Adam L. Silverman, PhD*
Several weeks ago the Washington Post** reported on one of the responses to the Green on Blue attacks in Afghanistan. While the way this is labeled is not exactly right, as green on blue would be Afghan civilians attacking the US military (we use green for the population/host country nationals), blue, obviously for the military and in this case specifically the US and coalition forces, the problem does exist and does need to be addressed. What the article tells us is that a guide has been developed for Afghan soldiers to teach them "...the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it's likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge."
Given my understanding of how we interact with the Afghan National Security Forces, I have a hard time believing that they came up with this on their own. My informed guess is that we came up with this. This screams "thought up by someone who is in charge of mandatory, quartely training by powerpoint!" This also tells me that we have given up, at least for Afghanistan, on trying to come to terms with our cross-cultural competency (3C) problems. 3C is all the rage in both the corporate and military worlds. And it is important, the problem is that we have over ten years of research on it - some good, some meh, some bad - and it all focuses on the precursors to actually being cross-culturally competent. The focus is on predicting who will be good at it and then trying to figure out what kind of training and education will get them to comptency (read that as proficiency). We do not pay much attention to actually certifying anyone as cross-cultural competent in terms of being able to actually perform. What the approach outlined in the WaPo artile indicates is that if we cannot get this right among ourselves, cannot police ourselves up so we do not do stupid things that cause blowback from the Afghans, we might as well mandate that the Afghans learn it. That way, the next time there is an incident, and there will be, its not our fault - the Afghan's have the cross-cultural sensitivity manual and training, its their fault for not being understanding of our inability to get this right... Whoever came up with this has got to be the same type of person that thinks that going through a pdfed powerpoint on "bath salts" once a year is going to solve the problem of military personnel huffing the stuff...
Doing something like this demonstrates the anti-3C. Its patronizing to and of the Afghans and another example that we think they're stupid. They know things aren't going well. And they learned long ago that we really do not understand them, all the different varieties of Afghan that make up them as Afghans, and Afghanistan itself - as both place and concept. We consistently do things, often without meaning to, that demeans and degrades their concepts of self, place, honor, shame, and relationships (near and far). We are communicating in hundreds of non-verbal ways, often with the
best of intentions that we think convey we want to help, that we are big, blundering, and stupid. The Afghans have taken great advantage of that. Just as they did when the Soviets and the British did the same things. Our entire approach towards trying to train up Afghan security forces has been completely backwards from an Afghan point of view. The focus on literacy, while admirable as a concept in and of itself, is squarely a western-centric one. Do I think Afghanistan would be better off if it had high literacy
rates? Without a doubt. Should that be one of the primary foci of our training mission? Not at all (though it should be of an overall societal developmental one). The Afghans that we have been trying to train, specifically those who are illiterate, are experiential learners. Their entire way of life is built around being experiential learners - what they can visually and auditorially observe and memorize. The key to preparing them to do security for themselves, either as police or Army, is to leverage this reality and expertise. While not every training cohort will have a hafez (one who has memorized the Quran for recitation), given the importance placed on becoming a hafez within Islamic culture, there are likely to be several Afghans in each class who have memorized significant
portions. Identifying and leveraging these men would have been essential to a successful training strategy. Identify them, ask them if they would honor their classmates and us by reciting from the Quranic verses they have memorized. By doing so we build them up a bit in the eyes of their classmates and we demonstrate that we understand both the importance of becoming a hafez and respect for Islam. This then creates an opportunity to engage them on the tools they learned to memorize the Quran from hearing it recited and then to leverage them to help teach these skills to their
classmates. Once that is done, then we utilize this Afghan way of learning and knowing to teach the policing or soldiering materials that we need the Afghans to learn. At the same time we attack the literacy problem from the bottom up with a focus on getting Afghan children to be able to read and write and then utilize them to help teach their parents, cousins, etc. This is actually one of the ways we attacked adult illiteracy in the US and other places - through leveraging children. Our emphasis on trying to bring the Afghans in training to a basic standard of literacy fails to do this. We should have first had the Afghans teach us how they teach themselves and how they learn, then built what we needed them/wanted them to learn around their frameworks so it made sense within their understanding of learning. In reality we just exported our own ideas... One of the major reasons we need socio-cultural inputs and cross-cultural compentency is to prevent us from mirroring ourselves onto those we need to interact with in a negative way!***
Instead we still can not stop looking at this from an American perspective. We first got frustrated because they were not literate, then became frustrated because they were not becoming literate fast enough (because overcoming hundreds of years of cultural mistrust of anything written or of the educated White occupiers and their fancy books was going to happen in the space of a year in a classroom - the literacy issue goes beyond the individual functionality problem and to a larger socio-cultural understanding), then we basically decided it was good enough, then said that the Afghans were becoming good enough. In some ways we are the most easily self-deluded folks on the planet and this pamphlet gets to the heart of it. It is the Afghans' country, not ours, all this pamphlet will do is demonstrate to them that we have learned nothing about them, that we do not care about their ways, but expect them to care and respect ours, and will only be seen as the latest in a long list of slights and insults from people who do not look like them, come from strange faraway places, and do not have the good sense to stay in those places and out of places like Afghanistan.
