'Lethal effects targeting'

A couple of weeks ago, Louis Proyect posted a press release from Wikileaks which in turn linked to the just released US Human terrain team handbook, along with David Price’s Counterpunch article and an editorial in Nature.

It is doubtless pure coincidence that for our bosses, we humans are no more than ‘human resources’ to exploit, and for the forces of repression, we are ‘human terrain’, to stomp all over. Anyway, Human terrain teams, apparently the brainchild, so to speak, of one Montgomery McFate, are groups of embedded social scientists tasked with conducting anthropological research on occupied populations and feeding military commanders with relevant predigested ‘expert human terrain & social science advice based on a constantly updated, user-friendly ethnographic and socio-cultural database of the area of operations’, which they will of course never allow to influence their ‘Lethal Effects Targeting’.

Describing the Nature editorial as ‘fierce’, quoting its subtitle, ‘the US military's human-terrain programme needs to be brought to a swift close’, Price writes, ‘This position is all the more devastating when contrasted with an editorial supporting the principles of Human Terrain and other forms of military-funded anthropological work published by Nature just five months ago.’

In reality, Nature’s editors have not retreated from their basic position. In July, they entertained hopes that Human terrain systems, ‘…have potential to be a win–win for all concerned — including, most especially, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and regions of future conflict’. It reads as if they regard Iraq, Afghanistan, and other regions of conflict as mired in some sort of unavoidable natural calamity and US soldiers are just there to help them through it. If the soldiers sit on the ground and drink tea out of a glass, then that is a win for the occupied, even if those same culturally sensitive soldiers bash down your door at 3:00 in the morning and clobber your mother senseless with a rifle butt.

Nature, you will recall, is the estimable scholarly journal that published the groundbreaking research by epidemiologists associated with Johns Hopkins University showing the real costs of the US occupation of Iraq in 2004 and 2006. Yet in their July editorial, they write, as if adducing evidence, ‘According to Gates, one commander in Afghanistan says that using an HTS team has cut the number of armed attacks he has had to make by 60%’. Clearly, they don’t subject their own editorial comment to the same rigorous scrutiny as they do contributed articles.

This month, they have concluded that the scheme ‘…is failing on every level’.

In theory, it is a good idea. The Human Terrain System aims to embed anthropologists and other social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help improve understanding of local cultures and thus relieve tensions between civilians and soldiers…In practice, however, it has been a disaster. Questions have been raised about how well the programme vets its employees. Some scientists who have joined the system have complained about inadequate training. And qualified researchers have been dismissed for seemingly trivial reasons, even though much more questionable people seem to breeze onto the payroll.

…The immediate problems with the Human Terrain System can be traced to BAE Systems, the military contractor based in Rockville, Maryland, that screens potential employees, then trains those it hires. It has failed in every one of those functions, and army management has failed in its oversight of BAE.

So for them, it’s just a matter of human resources management issues, and professionalism, of course. After all, if human terrain research is carried out unprofessionally, it can hardly be expected to ‘relieve tensions between civilians and soldiers’. Realistically, though, considering that ‘the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has formally condemned it, saying that participants would find it difficult or impossible to follow the association's ethical guidelines in a combat zone…’, the program could only ever have hoped to atttract renegade anthropologists who reject their colleagues’ ethical principles. Furthermore, I think it is inevitable that the military itself would want to have a say, if not an outright veto, in the vetting process. They would want to feel that they can rely on Human terrain teams not to betray military movements, not to run to the media every time they observe perpetration of an atrocity, and so forth. Hardly propitious conditions to recruit the most competent anthropologists.

In July, Nature hoped the Human terrain project would address ‘the hard lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan — where troops with insufficient understanding of the cultural or political landscape have too often exacerbated the insurgency they were trying to control’, suggesting that troops with sufficient understanding of the cultural or political landscape would not exacerbate the insurgency. It’s as if they hadn’t considered the possibility that the occupation doesn’t exist to control the insurgency, that in fact the insurgency is a direct response to the occupation. What exacerbates the insurgency is not the occupying forces’ level of understanding, it’s that there are occupying forces.

In case there was any lingering doubt,

Nature is not opposed in principle to academics working with the military; we have said before that social science can and should inform military policy. We continue to believe that the insights of science have much to offer strategies in a war zone — not least through training combat troops to understand the local cultures within which they operate.

The only problem is that, ‘…as currently constituted, the Human Terrain System is not the way to do this. Unless the programme can be reborn in a format less plagued by deadly mistakes, it needs to be closed down’.

While I agree with Price that Nature’s call is welcome, they have not enunciated a principled objection on scientific, political, legal or moral grounds. Far from it. Their problem, it seems, is with BAE Systems.

Less still have they opposed the occupation of Afghanistan itself, which they apparently regard as just some phenomenon that NATO forces are dealing with as best they can.

