Montgomery McFate

Transcription

Gerhard: We're here with Prof. Montgomery McFate. You hold the Minerva Chair at the Naval War College here in Rochester. Montgomery: Rhode Island. Gerhard: Rhode Island—sorry. Montgomery: It's okay. Gerhard: We've come here to talk about a big issue, I guess, a contemporary issue of anthropology and war, or anthropology in the military. Before we get there, I'd like you to just take us on a little journey of your life and perhaps just tell us: how did you get to anthropology? What made you choose an anthropology PhD or get into that field? Montgomery: That's a big question. I think the short answer is that my parents were sort of beatniks and we lived on a houseboat. My mother was a sculptor, and she was very much influenced, as many artists were in the 1960s, by the artwork of Polynesia, which had been really popularized by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. So in a sense we always had these giant Polynesian sculptures in our house, and I think anthropology was sort of a natural outgrowth of that cultural moment. Gerhard: Can you tell us a little bit: what was your graduate work on? Montgomery: I wrote a dissertation about British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland. Actually, at the time I was doing that, a lot of faculty and students in my department said, "You know, anthropologists---we don't really study war. You'd be better off in political science." That annoyed me a little bit because I thought, "Well, really, what is a war except a social construct? Why is war excluded from what we are allowed to study?” It's as much a product of human culture as table manners or sexual practices or death rituals. I think there is a place in anthropology for the study of war or the study of conflict. Gerhard: There is—going back - Pierre Clastres - sort of classics of study of warfare, maybe tribal warfare or small-scale warfare. Do you think there's a difference then between those sorts of studies and what we now consider to be war, these sort of large-scale…? Montgomery: Yes, I think when you look at the classic studies of war, a lot of them are—there's quite a big body on the archaeological record. Then there's the literature in anthropology that concerns human origins, what—is there a biological determinism involved with violent behavior or something like that? Then there are small-scale studies that look at warfare in New Guinea. There are actually not that many studies on war per se, especially how wars are fought. That is something that anthropologists tend to exclude from their realm of study. Gerhard: You think that's because of access in terms of—participant observation in a war is really difficult, I guess, unless you're part of one of the sides or… Montgomery: Yes. Well, I think that that really began to change. I think there was a political aversion to studying war that was a product of the Vietnam era. Then I think when we're starting to talk about the ethnographies of the late '80s and early '90s and into the 2000s that you see a lot more focus on this. Allen Feldman’s book about Northern Ireland, for example, is a fantastic piece of writing about warfare. There are some other very nice things that have been written about different conflicts in Africa. I think it's become more common—a more common thing to study, anyway. Gerhard: Maybe let's go to the issue at hand, the Human Terrain System. If you could just tell us a little bit about your involvement in it, and what it is, and then maybe we can backtrack and look at anthropology's relationship to war and the military over the last 100 years, I guess. Montgomery: Okay. Tall order. That's a lot of ground to cover. The Human Terrain System really started in—I think we started thinking about it in about 2003, 2004, recognizing that the US government and the US military were making bad policy decisions, bad strategic decisions, and bad tactical decisions because they didn't understand the first thing about Iraqi society or Afghan society. Recognizing that there was a gap, the question was: how do you address the problem? How do you ameliorate the situation because when soldiers don't understand that these people are flying black flags because they’re Shia—the black flag is not a sign that they are the enemy and you should kill them now—that tends to escalate violence. When soldiers are put into a situation where they don't have the right information, their first impulse is going to be to go for the weapon. We saw that again and again and again and thought this is—I mean, we're not there to take over the country of Iraq. We're there to support this new government that we've helped to create, and we want the Iraqis to run it for themselves, and we're going to fight the insurgency to the degree that we can. If you're fighting in that environment, it's not your goal to create more harm or more casualties, especially among the civilian population. The goal is actually to reduce the level of violence so that the government can function, so that the economy can function, so that NGOs can come in, so that the UN can come back into the country. That was the kind of macro realization of what we thought the problem was, especially this was happening with brigades in combat. That