The Dominion - Counterinsurgency

The Ethnography of an Air-Strike

Tim McSorley — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 05:54:49 +0000

Canada’s military academics in the Afghan war and at home

MONTREAL—In the age of counterinsurgency and the battle for “hearts and minds,” cultural knowledge is valuable currency for the military intelligence business. The desire for cultural intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq has led Canada and the United States to implement hybrid military-academic programs meant to mimic anthropological research, mapping the “human terrain” of a battlefield.

These programs have led to serious concerns among social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular, about the possible militarization of their practice, and the erosion of the creditability of their work.

According to Robert Albro of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), there is a fear among academics that the military wants to “plug into” anthropological knowledge without engaging in a dialogue that respects the work, ethics and history of the discipline. Anthropologists in Canada and the United States worry that their discipline could go the way of physics after the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II, weaponizing knowledge at a cost to anthropology as well as the cultures and people it studies.

In late 2008 the Canadian Forces launched a new counterinsurgency initiative in Afghanistan. Entitled the White Situational Awareness Team (WSAT) program—named for military colour codes of red for enemy, blue for friendly and white for civilian. It is similar to the controversial Human Terrain Teams (HTT) deployed by the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007. HTTs are the on-the-ground research arm of the United States’ Human Terrain System (HTS) which, according to military sources, is “designed to meet the military’s requirements for socio-cultural knowledge across a spectrum of operations that the US may encounter in today’s world.” Each HTT is made up of five members, three military personnel and two civilians, while each WSAT includes two military intelligence officers and three civilian Department of Foreign Affairs employees.

Critiques of HTS range from calls for its immediate and complete halt, to recognizing an inherent value while denouncing program management. Plagued by scandal, HTS has been caught in a firestorm of internal and external discontent. According to a former employee who spoke confidentially to The Dominion, HTS, in its current form, cannot function as a war-fighting system, and those who should be concerned with its ineffectiveness are more concerned with selling the perception that it works.

Anthropologists in the United States have pushed back. The AAA, founded in 1902 and the largest professional association of anthropologists in North America, published a public statement on HTS in October 2007 calling HTS an “unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.”

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) was founded by eleven academics in 2007 to resist the militarization of anthropology. In 2009, the NCA published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society in response to the publication of US Army US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a document the NCA calls “faking scholarship.” They directly counter the military’s declaration of success, writing, “[T]here is no evidence, as some supporters have claimed, that the program saves lives.”

In fact, even as these programs are developed, casualty rates have continued to increase year over year. According to a report from the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 6,584 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. In the first ten months of 2009, they estimated that over 2,000 civilians had been added to that total.

“We modelled our approach upon that taken by physicists critical of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” said Roberto Gonzalez, founding member of the NCA. “After much discussion, we decided to take collective action and produce a statement of our objections to developing trends in the militarization of anthropology.”

The statement has since garnered 1,000 signatures from anthropologists and other like-minded scholars, including a number of Canadian anthropologists, declaring non-participation in all counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Although not opposed to “all work with military and civilian policy makers,” the NCA is “staunchly opposed to HTS.”

One of these Canadian signatories is Dr. Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, and member of the steering committee for Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

“I am totally opposed to the use of anthropologists and other social scientists in any situation where combat, counterinsurgency, or even the psychological and cultural manipulation of other societies is concerned,” said Forte. “If academics align themselves with the national security state, they diminish the relevance and credibility of their work, and potentially endanger the reputations and lives of all other academics.”

Anthropologists for Justice and Peace was founded in 2009 with a mandate to work in solidarity with civil society, anti-war activist groups, and Indigenous communities, and “call[s] on anthropologists to radically rethink the nature of their position in local communities, to decolonize ethnography, and to re-conceive the nature of the research process so that ethics are not a minor, procedural consideration.”

The NCA and AAA both identify ethics as a major issue within HTS, citing an absence of any code of ethics for both researchers and the use of knowledge collected. The Human Terrain program attempts to approximate anthropological fieldwork methods where we develop intimate and constructive relationships with research subjects, Robert Albro told The Dominion, but does so operating in a state of ethical exception.

“Leadership [of HTS] has at different times and ways stated it doesn’t need to follow United States ethics,” said Albro.

The NCA has a similar position, writing that “the HTS program violates scientific and federal research standards mandating informed consent by research subjects.” Both are referring to the Common Rule, an ethical regulation which enshrines the protection of human subjects in scientific and medical research.

