As is now widely known, the US military is increasingly drawn to the concept of ’culture’, both for its explanatory power and for the operational value of cultural awareness and sensitivity. FM 3-24 embodies culture as a core value and priority of counterinsurgency ‘best practice.’ And Human Terrain Teams are being expanded as anthropological aids to the occupiers of Iraq.
While the debate about anthropology in military affairs rages on, there is one troublesome tendency I’ve noticed lately that might be worth pausing over.
It is illustrated in the latest Economist. The otherwise crisp and balanced overall review of what’s happening in Iraq, including a brief statement about the value of General Petraeus’ reorientation of the US military towards respecting ‘local culture’, it finishes on a strange note:
In his memoir of service as a British diplomat, among other places in Baghdad in the 1960s, Sir Donald Hawley characterises the Iraqis thus:
‘[They] are a very talented, intellectual people and have no lack of experts on many subjects. They have a tendency, however, not to agree with one another and are no strangers to violence. Late at night after several strong whiskies, they could be very frank on many subjects, including themselves, and would sometimes grow quite maudlin. We are a very bad people and very difficult to govern. Did we not kill Ali [the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, whom the Shias revere]? Did we not kill Hussain [his son]? Very few have successfully dominated us…Nuri Said [the pro-British prime minister, assassinated in 1958] too knew how to govern Iraq,” they would say. It is an Iraqi trait to admire strength and to respect it for the stability it can give.’
Mr Maliki has a last chance to change things for the better. Iraq’s battered people are yearning for their politicians to make up. But some things do not change.
As I say, there’s lots of fine analysis in this article, but this final statement smacks of the naive stereotyping of peoples with overly sweeping generalisations that flourished in so-called ‘national character’ or ‘modal character’ studies in the aftermath of World War II, and lives on in the mutual stereotyping mindsets of ‘orientalism’ and ‘occidentalism.’
In particular, this approach ascribes an intrinsic pathology to ’orientals’, whether it be Douglas MacArthur’s dubious claim around the time of the Korean war that he had an insight into ‘oriental psychology’ and its instinctive respect for aggressive leadership, to Sir Donald Hawkey’s claim that Iraqis were a bright but disputatious people given to quarrels and drawn towards and only really governable by strongmen.
The problem is not so much that it detects patterns of mentality and behaviour in a culture. If done carefully, it probably is legitimate to note cultural differences or at least dominant patterns, although these efforts often overstate the homogeneity of a people. The danger is rather that it explains behaviour and attitudes in terms of a timeless cultural flaw, instead of the dynamic, contingent and messy background of political context and the impact of conflict.
In other words, even if Hawkey and the Economist are right that there is something about Iraqis that makes it hard to govern Iraq without an authoritarian strongman, we need not attribute this to a theory of ‘national character’ that is only slightly a more sophisticated version of ‘Iraqis are just like that.’ Instead, we might stress the cumulative impact of colonialism, Saddam’s B’aath policy of ’divide and rule’, and the anarchy induced by the botched US-led invasion, that unleashed and exacerbated the ethnic/sectarian divisions and tensions, that were ’locked in’ by the artificial creation of the Iraqi state by outsiders, and encouraged but also held in check by Saddam.
Instead, Hawkey’s rhetoric divorces Iraqi attitudes from contingent political circumstances, legitimises the subjugation of Iraqis by both tyrants and imperial powers, and assigns blame for any internal conflict to Iraqis themselves.
I’m not sure of the exact policy implications of this type of stereotyping. Nor can I evaluate the overall content and quality of anthropological study or Human Terrain Teams within the US military. And I can see that the US-led coalition probably feels it benefits from the ability to speak the language, understand the local context, and apply force more discriminately.
But from my own research, I can’t help noticing that sometimes the most strident appeals for a new culturalist approach to counter-insurgency are made by those who also fall prey to a rather crude cultural stereotyping. So, for a far more toxic example, one prominent anthropologist working with the US military and championing the ‘cultural turn’ has defended the use of Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, a work that cast Arabs from Algeria to Saudi Arabia as a monolithic people, loveable but infantile, drawn to fantasy and aggression by their language and music, and acting out a role scripted by their Bedouin origins and climate, etc. The most recent edition of this book was introduced by a Colonel who used to brief American military personnel, who used to precribe the text.
