The
Use and Abuse of Culture (and Children): The Human Terrain System’s
Rationalization of Pedophilia in Afghanistan
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on October 9, 2015 in Culture
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by
David Price – Roberto J. González
Over
the past eight years, news reports gradually revealed that Afghan soldiers and
police officers allied with US military forces are sexually abusing young boys
held against their will—sometimes on US military bases. Last month, Joseph
Goldstein (2015) published a front page story in the New York Times under the
headline “US Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,”
which opened with the disturbing story of Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr.,
who was fatally shot along with two other Marines in 2012. Buckley was killed
after he raised concerns about the American military’s tolerance of child
sexual abuse practiced by Afghan police officers on the base where he was
stationed in southern Afghanistan.
Buckley’s father told the Times that “my son said that his officers told him to
look the other way because it’s their culture.”
The
Times story provides the now standard boilerplate narrative that adult men
having sex with young boys–some as young as twelve years old–exemplify a
culture complex known as bacha bazi, or “boy play.” But it also includes
vignettes of US soldiers walking into rooms of Afghan men bedded with young
boys, a young teenage girl raped by a militia commander while working in the
fields, and the story of a former Special Forces Captain, Dan Quinn, who was
disciplined after beating an Afghan militia commander who was “keeping a boy
chained to his bed as a sex slave” (Goldstein 2015). The article recounts a
number of harsh disciplinary actions taken against other US soldiers and
Marines who attempted to stop such abusive practices.
The
military’s position is that these are local cultural practices, like
differences in dress, diet, or musical preferences, and American forces should
look the other way and not interfere with these cultural differences. According
to a recent report by Shane Harris (2015), Marines are offered little direction
if they witness rape or other forms of sexual abuse by local people in other
countries. Harris obtained a copy of training materials in which sexual assault
is explicitly described as a “cultural” phenomenon in Afghanistan.
Perhaps
such revelations were predictable. A decade ago, the counterinsurgency doctrine
developed by General David Petraeus and his associates was lauded by supporters
as a kinder, gentler way of conducting war. They embraced the idea that the local
populations of Iraq and Afghanistan were the “center of gravity,” a
fulcrum upon which the fate of the US led occupations rested. The
doctrine, most clearly expressed in US Army Field Manual Counterinsurgency: FM
3-24 (US Army 2007), required American forces to work with “host nation” allies
(Iraqi tribal leaders in Anbar province, Afghan warlords opposed to the
Taliban, etc.) whose beliefs and practices might be very different from those
of US
troops. Neither FM 3-24 nor any other doctrinal materials provided guidance for
dealing with allies who regularly violated basic principles of human rights–or
of human dignity for that matter. To make matters worse, the Petraeus doctrine
clearly functioned in a top-down manner: soldiers and Marines were expected to
set aside their better judgment and experience in order to conform to the
demands of the new counterinsurgency.
What
makes this topic somewhat tricky is the obvious fact that cultural beliefs and
practices vary dramatically from one culture to another. A custom that is
considered taboo in one place may be widely accepted or even encouraged
elsewhere. Among the most significant contributions made by 20th century
anthropologists was the idea of cultural relativism–the notion that each
society should be viewed within its particular context, or understood on its
own terms. But, as we discuss below, cultural relativism is not the same thing
as moral relativism. There has been a surprising lack of inquiry into how
American military officials who were obsessed with “cultural awareness” came to
accept practices in which unwilling children were taken by Afghan police and
militia leaders for sexual gratification.
Rationalizing
Child Abuse
While
much of this story remains unknown, there is some evidence that the US Army’s
Human Terrain System (HTS) played a role in rationalizing pedophilia in Afghanistan,
both within military circles and in the popular media’s discourse supporting
the establishment of these policies. CounterPunch readers may remember HTS as
an experimental and controversial counterinsurgency program that embedded
social scientists with combat brigades in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
During its eight years of existence, the program cost tax payers more than $720
million, making it the most expensive social science project in history. It was
fraught with ethical problems and was even condemned in 2007 by the American
Anthropological Association. Earlier this year, one of us discovered that the
Army quietly shelved the program in 2014 following accusations of fraud,
mismanagement, and waste (González 2015).