The AAA code of ethics promotes responsibility by anthropologists in the field, specifically toward the subjects of their research. At the heart of this code, Albro cites a “do no harm” ideology. This creates a problem if research is feeding military intelligence and facilitating the kill chain. Additionally, anthropological ethics state that research should be shared openly, especially with the fieldwork subjects. In the HTS, research immediately becomes classified, creating what Albro calls an issue with “social scientists working in secrecy.”

HTS adopts the language of anthropology and trains recruits in the basics of fieldwork,
yet only six PhD anthropologists, of over four hundred employees, are serving in the program. According to Zenia Helbidg—a former HTS recruit, who was fired for pointing out some of the program’s shortfalls to superior officers—HTS is “hiring anyone with a degree which they can sell as social sciences.”

There is concern that deploying the army approximation of anthropologists, clad in fatigues with a gun in hand, gives the image of bringing the full force of the military to bear in a fieldwork situation and fundamentally skews power dynamics between researchers and the communities they study.

“One [blowback] is to recast anthropologists as servants of empire, and as the eyes and ears of the national security state,” Canadian anthropologist Maximilian Forte told The Dominion. “Many anthropologists already, in the best of times, have been suspected of being intelligence agents. These developments will only solidify that perception, and could potentially put the lives of anthropologists abroad at risk.”

The most public example of this was on November 5, 2008, when Paula Loyd, a member of HTT AF4, was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire while interviewing residents of the village of Chehel Gazi, 80 kilometers west of Kandahar city. She later died in a United States medical facility.

A United States military statement described the incident noting that one of Loyd's HTT co-workers shot and killed her assailant, sparking questions about why a United States civilian is carrying a weapon while deployed as part of an active military counterinsurgency operation. Lloyd’s team was embedded with Task Force 2-2, a United States unit deployed under the command and purview of the Canadian Forces Task Force Kandahar. The Canadian Forces made no public comment on the incident.

The situation in Canada is exasperated by the fact that any social scientist deployed with the Canadian military is a federal employee first, and an academic second.

“Their [WSATs'] job seems to be no different from that of HTS, except that for now the civilians they use are government employees, not academics,” Forte told The Dominion. “They have breached a barrier however: the idea that social and cultural knowledge can be useful for counterinsurgency, at least that door has now been opened in Canada”

Inquiries to the Canadian Forces were not returned by press time.

Academics, and their research, become part of the military intelligence machine in a system where, according the Canadian Forces COIN manual, “[R]egardless of what agencies are used to undertake activities, much of the assessment in support of operations will come from military intelligence staff.”

This places academia in a position which, according to Dr. Forte, mistakes “service to the state as service to the people—a mistake that is a hallmark of classic fascism.”

To date, the debate about military influence in anthropology and other social sciences remain chiefly in Unites States, but that could be changing. A well attended panel entitled “The Use of Culture and Anthropology in Counter-insurgency and Peacekeeping Operations” at the Canadian Anthropological Society’s 2009 conference, along with the foundation of groups like Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, are evidence of growing momentum against the military’s attempts to drape a green beret on the ivory tower.

Human intelligence programs represent a dangerous step towards “cultivating a dependency on the national security state, and on military funding, to build prestige, prominence and power,” according to Dr. Forte. “This will diminish the space of independent, critical intellectual endeavours, and ultimately create momentum against academia as a safe space in which to produce knowledge that challenges dominant assumptions.”

Cameron Fenton is an intern at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

Embedded Anthropologists

The Future of Warfare

dawn — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:01:53 +0000

Canadian counterinsurgency manual reflects US-Canada "synergy"

Capping a sweeping transformation that began in the late 1990s, the Canadian Forces recently issued their first counterinsurgency (COIN) operations doctrine, which will help Canadian soldiers prepare to fight the wars of today and the "foreseeable future," alongside its chief ally and the sole global superpower, the US.

In development since 2005, the COIN manual was authorized by Chief of Land Staff Lt. Gen. Andrew Leslie in the waning days of the Bush administration. It was not formalized for another two months—six weeks after the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Obama's administration has sent clear signals, through political appointments and holdovers (such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates), that the US military and national security apparatus' transformation toward fighting smaller, "irregular wars" begun under Bush will continue apace.

Only a week before Bush left office, Gates, together with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Director of USAID, Henrietta Fore, co-signed the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide. Neo-conservative historian Eliot Cohen, who oversaw the Guide's creation, wrote in its introduction:

Insurgency will be a large and growing element of the security challenges faced by the United States in the 21st century...Whether the United States should engage in any particular counterinsurgency is a matter of political choice, but that it will engage in such conflicts during the decades to come is a near certainty. This Guide will help prepare decision-makers of many kinds for the tasks that result from this fact.

According to Lt. Gen. Leslie, the Canadian Army is "at the cutting edge" of Western armies readying themselves to fight 21st-century wars.