So on a number of occasions, the movement to re-orient the American military around cultural knowledge has been accompanied by a bodyguard of falsehoods: crude stereotypes, one-dimensional mischaracterisations, and crass ‘pick up and play’ versions of foreign societies.
The problem seems to stem partly from the impulse not only to study but to ‘use’ culture in order to yield dividends in fighting a war. Where cultural empathy, awareness and contextual immersion can take decades of careful, rigorous and self-aware study, the military anthropology is taking place in the bewildering context of dynamic and shifting politics within Iraq, as well as an understandable impatience for better results by the US government and military.
For its part, the American Anthropological Association has warned that if cultural understanding is to play a constructive role, the idea of culture matters as much as the desire to be more culturally-minded:
“The idea of culture as an historically contingent, power-laden, dynamic and emerging property of human relations, and the theoretical and methodological entanglements that such a view implies, are largely lost on people who equate ‘culture’ with a set of discrete and static elements that can be neatly catalogued, captured, stored, and pulled out to support decision-making.’
So that in order for the military to grasp the context of their environment, a glib snapshot of ancient traditions is not enough. The Economist itself explained the dramatic changes that have taken place in the configuration of the war over the past year. To explain why the Iraq war, and Iraqi society, are different in 2007-8 from what they were in 2005-6 or 2003-4, one needs political awareness and a healthy consciousness of the volatile political climate in which wars rage. Over the past year, the Sunni insurgents who once regarded the US occupier as the prime and hateful enemy, benefited from the truce declared by the Mahdi army, and decided that for at least a time, they hated AQI more and teamed up with the US to defeat them. A strategic opportunity and changing environment, not customs and mores, drove this realignment.
We also know that AQI’s mode of warfare and doctrine does not spring directly from imagined indigenous Arab traditions, but is an amalgum of Wahhabist ideology, the study of western strategic texts from Clausewitz to ‘fourth generation’ warfare, and Chinese ones for that matter, American and British online field manuals and doctrines, as well as the competing and overlapping attitudes of different power figures within the loose coalition it represents. If anything, AQI has proven the ability to surmount localised culture in the writing of doctrine.
Like many other people in wartime, the Iraqi insurgents who turned against AQI proved to be changeable and unpredictable, and it is this lack of cultural determinacy that helps to explain why war is so full of surprises.
Sunday, 16, December, 2007 at 11:45 am |
Thank you for an excellent post, with many interesting points. In reading your post, the Economist article, and FM 3-24, I wonder if the “cultural turn” is putting too much pressure on commanders and even the individual soldiers to know too much. You say that there is a “lack of cultural determinancy” in a constantly changing climate, but in Chapter 7 of FM 3-24, it says “Effective commanders know the people, topography, economy, history, and culture of their area of operations (AO). They know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance within it.”
This seems impossible to begin with, unless one is an anthropologist with a research grant for several years of research on the community. A company commander, even one who has been in the area for a year or more, will have only the briefest of understanding about the community. And if it’s constantly changing, then keeping tabs on every change in the above conditions is impossible. The military leaders also seem to need to be cultural theorists to understand some parts of FM-24, and in the arguments in this post (which I agree with in large part), to be effective in taking a cultural approach to COIN.
I understand that there needs to be more cultural awareness, and that it is vital for intelligence purposes, but on the other hand, it seems like the call to be more culturally aware places unreasonable demands on commanders, and also detracts to a certain degree from the military tasks of COIN, which are downplayed in FM-24 and elsewhere to an extent that I think is potentially damaging to the ability to fight the war.
Sunday, 16, December, 2007 at 2:58 pm |
hey Christopher,
thanks for that, and good point!
This actually is a very important part of the debate. Those who advocate what might be called the ‘cultural revolution’ in military affairs either knowingly and unknowingly are also arguing for a significant reallocation of resources – time, money, people, operational priorities, education – around cultural matters.
So in order to make their case that this reallocation is justified, they have to demonstrate the profound importance of this shift. I don’t dismiss cultural elements wholesale, and can see that they could be practically very helpful, but if they are a useful variable rather than the essence of modern warfare, then this has implications for how we prioritise things.
