Yeah. Let's start straightaway with today's call on contemporary counter-insurgency by Dr. Ali Khalili,
obtained officially from Columbia University with the thesis that she later turned into a book that is called Heroes
and Martyrs of Palestine The Politics of National Commemoration with published by Cambridge University Press in 2007,
a work that included a very thorough field fieldwork of one year of research in the Palestinian refugee camp.
She is now senior lecturer in politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in
London and is also co-editor of the book on Policing and Prisons in the Modern Middle East.
The lecture she is giving today is part of a larger work, the working time for the manuscript,
his time in the shadows, incarceration in counter insurgency.
So this lecture today is focusing on the agenda of counter-insurgency.
Thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure to meet you. And thank you all very much for having me here.
I do apologise. I'm a bit cold here today. I've got a couple of young kids at home and this time of the year there are a little germ factories.
And so if I'm if I'm sucking on stuff, it's not I'm not chewing gum through them having cold medicine to let me breathe while I read.
Okay. Gender in counterinsurgency,
counterinsurgency defined as asymmetrical warfare by a powerful military against irregular combatants supported by a civilian population,
is as old as warfare itself. Although the term itself was coined by John F Kennedy in 1960,
this particular method of war fighting has been a mainstay of colonial war fighting and imperial policing, particularly since the 19th century.
Despite the long history of small wars and colonial counterinsurgencies,
today's advocates of popular population centric counterinsurgency in which
the civilian population is persuaded to defect to the counterinsurgency side.
And this is often counter opposed to enemy centric counterinsurgency in which instead of persuasion,
you get intimidation into getting the civilians on your side.
The advocates of population centric counterinsurgency presented as a soft option, especially as compared with scorched earth military tactics,
where the annihilation of the enemies is the end point and the population centric doctrine advanced in the
U.S. Army and Marine counterinsurgency manual FM 324 and other current classics of counterinsurgency,
including John Nagl Eating Soup with a Knife, and David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla.
And also counterinsurgency kinetic force, which is the killing capacity of the military,
is to take backstage foregrounding developmental language and agendas and practice, such as, for example, and I quote,
a vibrant economy, political participation, restored hope, psychological information operations,
the use of local proxies, and the integration of civilian military efforts, including aid and governance.
Because ultimately the ultimate goal of counterinsurgency is to win over a largely uncommitted civilian population.
This coding of counterinsurgency has the civilian ized option,
which aims at winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations and persuading
them to support the counterinsurgent has a particularly gendered character.
What I mean by gendering is a set of practices and discourses that constitute men and women,
and the masculinities and femininity is in particular ways as diametrically opposed things.
Gendering is not about women alone.
You often see gender equated to women, nor is it about a pure and autonomous autonomous dichotomy between men and women.
Rather, masculinities and femininity, especially in imperial contexts,
are always already crosshatch with other kinds of difference, including racial and class designations.
At one level, counterinsurgency itself is presented as the opposite of a more mechanised,
technologically advanced, higher kinetic, more kinetic form of warfare.
Given that the latter is often coded as hyper masculine populations, the population centric counterinsurgency is considered feminine.
Second, the very object of population centric counterinsurgency is often perceived and represented as feminine,
since the focus of counterinsurgency is seen to be the transformation of civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world.
On the other hand, in the binary categorisation, which forms the basis of mainstream discourses about war,
civilian, which is feminine, is often posed as the opposite of combat, which is often portrayed as masculine.
That's on one hand. On the other hand. Spaces and subjectivities, which regular warfare destroys as a matter of side effect rather than intent,
or which are considered to be collateral to the main job of warfighting in conventional warfare or de marginalising counterinsurgency.
That brought into focus and in some senses made central to the work of military and civilian counterinsurgency.
These spaces and subjectivities are perceived by both the military and civilians as gendered in particular,
in specific sorts of ways, which I hope to show.
Finally, the practices of counterinsurgency itself is predicated on being able to tell combatants from civilians, hostiles,
from friendlies, as well as invading, organising, fighting, detaining, transforming and destroying often again on the basis of gender.
And again, I will talk about this in a minute.
We know from a wealth of scholarship that war and violence have always been gendered class and racialized, not only in a practical way,
therefore, but also in longer term or everyday manner that they shape social relations and are shaped by them.
