Comments on: Send in the geeks

By: Kenneth Payne

Kenneth Payne — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:16:35 +0000

Tom, on which, here’s the late Bernt Glatzer in interview:

Would you work for the Pentagon?

No. I would consider such a request absurd and ethically objectionable. Most colleagues, also in the US, reject this. After all, we ethnologists get to our findings by winning the trust of those people, by living with them, by them sharing their knowledge and history. It is part of the ethnologists‘ professional ethics to tell his informants openly and honestly who their contractor is and what they plan to do with the findings of their research. If an ethnologist wanted to find out where the limits of the proverbial Afghan hospitality lie, he only needs to tell the people that he works for the US Army.
http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/index.asp?id=506

Fair enough – I’m sure it’s a widely held view. Indeed I recall the anger from some US anthropologists about colleagues involvement HTTs. Not everyone shares his view, though. After all, the US national security establishment has a long track record of funding social science and humanities research, in a broad range of fields.

By: Mike Innes

Mike Innes — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:48:11 +0000

@Grant – well put.

By: Tom Wein

Tom Wein — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:17:22 +0000

It’s worth adding to this that Andrew Mackay spent a significant part of his article *begging* for more expert involvement, and lamenting his inability to find anyone who could tell him how it worked.

By: Grant

Grant — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:35:28 +0000

A problem with finding linguistics and history experts in my opinion would be finding a way to convince soldiers to respect them and to take their advice seriously. If those experts would be out in the field and actually working with soldiers, civilians, the local government, and foreign aid they would need to convince all involved that they have some kind of authority or vital expertise. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain but in the States we have a strong bias towards anti-intellectualism and it’s much easier to get soldiers to respect another soldier. Also scholars are generally wary of working with governments for a war effort, if they get involved in something dubious they could suffer for it professionally later.

By: Mike Innes

Mike Innes — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:15:54 +0000

Ken,

My cynicism notwithstanding, I think the debate on social distance and knowledge formation is a healthy one. Ultimately, as long as the analyst in question is an obsessive-compulsive ferret or bloodhound perpetually suspicious that there’s always one more piece of the puzzle that can be unearthed, and predisposed to critical evaluation of sources, then his output can generally be given a larger dose of trust than the usual. It doesn’t really matter whether he/she is a deskbound scholar, a forward deployed collector, a journalist, or what have you. That was my main issue with Flynn’s report: it was co-authored by a former journalist turned intelligence officer, and the report screamed of heuristic bias. It demonstrated a very shallow understanding of intelligence processes and structures at various levels of command, at least from a NATO perspective (the elephant in the room, btw). Moreover, whatever Pottinger’s qualities as a journo, he’s a junior officer with very little time in trade. That strikes me as extremely problematic, to put it mildly.