The other thing that 3C is supposed to get us is cross-cultural empathy. And forget the touchy feely nature of the phrase, what I mean when I use it is the ability to not mirror, recognize how the people we are interacting with see the world, recognize how that makes sense to them and how it would in our context, and then act accordingly. So in this case imagine how a random group of twenty year old enlisted US Army personnel would feel, if we brought in large amounts of British, Italian, German, Israeli, Japanese, etc trainers to teach them how to be proper soldiers from a multinational environment. And we did this here at home in the US. And after our personnel had spent months shaking their heads in amusement, frustration, anger, shame, or some combination at the behavior of those foreigners that they were being afflicted with, having the foreigners dictate to them in a handbook why the foreigners are not bad folks they are just different and our personnel had to tolerate and accept those differences that had become points of contention, and we have to be patient with them because they are not from here, just what do you think the response would be? It would not be positive or patient or understanding - it would be anywhere from this is stupid to further enraging as it would be seen as something else imposed by those idiot outsiders who were forcing their ways on us. The only difference here is that because of how we do our initial military training (IMT), and our professional NCO Corps, that it would likely not result in violence directed against the foreign trainers, perhaps, outside of the occasional drunken bar brawl...
This is one of the best examples of how we are so cross-culturally unaware that we are trying to make the Afghans cross-culturally aware and sensitive and understanding because we cannot be bothered to properly do it to ourselves! Basically we think the Afghans are stupid and they aren't. The Afghans think we're stupid and we are - or at least we're doing a really good impression." Our entire approach in Afghanistan, just as in Iraq, has paid lip service to the bottom up - to learning local knowledge and ways of doing so we can build and package what we are doing in ways that the host country nationals can accept. Yet we live in fortified gated communities. Sure we build them smack dab in the middle of towns, villages, settlements, what have you and tell ourselves we are embedded in the local community. And we are, if, by embedded we mean scarfing up prime real estate, heavily fortifying it, and then subjecting the locals to demeaning security screenings to ever set foot on Post. I am not sure this is what Robert Frost meant when he wrote that "good fences make good neighbors". Because we commute to work, so to speak, we do not have a feel for Afghan life because we do not
actually live within the lives of the Afghans. We helicopter in (sometimes literally), then fly or ride back to our safe (temporary) homes on base. Sure there are some ODAs and some Joint Security Stations for training teams where we have American and/or coalition personnel living with the Afghans, just as we did with the Iraqis, but the former have a better understanding of how to do this stuff and the latter are still living under heavy
security. Sadly, the only thing this is likely to lead to is more bad feelings and more violence. This cultural awareness guide is a great example of why we need Good Idea Fairy Sniper Teams...