An
early public acknowledgment of the abusive practices of the US’s Afghan
allies–and of American military anthropologists encouraging military acceptance
of Afghan men having sex with boys–occurred on October 10, 2007 on a radio
broadcast of The Diane Rehm Show. In an interview, HTS’s Senior Social Science
Advisor Montgomery McFate provided an account of how Human Terrain Teams had
helped a US
battalion accept these “cultural differences.” McFate (who holds a Ph.D. in
anthropology from Yale
University) said that HTS
had raised intercultural awareness and acceptance of something she referred to
as the NAMBLA-like sounding “Man-Boy Love Thursday.” She recounted this as a
“humorous” story illustrating the role of Human Terrain Teams in establishing
military interactions with local populations:
“I’m
just laughing, because anthropologists are great believers in reflectivity and
in understanding your own biases, and sometimes it can be somewhat challenging
and humorous to try to teach those perspectives to the military. And I’ll just
give one example from Afghanistan,
which is that on the Forward Operating Base it was a common practice on
Thursday afternoons for some of the older men to go off with some of the younger
boys for a little hanky-panky in the bushes. And the Brigade asked the Human
Terrain members: ’what’s up with Man-Boy Love Thursday—what is going on?’ And,
you know, essentially the Brigade’s view was ‘we need to put a stop to this
because it was wrong, it was [in a laughing voice] wrong, it, you know,
violates our notion of what’s appropriate.’
And
the Human Terrain Team members said, ‘you know, actually that’s part of Afghan
culture and there’s not really much you can do about it. If you don’t like it,
you can’t stop it. It’s just part of what they are. Don’t try and impose your
values on the people you’re working with because you’re not going to change
them.’ So [that’s] somewhat a humorous example.” (McFate quoted in
“Anthropologists and War” 2007).
McFate’s
public persona was that of a bohemian counterculturalist, and her indifferent
depiction appears to have influenced rapt US military officials who began to
view rampant pedophilia as little more than a cultural oddity. McFate’s glib
summary of “Man-Boy Love Thursday” stands as an example of what happens when
anthropology is stripped of its ethics for the sake of convenience. By peddling
this cheap, tawdry version of social science for military consumption, McFate
told her sponsors and the general public that anthropology could serve a useful
role in the age of American Empire by simplifying the moral complications of
invasion and occupation.
While
the New York Times now deserves some credit for focusing critical attention on
the current manifestation of “Man-Boy Love Thursdays,” for years, the newspaper
played an essential role in portraying HTS in glowing terms. In 2007, the Times
ran a sympathetic front-page story in which HTS’s supporters described the
program as effective and even “brilliant” (Rohde 2007). The corporate media
largely ignored critics of the program. Later that year, the Times followed up
its feature story with an op-ed piece lauding HTS, as University of Chicago
anthropologist Richard Shweder praised McFate’s program, writing, “Ms. McFate
stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral
judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with
younger boys on ‘love Thursdays’ and do some ‘hanky-panky.’ ‘Stop imposing your
values on others,’ was the message for the American soldiers. She was way
beyond ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ and I found it heartwarming” (Shweder 2007).
Shweder did not fully understand what sort of program of cultural acceptance he
found heartwarming, yet his ignorance helped HTS gain the public legitimacy it
needed at a crucial moment when anthropologists who were critical of HTS found
it impossible to be heard by the Times’s editorial board.
Turning
a Blind Eye
Between
2009 and 2011, the US
military created a situation in which official reports and documents
effectively portrayed the sexual exploitation of children as a natural and
acceptable part of Afghan culture.
In
2009 an unclassified Human Terrain Team report on “Pashtun Sexuality” was
released to the public. The report, authored by AnnaMaria Cardinalli (who holds
a Ph.D. in theology from Notre Dame University), argues that a vast number of
Afghan men practice “a culturally-contrived homosexuality,” particularly with
boys, which can be partly explained by “a long-standing cultural tradition in
which boys are appreciated for physical beauty and apprenticed to older men for
their sexual initiation” (Cardinalli 2009: 1,2). Cardinalli’s report suggests
that US military personnel need to understand such dynamics as “an essential
social force underlying Pashtun culture,” and although it acknowledges that
these practices may involve “a great imbalance of power and/or authority to the
disadvantage of the boy involved,” it casts doubt on “whether this can rightly
be termed abusive when seen through a lens from within the culture” (Cardinalli
2009: 2).
