Social scientists contributed to victory in World War II by assessing opposing morals.
In Afghanistan, on the other hand, the US kept making mistakes.
The US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan helped the Taliban to quickly seize power.
The USA made serious miscalculations in assessing the situation.
A historical comparison shows that other consultants could have helped, says author Zachary Shore.
This article is available in German for the first time - it was first published on September 18, 2021 by the magazine "Foreign Policy *".
Washington, DC - America's recent defeat in Afghanistan * draws understandable comparisons with Vietnam - two conflicts in which the US leadership has apparently never grasped the power of morality, the role of culture, or the realities of the world.
While these comparisons are inevitable, the United States has not always been so unsuccessful.
Valuable lessons can be learned from a war won by the United States in determining the mindset of the enemy.
USA: Historical Lessons - German Will to Victory Broken in 1943?
Expert panel has a different opinion
In 1943, many experts believed that the German will to fight would soon collapse. The Russians had just repulsed the Germans in Stalingrad while the Allies had defeated the Germans in Tunisia, resulting in the capture of more than a quarter of a million Italian and German soldiers. The tide had clearly turned against the Nazi juggernaut. In the face of this dramatic turnaround, many US military and political leaders * could not imagine that the Germans would continue to fight for a lost cause.
At least that was the prevailing opinion. But a small and unusual group of intelligence officers in the United States disagreed and warned that the Germans would only lose their will to fight with the invasion and destruction of the Wehrmacht itself. And the opinions of these unique experts carried weight. Not only were they Germans (many of them Jews who had fled the Nazi regime), but also harsh social critics, leading members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. (The name of the school of thought itself was only coined after the Second World War, although it already existed as a social research institute.) As released records of their reports show, their assessments of how German social structures shaped the war were often correct.Her focus on cultural and social forces proved invaluable.
During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, recruited numerous scholars to judge America's adversaries. By providing insights into the mindsets of opponents, they should help avoid political mistakes and win the war. One of many examples: They corrected the then prevailing but incorrect view that German morality would collapse after Tunisia. Although they did not use the term, they explained that this misperception was the result of what psychologists today refer to as reflection: the belief that the opponent thinks and acts like us. In a democracy, the loss of confidence in the government can indicate collapse, but in the Nazi dictatorship, they emphasized, individual feelings played little role.
As one of these scientists, Franz Neumann, correctly predicted in his report “The German Morals to Tunisia”, only the invasion and destruction of the Wehrmacht would make morality a political factor.
For the average German: "Regardless of their personal wishes or fears, they still have to do the work of the Nazis: the only alternative is the concentration camp or the guillotine."
Afghanistan withdrawal: gigantic misjudgment by the USA
Decades after World War II, the United States faced the great challenge of assessing the will of its Afghan allies to fight the Taliban after the withdrawal of American forces. According to press reports, the secret services warned that the Taliban could recapture the country after the US withdrew, but the traumatic images from Kabul show the importance of knowing whether the Afghans could hold out for years, months, weeks or days.
It is not yet clear whether the intelligence services provided continuous, let alone precise, assessments of the readiness of the Afghan army to be on its own throughout the war. But the chaotic withdrawal came in part because the planners assumed the Afghan military would provide security. Even if they were pessimistic about a Taliban victory, at least they believed that an army in which the United States had invested would not suddenly collapse. This assumption was in turn based on a misjudgment of Afghan morality. In defense of the planners, it should be said that it is extremely difficult to assess morale, even if the Frankfurt scientists have often succeeded.
What would have happened if the United States had secured the support of the Frankfurt scholars during its long war in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, the ability to get such a concise analysis turned out to be far less likely after the Cold War heat-up, as it became increasingly difficult to get foreign nationals involved in American intelligence. The security concerns seemed justified when it was discovered that Franz Neumann had disclosed top-secret material to the Soviets. Since then, concerns about security and clearance procedures have largely denied access to some of the best placed to understand a foreign culture: the foreign nationals themselves.Not only were the Frankfurt scholars born abroad, they also had an in-depth knowledge of the forces of society, and that is an area where America's national security apparatus could need upgrading.
It is often unclear which experts are used by the secret services - but we externals can guess who it is based on the results from outside. An internal review of the CIA or a safe congressional body could conclude that the intelligence service over-employs military, political, economic, and technological analysts, but does not have enough sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and similar specialists - and that the former are overrated. Recent events in Afghanistan make it painfully clear that knowing how many weapons an army has is less important than knowing whether the soldiers will use them. Sometimes these weapons were sold to others, passed on to the family, or simply retired in favor of more familiar weapons.
Afghanistan misjudgment: US error begins with adviser system
There can be reasonable solutions to these problems.
Gregory Treverton, former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, once advocated that scholars from abroad should evaluate classified documents on a fee basis, but he was unable to enforce this plan.
Similarly, the CIA briefly experimented with Open Source Works, an initiative that allowed nearly 100 foreign-language native speakers to share their views on classified material, but the agency quickly shut down the program.
