations is at the heart of counterinsurgency operations, and McFate argued these goals hold vital roles for anthropology: “the fundamental contradiction between ‘knowing’ your enemy in order to develop effective strategy, and de-humanizing him in order to kill efficiently is a theme to which we will return. Suffice to say, that the dogs of war do have a pedigree, which is often ‘anthropological’ and that counterinsurgency strategy depends not just on practical experience on the battlefield, but on historically derived analogical models of prior conflict. Paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, enemies are not only good to kill, enemies are good to think” (Carlough 1994:114). Here McFate expressed a desire for PSYOP anthropologists to use anthropological conceptions of cultural relativism to understand how enemies view the world and to use this information to better understand how one’s own actions or use of symbols will be interpreted by enemies. McFate insists on ethnographies of enemies in order to out-think them, because “understanding the possible intentions of the enemy entails being able to think like the enemy; in other words, successful pre-emptive counter moves depend on simulating the strategy of the opponents” (Carlough 1994).

McFate wanted military forces to understand how their actions have undesired consequences that they cannot understand unless they learn to see things from within the enemy’s mindset. This approach is often spun by McFate and her supporters as being a desire to use anthropology so that less violence will be used by U.S. forces. But McFate and HTS supporters desire minimal force because they believe it leads to a more efficient occupation, cooption and conquest of enemies, not because they object to occupation, cooption and conquest. This presents serious political problems for most anthropologists, and given anthropology’s often odious past role as a handmaiden to colonialism, these issues easily move from the realm of individual politics to disciplinary politics, and properly raise the attentions of disciplinary professional associations.

Drones and Human Intelligence

Today, reliance on military robotics and drones in Iraq and Afghanistan progresses at a startling rate. In the span of the past eight years, the robotic presence in these theaters has increased from a state when there were no military robotic units to today’s total of over 12,000 robotic devices in use, with over 5,000 flying drones in use. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) like the Predator, with a flight range of over 2,000 miles, an ability to remain airborne at high elevations for over 24 hours at a time, advanced optical surveillance capabilities with the remote pilots linked by satellite half the world away, can track and kill humans on the ground. Other earthbound robots like the PackBot and Talon detonate landmines or roadside bombs, while some like Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System have options of being armed with M-16s and other weapons (Singer 2009).

The impact of this tactical shift has radically changed the U.S. military’s ability to track and control occupied and enemy populations. As P.W. Singer shows in Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, battlefields and occupations are being revolutionized in ways that are quickly progressing beyond strategists’ ability to understand how these increases in remote tracking, controlling and killing are impacting the cultures they are physically dominating. Unsurprisingly, increases in robotic-panoptical monitoring and control have negative consequences for American interests, as mechanical manipulation reveals deep divisions between the worlds of machines and humans (Singer 2009). To her credit, a decade and a half ago, McFate understood how such dynamics would play out, though her “practical” solution to such dilemmas is mired in irresolvable political and ethical problems for the anthropologists that would become the sensors for the machines dominating these battlefields.

Early-McFate’s most insightful statements concerning military needs for anthropological knowledge focus on high-tech warfare’s inability to decipher or address the human reactions and problems created by warfare. McFate understood that, “global positioning systems and cruise missiles won’t pay for your ammunition in Kurdistan. Low-intensity conflict requires human generated intelligence, local knowledge, and mission-oriented tactics. Atavistic modes of intelligence collection — espionage, infiltration — take precedence over more sophisticated techniques in these conditions. Thus, an interesting inversion occurs: as the technological sophistication of the enemy declines, reliance on intelligence derived from human sources (HUMINT) increases” (Carlough 1994:216).

McFate was correct. While battlefields become increasingly dominated by high-tech gadgetry and panoptical drones, iris-scanners and computer tracking software, something like the currently attempted Human Terrain Teams will be needed to gather human knowledge on the ground. McFate’s early writings clarify why those designing counterinsurgency campaigns crave anthropological knowledge — and given the economic collapse’s impact on the anthropological job market, I would not preclude the likelihood of some measure of success, especially as these calls for anthropological assistance are increasingly framed in under false flags of “humanitarian assistance” or as reducing lethal engagements.

