5 - Anthropological Assumptions and the Afghan War

Summary

If the war in Afghanistan, even more than that in Iraq, was meant to win the hearts and minds of the locals so they would not sponsor the terrorists we were seeking to defeat, how were Western forces supposed to accomplish the task – or indeed, know when they had accomplished the task? The answer, at least initially, was what was called the Human Terrain project, which might as well have been called the anthropologists full employment scheme, as it sought to use anthropologists to guide Western forces in assessing local support. Coupled with the American administration’s naturalistic belief that once terror states were torn down democracy would spring up unaided, the project was a colossal failure. By tracing the assumptions that went into this particular encounter, we can, perhaps, more readily avoid such actions in the future.