Moreover, we know that the discursive practice of surrounding war also reproduce excellent gender hierarchies
through the constant reproduction of a dichotomous rhetoric of masculinity and femininity.
What is new with counterinsurgency is the extent to which the sensuality of civilians
as potential object of military operation is acknowledged in doctrine and practice,
even perhaps especially as civilians are instrumentalized as part and process of the war.
The complex process by which civilians are mapped to particular gender grids and men and women are read and interpolated
according to constructed notions of civilian is one of the central forms that this counterinsurgency gendering takes.
Further, as mentioned above,
counterinsurgency doctrine and practices directly bring these bodies and spaces which are usually coded private or feminine households,
markets, shops. These are usually coded feminine.
Went into the space of battlefield.
They transform cities and homes and persons into highly gendered segments of physical and human
terrain and utilise detailed knowledge about the quotidian as ethnographic intelligence.
And of course in the end everyday is often perceived and represented as feminine as well.
Every day is supposed to be the domain of the women. This conquered and gendered space in which an indigenous population is controlled, surveilled,
monitored and made to acquiesce is the first site which I shall analyse gendered practices of counterinsurgency.
I will also analyse two other spaces, one in which what I consider to be a seam of encounter,
where the the encounter between the counterinsurgent and the population is much more intense, much more routine, and much more repeated.
And the third is actually where the policy is made. So the first is the field of the first is the actual field of practice of
counterinsurgency because of the centrality of the civilian in counterinsurgency.
Gender relations are also inevitably transformed on the basis of counterinsurgency action.
This works through demographics, through targeting of women, as counterbalancing forces to male radicalisation,
through the cooptation of gendered spaces, to counterinsurgency practice.
And finally, the use of gender telling to distinguish those who are to be protected from those who are to be feared and destroyed.
Gender demographics are here often invoked as both justification for targeting young men and more instrumentally for planning military action.
Youth bulges. A demographic profusion of men between the ages of 15 and 30, especially in Muslim countries,
is seen as a structural condition underlying extremism and is a problem to be addressed militarily in faraway places.
Young men are seen as an automatically useful resource for radical recruitment,
and the counterbalance to this is often posed in policy circles as being women's education and job creation programs,
which are considered to be necessary antidotes as a response to this kind of youth bulge is often of men and often, again, of Muslim populations.
It's argued that women are essentially less corrupt, more efficient, better for economic development and less warlike.
And all of these things come out of a modernisation theory of the 1960s, which posited women as being essentially different kinds of characters.
The feminised security. Discourse is deployed by all and sundry, and gender mainstreaming becomes even central to military intervention.
Policymakers, for example, argue that by providing economic development specifically to women,
women can be saved from alienation and thus radicalisation.
Women are cast as wholly socioeconomic beings, divested of politics or ethics under the heading of, for example, why the military should care.
Two U.S. officers, both of them women, suggest that. And I quote,
By collaborating with USAID and using women in development expertise and on gender integration as part of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.
The military can more effectively address the negative socioeconomic conditions that make areas ripe for terrorist exploitation.
In a highly influential and much circulated set of guidance notes, the counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen similarly argues that, and I quote,
Co-opting neutral or friendly women through targeted social and economic programs
builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents.
When the women and you owned the family unit, owned the family,
and you take a big step forward in mobilising the population on the side of the counter insurgents and, quote,
those advancing women's rights through modernisation is automatically seen as as meeting the national security
interests of the U.S. A significant element of counterinsurgency thus becomes provision of social services,
which are often allocated to women and are seen as another way in which counterinsurgency action can win them over.
For example, a brand analyst and the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad.
Cheryl Barnard writes that, and I quote, Health care operations have been particularly effective and winning local support in Afghanistan.
And repeated occasions, female patients in health clinics, thankful for care,
received and motivated to support the new order that provided it, have volunteered valuable tactical information to U.S. forces.
In this instance, it's not even the question of development.
It's just the kind of a short term and immediate return of intelligence for provision of social health services in the field.
Counterinsurgency transforms the population. It is intended to pacify it into a human terrain which can be made visible, knowable and malleable.
The human terrain system of the U.S. military, for example, couples, military officers with social scientists you guys know this already.
And they actually are very interested in all sorts of things, including such things as kinship structures,
the peculiarities of gender relations, the way that people live and the relations with those around them and beyond.