Obama’s illegal drone war in Pakistan raises the scorn of American counterinsurgency masterminds like David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum who publicly criticize the Bush and Obama administrations’ use of remote robotic killing from above as effective (in terms of killing desired “targets”) but counterproductive. In the pages of the New York Times they asked readers to, “imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war” (Kilcullen and Exum 2009). Kilcullen and Exum do not object to the hunting and killing of enemies. They object to the robotic limitations of killing from above divorced to sensitivities to the human meanings on the ground.

These war machines need human input. The machines need not so much anthropologists’ eyes and ears (they see and hear better than we ever will), but they need our spirits — our ability to symbolically and humanly process the human environments these machines dominate. The war-machines are technically efficient but humanly stupid. They can track and control the movement of human bodies, but they cannot understand the webs of cultural meanings of those they physically dominate. They cannot sense their own effectiveness on the lives they control: this is one of the reasons why something like human terrain teams are needed to function as nerves, feeling and reporting the cultural-emotional responses of occupied peoples so that the machines of war can more exactly manipulate and dominate them. It is useful to metaphorically consider themes of The Matrix when considering the ways that humans (anthropologists) are needed to be the interface with and serve the machines of high tech-warfare.

Nabokov riddles his novel Lolita with references to a form of destiny referred to as “McFate,” which are cruel turns of apparent coincidence that set characters upon paths linking their destinies with larger themes. In Nabokov’s world, the “synchronizing phantom” of McFate arranges what might have been chance events into patterns revealing if not providence, then at least a recurrence of trajectories (Nabokov 1959:103). In only a partial Nabokovian sense, anthropology’s McFate merges old anthropological and military themes together in ways revealing new uses for anthropology that the core of the discipline will be increasingly unable to control regardless of how offensive these uses are to core anthropological values.

It’s not that anthropology and warfare haven’t merged before; they have fatefully merged in all sorts of ways that have been historically documented. One stark difference is that today’s counterinsurgent abuses of anthropological knowledge occur after the discipline of anthropology has clearly identified such activities as betraying basic ethical standards for protecting the interests and well-being of studied populations. Anthropologists’ professional activities in the Second World War occurred without the existence of professional ethical codes of conduct, and it was a direct result of anthropological misconduct during the Vietnam War that the American Anthropological Association developed its first formalized Code of Ethics in 1971. It insisted that anthropologists’ primary loyalties be to those studied and that research not lead to events harming research participants. There was to be no secret research. There were mandates for voluntary informed consent. That HTS throws up weak sophistic arguments claiming that their involvement in warfare reduces harm changes nothing.

The notion of using anthropologists and other social scientists to gather information, probe and soothe the feelings of those living in these environments, increasingly monitored and controlled by machines, strikes me as an anthropological abomination. Given what we know anthropologically about the complexities of how culture works, it also seems doomed to failure.

Simple notions of mechanical, disarticulated representations of culture can be found in the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, in which particular forms of anthropological theory were selected not because they “work” or are intellectually cohesive but because they offer the 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. Such notions of culture fit the military’s structural view of the world. It is the false promise of “culture” as a controllable, linear equation that drives the COIN Team’s particular construction of “culture.”

What McFate’s writings and those of fellow-counterinsurgency supporters do not address is just how difficult it is for anthropologists, or anyone else, to successfully pull off the sort of massive cultural engineering project, needed for a counterinsurgency-based victory in Afghanistan. Those advocating anthropologically informed counterinsurgency are remarkably silent concerning just how difficult it is to bring about engineered culture change.

Beyond Human Terrain Systems, the Pentagon and the State Department can come up with other counterinsurgent uses for anthropologists, many of which will not alarm anthropologists in the ways that HTS, with its armed presence, does. But given the manipulative forms of cultural engineering goals behind these projects, many of the same ethical and political issues are raised by anthropologists’ participation in this work. Anthropologists and others being recruited to try and enact these counterinsurgency dreams risk confusing a supportive role in the wake of military decimation with engaging in humanitarian work. Reliance on “soft power” for the building hospitals, schools, supplying microloans and other agents of apparent gentle persuasions will help bring many liberals into the counterinsurgency fold, but it doesn’t resolve the problems of the larger project, even if the machines seeking our help are armed not with bombs and bullets but with the dolling out of needed loans, food, water, health and infrastructure (see Price 2010).