Anecdotally, one concern within militaries is the ’skills fade’ problem – that retooling a military to be adept at the intricacies of COIN is not an open-ended additional improvement, but a tradeoff with other vital abilities, such as the simple ability to fight.
So the relative importance of culture is linked to the relative importance of different assets, priorities and resources, and thus this is a very practical debate as well as an academic one.
The other difficulty is that the cultural leitmotif seems now to be a way of getting attention and funding in Washington public/military circles. As the superpower is impatient for a practical solution to the fraught situation in Iraq, its government and military are receptive to the notion of culture as the strategic salvation. Hence the overselling of culture, and the adoption of culture in haste.
Sunday, 16, December, 2007 at 8:39 pm |
The flip side of COIN is an unsuccessful war of occupation.
Sunday, 16, December, 2007 at 11:11 pm |
Pat,
Glad to hear your response. This shift in priorities/scarce assets bothers me quite a bit. The military is designed for fighting wars, and too much cultural orientation might damage our ability to fight future conflicts of a more conventional nature. I know I probably sound like Harry Summers here, but I’m thinking more of what I know of French and British colonial commanders in the world wars and in 1870. With very few exceptions (the most notable being Gallieni in 1914), the colonial commanders performed badly in major conventional conflicts in the European theater. I worry that tooling ourmilitary (I’m American) toward an overriding cultural approach to COIN might have a parallel effect. Also, I think the cultural approach downplays the actual “war” aspect of a COIN campaign. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of major conventional war, or “3rd generation warfare” just yet, either.
Mark, I’m not sure I follow the logic of your comment, could you elaborate it a bit, please?. I know you have good ideas, since I’ve read some of your comments on other blogs.
Monday, 17, December, 2007 at 12:41 am |
Two historical wars of successful occupation:
1) the American conquest of the West against Native American nations, such as the Cherokee, Lakota and Seminole.
2) the conquests made during the 1920’s and early ’30’s by Bolsheviks in creating and sustaining the USSR, with emphasis on conflicts involving central Asia.
My point is that a successful war of occupation can be a matter of brute strength and ruthlessness, rather than the finesse game offered by the inclusion of anthropologists. Where there is an unsuccessful war of occupation, you find a counterinsurgency. Where you find a successful war of occupation, you do not.
In terms of Iraq, the initial approach was flawed. The entire operation was conducted on the cheap as a form of liberation, when in fact it would have been more properly conducted from the start as an occupation by force. The two approaches are very different.
Rather than concentrate on COIN, military thinkers should be focused on occupation by force so that there will be no COIN.
Monday, 17, December, 2007 at 2:16 am |
A few thoughts. Feel free to shoot down.
1) In order for the “culture-centric” approach to be of value it’s important to set it within the correct context within broader strategic theory. It must not be viewed as some sort of silver bullet. It’s quite common for strategists to set aside an holistic approach and fixate upon one key mechanism that is flavour of the moment (J.F.C. Fuller is perhaps a good example of the monomaniacal enthusiast tendency in strategy, focusing first on tanks and then abruptly switching to a laser-like focus on aerial bombers, thus managing to be sort of right and to simultaneously miss the point completely). This sort of approach sells books but it tends not exactly to age like fine wine.
2) While I think Patrick’s sceptical approach has a lot of value and is well put, we need to be careful of putting up straw men. Yes, it’s worrying if we’ve got apparently serious thinkers endorsing Patai, but in Big Picture terms the whole point of the culture-centric approach is to get away from that. Pretty much everything on the planet can be done in a really crap, half-arsed fashion (a little learning is a dangerous thing) but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the concept itself. Arguably the Patai approach was what was happening in the first place.
3) It’s pretty clear that we’re still feeling our way in terms of how resources should be deployed and I think there are reasonable concerns regarding the timeframe and man hours needed to really build up a serious cultural capacity. While I support the Human Terrain effort, I do wonder whether some of the available anthropological expertise (especially those who aren’t Iraq or Afghanistan experts) would be better employed back in Washington, building capacity for future strategic planning. As I put it in an email to Dr Betz a couple of weeks back – are we in need of anthropological Andrew Marshalls more than latter-day Gertrude Bells?