These are specifically gendered structures of life, are refined, fixed in time and space,
and mobilised as kind of useful facts about the civilian population.
Again, gender in a very kind of a refined and reductive sort of way.
For example, a paper produced by Human Terrain Systems Research Unit is specifically named after gender kinship structures.
My cousin's enemy is my friend is the name of the title, argues that and I quote, Rural,
rural Pashtuns have well developed methods to resolve conflict through jirga, mediation and exchange of property or women.
The result of this special kind of intra family relationship is that during times when conflicts aggravate first cousin hostility,
the signs don't necessarily break down along closest male relatives line.
Whereas in classical middle east tribal situation as if there is such a thing,
all the participants in a conflict pick sides based on which side represent their closest male relative.
Pashtuns establish temporary factional groupings that are unpredictable and not necessarily based on familial relationships, end quote.
Here Pashtun kinship ties are taken as timeless fact in the sense that they will never,
ever do exactly the way that the Middle Easterners will always, always do.
And so there's there's a kind of they're always considered to be timeless and contrasted to some idealised, homogenous,
equally timeless classical Middle Eastern tribal situation,
even as the paper again and again indicates that tribal structures can and do vary across time and space.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, gender familial and kinship ties are seen as the basis of military strategy,
whereby different tribal structures can determine whether or not surges of troops can be effective.
Just as important, the very sites of counterinsurgency are usually civilian spaces that are often walled off,
both figuratively and literally, as a subsection of the battle, a grid square that can be more easily pacified in counterinsurgency.
All spaces, and perhaps especially urban quarters, are seen as potential battlegrounds by the counter insurgents.
The conventional privacy measures for homes and the peacefulness of everyday spaces are no longer guaranteed.
Space is often not only coded as feminine, but also considered women's domains.
For example. Homes. Hospitals. Schools and schools especially, are frequently invaded by counterinsurgency.
These private or civilian spaces the home, the school, the hospital, the mill, the market,
the village are increasingly targeted in modern wars and in fact were specifically
the object of intense bombing and conventional warfare in the 20th century.
What counterinsurgency does, however, is to transform these spaces without necessarily destroying them.
Although destruction, especially in the wake of population resettlement, is often inevitable.
But it co-opts these spaces into a landscape of war.
Inevitably, these everyday landscapes are inhabited by civilians who are also made to be figures in the ongoing counterinsurgency.
The utilisation of these spaces in counterinsurgency is directly and intimate,
intimately tied up with the ways in which counterinsurgency practice makes men and women legible
and assigns them to different categories of various utility for combat and pacification.
Because counterinsurgency requires the categorisation of populations into combatants and non-combatants,
and because the easiest way to quickly identify and categorise populations as high risk combatants or low, low risk civilians is by gender.
The combatant non-combatant distinction becomes fully gendered,
where the all encompassing suspicion against all men is operationalised into specific actions, which I want to discuss a little bit further down.
While women are afforded the status of being naive objects of protection, pacification, humanitarian salvage,
social health care, etc., we already know that this gendering produces a masculinist logic of protection.
This is known from all kinds of warfare and the object of military intervention,
humanitarian aid and primary focus of concern in a post-conflict environment becomes an undifferentiated women and children,
as Cynthia and Lou originally wrote.
What counterinsurgency does is to transform the women and children into actors considered by the counterinsurgency to be either
complicit with the combatants or a terrain upon whom the counterinsurgency social engineering experiments can be performed,
or increasingly as hostages and literal or symbolic message bearers for the work of counterinsurgency.
Importantly, given the paucity of distinguishing features between civilians and combatants,
the gendered process of telling women and children from others becomes central to targeting processes in counterinsurgencies.
In 2004, for example, a large number of Iraqi cities were either surrounded by barbed wire, placed under constant monitoring, or both.
House invasions were often the norm. In these circumstances, women became direct targets of violence.
They were taken as hostages to compel the men to surrender. Their homes were destroyed,
and they were specifically targeted because of the purportedly intuitive understanding of the
enormity of attacking women and the ways in which such targeting would send a message to others.
So they specifically were taken hostage to send a message. Men were targeted differently, and the cordon cities where retinal scans, thumbprints,
identity cards and registers of residents are used to monitor the populations.
