Do professional ethics matter in war?

By Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

What happens when the U.S. military decides that an academic discipline's professional ethics code is a nuisance?

That is the situation in which anthropology now finds itself.

In 2007 the U.S. Army unveiled its Human Terrain System project--a program to embed civilian anthropologists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they would, like the avatars in James Cameron's current Hollywood blockbuster, engage the "natives" on the military's behalf. Gen. David Petraeus has said that in counterinsurgency campaigns, "the decisive terrain is the human terrain, not the high ground or the river crossing" and anthropologists have been assigned the job of "mapping the human terrain" on behalf of U.S. military commanders. There are 21 Human Terrain teams in Iraq and 6 in Afghanistan, with more teams slated for deployment to Afghanistan in the near future. There is also talk of sending Human Terrain teams to places such as Yemen in the future.

While Human Terrain teams may vary in size, a typical team includes two civilian social scientists and three military personnel. The civilian anthropologists often wear military uniforms and some even carry guns. Those who don't carry their own guns are guarded by soldiers who do. The teams are usually accompanied by translators, since the U.S. military has been unable to recruit many social scientists that are experts on Iraq or Afghanistan and thus speak the local languages. (One civilian social scientist embedded with a team in Baghdad is an expert on Filipino hunter-gatherers and dumpster-diving "freegans" in the United States.)

Once in the field, these anthropologists are involved in activities such as gathering information on genealogical relationships and development projects, finding out why insurgents cluster in particular areas, briefing commanders before tactical operations, and advising on psychological warfare.

In order to recruit them, the U.S. military has offered eye-popping pay. A student from my academic program, who graduated with a masters degree, was offered almost $300,000 a year to sign up. (For comparison, salaries for beginning assistant professors with PhDs are often less than $60,000.) Since BAE Systems was abruptly removed as the project's contractor last summer, salaries have fallen, but this is still just about the most lucrative job a young anthropologist can get.

To date, three of the Human Terrain team social scientists have been killed. One, Paula Loyd, was interviewing an Afghan peasant when he doused her with cooking fuel and set her on fire. And in January Iraqi insurgents captured (and are still holding) 60-year-old Issa Salomi. A video of Salomi was recently released by his captors.

In the fall of 2007, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued an unusually strongly worded statement condemning the Human Terrain project: "The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association concludes (i) that the [Human Terrain System] program creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the [the association's] Code of Ethics and (ii) that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study. Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program [italics in original]." The executive board also appointed a special commission to investigate the project. The 10-member commission, which included two military anthropologists and another who works for Sandia National Laboratories, unanimously concluded PDF in December 2009 that the Human Terrain project was inconsistent with anthropologists' code of ethics and couldn't "be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology."

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