"The paradigms of the past based on the Cold War have changed a great deal. We have demonstrated beyond any doubt that we can adapt our doctrine and training quickly in order to meet scattered, complex operations focused on counterinsurgency missions," Leslie told a Senate defence committee meeting in March.

Shifts in Canadian policy adhere closely to those of her allies, like the US, the UK and other NATO partners. These governments are at the forefront of institutionalizing COIN principles and practices in military culture, across the "whole-of-government," and, eventually, within the "whole of society."

Based on the "comprehensive approach," the Canadian COIN manual represents a synthesis of two recent US Army Field Manuals: Counterinsurgency (FM 3-24); and Stability Operations (FM 3-07).

In 2007, after over one-and-a-half million downloads, the US Army COIN manual was published in print by the University of Chicago Press and received wide media coverage. The subsequent US Army Stability Operations Manual, published in early 2009, has also been widely distributed. By contrast, the Canadian manual is not yet publicly available. A copy of the Canadian COIN manual was obtained by The Dominion from the Department of National Defence.

Writing in the Canadian Military Journal last fall, Leslie defined the comprehensive approach as the "ability to bring to bear all instruments of national and coalition power and influence upon a problem in a timely, co-ordinated fashion." This definition aligns with that of the US Army, as found in the Stability Operations Manual:

A comprehensive approach...integrates the co-operative efforts of the departments and agencies of the United States government, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, multinational partners, and private sector entities to achieve unity of effort toward a shared goal.

The concept of "unity of effort" is drawn from classical counterinsurgency theory and doctrine.

In 1966, John J. McCuen wrote in The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War that, "Unity of effort...is extremely difficult to achieve because it represents the fusion of civil and military functions to fight battles which have primarily political objectives."

As the Canadian manual foregrounds, today's insurgencies remain inherently "a political problem."

"The nature of operations today and in the future will resemble the Three Block War construct—one that demands that soldiers interact with many different players other than their own armed forces, and undertake non-traditional tasks," wrote Leslie in the Canadian Military Journal.

In October 2003, [then Chief of the Land Staff and Lt. Gen. Rick] Hillier made the Three Block War scenario "a guiding concept for the Canadian Army."

Hillier's support for the Three Block War was one of the reasons he was selected to be Chief of Defence Staff in 2005. According to then-Prime Minister Paul Martin, "[Hillier] advocated a concept called the 'three-block war,' to describe the [military's] mission...This was not a rejection of our peacekeeping tradition, but a revision to suit tougher times, and I supported it."

Martin's government dovetailed the Three Block War approach with the broader institutionalization of the "whole-of-government" (or 3D: Defence, Development, Diplomacy) foreign policy approach in its International Policy Statement of 2005. This trajectory has continued, with minor modifications, under the minority Conservative governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

That Canada should shift its foreign and defence policies in concert with the US comes as no surprise given their close historical relationship, even if the level of integration is often downplayed by the mainstream media. "No two militaries are more closely united than those of the United States and Canada," said US Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins in 2007.

With counterinsurgency practices and principles on the rise under the Obama administration, an increasing level of "COIN-synergy" exists between the two militaries.

"We are learning from others. I happen to know General David Petraeus, who is very good man. You will find that some of our recent philosophies closely match his and those of the US Army and our friends and allies," Lt. Gen. Leslie told the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence in March.

Gen. Petraeus is likely the person who contributed the most to the resurrection of a new "counterinsurgency era" in the US. He oversaw the drafting of the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual in 2005 and 2006, and supervised its implementation during "the surge" in Iraq in 2007.

As Commander of US Central Command, Petraeus currently oversees both the Iraq and "AfPak" wars. Many followers of Petraeus have risen to prominence within Obama's cabinet; others have gone on to become "experts" in private think-tanks and appear regularly in the US media as proponents of counterinsurgency war.

Petraeus visited Calgary this week for a "social" meeting with Canada's top military brass. Partly a public relations exercise, the meeting saw Petraeus and Canadian Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk, who once served in Iraq at the same time as the US general, donning cowboy hats as they attended the Calgary Stampede. There, according to Petraeus, they discussed "the way forward for the next two years" in the COIN fight in Afghanistan.

Petraeus was subordinate in rank to Natynczyk when the Canadian general was Deputy Commander of the Multi-National Corps in Iraq in 2003-04. At the same time, Petraeus commanded a small number of Canadian soldiers in Iraq on a low-key NATO mission to train Iraqi soldiers, according to declassified documents obtained by The Dominion via Access to Information.

