The SF Chronicle has another article on Montgomery McFate, the war, and anthropology -- this one very much worth reading. The response from the anthropologists is, I think, kind of astonishing. Read on... Montgomery McFate's Mission

Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?

Matthew B. Stannard

Sunday, April 29, 2007

More...

We're trying to do something against mealy-mouthed policies that don't hold responsible those scum with Ph.D.'s who stand beside torturers," Gerald Sider, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, snarled to a reporter for Inside Higher Ed. Sider was interviewed in November at the 105th annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose. The meeting was abuzz over a year-old New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, alleging that a 1973 book by cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai, "The Arab Mind," might have inspired the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, on the theory that sexually humiliated Arab men would become willing informants. Hundreds of anthropologists at the business meeting -- the first official quorum in 30 years -- unanimously endorsed a resolution condemning "the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture." But one anthropologist, while sharing her peers' condemnation of torture as immoral and ineffective, worried that some of her colleagues had the wrong response to Abu Ghraib: Don't scold the military, she argued. Educate it. "If Patai's book had been used correctly, they would never have done that. Because they would have understood that ... you're not going to get intelligence information out of these people, you're going to get them and their families attacking you," she said later. "Half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all." She is Montgomery McFate, a Marin County native now at the United States Institute of Peace. For five years, McFate has made it her mission to convince the U.S. military that anthropology can be a more effective weapon than artillery. "If you understand how to frustrate or satisfy the population's interests to get them to support your side in a counterinsurgency, you don't need to kill as many of them," she said. "And you certainly will create fewer enemies." That kind of kumbaya comment seems misplaced in a militaristic era of shock and awe, but so does McFate: a punk rock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool hippies, a 41-year-old with close-cropped hair and a voice buttery with sardonic amusement, a double-doc Ivy Leaguer with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed. Her ideas have made McFate the focus of bitter criticism -- but not from the uniformed forces. After four years of a war that was supposed to last more like four months, the military is now listening to McFate's ideas -- and committing money and manpower to make them a reality. "By force of her intellect and personality, she's going to shape the way this is understood," said Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "What she reveals can't be ignored." The criticism of McFate comes from social scientists who say McFate is following a path of good intentions toward a diabolical future where science meant to improve humanity becomes a weapon of mass destruction. "If people like McFate and their vision of anthropology becomes more powerful, the discipline will really change in ways that I think would be calamitous," said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University and one of McFate's more vocal critics. "I think she's encouraging people to do things that I regard as unethical." McFate has little patience for what she views as academic malcontents more interested in issuing resolutions than in finding solutions. After 30 years, she wants to see an anthropologist sitting on the National Security Council. "The military is so willing to listen now ... and for anthropologists to sit back in their ivory tower and spit at these people that are asking for their help -- I think there's something unethical about that," she said. "If you're not in the room with them, you won't influence their decisions." Montgomery McFate was born on Jan. 8, 1966 in Waldo Point, a Sausalito backwater of houseboats and hippies described by a San Francisco Examiner reporter in 1972 as "equal parts fantasy and ghetto reality." McFate lived at what she calls the "art scene" of Gate 5. A childhood friend, author Cintra Wilson, calls the denizens there "practically squatters." "I lived in a little bit more gentrified houseboats ... we had plumbing," said Wilson, who loosely based a character in her novel "Colors Insulting to Nature" on McFate. "But Gate 5 had resolved to not be gentrified, and there were riots where you'd have pregnant women hitting cops with boat oars, like 'No, we don't want plumbing!' " McFate's mother, Frances Pointer, bought a surplus World War II ammunition barge for a dollar, converted it into studios and married Martin Carlough, a 6-foot-8-inch former Marine who got out of the corps on a mental health discharge. "He used to walk around downtown in this pink denim jacket and it said, 'I am God' in giant rhinestone letters," McFate said. "It's my first memory of my father." Frances won custody in their 1968 divorce, despite her estranged husband claiming that as the "living incarnation of the eternal Buddha" he made a fitter parent. Hospitalized and treated with electroshock therapy, Martin ended up wandering the streets of Sausalito in the early '70s. "They basically fried his brain. He was no longer a human being," McFate recalled. "He rather flamboyantly threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge." McFate's mother was comparatively stable. But her rejection of society left her with no real income other than rent from the other apartments on her barge -- the white curtains in the bedroom of a Marin City friend seemed to McFate an unimaginable luxury. "Her advice to me when I was a kid was never write anything down, don't leave any records, never trust the government, don't join any organizations. She was a real anarchist," McFate said. The conflicts between the Gate 5 residents and the forces of development led to a long standoff around a pile driver near McFate's barge. Sheriff's deputies took up residence outside her bedroom, protecting the equipment. "It made me feel really sympathetic toward the police, who I saw as people who were just trying to do their jobs as best they could," she said. "And these (protesters) have their really legitimate viewpoint, too, which is that they want to keep the wild world wild. "It made me feel like, well, there are two sides to every story." Her mother didn't encourage academics, instead urging McFate to get ahead on her looks. McFate and Wilson ended up studying at the local bus stop. She excelled academically, but the fashionable cliques of Tamalpais High School were daunting for a young woman who would be too poor to buy a new coat until she entered graduate school. She sought her own niche. "She walked in the door one time and it was all black jeans, black combat boots, tight black sweater and this big black hat with a big black veil. It was this great look ... we called her 'Satan's beekeeper,' " Wilson recalled. "She was goth before anybody was goth." In the Bay Area punk scene -- the Mutants, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, the Offs -- it didn't matter if McFate had thrift store clothing and a bed on a barge. But after three boyfriends in a row died -- hanging, meth, heroin -- McFate escaped back into academics. Hard work paid off in a slew of small