Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

[seafan]

Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual

By DAVID PRICE
October 30, 2007


Editors' note: This expose of the stolen scholarship in the Army's new manual on counterinsurgency to which General David Petraeus has attached his name also runs in our current newsletter sent by US mail or as a pdf to our newsletter subscribers. Normally material in our newsletter does not run on the CounterPunch website. In the belief that David Price's story merits the widest and swiftest circulation, not only as regards the "borrowings" from unacknowledged sources but also the prostitution of anthropology in evil military enterprises we (a)re making an exception in this case. AC / JSC

Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance.

.....

The Secrets of Chapter Three

Montgomery McFate and an unnamed "military intelligence specialist" co-wrote the Manual's chapter 3, the Manual's longest and the key chapter on "Intelligence in Counterinsurgency." Chapter 3 introduces basic social science views of elements of culture that underlie the Manual's approach to teaching counterinsurgents how to weaponize the specific indigenous cultural information they encounter in specific theaters of battle. General Petraeus is betting that troops working alongside Human Terrain System teams can apply the Manual's principles to stabilize and pacify war-torn Iraq.

When I read an online copy of the Manual last winter, I was unimpressed by its watered-down anthropological explanations, but having researched anthropological contributions to the Second World War, I was familiar with such oversimplifications. But some in the military found the Counterinsurgency Manual to be revolutionary. McFate claims the Manual is so radical that it "is considered 'Zen tinged' not just by the media, but also by many members of the military who felt that the Manual, and chapter 3 in particular, was 'too innovative' and 'too politically correct.'" Like any manual, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is written in the dry, detached voice of basic instruction. But as I re-read Chapter 3 a few months ago, I found my eye struggling through a crudely constructed sentence and then suddenly being graced with a flowing line of precise prose:

"A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." (Counterinsurgency Manual, 3-51)

The phrase "stereotyped sequence" leapt off the page. Not only was it out of place, but it sparked a memory. I knew that I'd read these words years ago. With a little searching, I discovered that this unacknowledged line had been taken from a 1972 article written by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who brilliantly wrote that religious ritual is:

"a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests." (See full citation in the concluding "comparison" section of this article.)

The Manual simplified Turner's poetic voice, trimming a few big words and substituting "supernatural" for "preternatural". The Manual used no quotation marks, attribution, or citations to signify Turner's authorship of this barely altered line. Having encountered students passing off the work of other scholars as their own, I know that such acts are seldom isolated occurrences; this single kidnapped line of Turner got me wondering if the Manual had taken other unattributed passages. While I did not perform exhaustive searches, with a little searching in Chapter 3 alone I found about twenty passages showing either direct use of others' passages without quotes, or heavy reliance on unacknowledged source materials.

In the concluding "comparison" section of this article are listed some of the unattributed passages I identified in the Manual's third chapter, along with the unacknowledged sources that I tracked down. These examples show a consistent pattern of unacknowledged use in this chapter. Any author can accidentally drop a quotation mark from a work during the production process, but the extent and consistent pattern of this practice in this Manual is more than common editorial carelessness. The cumulative effect of such non-attributions is devastating to the Manual's academic integrity.

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The requisitioning of anthropological knowledge for military applications has occurred in colonial contexts, world wars and proxy wars. After World War II, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton Coon recounted how he produced a 40-page text on Moroccan propaganda for the OSS by taking pages of text straight from his textbook, Principles of Anthropology. " padded it with enough technical terms to make it ponderous and mysterious, since had found out in the academic world that people will express much more awe and admiration for something complicated which they do not quite understand than for something simple and clear."

The most egregious known instance of the military's recycling of an anthropological text occurred in 1962, when the U.S. Department of Commerce secretly, and without authorization or permission from the author, translated into English from French the anthropologist Georges Condominas' ethnographic account of Montagnard village life in the central highlands of Vietnam, Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt. The Green Berets weaponized the document in the field. The military's uses for this ethnographic knowledge were obvious, as assassination campaigns tried to hone their skills and learn to target village leaders. For years, neither publisher nor author knew this work had been stolen, translated, and reprinted for militarized ends. In 1971, Condominas described his anger at this abuse of his humanistic work, saying:

"How can one accept, without trembling with rage, that this work, in which I wanted to describe in their human plenitude these men who have so much to teach us about life, should be offered to the technicians of death -- of their death! ...You will understand my indignation when I tell you that I learned about the 'pirating' only a few years after having the proof that Srae, whose marriage I described in Nous Avons Mangé la Forêt, had been tortured by a sergeant of the Special Forces in the camp of Phii Ko.'"

Today, anthropologists serving on militarily "embedded" Human Terrain Teams study Iraqis with claims that they are teaching troops how to recognize and protect noncombatants. But as Bryan Bender reports in the Boston Globe, "one Pentagon official likened to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States." This chilling revelation clarifies the role that Pentagon officials envision for anthropologists in today's counterinsurgency campaigns.