seemed to be the right level. A bunch of us had this idea that these brigade commanders and their staffs, they didn't have the right type of information that they needed. Nothing in the US government was designed to give them that. The intelligence community, primarily military intelligence, does lethal targeting. These brigade commanders didn't know—didn't need to know more about who to kill. They needed to know: how does the society work; how does this local economy work; why are these people so concerned about orange groves? This kind of almost simple things, but if you're on a forward-operating base and you are concerned with force protection and you never get out of MRAP, you don't have the opportunity to even talk to people to find out. Gerhard: What's an MRAP? Montgomery: It's a mine-resistant military vehicle. Initially, we thought we would do all of this with a laptop. That was the Pentagon solution. We're just going to create this giant database of everything known about Iraq. I think, me and my other colleague Andrea Jackson were totally skeptical about that as a solution for anything. Gerhard: Were you working for the government or the military at this point? Montgomery: I was working for the Navy at the time. Originally, it was a little project on the joint staff. We basically—she and I were like, "No, this is not going to work. You need to have somebody on the ground to advise the commander because if you're just giving him more information in a laptop, he's going to use it to prop open the door or he's going to sit on it or whatever. It's not going to work." We went through it anyway. It turned out—in fact, we tried it out in Iraq and got the same answer, which is this is totally useless for us. We actually—what we need is somebody to conduct research on the ground and come back and tell us about it so that we can make better decisions about how we spend our money, the people with whom we're creating connections. We don't know who the sheiks are. This guy says he's a sheik. That guy says he's a sheik. How do you know who the sheik is? It’s sort of almost… Gerhard: And why is it important to know who the sheik is? Montgomery: Exactly. We spent a lot of time thinking about how do you—this had never been done before, so we had to think about how do you configure a team, what echelon do you put them at? Do you put them with platoons or companies or brigades? What kind of skills do you need on that team? You need somebody to conduct the research. You need somebody to manage the research. You need somebody to be the leader, who can translate back and forth with the military. We identified all these sort of functions that we thought were important. Then after that, it was a question of getting somebody to tell us that they wanted this from downrange, and we did. The 82nd Airborne in Khost, Afghanistan basically sent word back to the Pentagon that they wanted to try this. We started it as an experiment. We thought that we would have one team for one year on the ground in Afghanistan and then three—or four more teams for another two years, and then we could learn about how to do this. Basically by the time we had one team on the ground in Afghanistan, we had gotten a requirement from Iraq to put—and then from CENTCOM itself to put a human train team on every brigade in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gerhard: How many brigades were there? Montgomery: At that time it was 26, and then it went up to 31. We didn't have time to run the experiment. It was just like full speed ahead. That's the brief history of it. Gerhard: Can you just give us a little idea of what it entails? What is—some people call them embedded anthropologists, but they were social scientists more broadly, weren't they? Montgomery: What were they doing? Gerhard: What were they doing? What are they doing? It's still ongoing. Montgomery: Yes, the program is still going. I left in 2010 after my son was born. I couldn't be flying around in Black Hawks anymore breastfeeding. You can't do that. The program is still going on. It's smaller now because obviously troops have gone out of Iraq. There are still teams in Afghanistan, but there's going to be a drawdown there as well. What the teams are doing basically is—I have to point this out, that every brigade is unique. It is a unique organization. It’s configured differently. It has different leadership. It has a different personality. A striker brigade is different from an airborne. They're different from the Marines. Recognizing that and recognizing that Basra is a lot different from Kabul, so you've got… Gerhard: Is that the first thing then that an embedded social scientist has to get their head around in terms of finding out what the culture is of that brigade? Montgomery: Yes. You have to find a way to work inside the military's framework, to speak the language that they speak, and to make them feel that you're not foreign or threatening to them. There's some prejudice there against wooly-headed hippies, which is often what they think anthropologists are. Recognizing that there is unique culture for the military unit; there is a unique culture about the place, and then the people living in that place are all different. The Yazidi are very different from