Men between the ages of 15 and 15, 16 and 50 were considered to be primary targets of this intensive, aggressive and invasive surveillance.
This targeting of men also conveniently served another function.
It allowed for soldiers to specifically feminise the men of the population through both symbolic and practical emasculation.
Such tactics included undressing of men at checkpoints and in prisons and the use of language which is intended to dishonour them.
This partially came out of an Orientalist understanding of what is considered honourable or shameful in Muslim culture,
and which presents this culture's notions of indignity and abuses.
Exceptional.
As a former US military interrogator recounts the interrogators, cultural training was based on the infamous book called The Arab Mind by Rafael Beti,
which included such admonishments as Men should not touch Arab women.
Female soldiers should avoid touching Arab men,
thus casting sexualised abuse as a particularly abhorrent thing to Arabs rather than to the entirety of the population.
So this is one of the first places where it happens and in these kinds of encounters between soldiers and the populations.
Then there is a second location in which gendering happens in counterinsurgency.
And this is what I call the seam of encounter.
A more complicated set of gendering practices occurs not at the end point of application of counterinsurgency force, but at the seam of encounter,
which is repeated routinised and intentional encounters between occupying military forces and the people subjected to counterinsurgency.
This scene is a messy, interstitial space in which race, gender and class end up becoming much more significant here.
Two groups in particular stand out. First, the women from the invading and occupying army.
And second, the local men who serve as proxy enforcers of order for the invading military.
In the first. Instance with the women that are in the army, the displacement of inequalities to a new colonial setting suddenly inverts.
Orders of hierarchy,
and women from very disadvantaged backgrounds can suddenly become powerful players positioned against and above the local males in the invited space.
This inversion of hierarchies is reinforced by representing the arrested and incarcerated Iraqi men,
for example, as rapists and the local male population as oppressors of their wives and families.
The peculiar the peculiarity of this positioning where working class women from the least
privileged parts of the U.S. found themselves in positions of power vis a vis Iraqi men,
has been best personified in the narratives about Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman.
England and Harman have become iconic figures, symbolising the torture inflicted upon Iraqi men in the Abu Ghraib prison.
The former held a leash encircling the neck of a naked Iraqi man curled into a vulnerable foetal position.
The latter had herself photographed, smiling,
cherubic and giving a thumbs up sign while leaning close to the dead body of a visibly bruised and battered Iraqi general.
The U.S. prison guards and interrogators who had inflicted pain upon Iraqi captives
never managed to generate the same sense of disgust as England and Harman.
This is quite interesting, but the two women generated much more outrage than the male their male counterparts had done.
Although one of the men, one of the male abusers, ended up getting a longer sentence than everybody else in general public,
the women were the ones who generated the outrage. Not only where England and Harman, the iconic representations of transgressive women.
There were also certainly the embodiment of a new hierarchy of power in which white women were automatically
placed in superior positions to men who in other circumstances would have been the expected superiors.
For example, the Iraqi generals.
Class position would be more privileged than that of a daughter of a police detective Harman, or a poultry factory worker.
ENGLAND In the instances where women have been used as interrogators, their bodies and their sexuality have been deployed as technologies of power.
And one of the most disturbing accounts of interrogations, this is both at Bagram and later at Guantanamo.
A male interrogator writes about female interrogators using their breasts,
their bodies and their menstrual blood as necessary tools for achieving dictated aims.
I'm going to recount a story that is pretty gory, but I think it sort of indicates what I'm talking about.
This is an account written by a U.S. interrogator. We returned to the interrogation book.
This broke a female interrogator and I were both in our sanitised figures and sanitised because they had their names taped over.
Obedience, use, battle dress uniform. To my surprise, she started to unbutton her top, slowly, teasingly almost like a stripper,
revealing a skintight brown Army T-shirt stretching over chest forehead.
In this instance, a Saudi prisoner wouldn't look at her. What's the matter for you?
Don't you like women? Are you gay? Why do you keep looking at him?
Brooke asked, referring to me. She started unbuttoning her medium pants.
Do you know what? I'm having my period. You know what? I'm having my period.
She said. She placed her hands in her pants as she started to circle behind a detainee.
How do you feel about me touching you now?
Brooke came back around the other side and he could see that she was beginning to withdraw him from her pants as it became visible.