Two
years later, in 2011, the Army released a draft training handbook which
explicitly advised US personnel to ignore abuses perpetrated by Afghan security
officers. The handbook, entitled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural
Incompatibility,” was written by Major Jeffrey Bordin (2011). According to his
LinkedIn page, Bordin has a Ph.D. in psychology and holds a “Human Terrain Team
Leader” certification from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (LinkedIn
2015). The draft handbook includes a list of “taboo conversation topics” that
American soldiers should avoid, including “any criticism of pedophilia” and
“mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct.” Like Cardinalli, Bordin downplays
child abuse as a cultural quirk. The handbook states: “Bottom line: Troops may
experience social-cultural shock and/or discomfort when interacting [with
Afghan security forces]. . .Better situational awareness/understanding of
Afghan culture will help better prepare [American troops] to more effectively
partner and to avoid cultural conflict“ (Bordin quoted in Nissenbaum 2011).
It
is remarkable that HTS’s justifications of pederasty provoked so little media
attention. By contrast, military narratives of the mistreatment of Afghan women
by the Taliban were routinely recycled by a willing press after 2001, and many
Americans came to believe that Afghan women needed to be saved from their own
men. Curiously, US news organizations have largely ignored the mistreatment of
women in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or Pakistan–close allies of the United States.
In
fact, Human Terrain Team analyses fit the preconceived off-the-shelf
Orientalist stereotypes of Islamic societies critically dissected by the late
Edward Said. One need look no further than the cover of Said’s Orientalism. It
features Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting The Snake Charmer, a romanticized
portrayal of a nude boy dancing before tribal elders. The image neatly aligns
with long-standing European notions of Oriental exoticism. (It is striking that
European and American critics of pederasty often ignore the fact that it was
practiced in the West for centuries–most famously in ancient Greece and Rome.
Some suggest that the practice may have been introduced to Central
Asia during the period of Alexander the Great, long before the
arrival of Islam.) The “anthropological” information provided to the military
by HTS frequently stressed such exoticism, while ignoring centuries of contact
with the West, legacies of European colonialism, and the inequities of power
relations that most anthropological analyses would address.
In
any event, the reports by Cardinalli and Bordin were entirely consistent with
the nonchalant attitude expressed by Montgomery McFate. In 2010, documentary
film maker Adam Curtis (2010) blogged about a conversation he had with McFate.
When Curtis asked her what she thought anthropology could provide to the
military, she answered, “cultural relativism.” To illustrate, she told him
about “Man-Boy Love Thursday,” saying: “The
Americans running the base had decided it was wrong. They worried about elder
men preying sexually on young boys. They wanted to arrest the Afghan men–but
the Human Terrain team persuaded the base commanders that this was an accepted
part of Afghan sexual culture. I wonder how long it will be before the
anthropologists start telling the military that what they think of as
’corruption’ is in reality a deeply rooted system of tribal patronage in
Afghanistan that they should accept.” (Curtis 2010)
Curtis
was clearly disturbed by her response.
Cultural
Relativism is Not Moral Relativism
The
comments of McFate and other former HTS personnel such as Cardinalli and Bordin
reveal a profound misunderstanding of anthropology–and of Afghan society.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that the ideas expressed by Human Terrain Team
members betray a basic misunderstanding about the differences between cultural
relativism and moral relativism. The first is a basic anthropological
recognition that all cultures have distinct beliefs and behaviors that are seen
by members of the cultural as normal and proper. Given the universality of this
arrangement anthropologists use cultural relativism to understand cultural
differences in their own terms.
But
moral relativism is another thing altogether. Moral relativism moves beyond the
acknowledgment of cultural difference and refuses to engage with any evaluation
of the morality of practices. In this context, pedophilia in contemporary Afghanistan
cannot be separated from the American military’s presence there, as HTS’s
pseudo-philosophers maintain. By adopting a position of moral relativism, the
Human Terrain System pretends to remove itself and the US military
from responsibility for these abusive acts occurring on American military
bases. One can only wonder why, as they reached this position of moral
relativism, HTS’s anthropologically-trained personnel blatantly disregarded the
American Anthropological Association’s commitment to the principles of
international human rights (AAA 1999; see also Engle 2001). Interestingly, Afghanistan’s
president Ashraf Ghani–who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia
University–recently condemned the sexual abuse of children in his country and
vowed to crack down on the abusers (Rosenberg 2015).