the Zadran are very different from urban people in Baghdad, and so the research environment is quite different. Then there's also the question of the security environment within the research environment. If you're in a very non-permissive place or you're with a brigade that thinks that the answer to insurgency is firepower, you, as a human train team, are going to have limited possibility for impact. Then in addition, there's also the qualifications of the people on the team. If you have somebody who is social scientist on that team and they're accustomed to doing quantitative research and surveys—in certain places you can do survey work like Baghdad, certain parts of Baghdad. We had people doing surveys in other parts of—especially rural areas, surveys are very difficult. In some places, you can do participant observation because you can stay out for a long time and you can make repeated visits. In other places you just can't. Gerhard: In terms of this research, what happens with it? Can it be published? Montgomery: Yes. Gerhard: Is it's freely available, or is it… Montgomery: Well, right now you're starting to see a lot of publications from people who've served on teams. AnnaMaria Cardinalli's book is coming out. Katherine (Kate) Blue Carrolll has a book coming out. Nick Krohley's book is coming out, and that'll be published later this year. That's on the Mehdi Army. People definitely use their research as the bases of things that they later wrote. There are a whole lot of peer-reviewed articles that have been in journals. People don't all the time advertise how they did that research but a lot of them were with HTS. In terms of the research they were conducting—I mean, I'll give you a couple of different examples. We had one team that was in—they were in Iraq, and I'm not going to say too much about the place, but the social scientist, he was going out with these platoons and talking to all these local people. He started asking them, "What do you really need? What is important to you when it comes to security? What are your security concerns? Are you afraid of the government? Are you afraid of the police? Are you afraid of this group of insurgents that we know are operating in this area?” Everybody said, "No, no, that's not the problem. The real problem is wild pigs." He was like, "Well, really? Wild pigs, huh, that's your major security concern?” Everyone—lots of people were saying, "Oh, my gosh. These feral pigs—they're really dangerous because they're huge. They are as big as that bush and they attack our livestock, and they sometimes attack children. It's a real problem. We have this pig explosion.” He was like, "Really? I can't believe this is true, but, okay, I'm going to go back and report it." He went back and reported it to the brigade staff. The staff went to the commander and they said, "These people are really concerned about these pigs." He's like, "Okay, we're going to do like pig patrol, and we're going to take out all these pigs. These people say pigs are a concern, so we're going to just wipe out the pigs.” They did. They actually—the brigade went out there and went on a pig hunt and had a huge barbecue and invited all these locals to the barbecue on the base, which was, I mean, hilarious, right, but that's a good outcome from the research. Gerhard: Pork for Muslims? Montgomery: Well, you know, they don't—they're not all Muslims. In that area, there were a lot of Christians, too. Gerhard: All right. Montgomery: The soldiers liked it. Then another example from Afghanistan—actually, we have a book coming out. It's an edited book with, I think, seven or eight chapters by social scientists who served on teams, talking about their research, how they did it, what was important, their methodology, their doubts, a lot of personal stories in there. Ted Callahan was with this army unit. They believed that this forested region north of their forward-operating base was being utilized by insurgents. They were basically shooting unobserved ammunition into that forested area. Ted was talking to all these local people, who were from a tribe called the Zadran, and he was asking them, “What's going on in your life? How is the new government—how are you dealing with it? What is the economy like here,” just sort of basic questions. They all said, "Well, we really hate these army dudes here because they are shooting into our forest." He was like, "Well, what are you doing in the forest?" They said, "Well, our main source of economic—our main economic resource is pine nuts. We go into the forest and we gather up these pinecones. We take out the pine nuts, and that's how we get money.” Pinecones are a critical, absolutely a critical part, of the economy in this part of Afghanistan. The brigade had no idea. They thought these people were insurgents. They didn't realize that those guys in the forest are collecting pine nuts. Ted went back and he told them. "Well, this is what's going on." They were like, "Okay.” “I guess we should stop shooting at them. I guess we should start figuring out a way to export more pine nuts." That's what they did. You get good outcomes like that. Sometimes you get no outcome. Sometimes you get counterproductive results. Gerhard: I guess one other thing I'd like to ask