scholarships and in August 1985 she moved into the freshman dorms at UC Berkeley and tried to call her mother. "Her friend called me back an hour later and said, 'I have some bad news for you: She's dead," McFate said. Her mother had had a stroke. "I had no brothers and sisters. My father was dead. Really I had no one to turn to. ... It was just me." She recovered enough to maintain a B-plus average in her first semester, develop an interest in anthropology and enroll in graduate studies at Yale with a full scholarship. But her dissertation on the Republican community in Northern Ireland puzzled other anthropologists. "People said, 'You really should be doing this in political science, because it's not appropriate for an anthropology degree,' " McFate said. "And I was like, wait, you don't think that Republican community in Northern Ireland is a culture? It seemed to me that how human beings go to war is as much a product of culture as table manners or sexual practices." In Belfast, McFate had an epiphany: The common view of the Troubles as a battle between Catholics and Protestants, or loyalists and Republicans, or even terrorists and the government, was not how the warring sides saw it. "The way (Republicans) legitimate their activities is that they are an occupied country," she said. "They've been occupied for 800 years by the British military." What's more, McFate said, the British troops involved in counterinsurgency recognized the same narrative. "They may think personally that these people are terrorists and despise them, but they understand what's motivating it," she said. "They could not have built an effective strategy in Northern Ireland as they did without having a very full understanding of their enemy -- which, by the way, it took them 30 years to get." But McFate was realizing that academia -- "where you read books about books and then write a book about other people's books about books" -- was not for her. "I wanted to do something in the world, not about the world," she said. After receiving her anthropology doctorate in 1994, McFate jumped to Harvard Law School, where she earned her juris doctor in 1997 and landed a job as a litigation associate at Baker & McKenzie in San Francisco. "But I got there, and they took me up to my 24th floor office on the Embarcadero and shut the door and I'm sitting there with a view of the bay and all of a sudden I just started to cry. ... 'This is all wrong. This is not what I should be doing. What am I doing here?' " That quest for meaning would lead McFate into the gap between two communities that had maintained a frigid divorce for 30 years: anthropology and the military. Anthropology has been called "handmaiden to colonialism" -- a phrase normally used to criticize the discipline, but one McFate uses to make a point of historical fact. In 1902, when the American Anthropological Association was founded with an initial membership of 175, anthropology was dominated by British scientists reporting on the empire's subjects in Africa, or Americans studying the Sioux for the Bureau of Ethnology. Even then, there were those who argued for separation. In 1919, Franz Boas, dubbed "father of American anthropology," publicly complained that colleagues had "prostituted science" by scouring Central America for German submarine bases under the guise of research and was censured by the association. Boas died in 1942, when most anthropologists were helping wage World War II, studying everything from Japanese culture to the physiques of draftees. Even Margaret Mead, probably the most famous anthropologist of all time, wrote pamphlets for the Office of War Information. Some later regretted their involvement in propaganda efforts; others complained that their advice to the military -- such as that the Japanese could be persuaded to surrender without a large-scale attack -- was ignored. Nevertheless, for many, victory was vindication. "Everybody came out of World War II and said ... that was a necessary but nasty task," said David Price, author of the forthcoming "Weaponizing Anthropology: American Anthropologists in the Second World War." "Anthropologists came out of World War II and said, 'We can use anthropology to solve the world's problems.' " American military mistakes in Vietnam -- a belief in American virtue, listening to a few locals pushing an agenda instead of the entire culture -- presaged those in Iraq, McFate said. "We lost in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the entire national security establishment decided that they would never do that again," she said. "They decided to focus their energies on a peer competitor -- the Soviets." The decision to avoid Vietnam-style counterinsurgency warfare led to the creation of large-scale, high-tech, heavily armored conventional forces that could play the Soviets to a draw and utterly overwhelm any other foe. Military training mirrored that strategy, as young officers were encouraged to pursue careers in combat leadership over more academic pursuits. "If what war fighting becomes is servicing targets from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, you don't need cultural understanding," said Steven Metz, professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. "(But) the people who were opposed to us, they learned from the Gulf War as well." The adversary applied its lessons of asymmetric warfare in the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, and the American military under Donald Rumsfeld faced a task unlike any it had before -- and had all the wrong tools. "Rumsfeld ... was going to optimize the way the force functioned. Other cultures didn't matter. Other societies didn't count. Just how efficiently could you deliver firepower," Sepp said. "(But) in Iraq, just bombing and blasting things, the people who knew that wasn't working were the guys on the ground -- the captains and sergeants -- that had to make this happen. You just can't kill enough of these people." At some point in the past 18 months, the focus in Iraq began to shift away from a military solution. Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates, a former CIA director with a doctorate from Georgetown University. Operations in Iraq went to Gen. David Petraeus, a Ph.D. from Princeton, fresh from overseeing a new counterinsurgency manual that urged field commanders to consult outside experts in governance, economics and anthropology. But as the military began embracing the academics it had effectively forsworn since Vietnam, there were relatively few anthropologists returning the embrace. "Anthropologists for decades were screaming at the top of their lungs, 'Hey, we can help you to administer your colonial empires, we can help you to administer post-occupation Japan' ... and were ignored," said Dustin Wax, a doctoral candidate focusing on the history of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. "Now it's a couple decades later, and they're saying, 'Well, where are you guys when we need you?' " The narrative of anthropology in the past 30 years is remarkably similar to the military's: a new generation recoiling from Vietnam. "The elders of the day had not just fought in (World War II), but used anthropology in the war. And among the anti-war forces were a whole bunch of people who fought in (Vietnam) as 18- or 19-year-olds, got the GI Bill and were in their 30s," Price said. "So there was a generational split." The resultant friction exploded in a series of meetings of the association in the 1970s, fueled by two of the last gasps of anthropological cooperation with the military: Project Camelot and the Thai scandal. Project