There
are, of course, cultural differences in expressions of human sexuality. Indeed,
the impacts of these cultural differences are significant, and include things
like cultural constructions of acceptable sexual expressions, orientations, and
consent. Culture’s impact on these elements of sexuality are real and
important. But what is vital and missing from such militarized social science
analysis is a central acknowledgment of the political context generating these
analyses. Like most other things created in a context of military invasion and
occupation, the studying and reporting on sexuality occurs through a fog of war
obscuring and permeating the operationalization and analysis of that which is
studied. In such contexts, what might be normalized descriptions of variations
in sexual behavior are transformed by power relations, and efforts to
de-exoticize cultural differences in these contexts becomes counterinsurgency
intelligence, used not only to understand and accept, but to understand and
control. In Afghanistan,
these conditions created a cascading escalation of events where HTS personnel
provided the rationalization needed to transform American military facilities
into areas where US-backed allies raped and brutalized screaming children.
These dynamics of rationalization are not unique to this war. As anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins observed half a century ago in his essay “The Destruction of
Conscience in Vietnam,”
soldiers are often placed in a predicament where “all peripheral rationales
fade into the background. It becomes a war of transcendent purpose, and in such
a war all efforts on the side of Good are virtuous, and all deaths unfortunate
necessity. The ends justify the means” (Sahlins 1966).
HTS’s
efforts to absolve American officials of responsibility or agency in these
reports of abduction and child rape places US
soldiers in an impossible position: they are asked to pretend that US protection
and sheltering of those undertaking these acts does not make them morally
culpable, even when they bear witness to sexual exploitation, coercion, and
abuse. Perhaps there is no clearer indication of the Human Terrain System’s
moral bankruptcy than the second-hand effects of its reckless forms of
“research,” which have a real human cost. As Afghan children suffer the
consequences of official indifference in the face of sexual abuse, American
soldiers are haunted by the moral guilt of enforced complacency as they endure
yet another lie about the US-led occupation of Afghanistan.
References
American Anthropological Association. 1999.
Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights. http://www.aaanet.org/about/Policies/statements/Declaration-on-Anthropology-and-Human-Rights.cfm
Anthropologists and War. 2007. The Diane Rehm Show,
October 10. http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2007-10-10/anthropologists-and-war
Bordin, Jeffrey. 2011. A Crisis of Trust and Cultural
Incompatibility. Unclassified N2KL Red Team Report. Available at
Cardinalli, AnnaMaria. 2009. Pushtun Sexuality.
Unclassified Human Terrain Team Report. Available at https://info.publicintelligence.net/HTT-PashtunSexuality.pdf
Curtis, Adam. 2010. Kabul: City Number One — Part 9. BBC Blogs,
May 27. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/c3dedc2f-3133-39e9-af1b-8444dd60605a
Engle, Karen. 2001. From Skepticism to Embrace: Human
Rights and the American Anthropological Association, 1947-1999. Human Rights
Quarterly 23(3). https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/human_rights_quarterly/v023/23.3engle.html
Goldstein, Joseph. 2015. US Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual
Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies. New York Times, September 20. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html
González, Roberto J. 2015. The Rise and Fall of the
Human Terrain System. CounterPunch (Online edition), June 29. http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-human-terrain-system/
Harris, Shane. 2015. Marines Trained That Rape in Afghanistan is
a ‘Cultural’ Issue. The Daily Beast.com, September 23. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/23/marines-taught-to-look-the-other-way-when-afghans-rape-children.html
LinkedIn.com. 2015. LTC Jeffrey Bordin PhD. https://af.linkedin.com/pub/ltc-jeffrey-bordin-phd/7b/975/176
Nissenbaum, Dion. 2011. Draft Army Handbook Wades
into Divisive Afghan Issue. Wall Street Journal, December 11. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324024004578171561230647852
Rohde, David. 2007. Army Enlists Anthropology in War
Zones. New York Times, October 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Rosenberg, Matthew. 2015. Ashraf Ghani, Afghan
President, Vows to Crack Down on Abuse of Boys. New York Times, September 24. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/world/asia/ashraf-ghani-afghan-president-vows-to-crack-down-on-abuse-of-boys.html?_r=0
Sahlins, Marshall. 1966 [2000]. The Destruction of
Conscience in Vietnam.
Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, 229-260. New York: Zone Books.
Schweder, Richard. 2007. A True Culture War. New York
Times, October 27. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/27/opinion/27shweder.html
But those soldiers are not real men.
They are American pimps.
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