4) I second the claim that it is unwise to bet the farm on “conventional” inter-state conflict being dead in the ground. That said, right now it’s a hypothetical and ultimately we have to deal with real-world problems. It’s a tightrope walk between COIN-fetishism and the institutional tendency to view COIN as a distraction from “real war”. This means that hard choices will have to be made and it’s quite possible that neither camp will be fully satisfied. Eliot Cohen wrote a very good article on this in the late 1980s (and employed the example of armies that were essentially colonial police forces paying a steep price in WW1).
5) As for “wars of occupation”, I’m spectacularly unconvinced that we can recreate the Indian Wars on a contemporary map without the shit hitting the fan in terms of press scrutiny and public support going down the toilet (and I don’t think either the British or American armed forces would like to use Bolsheviks as people to emulate…). We can rail against this until we’re blue in the face and it isn’t going to change anything. On that basis, setting it up as some sort of ideal doesn’t really amount to much more than examining our navels for lint.
6) On the skills thing, I think it’s a very tricky area and it’s both too late at night to deal with right now and too long for a comments box…
Monday, 17, December, 2007 at 3:38 am |
Regarding Anthony’s number 5, the latest successful wars of occupation waged by a Western power were won by Israel in 1948 and 1967. Their subsequent methods of occupation have been characterized as brutal and effective. But it is also noteworthy that the Israelis were unsuccessful in the two wars fought later in Lebanon.
Tuesday, 18, December, 2007 at 12:49 am |
Mr King (blog author): not all stereotypes are groundless.
To those who worry we can’t fight in the Fulda Gap–You can face up to the war you have and win it*, or keep pretending it’s the 1930’s still. As far as priorities…if you can be a good light infrantryman you are already a good gurrerilla, and if you are a good gurrerilla you will probably be good at COIN, and if you can do these things well you can scale up to armored warfare, etc. In other words if you can do 4th Gen warfare you can probably regress back to the earlier generations. I submit Mao and the current crop of enemies as evidence.
*BTW: if this one is lost, don’t worry about making up for the rest. You’ll be fighting 4G war on your own soil, quite possibly against former comrades. Neither the British people or the American people will forever tolerate a state that cannot protect them or pay for military establishments with a long record of losing wars. Not when it comes right to your door. Enjoy your commute Tommy Atkins… ;}
Tuesday, 18, December, 2007 at 3:26 pm |
Hey Anthony,
I agree that ‘culture’ can be conceptualised in more sophisticated ways, and that there are people in the HTS movement who want to do so.
But the ‘culture-centric’ approach, I suggest, takes a deterministic approach to the relationship of culture and modes of warfare. What else does ‘culture centric’ mean than the notion that culture is the primary element and explanatory idea to be used in interpreting warfare?
Culturalists should be consistent in their arguments. Are they arguing that culture is ‘central’ or aren’t they? If they are, then I disagree for reasons set out above.
Finally, I don’t think its just a bad coincidence that the leading proponents of culture centrism repeatedly fall prey to simplistic stereotypes. By viewing culture as a static and uniform thing that has great utility, distortion results.
Montgomery McFate is possibly the most powerful voice in the movement to anthropologise warfare in the military. She has the plaudits and endorsement of many senior officers, she has played a key role in debating and writing COIN doctrine, she has helped drive the re-writing of military education, and generally has the attention of many people in Washington and the Pentagon. She has gained great influence and status. So if her ideas of culture are facile, its not erecting a ’straw man’ to challenge them.
Tuesday, 18, December, 2007 at 5:57 pm |
“What else does ‘culture centric’ mean than the notion that culture is the primary element and explanatory idea to be used in interpreting warfare”.
I’d hope this would be a cosmetic thing and not a substance issue, but yeah, we might be well served by employing a different term. It’s certainly the case that it sounds unappetisingly like “network-centric” and I think we both agree that what will not be helpful will be if it ends up simply repeating the worst sins of the network-centric theorists. As I say, in my view what is needed is an holistic approach and the culture angle will work, if it works at all – which I hope it will – to fill in gaps left by current accepted thinking. It won’t stand on its own, bestriding hundreds of years of previous strategic theory like a collossus.
I’m assuming you saw the Weekly Standard piece having a go at the Human Terrain programme?