Camelot was a 1964 Defense Department effort to identify the potential for and means of preventing internal war in Chile, where protests forced the project's cancellation in 1965. Five years later, documents stolen from a university professor suggested that anthropologists were helping the American and Thai governments study ways to strengthen loyalty to the Thai king. Again, those involved said their goals were salutary -- studying other cultures with the goal of preventing war. "A less charitable way of looking at it is it was to keep regimes in power that were favorable to the United States," Price said. "If the regime is being propped up by the military, those regimes are probably not helping the peasants, which is who the anthropologists are out studying." That, said George Mason University's Gusterson, points to a more fundamental issue that arose in anthropology in the 1970s: the idea that cooperation with the military ran contrary to the science's basic principles. "You pitch a tent ... among the people you want to understand, you live with them, you catch their diseases, you eat their horrible food, you share their joys and pains," he said. "The thought that you would cultivate those relationships of trust and intimacy and then ... go to the Pentagon and say 'these are the people you should kill, these are the people you shouldn't kill,' that's extremely problematic for people with that methodology." For some elder anthropologists, the discipline's recoil had by the 21st century led to practical irrelevance. "Margaret Mead was on 'Johnny Carson' more than two dozen times," said Felix Moos, a University of Kansas anthropologist. "Today when I ask an audience can you name one internationally or nationally known anthropologist, I meet nothing but silence." By 2005, less than 4 percent of American Anthropological Association members surveyed by the association were working for the government. The discipline also had become politically homogenous: A George Mason University survey found Democrats outnumbering Republicans in anthropology and sociology by 20 to 1 in 2004. In a largely symbolic act that year, the association rescinded the 1919 censure of Franz Boas. Little wonder that when the military finally started looking for in-house anthropologists, the list of names was very short. One of them was Montgomery McFate. McFate met her future husband, Sean, at Harvard in 1997. She was the daughter of West Coast hippies, he the scion of a patrician East Coast family. But they shared an interest in Taoism, and something else: She was an anthropologist interested in the military; he was a soldier seeking to study anthropology. They married in December 1997. But Sean McFate found that the military took a dim view of his scholarly interests -- when he sought to leave the service for studies, they sent him to Germany for a three-year tour. His new bride traded her 7-month-old law career for the life of an Army wife. "It was a nightmare for me," Sean confided. "Her punk rock, Ivy League background was very potent, but did not prepare her for the Army." But by the end of three years, Sean said, "she spoke and understood Army." The McFates returned to Washington D.C.'s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood. A CD collection fills their entryway -- Sean's classical collection overwhelming a small grouping of rock CDs including Nirvana and the Sex Pistols. The remainder of the flat is filled with tikis, boat lights and Montgomery's collection of Orientalist art. Despite her return to American shores, McFate found herself still grasping for purpose until one night in 2002 when she ended a long talk with her husband about their futures by scribbling a sentence on a cocktail napkin: How do I make anthropology relevant to the military? "It's one of those times where you get goose bumps all over your body," she said. McFate set out to work her way into the national security system: to Rand, where she studied North Korean society, then to the Office of Naval Research, where in 2004 she won permission to interview American Marines back from Iraq. Some younger troops were frustrated with what they saw as Iraqi culture of inshallah, God willing -- failure to meet schedules, reluctance to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. McFate saw an imposition of American cultural expectations on a culture born of survival. "There's a psychological legacy of living under a regime of fear. If you stuck your head out and tried to do something good, you would be potentially sent to prison," she said. "Now here we come and we just knocked over their sovereign government -- dictatorship or not -- and we suddenly expect they're going to behave like us. That's a preposterous idea." But mainly, McFate found in the Iraq veterans a hunger for cultural knowledge, one the troops had fed through Google and Barnes & Noble, producing improvised innovations that were sometimes remarkable, if short-lived. "This young Marine captain described how he had basically got there and been told it was his job to create a judicial system. ... He went on the Internet and found a copy of the 1950 Iraqi constitution. So he used their system and he used their law, so it had tremendous local legitimacy," McFate recalled. "But he was told by the (Coalition Provisional Authority), 'You're employing Ba'athists and you have to stop now.' " In November 2004, McFate threw together a conference on "national security and adversary cultural knowledge," the first such conference since 1962. She expected a crowd of maybe 125. More than twice that number attended. "The most embarrassing thing was we discovered we wait-listed a general," she said. "You don't wait-list a general." Three years after her cocktail-napkin revelation, McFate received a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I was the only person he could find," she said. "The basic message was, 'The war fighters say they want information about the society they are operating in. ... We need an anthropologist. Can you come over here right now?' " Corralling a colleague who had done field research in Iraq, McFate came over, and soon was visiting the Pentagon almost every day. The McFate message, as enunciated in those meetings and in a series of essays, is that cultural ignorance is behind many U.S. problems in Iraq. Her oft-cited simple example was a gesture -- arm straight, palm out -- that means "stop" in America but "welcome" in Iraq. That difference translated into Iraqi families driving blithely toward a seemingly welcoming American soldier at checkpoints until shot as a presumed suicide bomber. On a more fundamental level, McFate has argued, the entire Iraq war was a colossal failure of cultural understanding at the highest levels of the Bush administration. "They assumed that the civilian apparatus of the government would remain intact after the regime was decapitated. ... In fact, when the United States cut off the hydra's Ba'thist head, power reverted to its most basic and stable form -- the tribe," she wrote. "The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding the Iraqi culture." In conversation, McFate takes the argument a step further, saying that had the Bush administration understood Iraqi culture, "we would never have gone to war. Not in a million years. There's no harder case than Iraq." To the military -- particularly to those long-lonely counterinsurgency experts moving into positions of influence as the war soured -- these ideas were both obvious and revolutionary. "These kinds of perspectives that McFate brought made instant sense to people who had been fighting on the ground in Iraq," Sepp said. "They were pounding on those issues going, 'Here's somebody who understands the kind of war were fighting.' " These days, McFate is holding so many meetings that she is finding it hard to write her book, tentatively titled "Cultural Knowledge and National Security." Her expertise has been tapped for everything from writing part of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual to working with the Office of the Secretary of Defense to apply that manual to the current "surge" in Baghdad and evaluating the military's cultural information needs and training programs. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has started a program dubbed Cultural Operational Research Human Terrain System -- based on an essay McFate co-authored in 2005 -- to embed five-member teams of experienced military officers and civilian social scientists with operating brigades: an anthropological brain transplant. Heading the program is Steve Fondacaro, a Fresno native and self-described radical who retired from the Army as a colonel after 30 years in the infantry and special operations. "(McFate) is my political commissar. Every time she opens her mouth I stop what I'm doing and listen very closely, and then I apply it. Because she's always right," he said. Originally, Fondacaro said, the military tried to turn McFate's ideas into a laptop-based tool. But he argued that field commanders needed human experts to explain cultural conundrums. Such as why escorting home a person arrested in error, giving his family money and apologizing to his boss might sound polite, but will get the person killed as a collaborator. Or why parched villages might violently resist well-meaning efforts to dig new wells if you don't involve the local sheikh whose political legitimacy has for centuries been based on control of water. "Give him credit for designing the plan and informing the population of what he is going to get the Americans to do, and when the ribbon-cutting time comes, we stand in the background and he takes all the credit," Fondacaro said. "You (now) have an incredibly powerful ally." The first team arrived in Afghanistan at the beginning of March, Fondacaro said, and another should be ready for Iraq in July -- assuming he can add to the half dozen social scientists who have so far joined the program. "If you're a scientist worth your salt, and you object ... to the way military operations and military thinking ruined the quality of life for the indigenous people we deal with ... then the approach to solving that problem in my view is engagement and education. It's not isolation," he said. "It's not because we're evil people, it's because we're stupid. And the cure for stupidity is education. And who's going to do that education if it isn't you, a cultural anthropologist?" To McFate, early success in getting her ideas implemented by the Pentagon is a blessing. But if her work was winning her fans in the military, it was outraging some of her colleagues in anthropology. In 2004, Felix Moos brought an idea to his senator, Pat Roberts, R-Kan., then chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "My idea really was that the military desperately needs more language- and area-qualified people than they have," he said. "It seems to me that we would do much better in the world if we had a few thousand Arabic-speaking soldiers with us at the beginning of the current conflict in Iraq." The idea turned into the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholarship Program, which provided intelligence agencies with scholarship funds to recruit and train students with language and cultural skills. Moos was delighted. But the new program electrified the 2005 meeting of the association. "Initial reaction ... was that the AAA should weigh in against this," said Paul Nuti, director of external, international and government relations for the American Anthropological Association. "(But) there were competing voices heard from the membership that maybe that was too hasty of a move." One of those voices -- a loud one -- was McFate's. "I, for one, did not know she existed. That's been the case with a lot of these folks that are already embedded and working for national security intelligence entities," Nuti said. "Montgomery and others have really opened up discussion on the many, many different roles and different applications of the discipline." Rather than take an immediate stand against PRISP, the AAA established a commission to review its ethical guidelines and the challenges anthropologists face in national security work by late 2007. But at the AAA's next business meeting in San Jose, members passed not only the resolution against the use of anthropology in torture but also one calling for an end to the U.S. presence in Iraq. If approved by the full membership in May, both will become official AAA policy. "The anthropologist turned military consultant Montgomery McFate ... (and others) are suggesting a form of hit-man anthropology where anthropologists, working on contract to organizations that often care nothing for the welfare of our anthropological subjects, prostitute their craft by deliberately earning the trust of our subjects with the intent of betraying it," Gusterson wrote in an essay prepared for the meeting. Prostituting the science -- the same charge Franz Boas levied against his spying colleagues in 1919. McFate seems to relish some of the controversy -- in an early conversation about criticism of her work, she urged me to call Gusterson with what seemed like impish glee. But her jaw sets at some of the personal attacks in journals or anthropology blogs -- not the accusations of intellectual prostitution, but claims that she is motivated by greed. "I don't like being personally attacked. I don't mind if they attack my writing and say I'm full of crap," she said. "(But) if I were in this for the money ... I'd be a partner in a law firm making millions of dollars a year." More academic critics of McFate's work cite, by and large, three main issues. Some say her work involves a degree of secrecy that strikes them as counter-scientific, although McFate argues that secrecy can protect lives -- troops' and informants' both. Others are concerned that she is placing anthropologists everywhere under suspicion of spying -- a suspicion many say they encounter in any case -- and effectively endorsing the military's agenda. "The American military is being used by and large from my point of view for geopolitical domination," said Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University who prepared the 2006 anti-torture resolution. "I think it is very problematic for anthropologists to be involved in a system of essentially domination." Wilson, the childhood friend, argues that such critics fail to understand McFate. "The people we grew up around labor under the idea that no war is ever OK. (McFate), having been an anthropologist, comes from the understanding that war is a human impulse that's not going away. Like homosexuality or something that is utterly normal and has always been there -- you may object to it, but there's no point in doing so, because it's not going away," she said. "At its core -- for her -- I know it's an altruistic mission. What she really wants is a bloodless war." McFate displays little patience for such critics. "Their intentional disengagement from policy process, their uninformed unwillingness to learn about what actually goes on in Washington," she said, a tone of icy exasperation briefly replacing the normal warm amusement. "There's a blanket condemnation without trying to understand, which strikes me