The Saudis saw what looked like red blood on her hands. It was actually ink.
You [INAUDIBLE]. She tests wiping what she barely what he believed was menstrual blood on his face.
What do you think your brothers will think of you in the morning when they see an American woman's menstrual blood on your face?
Brooks said, standing up. By the way, we've shut off the water to your cell tonight.
So the bell, so the blood water will be there till tomorrow.
This uncritical self-abnegation of the white interrogator woman in the service of some nationalist understanding of national security
is part of the peculiar gendering of counterinsurgency practices and much more banal representation of this seam of encounter.
And perhaps in many respects, more important, because much more pervasive and much less dramatic,
has been the ease with which women have moved into combat roles,
serving the Empire unquestioningly with their integration into these roles being celebrated as some form of liberation as policy.
A male lieutenant colonel in the Army, in the US Army writes On any given day in Iraq,
an American soldier might be asked to search travellers at a roadside checkpoint
comfort distraught mothers whose children have been killed or injured.
Search a woman's quarters in a strictly Islamic household or assist civilians whose homes have been destroyed.
Given the traditional role of women as peacekeepers and humanitarians in their own home.
It is not illogical to believe that a woman could perform.
Form each of these tasks as well, if not better, thus providing a justification for women in combat roles.
Thus, a gendered body becomes a necessary and desired adjunct or an accessory to an asymmetrical warfare.
Because she does softer work, traditional work, peacekeeping work,
a second place in the scheme of encounter where genders are inflected through this mixture of race,
class and imperial hierarchies is where U.S. military men meet the local security forces.
Their training, training and developing indigenous police and military forces is a central tenet of counterinsurgency.
The tasks here include developing a U.S. style training base, embedding advisers,
initiating an intensive collective training program, and partnering American units with indigenous units.
Yet the local men who often risk opprobrium for joining Americans, are constantly berated and feminised,
called women or pussies and seen as inadequate and passive enforcers of good order by their trainers.
Here, masculinity alone of the indigenous forces does not form the basis of transnational solidarity.
And again, gender hierarchies are strongly shaded by other factors such as class,
race or ethnicity, language and religion, subcultures, sexuality, etc.
According to this logic, if a member of the local security force does not fight a war in which to which he does not necessarily have allegiances,
his manhood is considered to be impaired. And in account of the U.S. assault on Fallujah,
a commander of the First Marine Regiment considers Iraqi policemen and civil defence
corps troops who fled the devastation of the city to be inferior and feminised.
He said When are these people going to discover their manhood and stand and fight with us to save their city?
In this view, working for the occupying force is what allows a man his masculinity.
But sometimes even this acquiescence does not necessarily suffice.
When more circumspect officers speak of a lack of maturity for an indigenous security force which does not perform as the imperial military,
expect them. There are videos circulating online sites that show a much more overtly gendered conversation between the U.S. Marine trainer,
for example, and Iraqi security forces. The former questions, the loyalty of the latter, and then calls them bunches of women pussies cowards.
Too much of a [INAUDIBLE] woman to die for a country lacking a backbone.
Killing Americans and refusing to fight insurgents. When I met, when an Iraqi standing there being berated, sneers at him,
the Marine challenges him to going out back and having his little ass being beaten.
In a context where a proxy force fights for an imperial one,
the gendering of these proxy forces can usually take two different paths in imperial history.
On the one hand,
the colonial discourse discourse surrounding martial races envisioned fighters in the service of empire who were naturally fiercer fighters,
for example, like the Kenyan Maasai, the Nepalese Gurkhas, the Afghan partisans, or Pashtuns,
the Indian Sikhs, the Scottish Highlanders were all considered to be martial races.
This, at the same time, is in such colonial war fighting.
Nevertheless, a gendering happens as an McLintock has written with regards to Africa.
The white race was considered the male of the species and the black race was considered the female.
So on the one hand, you have this discourse of martial races. On the other, you have this gendering on the basis of racial difference.
Although this may seem in the first glance contradictory, a certain set of familiar tropes actually connect the two discourses to one another,
and notion of loyalty to the conquering empire represents a degree of masculinity.
So the more loyal you become to the empire, the more male you become.
You move along this gender spectrum from from the more a feminised object colonial to the more masculine, loyal fighter.