To deal with it better, in October, Philip Dorling reported in the Canberra Times that the Australian Army has put out a request for tender ‘for a commercial supplier to deliver intensive training in the language for three years, beginning next January, with the likelihood of a two-year extension’.

Soldiers with no previous Pashto language training will undertake an anticipated 42-week course to successfully perform as ''military linguists using the ... language in a wide range of social situations, and specialised military subjects''

As the article’s headline cannily predicts, ‘Afghan language training hints at long haul’. As if to confirm this, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced on his return from a brief junket to Afghanistan and the UAE last week, ‘I've always said we're in Afghanistan for the long haul, for a long time. We've got to be serious. It's tough, protracted work. We're of a mind to see it through in partnership with our friends and allies.’

Dorling further reported that ‘Defence sources said Pashto was in demand for Afghanistan operations, but the language had little wider application’. Dorling may not be aware that an estimated 27 million Pashto speakers – more than twice as many as live in Afghanistan – inhabit the area east of the Durand Line that has been on the receiving end of US President-Elect Barack Obama’s most aggressive sabre rattling. But ‘Defence sources’ almost certainly are.

Loaded questions

They’ve really gone and done it this time. Ordinarily, the Gallup poll questions are not that bad. But Joseph Carroll reports that in their 11-14 June survey of 1007 American adults, they asked, if you can bring yourself to believe such a thing,

33. Who do you think is currently winning the war against terrorism -- [ROTATED: the U.S. and its allies, neither side, or the terrorists]?

This is as bad as that bogus Newsmax push poll I wrote about earlier. To answer it at all, you are sucked into a whole swag of unsavoury admissions. ‘America’, anthropomorphised by the interrogative pronoun who, is at war. It has allies and they are on one side in this war, which is being waged against terrorism, the other side. The war itself is not a form of terrorism. It doesn’t matter which of the three options respondents choose, or even if like 2% they express no opinion, it still entails buying into the whole twilight zone worldview where a question like that could make sense.

If it’s of any interest under the circumstances, an all time low of 29% said America was winning, while an all time high of 50% said neither side was winning.

It actually gets worse, because the next question asks

34. Do you consider [the war in Iraq/Afghanistan] to be part of the war on terrorism which began on September 11, 2001, or do you consider it to be an entirely separate military action?

This question frames the war as ‘in Iraq/Afghanistan’. That’s a very neutral and journalistic way of putting it. Or is it? The war just happens to be taking place in those countries. America and its allies wouldn’t be fighting against Iraq of Afghanistan – it couldn’t be a ‘war on’ or a ‘war against’ those countries. The reason it is in those countries is that the respondent and the audience for the media treatment know who the enemy is. It’s the terrorists. They’re the ones at fault. They’re the ones who forced us to follow them to their lairs in Afghanistan and Iraq, endangering the innocent people of those countries. Any damage to them is ‘collateral’. Alternatively, the democracy myth can be activated. Afghanistan and Iraq harboured those horrible terrorists, so the people who live there are responsible and deserve whatever befalls them.

Furthermore, the question places an exact date on when the war on terrorism began. By an uncanny coincidence, it was the very same day as those airliners crashed into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nothing could possibly have preceded it. That was the first blow. That was the provocation. A completely innocent America was forced against its will to enter this war on terror in a struggle for its very existence. You’d think it was Israel, which is always innocent, only retaliates, and is compelled to do so unwillingly on each occasion to prevent another otherwise inevitable Holocaust.

It is somewhat reassuring that only 43% reckoned the war in Iraq was in fact part of the war on terrorism, equalling December 2005 lowest proportion ever. But this time they also asked about the war against Afghanistan, and 65% thought the war in Afghanistan was part of the ‘war on terrorism’.

Opinion polls that ask loaded questions like these, along with the media reports of the results, are actually part of the propaganda campaign to ‘manufacture consent’ for the US government’s military adventures. And not only that. They reinforce the myth that the US is under attack by a ruthless and implacable foe, motivated by an irrational hatred of the very essence of America. And that helps to instil the kind of fear that makes it possible for the government to enact legislation like the USA Patriot Act and make other incursions into hard won civil liberties, including, significantly, those that facilitate dissent and self organisation.

‘A light unto the nations’

A few days ago, I alluded to the chequered history of US and Australian treatment of refugees. The article I was discussing there pointed out that many refugees entering the US never even have an opportunity to test their claims due to their ‘expedited removal’. Australia has also made a point of violating Article 33 of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, under which ,

No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

After all, it’s not as if they didn’t know what was going on in Afghanistan when, for example,

In one harrowing account, a Hazara Afghan deported after 16 months on Christmas Island and Nauru - despite his pleas that he and his family would be killed - lost his two children, aged six and nine. A grenade was dropped on their house four months after they returned to Afghanistan.

Well, in case you were concerned that Israel was on the verge of blotting its untarnished record of violating human rights, according to today’s Ha’aretz, by the end of March, they will be deporting about 70 Liberian adults and their 16 Israeli born children.