best of intentions that we think convey we want to help, that we are big, blundering, and stupid. The Afghans have taken great advantage of that. Just as they did when the Soviets and the British did the same things. Our entire approach towards trying to train up Afghan security forces has been completely backwards from an Afghan point of view. The focus on literacy, while admirable as a concept in and of itself, is squarely a western-centric one. Do I think Afghanistan would be better off if it had high literacy
rates? Without a doubt. Should that be one of the primary foci of our training mission? Not at all (though it should be of an overall societal developmental one). The Afghans that we have been trying to train, specifically those who are illiterate, are experiential learners. Their entire way of life is built around being experiential learners - what they can visually and auditorially observe and memorize. The key to preparing them to do security for themselves, either as police or Army, is to leverage this reality and expertise. While not every training cohort will have a hafez (one who has memorized the Quran for recitation), given the importance placed on becoming a hafez within Islamic culture, there are likely to be several Afghans in each class who have memorized significant
portions. Identifying and leveraging these men would have been essential to a successful training strategy. Identify them, ask them if they would honor their classmates and us by reciting from the Quranic verses they have memorized. By doing so we build them up a bit in the eyes of their classmates and we demonstrate that we understand both the importance of becoming a hafez and respect for Islam. This then creates an opportunity to engage them on the tools they learned to memorize the Quran from hearing it recited and then to leverage them to help teach these skills to their
classmates. Once that is done, then we utilize this Afghan way of learning and knowing to teach the policing or soldiering materials that we need the Afghans to learn. At the same time we attack the literacy problem from the bottom up with a focus on getting Afghan children to be able to read and write and then utilize them to help teach their parents, cousins, etc. This is actually one of the ways we attacked adult illiteracy in the US and other places - through leveraging children. Our emphasis on trying to bring the Afghans in training to a basic standard of literacy fails to do this. We should have first had the Afghans teach us how they teach themselves and how they learn, then built what we needed them/wanted them to learn around their frameworks so it made sense within their understanding of learning. In reality we just exported our own ideas... One of the major reasons we need socio-cultural inputs and cross-cultural compentency is to prevent us from mirroring ourselves onto those we need to interact with in a negative way!***
Instead we still can not stop looking at this from an American perspective. We first got frustrated because they were not literate, then became frustrated because they were not becoming literate fast enough (because overcoming hundreds of years of cultural mistrust of anything written or of the educated White occupiers and their fancy books was going to happen in the space of a year in a classroom - the literacy issue goes beyond the individual functionality problem and to a larger socio-cultural understanding), then we basically decided it was good enough, then said that the Afghans were becoming good enough. In some ways we are the most easily self-deluded folks on the planet and this pamphlet gets to the heart of it. It is the Afghans' country, not ours, all this pamphlet will do is demonstrate to them that we have learned nothing about them, that we do not care about their ways, but expect them to care and respect ours, and will only be seen as the latest in a long list of slights and insults from people who do not look like them, come from strange faraway places, and do not have the good sense to stay in those places and out of places like Afghanistan.
The other thing that 3C is supposed to get us is cross-cultural empathy. And forget the touchy feely nature of the phrase, what I mean when I use it is the ability to not mirror, recognize how the people we are interacting with see the world, recognize how that makes sense to them and how it would in our context, and then act accordingly. So in this case imagine how a random group of twenty year old enlisted US Army personnel would feel, if we brought in large amounts of British, Italian, German, Israeli, Japanese, etc trainers to teach them how to be proper soldiers from a multinational environment. And we did this here at home in the US. And after our personnel had spent months shaking their heads in amusement, frustration, anger, shame, or some combination at the behavior of those foreigners that they were being afflicted with, having the foreigners dictate to them in a handbook why the foreigners are not bad folks they are just different and our personnel had to tolerate and accept those differences that had become points of contention, and we have to be patient with them because they are not from here, just what do you think the response would be? It would not be positive or patient or understanding - it would be anywhere from this is stupid to further enraging as it would be seen as something else imposed by those idiot outsiders who were forcing their ways on us. The only difference here is that because of how we do our initial military training (IMT), and our professional NCO Corps, that it would likely not result in violence directed against the foreign trainers, perhaps, outside of the occasional drunken bar brawl...