In the context of the war on terror, the men who are located in the seam of encounter are cast in these seemingly contradictory ways.
They can be at once courageous and manly allies and sodomising homosexual rapists.
I want to particularly read a revealing account from an oral history of a former US military man stationed in Afghanistan,
which has all the tropes in one story. Okay, so he says homosexuality was pervasive among the Afghans, especially Pashtuns in the south.
This is the Pashtuns who were fighting alongside Americans even when they weren't overtly engaged in acts of sex.
They would cling to each other, hold each other's hands, and generally cavort in ways that would astonish Westerners and repulse soldiers.
Some of the Marines would laugh incredulously. Others would be moved to violent reaction.
In one case, Fitzgerald watched a gigantic Marine march furiously toward.
To couple their phones, pick them up, toss them in different directions like dogs yelling the whole time in English that fans couldn't understand.
The female of the two scurried away. The dominant male was sort of indignant and flipped the scarf over his shoulder and walked off.
Now the Pashtun. Just a paragraph before they got the same person has talked about how good a fighter as the Pashtuns were in these instances.
And then this story comes up. The Pashtun are the warrior allies in this narrative or compared to dogs.
And if feminised, not only because of the sexual acts of which the masculine US Marine disapproves,
but also because they hold each other's hands and repulse westerners with their homosexuality.
Even the story, as it is told, draws on certain masculine and feminine images.
There's a gigantic Marine who stands for unspoiled American masculinity while there's an indignant Pashtun who flimsy a scarf over his shoulder,
which is a cliched imagery of a petulant teenager flipping her hair in exasperation.
So this is a second sets of gender, things that happen.
The final sets of gender angle I want to look to is the counterinsurgent women and the soldier scholars of the Metropole.
While gendering works in familiar, even predictable ways and the conquered spaces and at the same event,
counter gendering of counterinsurgency becomes much more fluid and sometimes unpredictable.
In the Metropole, where policies are formulated, ideologies are articulated, and wars are planned and legitimised.
Two ways in which counterinsurgency practice and discourse have become gendered in the Metropole have been most striking.
On the one hand, the creation of a new counterinsurgent masculinity, that of the soldier scholar,
and on the other hand the appropriation of a colonial feminist discourse and its saturating of counterinsurgency discourse
by women bureaucrats and policymakers explicitly allied their counterinsurgency credentials to their gendered identities.
The Salter Scholars are numerous and now well-known. They are overwhelmingly represented in the ranks of counterinsurgency.
This is particularly interesting to me. David Petraeus, who's got a place in international relations.
David Kilcullen and political science. John Nagl in history.
From here H.R. McMaster, PHC in History.
Andrew Exum facing war studies are all vocal, articulate and highly educated military or ex-military men, all of whom are ranked quite high,
all of whom are engaged in policy making vis a vis the war on terror, and all of whom are enthusiastic counterinsurgency.
Some have written influential books and articles on counterinsurgency.
Others have been online or think tank presences, pushing forward a counterinsurgency agenda.
While Petraeus, of course, is needs no introduction, the Soldier Scholars all advance a notion of war fighting,
which ostensibly takes into account political nuances,
aims to win over civilian population, and deploys an openly liberal discourse of salvation and humanitarianism.
Not only is a soldier scholar the ultimate in civic virtue, he's also the embodiment of international wisdom,
warfighting prowess and a kind of knowingness about the world.
This transformation in the notion of masculinity from a kind of a macho warrior to
a soldier scholar is actually something that they very specifically talk about.
So, for example, when an old school warrior that many of the counterinsurgency did not like,
called Nathan Sassaman, wrote a book called The Warrior King.
Many of the blogs burst into commentary about how no real soldier would call himself a warrior.
They were soldiers. So it's a new form of masculinity that is being discussed here.
Even the official discourse around counterinsurgency reflects a shift.
The Counterinsurgency Field Manual from 324 compares a regular fighter to that ultimate icon of raw, physical masculinity,
a pugilist who's nevertheless blind and is wasting energy flailing at unseen opponents and perhaps causing an unintended harm.
They say that access to military intelligence, on the other hand, transforms the counterinsurgent from a blind boxer into story,
into surgeons cutting out cancerous tissues while keeping keeping other vital organs intact.
So on the one hand, you have this wholly embodied, corporeal presence of the boxer.