Many of the refugees have fled horrific incidents since the official end of the civil war in 2003.

three years after the end of the battles, crime and hooliganism are still dominant in many regions. The Liberian refugees who arrived in Israel in 2004-2005 tell of horrors from the ostensible era of peace. Sako Popana's uncle, for example, was murdered in 2004. Popana displays a picture showing his corpse with a bullet hole in his temple. Mohammed Sharif saw his father and his two brothers murdered in 2004 by neighbors who had joined the rebels. "Two of the murderers live in my street. They can easily organize a force and murder me at night if I return there," he says.

But, in one of a number of ironies surrounding the deportation of refugees from a country purportedly founded by and for refugees, the Israeli Interior Ministry’s move arises because ‘The UN has decided that there is no longer any danger to Liberian refugees who return to their country, and is encouraging them to return from their places of exile.’

After six decades of reviling the UN (in the American Jewish Committee opinion poll I mentioned the other day, 66% of American Jews said the UN treats Israel ‘unfairly’.) and ignoring every demand ‘the international community’ has made that Israel comply with the standards it sets, it seems on this one issue, Israel is going to take the UN at its word and blow off a handful of desperate rape victims who just happen to be Muslim, and black.

Even though Israel has decided that the Liberians deserve repatriation on the UN’s say so, I doubt it will surprise anyone that the UN’s repeated demand that Israel resettle the refugees it itself expelled in 1948 continues to go unheeded.

Underscoring the Jewish state’s humanitarian credentials, especially towards Africans, yesterday’s Ha’aretz reported,

A representative was sent by the Interior Ministry on Saturday to Ethiopia, to distribute rejection letters to thousands of Ethiopians seeking to immigrate to Israel.

…The rejected applicants have been waiting in camps in Gundar and Addis Ababa for several years, in hopes of receiving consent to come to Israel. Many of them claim they have Jewish roots from hundreds of years ago, but they are often unable to provide documentation or testimonies to prove their claims.

Grossman, etc.

Grossman’s speech continues to elicit comment. I neglected to mention Uri Avnery’s critique. Jonathan Cook takes on both Grossman and Avnery and is as incisive as usual. While crediting Avnery’s decades of mainly principled leadership of the Israeli peace movement, such as it is, he hits the nail on the head when he points out,

The bottom line in any peace for Avnery is the continued existence and success of Israel as a Jewish state. That rigidly limits his ideas about what sort of peace a "radical" Israeli peace activist ought to be pursuing.

Like Grossman, Avnery supports a two-state solution because, in both their views, the future of the Jewish state cannot be guaranteed without a Palestinian state alongside it. This is why Avnery finds himself agreeing with 90 per cent of Grossman's speech. If the Jews are to prosper as a demographic (and democratic) majority in their state, then the non-Jews must have a state too, one in which they can exercise their own, separate sovereign rights and, consequently, abandon any claims on the Jewish state.

Meron Benvenisti wrote in Ha’aretz the other day,

In the present reality, when the very concept of "peace" has become subversive, bringing it up again might be considered a stirring event and a cardinal text. But the passive stance taken by the spokesman for the peace camp should be noted: all that a fighter for peace has to do is preach to the hollow leadership.

Where is the call to join the struggle against the injustice of the security fence, the choke-hold of the roadblocks, the siege on Gaza, the killing of women and children, the destruction of the institutions of the Palestinian Authority, the deporting of Palestinian families "without documents"?

The Times also editorialized a few days ago on the opportunity Rumsfeld’s resignation present to build ‘The army we need’.

Part of the problem, it turns out, is that Rumsfeld ‘didn’t like the Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.’ Like Somalia? And Haiti? And Kosovo?

And ‘circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq called for just the things Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like’, and that is the problem, obviously.

According to George Friedman, in his Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report for 11.21.2006,

New York Democrat Charles Rangel, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has called for the reinstatement of the draft…Rangel's essential point is that the way the United States has manned the military since World War II is inherently unjust. It puts the lower classes at risk in fighting wars, leaving the upper classes free to pursue their lives and careers… When those who benefit most from a society feel no obligation to defend it, there is a deep and significant malaise in that society.

…

There is no inherent reason why enlistment -- or conscription -- should be targeted toward those in late adolescence. And there is no reason why the rich themselves, rather than the children of the rich, should not go to war…Rangel is correct in saying that the upper classes in American society are not pulling their weight…If Americans are serious about dealing with the crisis of lack of service among the wealthiest, then they should look to the wealthiest first, rather than their children.

Unlike his namesake, Thomas L., George Friedman has an interesting way of thinking. At least he knows there’s a class war going on. If only he could get past the idea that ‘nations’ have geopolitical interests independent of the interests of their ruling classes…well, then he wouldn’t be writing these analyses, and Stratfor wouldn’t attract the clientele they seek, would they?