as particularly un-anthropological." But the most common criticism of McFate's work is that it conflicts with the most fundamental ethical principles of modern anthropology. "She advocates that anthropologists should cultivate relationships of trust with those communities in order to advise the U.S. military apparatus how to control them," Gusterson said. "If you want to do what McFate is suggesting, you have an obligation to tell people in the Sunni triangle, 'By the way, I'm going to be going back to Alexandria and explaining all this to Robert Gates. How do you feel about that?' I can't imagine many people in the Sunni triangle are going to talk to you then." For some anthropologists, like Moos, that argument is grossly simplistic. "In World War II, to study the einsatzgruppen of the SS, would you want them to be signing statements of confidentiality?" Moos asked. "I mean, that's ridiculous." But Gonzalez argues that Moos' question is essentially correct -- and part of the reason why anthropologists should never assist the military, save perhaps in missions adjudged humanitarian by vote of the association. "It's absolutely essential to explain clearly to potential informants -- whether they are Zapotec farmers or whether those are SS officers -- any possible risks that the work might entail for them. ... No matter how distasteful we might find what it is they do," he said. McFate acknowledges the inherent tension in her work, and shares the fear of the abuse of anthropology. Anthropologists, she said, need to balance "the anthropological interest in protecting informants and the national security interests of acquiring valuable information and knowledge that might potentially hurt an informant but might protect the lives of American and foreign civilians and members of the armed services." "But most anthropologists ... live in a pretty simple moral world. Their only interest is the interests of their informants. That is the sine qua non of anthropology. That is the prime directive. And I live in a more complicated world where that is a directive, but it is not the prime directive. Perhaps that is what they find so objectionable." McFate seems to respect her critics -- even vocal ones like Gusterson -- for at least taking part in the debate over anthropology and national security. "I think Hugh is also doing a great service for the country. He's a dissenter. I'm also a dissenter. We're dissenting against different things. ... I'm dissenting against anthropology right now," she said. "Under different circumstances, we could have been great friends." But those anthropologists who are sitting out the issue, she said, are missing a great -- and perhaps a final -- opportunity to influence America's interaction with the world. "They have stayed in the ivory tower. It's a safe place, it's an easy place to be. I did a Ph.D. at Yale, so I'm very familiar with what that looks like. I'd just like to see them get out more," she said. "They have a unique voice, and they have a lot more power and a lot more authority than they think they do." It is that concern, McFate said, that makes her evangelize her fellow anthropologists, that makes her giddy when amid the many fan letters she receives from military personnel appears the occasional note from a fellow anthropologist expressing a desire to get involved -- or at least an interest in the debate. Because for McFate, it is not ultimately her colleagues' criticism that worries her. It is the fear that the entire discussion is taking place too late. "Dave Petraeus ... is going over there. And he's been given carte blanche by the White House. He can have any resource he wants," she said that cold February day, seated on her bench across from the White House, keeping warm with a fur coat and an American Spirit, her eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses. "My fear is that ... he's going to go over there and it's going to be too late, and he's going to fail. And the whole thing is going to be delegitimized: the counterinsurgency doctrine, non-kinetic force, delegitimized," she said softly. "And then what's the Army going to do? It's going to fall back on what it had before ... technology and firepower. "But if you can figure out how a society is wired, you don't need to do that," she said. "That's what the game is. That's what Petraeus is going to do. But you can't do that if you don't have information." E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.

Here is an interesting critique of the work of NGO's in the field of global health: The Challenge of Global Health Apparently, there are now more than 60,000 AIDS-related NGOs alone. The piece, published in Foreign Affairs, also includes an exchange between journalist Laurie Garrett and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.

What does it mean to move 'global warming' into the domain of security? - Here is an article in today's New York Times. April 15, 2007 Global Warming Called Security Threat By ANDREW C. REVKIN and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States. A report, scheduled to be published on Monday but distributed to some reporters yesterday, said issues usually associated with the environment — like rising ocean levels, droughts and violent weather caused by global warming — were also national security concerns. “Unlike the problems that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,” Richard J. Truly, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and former NASA administrator, said in the report. The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military. The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.” The report, called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” was commissioned by the Center for Naval Analyses, a government-financed research group, and written by a group of retired generals and admirals called the Military Advisory Board. In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable, One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies climate risks and other trends for the Defense Department and other clients, said the climate system, jogged by a century-long buildup of heat-trapping gases, was likely to rock between extremes that could wreak havoc in poor countries with fragile societies. “Just look at Somalia in the early 1990s,” Mr. Schwartz said. “You had disruption driven by drought, leading to the collapse of a society, humanitarian relief efforts, and then disastrous U.S. military intervention. That event is prototypical of the future.” “Picture that in Central America or the Caribbean, which are just as likely,” he said. “This is not distant, this is now. And we need to be preparing.” Other recent studies have shown that drought and scant water have already fueled conflicts in global hot spots like Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sudan, according to several recent studies. This bodes ill, given projections that human-driven warming is likely to make some of the world’s driest, poorest places drier still, experts said. “The evidence is fairly clear that sharp downward deviations from normal rainfall in fragile societies elevate the risk of major conflict,” said Marc Levy of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which recently published a study on the relationship between climate and civil war. Given that climate models project drops in rainfall in such places in a warming world, Mr. Levy said, “It seems irresponsible not to take into account the possibility that a world with climate change will be a more violent world when making judgments about how tolerable such a world might be.”