On the other hand, you have the precise intellect of the surgeon.
The theoreticians of counter-insurgency obviously prefer the latter.
Not only does this counter positioning of boxers and surgeons contains implicit notion of masculinities to different kinds of masculinities,
they, perhaps even more importantly, hide within plain sight a particular gradation of class.
The boxer is the working class hero. The surgeon is.
For a middle class professional, the former is emotional and boring.
It's perhaps even irrational. The latter is intellectual, cool, steady hand at all the ways in which counterinsurgencies seem to be most effective.
The soldier scholars particularly well suited to the liberal interventionist model,
which sees its job as cautiously and pragmatically doing the bidding of the U.S. national interest.
Soldier scholars are not interested in chest thumping gestures, deploying the language of heart and mind much more readily and see their want.
They deploy the language of heart and minds much more readily and see their want as being the wielders of softer or smarter power.
Alongside this new form of masculinity and much more familiar colonial feminism is
crucial in advancing a particularly new form of metropolitan warrior femininity.
Colonial feminism of today deploys the language of humanitarian rescue.
The feminised security rhetoric has become completely commonplace, and in the administration, says one of these warrior feminists.
So much so that it is typical for an official who gives a speech about American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan,
or about U.S. policy of promoting democracy around the world, to draw the connection to the pursuit of women's rights.
This colonial feminism is appealing to a new category of women policymakers who pride themselves in a kind of collaborative warrior femininity.
These counterinsurgent women not only deploy a gendered analysis in their discussion of counterinsurgency, for example,
they say that these types of operations require very perceptive and deep emotional IQ, and therefore they are particularly well suited to women.
This is one of the women counterinsurgency arguing this, and they also say women have a more collaborative style,
which again makes them more suitable to counterinsurgency, but also use feminist justification for their involvement.
So another woman counterinsurgency says we aren't going to win by telling half the population they can't play the counterinsurgency.
Women have been particularly crucial in creating or sustaining the humanitarian elements of the war on terror.
The human terrain system is also on this side.
The cultural side, for example, which was originally conceived by counterinsurgent woman Montgomery McFate,
who wrote her doctoral thesis in cultural anthropology on British counterinsurgency in Northern Light in Northern Ireland,
and who was for a while a highly visible figure, both as a target of U.S. anthropologist Sanger and as a fashionable and uber feminine policy wonk.
MCFATE And becoming a fellow at the Office of Naval Research.
She had her nose ring and she said, writing, realising that there were certain semiotic cues that would unnerve paranoid all old white men.
She found no contradiction between her awareness of the gender difference of old white men and counterinsurgent women,
and the particularly militarist role that she envisioned for social scientists.
A significant part a new category of women security scholars who circulate between the domain of academy think tanks and policymaking world.
As sorry as significant are the new category of women's security scholars who circulate between the domain of academy,
think tank and policymaking world. And many of them have been very significant until very recently,
and I'll answer this in question and answer is if need be in the Obama administration, but some are now leaving.
Sarah Sewell, for example, is in addition to having been formerly the head of the Carter Centre for Human Rights at Harvard
and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Peacekeeping during the Clinton administration.
I was also the author of the foreword to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and has been serving President Obama.
Samantha Power, also in the Obama administration, is a strong advocate of humanitarian military intervention and the author of a book about Rwanda.
She is also advisor to President Obama and was involved in drafting his
controversial Nobel speech in defence of U.S. counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
Similarly, the authors of the foreword and introduction to the U.S. Army Stability Operations Field Manual are also women.
Michele Flournoy, who was one of the one of the founders of Centre for a New American Security, which is counterinsurgency,
originally started off as a South Asia think tank but became a counterinsurgency think tank, and Janine Davidson, respectively.
Flournoy is will be, I think, until the 1st of March.
And then she leaves Deputy Undersecretary of defence for policy at the Obama Pentagon.
And as I said, she was a founder of CNAS.
Davidson was in the Bush Pentagon Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Special Capabilities Directorate.
She is also a former pilot and she has been the first Deputy Secretary of Defence for plans in the Obama Pentagon.
So there are all these women security officials who.
I've written extensively all of them and taught counter-insurgency.
These women are also increasingly present in the field of military operations.
Two women in particular worth mentioning here. Sarah Pious, adviser to General McChrystal, who was adviser to General McChrystal in Afghanistan.