you is about what you think the main mission or role of anthropology is, because in a way with the Human Terrain System, there's clearly a desire for a positive outcome, and one of the questions is is that positive outcome primarily for the people we work with as anthropologists and/or in this case for the people you work for, which is the military. Montgomery: I don't know. The role of anthropology—it's a big question. I think it really depends on what you think anthropology is. Is anthropology a methodology? Is it a body of knowledge? Is it a science? Gerhard: What is it for you? Montgomery: Is it a political platform? Gerhard: What definition of anthropology do you use? Montgomery: The way in which you answer the question is going to determine, to some degree, what you think the role of anthropology is. My view, to answer your question, I think anthropology is a science. It is the study of man. It should be objective. The researcher should, to the great greatest degree possible, be detached from the object of study and capable of reporting what they are seeing in a way that sheds some light on how people live their lives, the human condition. Since the 1960s, there's been a view that anthropology is not a science, first of all. That it is in fact the kind of activism that it's—the proper role for anthropologists is to protect their informants. It's been, since the 1960s, very much of a political viewpoint rather than a science. Of course, AAA is now saying it's in their long-range plan. You can read about it on the Internet that they're going to remove the word science from their description of what it is that they do, which to me is of great concern because if anthropology is not a science, then it should just be taught as creative writing because that's all it is. Gerhard: I guess, well, the debate is about: is it a humanities or—activism, I guess, goes that step further, doesn't it, because you can—within the humanities, you can still write about people. Activism is you take an active part in their protection or activism on their part, I guess. To get back to the Human Terrain System, where does the loyalty of the researcher then lie? It lies with the people you write for? Montgomery: It's very complicated because—that's a big question: who's the client? For a lot of anthropologists, there was no doubt that the military was the client. They saw what they were doing as basically research for a client, especially people who had come to the program from a business-type background, and we had quite a few of those, or people who came from a kind of applied background, already had that viewpoint. We also had a lot of people who saw or felt that their main responsibility was for the people out there: the Iraqis and the Afghans. They saw their role more as an interlocutor with the military, between the military and the local community. People framed what they were doing in different ways. We, as program management, didn’t try to enforce any particular view. Our goal was just to have people understand that there were security concerns on the ground, and that any time you're moving around with the military, you're under their control and you need to be wary of what's going on around you and you need to follow directions. If they say get back in Humvee, you get back in the Humvee. You don't create a security problem for the military unit you're operating with. Then also the other obligation that we felt that was important to talk about is that if you, as an anthropologist, become aware of an impending attack, you hear from somebody that this attack is going to occur, you have to report that because it's your responsibility to keep the people that you are talking to, the Afghans and Iraqis, safe. It's also your responsibility to keep your military partners safe. You have to have a balance with those two things. Gerhard: What do you think the key asset of anthropology has been in terms of the Human Terrain System or in general working with the military? Montgomery: I mean, I think what makes anthropology interesting and valuable both in a kind of operational military way and also from a broader strategic or policy perspective is that anthropologists, unlike political scientists, especially people who do international relations, are not focused on the state. They're focused on the local conditions of the people who live in a particular place. It's a different kind of perspective. It's from a view from the ground up instead of a view from the top down. That's an important thing for the US government to understand, especially if you're going to intervene in somebody else's country and you're going to destroy their political system—i.e. by taking out the evil dictator Saddam Hussein—and you want to rebuild that government and rebuild that country, well, you probably should recognize that there's a difference between the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people. When you're talking about the Iraqi people, that's very complicated from an ethno-sectarian point of view, from a tribal point of view, from geographic point of view. People in Iraq don't think about Baghdad as the center. This is a whole society that's based on the local. Afghanistan is pretty much the same way. There's a great