An interesting theme that has come across my radar in a variety of contexts recently is the threshold between emergency response and longer-term engagements with a field. Peter Redfield's paper at the biosecurity workshop touched on this question in humanitarian work, looking at how the exigency of HIV/AIDS treatment regimes -- which are long-term -- have raised questions about Doctors' Without Borders tool kit, which is oriented to medical emergencies. A student of mine, Caroline Nichols, is examining how emergency relief organizations like the International Crisis Group are reorienting their activities now that the Russian Government has declared that the "war" in Chechnya is over and the period of reconstruction has begun. This issue also comes up in interesting ways in an article in today's New York Times about reconstruction in New Orleans, and the efforts of a former Dean of the Milano School at the New School who has become a key player in reconstruction. He has been involved in the post-"event" recovery in New York (after 9.11), in Oakland, California (after Loma Prieta), and now in post-deluvian New Orleans (check out his bio at the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development). There is a particular universe of expertise in post-disaster reconstruction just as there is one (emerging) in post-conflict reconstruction. The question is: what are the norms, forms, and styles of reasoning in this domain? 

Bob Herbert in today's times has an op-ed on our decaying infrastructure that sounds like the late-1970s/early 1980s discussion. The column is not of much interest in itself, but refers to a CSIS Commission on Public Infrastructure that has been active (or has existed, at any rate) since 2004. There is a link to a 2006 panel on Guiding Principles for Strengthening America's Infrastructure, and Herbert refers to recent testimony by Felix Rohatyn, the head of the Commission (who some will remember as a key player in negotiating New York City's way out of financial crisis in the 1970s; sounds like a pretty interesting guy on other fronts as well). In any case, the interesting questions would obviously be: How do these proposals -- classic questions of population security -- relate to the substantial work in CSIS on Critical Infrastructure Protection? And is there any chance that these issues will get a different kind of hearing now that the democrats have more voice in the government? I wasn't able to find the recent Rohatyn testimony, but this is one interesting possible space of movement in a shifted set of security emphases under new political conditions.

NIAID unveiled today a multicenter flu research initiative. Apr 4, 2007 (CIDRAP News) – In a major effort to track influenza viruses in nature and learn more about how they interact with the human body, the federal government this week announced a $23-million-a-year program to fund research centers at six institutions around the country. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) unveiled the 7-year plan to fund six "Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance" at universities and other institutions from New York City to Los Angeles. "The goal of the newly created centers is to provide the federal government with important information to inform public health strategies for controlling and lessening the impact of seasonal influenza as well as an influenza pandemic," the NIAID said in an Apr 2 news release. Research under the NIAID contracts will range from monitoring of Americans' responses to flu vaccination to identification of possible targets for new antiviral drugs and testing of pigs and wild birds. Each center will collaborate with a number of other agencies and institutions. The new initiative builds on a program launched by the NIAID after the original human outbreak of H5N1 avian flu in Hong Kong in 1997, the agency said. In that program, led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, researchers studied flu viruses in waterfowl and live bird markets in Hong Kong, shedding light on the natural history of the viruses. St. Jude is one of the six centers named this week. The six centers, with their principal investigators and main areas of research as described by the NIAID, are as follows: St. Jude, Dr. Robert Webster. Research areas include antiviral drug regimens, factors in flu virus resistance to antivirals, virus transmissibility, and human defenses against the H5N1 virus. The center will also maintain surveillance for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in Southeast Asia. University of California, Los Angeles; Dr. Scott Layne. Researchers will monitor animal influenza internationally and in the Pacific Northwest and will maintain a high-throughput laboratory network for studying circulating flu viruses and antiviral resistance. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Dr. Marguerite Pappaioanou. Scientists will monitor flu viruses in migratory birds, conduct human flu surveillance in Thailand, and monitor US farm workers who work with swine. (See further information below.) Emory University, Atlanta; Dr. Richard Compans. Researchers will study how flu viruses adapt to new hosts and are transmitted between different hosts and will examine human immune responses to flu vaccination and infection. Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City; Dr. Adolfo Garcia-Sastre. Researchers will conduct molecular studies to identify viral genes associated with pathogenicity and the adaptability of flu viruses in birds and mammals. University of Rochester, New York; Dr. John Treanor. Investigators will monitor communities in New York for seasonal flu infections and study the effectiveness of annual immunization programs, among other efforts. (See further information below.) At the University of Minnesota, Pappaioanou said the center will collaborate with a number of other groups to test wild birds for flu viruses throughout the Central Flyway, with studies weighted toward the Upper Midwest. Partners in the effort include the University of Georgia in Athens, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the US National Wildlife Health Center in Madison (Wis.), the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, and Cargill Corp., she said. Depending on results, the bird surveillance may lead to testing of pigs and possibly testing of people who work with pigs, Pappaioanou, an epidemiologist and veterinarian in the School of Public Health, told CIDRAP News. "If we find birds that are positive, we'll look at swine that are nearby. We'll be interviewing people who own those operations and their employees. If there are reports of human illness that could be flu, we'll be testing specimens from [the patients]." In addition, the center will team up with Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, which has battled H5N1 outbreaks in recent years, for a human flu surveillance project in rural Thailand, Pappaioanou said. Researchers will be looking at risk factors for H5N1 exposure and also test people for antibodies indicating past exposure to the virus. Pappaioanou said the center will receive NIAID funding of about $3 million a year under a contract that requires various "deliverables" along the way. The latter include things like detailed information on the viruses collected plus laboratory reagents and protocols developed. The data generated will be deposited in GenBank and other public databases. "My role is largely going to be coordinating this, making sure things happen, providing scientific oversight, and making sure we deliver our deliverables to the NIH [National Institutes of Health]," she said. At the University of Rochester, scientists are planning research to help in the development of a single vaccine that can work against many different flu strains, Treanor commented in a news release. The Rochester center will study five topics in particular: (1) how white blood cells recognize qualities shared by many different flu strains, (2) the identity of viral proteins that turn on "helper" T cells, causing them to attack infected cells, (3) communication between immune cells, (4) the nature of changes in the viral protein hemagglutinin when flu viruses jump from birds to mammals, and (5) the qualities of viral polymerase, the enzyme the virus uses to copy its genetic material. As part of the effort, "Researchers will follow college students, healthy adults, and 150 families with young children in the Rochester area for seven years, monitoring them for exposure to flu and responses to vaccination," the release states. The Rochester contract is worth a total of $26 million, officials said. The university will collaborate with Cornell University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and community partners.