From 2007 to 2014, the US military employed anthropologists as part of its Human Terrain System (HTS) project. While some later studies found the effort very effective, the project received heavy criticism from the American Anthropological Association and others. This opposition created its own restrictions on the program. Without the support of seasoned scholars and with severe administrative problems of their own, they were forced to rely largely on graduate students looking for a way to pay off their loans, some of whom had no background in Afghanistan. It is particularly tragic that the attempt to bring HTS employees together with frontline workers resulted in three deaths.
However, these objections would be largely ineffective for the remote intelligence analysis based on the model of the Frankfurt scholars.
Increasing the number of cultural analysts could have at least two benefits.
First, it could help put an end to number worship - the tendency to get blinded by numbers and give them a credibility they often don't deserve.
Numbers don't lie, but people often do.
During the Vietnam War, the US military often exaggerated the number of enemy soldiers killed and completely understated the number of enemy troops.
In an embarrassing example after the Tet Offensive, that in David Halberstam's
The Best and the Brightest
is discussed, the military's numbers didn't even add up.
At a meeting of the so-called wise men, President Lyndon B. Johnson's council of elders to deliberate the war, a military spokesman claimed they killed 45,000 enemy soldiers during the battle.
When asked by one of the Wise Men how strong the enemy was at the start of the offensive, the reporter replied that it was between 160,000 and 175,000.
The questioner then asked what the relationship between the fallen and wounded was, whereupon the speaker replied: 3½ to 1. The questioner then remarked that if these numbers were correct, the enemy would no longer have effective troops in the field - and still someone would still be shoot at Americans.
Afghanistan's "ghost soldiers": devastating number games
Does the so-called ghost soldiers of the Afghan national army reflect a similar attachment to specific figures? The Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan reported that the official figure of 300,000 Afghan troops was grossly exaggerated, often 50 to 70 percent below, but such a solid number may have seemed too comforting to some leaders to refuse. Both supporters and critics of the withdrawal have clung to the number of a quarter of a million or more members of the Afghan National Army for the past few months as if it were a reality.
Numbers give the illusion of truth. They feel tangible, reliable, and powerful. But not everything in war can or should be quantified, and that is especially true of morality. Perhaps the investigation will reveal that some national security apparatus leaders have overestimated specific data such as the number of troops, weapons, or planes, while overlooking the quiet intelligence reports of Afghan motivations, ideological beliefs, and commitment to a cause. Around 66,000 Afghan soldiers died fighting the Taliban, and many more fought valiantly alongside their fallen comrades. Their use should never be questioned. Ultimately, however, what counted was not the number of fallen soldiers, but the conviction of thosewho didn't fight when it mattered most.
A second benefit of diversifying the ranks of intelligence services is that it could help reduce the tendency to focus on intentions while ignoring the driving forces. As I wrote in my book
A Sense of the Enemy
, intentions are what someone wants to do and drivers are why they want to do it. For example, if an Afghan villager joins the National Army, his intent may be to fight the Taliban, but his real drive may be to secure a steady paycheck until a better offer comes up - or an offer he doesn't such as violent intimidation by the Taliban.
By studying the soldiers' motives, we can at least appreciate some of the complexities of morality. It can also show how American action has changed the Afghan driving forces. By signing a separate deal with the Taliban, forcing the Afghan government to release about 5,000 Taliban prisoners, and by withdrawing the support it depended on, the Trump * government may have one of America's Afghan allies dealt a devastating psychological blow. As a result, many felt abandoned by the United States long before it withdrew. These measures may also have encouraged the Taliban and convinced them that their victory was inevitable. An area,Knowing the anthropologist well are the practices related to kinship. A deeper knowledge of and sensitivity to the Afghan practice of getting rivals to switch sides, as observed in the 1990s and 2001, might also have helped planners prepare for what we saw in the final phase of the war to have.
Policy makers often ignore intelligence assessments that they do not like. The deliberate rejection of information cannot be stopped. But for open-minded leaders, more frequent and thorough scrutiny of people's motivations by cultural experts or reliable foreign nationals could at least reduce the chances of debacles.
When the inevitable in-depth analyzes are carried out in the months and years to come, there will certainly be many blame. Was it primarily a failure of political leadership, military strategy or training, intelligence, or all of these factors? Rather than simply assigning the blame, it is more effective to investigate what went wrong and then try to remedy those circumstances. Is there a disproportionate reluctance to have foreign nationals work on classified material, an undervaluation of cultural experts, a tendency towards number worship, or an insufficient focus on the underlying drivers of the people? If any of these ways of thinking have brought down the success of the United States, there is a duty torethinking them.
by Zachary Shore
Zachary Shore
is the author of
A Sense of the Enemy
and
Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions
.
This article was first published in English on September 18, 2021 in the magazine "ForeignPolicy.com" - as part of a cooperation, a translation is now also available to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals. * Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
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