suspicion of the center, and there's a great suspicion of the state. If it's your policy to come in and start the government again, don't start with general elections from Baghdad. Start with rebuilding from the provinces. I think that that's the kind of viewpoint that anthropologists have, unlike political scientists who come in and say, "Okay, well, there's the government of Iraq." I think that view got us into trouble in terms of our national security policy in the first place. Gerhard: You think there's room for anthropology in the future in terms of providing that sort of expertise to military and government? Montgomery: Well, it's my hope. I mean, over the five years that I worked with the Human Terrain System, we deployed close to 700 people. Out of those 700 people, maybe 100 were anthropologists, probably not even that many but… Gerhard: The majority—what background did they have? Montgomery: Well, when we say 700 people, so that includes the military people on the team; the cultural analysts, a lot of whom where Iraqi or Afghan nationals… Gerhard: Translators and… Montgomery: …the research managers and the military personnel. That's a lot of people, but my hope is that someday one of those anthropologists will have the credibility and the resourcefulness and the connections to actually be in a position to make policy. That's my sincere hope. It's not going to be me, but I think what HTS did is it gave a group of people a very rare opportunity to see how the military operated and to work with them very closely. If you're talking about political circles in Washington DC or people who are on the National Security Council, the greatest credibility that you can have in that world is that you were downrange. Gerhard: What do you say to people—the anthropologists who have done work within the military? I'm thinking of Winslow with the Canadian military, for instance, who have done research projects but as independent researchers; whereas the HTS is embedded within military command within—you're working for the military in terms of those allegiances we just talked about, I guess. Montgomery: Interesting question, actually, to me because we already talked a little bit about allegiances and who are responsible for it. Talking about Donna Winslow who has now—she died a couple of years ago. She was a personal friend of mine, and she actually worked for HTS for a while. Also, she worked for Army TRADOC. The problem she had with the study that she did about the Canadian paratroopers in Somalia is that she could see that there was a tremendous problem with the military culture going on in parachute regiments. She was very concerned about that because it was detrimental to the mission, but because she was outside of the system, because she'd been hired as someone external to come in and look at it, her great frustration was that she was not able to influence them to change their culture. In fact, the military looked at her as if she were the enemy because she was outside making suggestions about what they should and shouldn't do. When you're outside, you're kind of the enemy, but if you're inside and you're saying, "Look, really, these people are not bad people. They just flash black flags because they are Shia," the military's going to be a lot more amenable to what you're saying and the advice that you're giving. That's what we always try to train teams and inform them about before they went out—is that you have to convince the military of your value. They're going to look at you, and they're not going to see the value. You have to convince them. You have to show that you have utility, and then they'll trust you, and then you can advise them. Gerhard: I guess that's the two sides of the coin, isn't it, this inside and outside, which is a perennial anthropological issue actually. We're the sort of the always the boundary walkers between the inside and outside wherever we work. If you're inside the military, you can affect change within the military, but perhaps not the society that you're working within; whereas if you're working with a particular society but you're outside the military in a warlike situation, you can't affect change within the military again. It's that trade-off, I guess, or that issue or problem. Montgomery: Well, I think it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to actually change the military—I mean, I think to a great degree, we did that. HTS did that. We opened the door for social science research. I mean, the program, it's written into doctrine. It's in the Army POM. It's going to be a permanent feature of the world of defense. The question is—the big debate inside the DOD and the Pentagon is: what is sociocultural knowledge? Who is responsible for it? Is it a kind of intelligence? Is it something different from that? Who should be doing it? Should it be soldiers doing it? Should it be outsiders, these crazy social scientists, doing it? What exactly do social scientists bring to the table? That's an ongoing debate that hasn't been answered. Gerhard: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Montgomery. Montgomery: You’re welcome. Gerhard: That was really interesting. I think we're going to leave it at this because it's been over half-an-hour already.