Here's an excellent article in today's New York Times on the drugs that are in your water. April 3, 2007 Drugs Are in the Water. Does It Matter? By CORNELIA DEAN Residues of birth control pills, antidepressants, painkillers, shampoos and a host of other compounds are finding their way into the nation’s waterways, and they have public health and environmental officials in a regulatory quandary. On the one hand, there is no evidence the traces of the chemicals found so far are harmful to human beings. On the other hand, it would seem cavalier to ignore them. The pharmaceutical and personal care products, or P.P.C.P.’s, are being flushed into the nation’s rivers from sewage treatment plants or leaching into groundwater from septic systems. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers have found these substances, called “emerging contaminants,” almost everywhere they have looked for them. Most experts say their discovery reflects better sensing technology as much as anything else. Still, as Hal Zenick of the agency’s office of research and development put it in an e-mail message, “there is uncertainty as to the risk to humans.” In part, that is because the extent and consequences of human exposure to these compounds, especially in combination, are “unknown,” the Food and Drug Administration said in a review issued in 2005. And aging and increasingly medicated Americans are using more of these products than ever. So officials who deal with these compounds have the complex task of balancing reassurance that they take the situation seriously with reassurance that there is probably nothing to worry about. As a result, scientists in several government and private agencies are devising new ways to measure and analyze the compounds, determine their prevalence in the environment, figure out where they come from, how they move, where they end up and if they have any effects. In many cases, the compounds enter the water when people excrete them or wash them away in the shower. But some are flushed or washed down the drain when people discard outdated or unused drugs. So a number of states and localities around the country have started discouraging pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes and residents from disposing of drugs this way. Some are setting up “pharmaceutical take-back locations” in drugstores or even police stations. Others are adding pharmaceuticals to the list of hazardous household waste, like leftover paint or insecticides, periodically collected for safe disposal, often by incineration. For example, Clark County, Wash., has a program in which residents with unwanted or expired drugs can take so-called controlled substances, like prescription narcotics, to police stations or sheriffs’ offices for disposal. They can drop noncontrolled drugs at participating pharmacies, and 80 percent of the pharmacies in the county participate. In guidelines issued in February, three federal agencies, including the E.P.A., advised people with leftover medicines to flush them down the drain “only if the accompanying patient information specifically instructs it is safe to do so.” Otherwise, the guidelines say, they should dispose of them in the trash (mixed with “an undesirable substance” like kitty litter to discourage drug-seeking Dumpster divers) or by taking them to designated take-back locations. Worries about water-borne chemicals flared last summer when researchers at the United States Geological Survey said they had discovered “intersex fish” in the Potomac River and its tributaries. The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, were male but nevertheless carried immature eggs. Scientists who worked on the project said they did not know what was causing the situation, or even if it was a new phenomenon. But the discovery renewed fears that hormone residues or chemicals that mimic them might be affecting creatures that live in the water. In a survey begun in 1999, the agency surveyed 139 streams around the country and found that 80 percent of samples contained residues of drugs like painkillers, hormones, blood pressure medicines or antibiotics. The agency said the findings suggested that the compounds were more prevalent and more persistent than had been thought. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration started looking into the effects of residues of antibiotics and antiseptics in water, not just to see if they might affect people but also to assess their potential to encourage the development of drug-resistant bacteria. Reports of contamination with pharmaceutical residues can be alarming, even when there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed. In 2004, for example, the British government reported that eight commonly used drugs had been detected in rivers receiving effluent from sewage treatment plants. A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was “extremely unlikely” that the residues threatened people, because they were present in very low concentrations. Nevertheless, news reports portrayed a nation of inadvertent drug users — “a case of hidden mass medication of the unsuspecting public,” as one member of Parliament was quoted as saying. Christopher Daughton, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency and one of the first scientists to draw attention to the issue, said P.P.C.P. concentrations in municipal water supplies were even lower than they were in water generally because treatments like chlorination and filtration with activated charcoal alter or remove many chemicals. Dr. Daughton, who works at the agency’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, said he believed that if any living being suffered ill effects from these compounds, it would be fish and other creatures that live in rivers and streams. Dr. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes of the ESWE-Institute for Water Research and Water Technology in Germany brought the issue to scientific prominence in 1999, in a paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. They noted that pollution research efforts had focused almost exclusively on “conventional” pollutants — substances that were known or suspected to be carcinogenic or immediately toxic. They urged researchers to pay more attention to pharmaceuticals and ingredients in personal care products — not only prescription drugs and biologics, but also diagnostic agents, fragrances, sunscreen compounds and many other substances. They theorized that chronic exposure to low levels of these compounds could produce effects in water-dwelling creatures that would accumulate so slowly that they would be “undetectable or unnoticed” until it was too late to reverse them. The effects might be so insidious, they wrote, that they would be attributed to some slow-moving force like evolution or ecological change. Initial efforts concentrate on measuring what is getting into the nation’s surface and groundwater. The discharge of pharmaceutical residues from manufacturing plants is well documented and controlled, according to the E.P.A., but the contribution from individuals in sewage or septic systems “has been largely overlooked.” And unlike pesticides, which are intentionally released in measured applications, or industrial discharges in air and water, whose effects have also been studied in relative detail, the environmental agency says, pharmaceutical residues pass unmeasured through wastewater treatment facilities that have not been designed to deal with them. Many of the compounds in question break down quickly in the environment. In theory, that would lessen their potential to make trouble, were it not for the fact that many are in such wide use that they are constantly replenished in the water. And researchers suspect that the volume of P.P.C.P.’s excreted into the nation’s surface water and groundwater is increasing. For one thing, per capita drug use is on the rise, not only with the introduction of new drugs but also with the use of existing drugs for new purposes and among new or expanding groups of patients, like children and aging baby boomers. Also, more localities are introducing treated sewage into drinking water supplies. Researchers who have studied the issue say there is no sign that pharmaceutical residues accumulate as water is recycled. On the other hand, the F.D.A. said in its review, many contaminants “survive wastewater treatment and biodegradation, and can be detected at low levels in the environment.” Some say the spread of these substances in the environment is an example of how the products of science and technology can have unintended and unpredictable effects. In their view, when the knowledge about these effects is sketchy, it is best to act to reduce risk, even if the extent of the risk is unknown, an approach known as the precautionary principle. Joel A. Tickner, an environmental scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, says that it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and that more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses. In his view, the nation’s experience with lead additives, asbestos and other substances shows it can be costly — in lives, health and dollars — to defer action until evidence of harm is overwhelming. Others say the benefits of action — banning some compounds, say, or requiring widespread testing or treatment for others — should at least equal and if possible outweigh their costs. “You have to somehow estimate as well as possible what the likely harms are and the likely benefits,” said James K. Hammitt, a professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. And while it is possible that some of the tens of thousands of chemicals that might find their way into water supplies are more dangerous in combination than they are separately, Dr. Hammitt said in an interview, “it’s perfectly possible that they counteract each other.” Anyway, he said, assessing their risk in combination is a mathematical problem of impossible complexity. “The combinatorics of this are truly hopeless.” Given all this uncertainty, policy makers find it difficult to know what to do, other than continuing their research. Studies of “the fate and transport and persistence” of the P.P.C.P.’s will allow scientists to make better estimates of people’s exposure to them, Dr. Zenick said, and “to assess the potential for human health effects.” But even that normally anodyne approach comes under question because of something scientists call “the nocebo effect” — real, adverse physiological reactions people sometimes develop when they learn they have been exposed to something — even if there is no evidence it may be harmful. “The nocebo effect could play a key role in the development of adverse health consequences from exposure even to trace elements of contaminants simply by the power of suggestion,” Dr. Daughton wrote recently in a paper in a special issue of Ground Water Monitoring and Remediation, a publication of the National Ground Water Association, an organization of scientists, engineers and businesses related to the use of groundwater. In fact, the idea that there are unwanted chemicals in the water supply has many characteristics that researchers who study risk perception say particularly provoke dread, regardless of their real power to harm. The phenomenon is new (or newly known), and the compounds are invisible and artificial rather than naturally occurring. But scientists at agencies like the Geological Survey say it is important to understand the prevalence and actions of these compounds, even at low levels. If more is known about them, agency scientists say, researchers will be better able to predict their behavior, especially if they should start turning up at higher concentrations. Also, the Geological Survey says, tracking them at low levels is crucial to determining whether they have additive effects when they occur together in the environment. Comprehensive chemical analysis of water supplies “is costly, extraordinarily time-consuming, and viewed by risk managers as prompting yet additional onerous and largely unanswerable questions,” Dr. Daughton wrote in his paper last year. But it should be done anyway, he said, because it is a useful way of maintaining public confidence in the water supply. “My work is really categorized as anticipatory research,” he added. “You are trying to flesh out a new topic, develop it further and see where it leads you. You don’t really know where it leads.”

From the website of the Centers for Disease Control: "The theme of the 12th Annual National Public Health Week is "Preparedness and Public Health Threats." CDC, the American Public Health Association (APHA), and hundreds of partner organizations will encourage Americans to prepare effectively for public health threats, from bioterrorism and natural disasters to disease outbreaks." One of the events perhaps worth 'attending' is a satellite broadcast and webcast on pandemic influenza planning designed for "state and local preparedness partners, emergency responses specialists, public information officers, hospital and community-based health organization planners, and any other public health professionals interested in pandemic influenza planning and exercising."