And Emma Sky, who might be a familiar figure here. Advisor to General Odierno in Iraq,
neither women have ever spoken about gender or feminism or the ways in which
their being women may have influenced their work and their political decisions.
So in this, they differ from the group that I talked about just a couple minutes ago.
Yet they both embody a kind of an intersection of particular class, class and gender positioning in particular imperial contexts.
Both women come from non-military backgrounds. KSA is the daughter of liberal Democrats who worked closely with President Kennedy.
Skies of a middle class background which provided her with private secondary education
before their careers as advisors to the military commanders of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The prize was a journalist. Sky was a development specialist working for Different and then later British Council.
Both received their educations in elite universities Harvard and Oxford,
and both have learned to speak the predominant language of the country in which their advisor So Sky speaks Arabic.
She also speaks Hebrew because she was appointed to Jerusalem for a while.
Hires has also had tutoring in Arabic, but has learned to speak Pashtu fluently.
Both their previous works has had anthropological elements in it,
requiring close and intimate knowledge of the indigenous people amongst whom they have worked.
Both are often described in a vocabulary that emphasises their femininity.
Kais is called tall and stylish, skies considered petite.
But Andrew Exum also says that she's one of those tough intrepid women the old British Empire excels at producing.
I hope she's not here. You're not here. Sky I'm supposed to be sitting on a panel with her in about two weeks time.
I'm hoping she hasn't read this or if she has.
Anyway, she probably quite likes being compared to Margaret Bell.
They both have assumed that kind of drag. While living in Afghanistan, Cyrus has decided to wear men's clothing as a lifestyle choice,
and on one blog post says Emma Sky has huge legions of admirers among counter insurgents in the US.
And somebody just writes about. I love this. They were like admiring her in different ways, her intellect, their travels.
And one of them said. And when the car broke down, she changed the tires.
That manliest of manly tasks. But these humanitarian workers with their backgrounds of privilege and their education,
training and experience in humanitarian development work, have become convinced of the good offices of the military.
On the one hand, they represent the soft, feminised notions of politics, developmental work, NGO work,
reconciliation work all posts that are often considered emotional, soft, womanly, and which are all too often also populated by women.
Yet they both see in the new way of war in the population centric counterinsurgency, a totally new way of doing development.
Sky is described as, as I say, the modern Gertrude Bell, not more rebel,
seeing her advisory job as to Odierno as a position of influence and speaks of loving the US military.
She thinks the military is better than the country it protects.
Hires describes the US military as public spirited and doing its darndest to do the right thing.
There's even a familiar element of screwball romance in the way that the pair's McChrystal,
Kais and Odierno skies were always portrayed in the writing.
The women come across as kind of frank and sassy companions who don't hesitate to talk back.
So there are these three fields. Counterinsurgency provides a fertile ground and conclusion in which a new kind
of new warrior masculinity regenerates itself through the figure of soldier,
scholar,
and the manner in which the self-declared emancipatory feminist project is co-opted by the Metropolitan Power Complex is also itself newsworthy.
This reproduction of resilient to new forms of masculinity and femininity show not only the flexibility of the machinery of rule,
but also the dynamic recreation of power hierarchies constantly in this reordering more like feminism and scholarly soldiering,
take their place at the top of the pyramid.
A few rungs further down, the imperial grunts themselves are much more ensconced in the traditional warrior masculinities,
about whom a good deal of lucidly critical scholarship has already been penned.
Their masculinity emerges out of a specific complex of class and racial geopolitical positioning,
where national security discourses are often problematically conjoined to heteronormative tropes of manliness,
courage and virtue below the man they embody.
Aerial grunts are the working class white women who,
in the scheme of encounter with the indigenous forces, find themselves elevated above the colonised men.
Their charge to monitor, control or subdue while ambiguous the empire gives them a pathway to climbing the ragged ladder of social mobility.
Racialized women are placed below them in this hierarchy,
too troubling to the kinds of social order envisioned in the Empire to be named in the heroic narratives
of imperial rescue and at the very bottom layer of this pyramid of power are the conquered men and women,
their bodies subjected to violence and surveillance.
Their lives re-engineered to suit urban counterinsurgency specifications, population control and the winning of hearts and minds.
Thanks very much.