The clearest embodiment of COIN's institutionalization and the Canada-US "comprehensive approach" can be found in the US Army and Marine Corps COIN Center. Established at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2006 by Petraeus and US Marine General James Mattis, it was from the COIN Center that the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) was drafted.

The COIN Center's pamphlet describes its purpose as "facilitat[ing] the development of a culture that enables us to more effectively adapt as a whole government when called upon to deal with future COIN or COIN-like threats."

Canada is identified in the pamphlet as a key COIN-partner of the US in the "COIN SITREP reports" that Lt. Col. Daniel Roper, Director of the COIN Center, publishes periodically.

"Each country needs to institutionalize it in a way that works for them," Roper told The Dominion. "But I see some pretty impressive collaboration at the inter-agency level in Canada, with people of cross-functional expertise trying to grapple with some issues; some similar things that we're doing."

Since General Leslie signed off on the COIN manual last December, the COIN Center and Canada have collaborated on more than 20 exchanges, including "COIN Leader Workshops" and "COIN Integration" meetings.

Members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM) met with the COIN Center for discussions about "US-Canada COIN synergy" five days after Leslie wrote in his issuing order for the new COIN doctrine that it is "complementary to our allies."

In April, the US COIN Center "visited military installations and think-tanks in Canada to inculcate the Canadian military establishment with COIN doctrine and best practices."

During one presentation with top officials from Prime Minister Harper's government, the COIN Center found that "policy advisors were most interested in how the merits of [Canada's new Afghan COIN] strategy could be explained to the Canadian public and Canadian political leadership."

Figuring out ways to sell the COIN campaign to a skeptical Canadian public has been a key aim of the Canadian government and military, and Canada's COIN manual emphasizes the goal of "creating and maintaining the legitimacy of the campaign." One of the central figures steering the Canada-US COIN-synergy is Lt. Col. John Malevich, who joined the COIN Center in November 2008 by way of a newly created exchange program between the two countries. He is currently the Deputy-Director of the COIN Center and recently gave a series of COIN lectures in Canada.

Reached via telephone upon his return to Ft. Leavenworth, Malevich told The Dominion that the biggest assets that he brings to the COIN Center are his scholarly background in asymmetric warfare and first-hand COIN experience in Afghanistan.

Prior to joining the COIN Center, Malevich was a member of the Strategic Advisory Team—a team of military advisors set up by General Hillier to provide direct advice to top Afghan cabinet ministers. He was later seconded to the Afghan Independent Electoral Commission, where Malevich says he "came up with their operations plan and their security plan" for the presidential elections scheduled for August 2009.

"When I speak, these guys give me a pretty good respect and they're pretty grateful to have this help...they're very grateful to have Canadians among them and grateful for the contribution we've made in Afghanistan," said Lt. Col. Malevich of his colleagues at the COIN Center.

Col. Roper, who says he's been to Canada "four or five times" to discuss COIN, told The Dominion that by having Malevich "institutionally embedded" in the COIN Center, "The Canadian Army benefits from having a full-time person working in here with full access to everything we've got and recognizing [when] he stumbles upon something here that, hey, he knows somebody in the Canadian Army that might benefit from that; he can very quickly share that information."

Invoking Gen. Charles Krulak, the US marine who coined the term "Three Block War" and who, in 1997, predicted the importance of "transnational movements" to 21st-century warfare, Roper said that today, "what we're looking at are transnational insurgencies."

Partnering as closely as possible with key allies like Canada is seen as crucial to conducting what some COIN experts call "global counterinsurgency."

According to Malevich, one of his key roles is "bringing [US COIN] expertise up to Canada and bringing it into the Canadian military culture."

Such a level of COIN integration has never been undertaken before, and it is difficult to foresee the possible implications for Canada's military culture, which inevitably spills over into broader society.

"The better the people understand the pros and cons and the risks [of COIN], the more informed a decision they can make," says Roper.

In her introduction to the University of Michigan Press edition of the US Army Stability Operations Manual, Janine Davidson acknowledges that, “[There] are those who see the new doctrine as another dangerous step on the slippery slope toward imperialism.”

Davidson dismisses those critics, writing that they "seriously misunderstand the purpose and role of military doctrine"—because the military doesn't set the policies that send them to occupy other countries.

On the other hand, influential COIN advocates such as Eliot Cohen have argued that the US needs to establish an "Imperial Army," the likes of which Canada is increasingly becoming appended to.

Anthony Fenton is an independent researcher and journalist based in Pitt Meadows, B.C. This article is based on a book he has been researching and writing with Jon Elmer. Fenton can be reached at fentona@shaw.ca

Tim Horton's opening Ceremony, Kandahar, 2006