The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual:

Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American

SocietyA Review
Jeremy H. Keenan*

Network of Concemed Anthropologists, The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual.

Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press,
2010.

HE COUNTER-COUNTERINSURGENCY MANUAL ( C C M ) (WHICH THE AUTHORS CALL

a pamphlet), may well come to be regarded as the most important work

to emerge from America's social sciences so far this millennium. It was
written by the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA), 11
anthropologists who came together in 2007 to find ways to express concems over
recent efforts to militarize anthropology.
Witha"Preface" of powerful indignation from Marshall Sahlins,respected elder
of U.S. anthropology, at the duplicity and lack of intellectual integrity of the U.S.
military's designs on anthropology, the CCM is a rejoinder to the U.S. Army and
Marine Corps' 2007 Counterinsurgency Field Manual (CFM) and a timely reaffirmation of the fundamental ethics, humane idealism, and professional standards
of anthropology.
The CFM was published in December 2006 as part of a well-orchestrated publicity campaign to convince the American public that a smart new plan was underway
to salvage the lost war in Iraq. The core of this new intellectually "smart bomb"
for victory in Iraq was to legitimize the war by "academizing" or, more precisely,
"anthropologizing" it. To paraphrase Alexander Leighton, the U.S. military used
anthropology the way the drunk uses a lamppost,for support ratherthan illumination.
The head of the task force to appropriate anthropological theory to the leveraging
of a Pax Americana onto a resistant Iraq (and now Afghanistan) was America's
latest "scholar-warrior," General Patraeus (Ph.D.). The CFM was his baby. The
Pentagon, which hyped this new dream of cultural engineering as a "rare work of
applied scholarship," was ably assisted in its assault on the American public by
University of Chicago Press (UCP), which republished the CFM in 2007 and then
flogged it into the Best Seller Lists as a "cult-read."
* JEREMY H . KEENAN is Professorial Research Associate, Department of Social Anthropology
and Sociology, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London University (e-mail:
jeremykeenan@hotmail.com). This review was first published in Times Higher Education.

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Social Justice Vo\. 31, Nos. 2-3 (2010-2011)

Review of the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual

159

The NCA's CCM is more than a deconstruction of the Chicago edition of the
CFM: it is a total disembowelment. Launched in a media frenzy that saw the CFM
splashed across NPR, ABC News, NBC, the New York Times,Newsweek, and other
publications, the CFM was pitched as the philosophical expression of Patraeus'
intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq. It included the original foreword by General
Patraeus, a new foreword by counterinsurgency expert Lieutenant Colonel John
Nagel, and an introduction by Sarah Newall, the reactionary head of Harvard's Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy. The heart of the CFM, however, and the chapter
most demanding of the NCA's response, was its discussion (Chapter 3) of "Intelligence in Counterinsurgency." Drafted largely by anthropologist Montgomery
McFate, the most outspoken proponent of this cultural turn, it teaches counterinsurgents how to "weaponize" indigenous cultural information.
The NCA authors expose the CFM's pretentious and faked scholarship, revealing its incoherent, simplistic, and outmoded understanding of the social sciences,
especially anthropology, and its shocking plagiarism. Dozens of passages are revealed to have been lifted from unaccredited sources. This was UCP's contribution
to Bush's "information war." But how could such a once prestigious publishing
house stoop to being the vehicle of such faux scholarship?
In contrast, the authors of the CCM (Catherine Besterman, Andrew Bickford,
Greg Feldman, Roberto Gonzlez, Hugh Gusterson, Kanhong Lin, Catherine
Lutz, David Price, and David Vine) strip America of its ill-fitting imperial drapes
to reveal an anguished state of fear, violence, duplicity, and permanent war. Their
contributions give us razor-sharp, authoritative, and scholarly insights and analyses
of America's militarized society: the statistics on its militarization; the history of
counterinsurgency; the rise of the military normal; violence and the American selfimage; the militarization of knowledge; the appropriation of the social sciences,
anthropology especially, and human intelligence; AFRICOM; the prospect of war
for a new generation, and proposals for a new "human-centered" foreign policy.
The NCA authors are to be thanked and congratulated for their courageous
and urgently necessary work, which, as we stand teetering on the brink of an
Orwellian future, is recommended as essential reading to all students of the social
sciencesand beyond.

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