This is one of the best examples of how we are so cross-culturally unaware that we are trying to make the Afghans cross-culturally aware and sensitive and understanding because we cannot be bothered to properly do it to ourselves! Basically we think the Afghans are stupid and they aren't. The Afghans think we're stupid and we are - or at least we're doing a really good impression." Our entire approach in Afghanistan, just as in Iraq, has paid lip service to the bottom up - to learning local knowledge and ways of doing so we can build and package what we are doing in ways that the host country nationals can accept. Yet we live in fortified gated communities. Sure we build them smack dab in the middle of towns, villages, settlements, what have you and tell ourselves we are embedded in the local community. And we are, if, by embedded we mean scarfing up prime real estate, heavily fortifying it, and then subjecting the locals to demeaning security screenings to ever set foot on Post. I am not sure this is what Robert Frost meant when he wrote that "good fences make good neighbors". Because we commute to work, so to speak, we do not have a feel for Afghan life because we do not
actually live within the lives of the Afghans. We helicopter in (sometimes literally), then fly or ride back to our safe (temporary) homes on base. Sure there are some ODAs and some Joint Security Stations for training teams where we have American and/or coalition personnel living with the Afghans, just as we did with the Iraqis, but the former have a better understanding of how to do this stuff and the latter are still living under heavy
security. Sadly, the only thing this is likely to lead to is more bad feelings and more violence. This cultural awareness guide is a great example of why we need Good Idea Fairy Sniper Teams...
* Adam L. Silverman is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College. The views expressed here are his own and do NOT necessarily reflect those of the US Army War College and/or the US Army.
** The link is to the Early Bird's reprint of the WaPo piece. The only WaPo link I have goes to a registration page, which is free, to see the article.
*** Lest anyone accuse me of being a back seat driver or Rear Echelon MoFo or Just another Fing Observer, I first began working this analysis of the problem up in late Summer 2009 for a project I was briefly involved with for a couple of weeks. I then sent it to my contact at NATO Training Mission Afghanistan (NTMA) in the Fall of 2009, who was one of the NTMA Commander's senior colonels with the offer to go over there and help them figure this out in 2010. After initial interest the whole thing died when they couldn't figure out how to get me over there in terms of the organizational stuff. I was more than willing to put my money where my (big) mouth is, but it did not happen.
Extremely well put with one proviso. Before teaching the children to read and write, you have to stop the Taliban from killing the children who try.
Posted by: Walrus | 21 October 2012 at 04:12 PM
A very useful discourse. Interestingly, I had a mental blurp for a second and imagined the gated, fortified communities were here in America with the inhabitants helicoptering to work in Manhattan, and special security for anyone interacting in their world, plus aggressive violent policing to anyone so culturally insensitive as to suggest something wrong with such an arrangement.
Although I can personally see the charm (of such a life, if I had a billion or two).
Posted by: ISL | 23 October 2012 at 08:24 AM
Parts of major Brazilian cities are like that.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 23 October 2012 at 08:51 AM
ISL
It seems to me that I read a piece of "future history" once in which the population had resolved itself into "taxpayers" who had all the money and "citizens" who were paupers living on the dole and carefully surveilled by the FBI. The "citizens" were heavily recruited for off-world colonization. pl
Posted by: turcopolier | 23 October 2012 at 08:56 AM
ISL,
Well there is this:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/10/duncan-black-the-evolution-of-republican-suburban-tribalism.html
Posted by: Adam L Silverman | 23 October 2012 at 09:42 AM
Adam,
Europe still loves its cities, we build little well policed enclaves in the center that anyone (with cash) can love, and dislike the rest. Its fascinating (not in a necessarily good sense) how our approach is the middle east has mirrored how our society here has evolved, and in ways that most American's would not approve (so why should the Afghanistani's).
Dear Colonel, I too recall a few such sci-fi stories, likely building on new world trends a few centuries ago. There was a saying in Italy in the 1920s about better to be free in L'America than under the boot of the count in Italy (where the commoners always went to bed hungry and owned no land). Sidenote, those who agitated in Italy for the rights of the hungry where exported by the aristocracy to the US rather than martyred, and agitated here. Mars revolts!!
Posted by: ISL | 23 October 2012 at 09:59 AM