Ramblemuse Touch Points

Last Wednesday night I “BARTed” into San Francisco for the Northern California Science Writers’ Association (NCSWA) holiday dinner; a dinner intentionally timed to coordinate with the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Last night’s dinner speaker was Jack Shroder, a geologist and physical geographer with the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has been visiting Afghanistan since 1973.

While Jack presented numerous interesting thoughts on geological resources and the time immediately prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, his comments on the current situation caught my attention the most. In a manner resonant with my recent post on Greg Mortenson, Jack feels strongly that the way out of the current mess is via providing education and operating from cultural understanding. Jack also feels that, while there are many like himself who have spent time in Afghanistan and come to have a sense of its cultural and people, they are largely being ignored by those who frame U.S. policy. This wouldn’t be the first time that the U.S. has ignored or done worse to its cultural experts.

In 1971, Time Magazine ran an article on The Old China Hands. The article covers a period in which the U.S. first ignored and then blacklisted civil servants who had considerable knowledge of China following World War II but whose opinions did not match official policy. Twenty-five years later, during the Nixon era, they were called back to testify before Congress. The theme was expanded in a book by E.J. Kahn, Jr., “The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them”. By happenstance, I had read the book, partly during lunch breaks at an AGU meeting, while a graduate student during the mid-1970’s. Kahn’s book is still available in the second-hand market. There’s also a summary available online.

As a closing comment, we have been slow at learning and embodying into our policy and strategy the lessons captured on counterinsurgency by a French Officer in Algeria in the late 1950’s. Pacification in Algeria, by David Galula, is available thanks to the Rand Corporation. There are those from whom we can learn, but, as a country, we first need to learn the art of listening to multiple perspectives.