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In recent years, McFate and other militarized anthropologists have been demanding more academic respectability. While some in this group are producing interesting quality studies of the military and intelligence community, the Manual shows the sort of low quality work that can pass as "innovative" uses of anthropology for the military. Chapter three reads like the work of lazy C students, taking phrases and sentences promiscuously from various sources, cobbling them together into a sort of Cliffs Notes version of anthropology, which the University of Chicago Press has now laundered into a book posing as an object of academic respectability.

Considering the Manual's importance for Iraq, perhaps it is only fitting that American strategists are now trying to win a war based on lies with the stolen words and thoughts of others.


Comparisons of Unacknowledged Sources for Passages in The Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Here are specific examples of portions of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, derived from other unacknowledged sources.


(many examples are listed)

.....

(bold type added)


Once again, we are fed an artificial, plagiarized version of reality by those who seized power on December 12, 2000.


The war crimes perpetuated upon us now will poison the world for generations.

[donsu]

1. you beat me to it, I was hot to post this too :)

wonder how far this hot potato will fly?

[Sancho]

2. Wouldn't it be interesting to see this on KO's show!?

:kick:

[seemslikeadream]

3. KICK!!!

AND REC

[speedoo]

4. Off to the greatest page,,,, NT

[tabasco]

5. The Bush oil mafia has promoted loyal idiots to top positions.

No doubt these scumbags had "rewrote Counterinsurgency FM" on their efficiency report.

Fucking clueless bums who can't think for themselves, only bow down to their master, Commander AWOL.

[Stalwart]

6. Maybe we are missing a bigger picture here?

Pilfering the statements of others was interesting but as I read the whole thing something bigger took shape.

This jumped out:

"McFate's current role as Senior Social Science Adviser for the Human Terrain program demonstrates how the military is implementing the Manual's approach to the use of culture as a battlefield weapon."

and this:

Chapter 3 introduces basic social science views of elements of culture that underlie the Manual's approach to teaching counterinsurgents how to weaponize the specific indigenous cultural information they encounter in specific theaters of battle.

I have not read the book, only about it but it is obvious that if a few keyword changes were made, what results is not military battlefield doctrine to employ indigenous culture to serve military objectives but a domestic political doctrine applied to our culture that serves political objectives. Guess which party?

Change military to political and some foreign country to the USA and the doctrine works equally as well.

It is a cold, hard, objective, scientific document applicable in general to objectives in any culture.

How is this for objective:

"A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." (Counterinsurgency Manual, 3-51)

Fine when it applies to the rituals of other countries, but not ours. But that is not how science works. It applies to our society as well. Its cultural science at its finest.

Wasn't this the Republican battle plan?

Religion and customs are big cultural things. How can they be used to achieve objectives in Iraq? In the USA?

Things that are factual and true cut equally as well at home as abroad.

This book might be worth reading and evaluating as a more universal doctrine beyond the military battlefield just like "The Art of War" applies to much more than only war in the military sense.

Scientific analysis of a cultural things like society, religion and customs and how to use them abroad to achieve our ends is ok but at home? Isn't this just another torture situation?

Who would ever use science at home to manipulate fundamental elements of our culture?

I think the book tells how to do it anywhere. With that in mind it might be interesting reading.

I think we are missing the forest for the trees here.

[EFerrari]

7. There's more than one way to look at a blackbird, isn't there?

I was thinking along the same lines because it's usually informative to turn around how BushCo thinks and talks about others.

[seafan]

8. Yes, this is about using anthropologists to wage a war of manipulation against different cultures.

And, *it can happen here.* After all, we are a giant "melting pot" of races and cultures in the USA.


From the excerpted portion in the OP:

Today, anthropologists serving on militarily "embedded" Human Terrain Teams study Iraqis with claims that they are teaching troops how to recognize and protect noncombatants. But as Bryan Bender reports in the Boston Globe, "one Pentagon official likened to the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project during the Vietnam War. That effort helped identify Vietnamese suspected as communists and Viet Cong collaborators; some were later assassinated by the United States." This chilling revelation clarifies the role that Pentagon officials envision for anthropologists in today's counterinsurgency campaigns.

As repulsive as it is, the plagiarism is only an incidental finding in the deeper context of what this piece is telling us, that instead of advancing scientific knowledge for the good of mankind, this criminal administration is using *embedded anthropologists* to exploit and/or target specific races and cultures, in ways that are dreadful.

[Stalwart]

9. Weaponized Anthropology

It is a recent development that the more remote "soft" tools of war can be weaponized. In other words used as a weapon tool to gain objectives of war/politics.

Analogous to things being monetized in the business world. Turning things like data bases into money by extracting their business tool value to gain the objective of profit.

Perhaps the genesis of weaponized anthropology was a bunch of financially poor but academically rich anthropologists sitting around talking about how to monetize their education investment. Some bright bulb having heard of the government/defense complex had a stroke of genius and said let's weaponize it and sell it to the government!