Social science at war
The New York Times has an interesting story today about the military's use of anthropoligists and other social scientists in its counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army officers tell the Times that the scientists have been a great aid in their efforts to understand local populations and dynamics. But the program has drawn criticism from other academics:
Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”
Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.
“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”
Arguing that her critics misunderstand the program and the military, Ms. McFate said other anthropologists were joining the teams. She said their goal was to help the military decrease conflict instead of provoking it, and she vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military.
Working with the armed forces in this capacity would seem to be a complicated opportunity for a scientist. On one hand, the military offers a tremendous lever arm to increase understanding and potentially do good. But that promise has to be balanced against the fact that the aims of the organization may at times be signficantly at odds with your own. At what point should a scientist in that situation draw the line? And when you're in the middle of Afghanistan on a military patrol, how much power do you have to do that?
Related on bioethics.net:
+ APA: Members shouldn't be involved with abusive interrogation
+ Medical Ethics and the Interrogation of Guantanamo 063
-Greg Dahlmann
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