Pre-9/11 intelligence failures and the post-9/11 neocolonial world: Unlearned historical lessons, applied ethnography and the decline of American academic anthropology
by Tom Cox
[ opinion - december 03 ]
There have been innumerable attempts to explain the colossal intelligence breakdown that allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to take place. Some pundits, commentators, scholars, etc. have placed the blame entirely on the US intelligence community's over-reliance on high-tech methods of information gathering. Others have said the underlying cause was a certain complacency and "cultural narcissism" that supposedly gripped an America intoxicated with its own prosperity and status as the world's only remaining superpower. Still others have said the main reason was the American government's unwillingness to recognize how radicalized Muslims had become by America's biased, pro-Israel foreign policies.
All of these arguments have some merit. And yet, for all that has been written, one of the most important reasons for the pre-9/11 intelligence breakdown has gone largely unrecognized. America's failure to stop the 9/11 attacks was due, primarily, to our government's unwillingness to learn at least two of history's very important lessons.
Lesson number one is that just because an enemy force is smaller and more lightly armed that does not necessarily mean that it is not lethal and cannot win. The fact is that human ingenuity can make up for almost any deficit in technological sophistication and numbers of soldiers.
This was, perhaps, most dramatically demonstrated in the battle of Ishandlwana back in 1879. The arrogant, technologically superior British army had sent a force of 1,400 soldiers to South Africa in order to conquer Zululand. The British assumed they would have an amusing "turkey shoot" against primitive black savages armed only with spears, and return home in no time with another colonial possession for the crown. Instead, in less than two hours after first encountering the main Zulu army, the British force was almost completely wiped out. Out of 1,400 men only 50 or so survived. Careful preparation, tactical brilliance and great courage enabled the Zulus to overcome every technological disadvantage.
Why didn't the British take the Zulus more seriously? Racism was certainly a major factor. The British assumed that the black Zulu warriors were incapable of planning and executing a tactically sophisticated attack.
Similarly, the Pentagon largely wrote off al Qaeda as too primitive, small and lightly armed to pose much of a threat to a superpower "protected" - to the east and west - by vast oceans, and - to the north and south - by friendly neighboring countries.
When the Pentagon looked at the bearded, turban-wearing, "dark-skinned" al Qaeda leadership they saw fanaticism, irrationality and intellectual inferiority. They did not see the determination and ingenuity that was equal, if not superior to, their own. In their own way the Pentagon was just as racist and arrogant as the British who were wiped out all those years ago at Ishandlwana.
America's failure to stop the 9/11 attacks was also due to the intelligence community's unwillingness to learn historical lesson number two. This is that applied ethnography is absolutely essential to effective intelligence work.
Once again, this was powerfully demonstrated by 19th century England. Britain's colonial administration created an extensive, sophisticated educational system to give soldiers (and others) the ethnographic and linguistic training necessary to gather intelligence and do colonial administrative work. In many colonies young British soldiers and administrators spent many months or years studying languages and local native culture. They would then have to pass a series of difficult tests before being sent out on their first intelligence or administrative assignment.
Many British agents were so linguistically and culturally sophisticated that they could completely assimilate themselves into native culture, to such an extent that, in some cases, they were not even recognized as British. Sir Richard Burton, for example, spent extended periods living, in disguise, with Arabs and Indians. His mastery of the local languages and customs was so complete that he was never recognized as a British citizen. Burton, like many other British agents before and after him, gathered the intelligence that enabled the British to divide, conquer and effectively rule large parts of the world. (Contrast this with a pre-9/11 America where transcripts of vitally important intercepted phone conversations between al Qaeda terrorists went untranslated because of the lack of Arabic translators in the intelligence agencies.)
Applied ethnography even enabled the British government to produce intelligence operatives and administrators who assumed important leadership positions in the native societies they worked with. TE Lawrence is a particularly famous example of the brilliant leaders produced by Britain's colonial-era educational system. Armed with his perfect Arabic and mastery of Arab customs he was able to lead an Arab revolt that defeated the occupying Turkish army. (While Lawrence himself was an idealist who wanted independence for the Arabs, his achievements played right into British colonial hands, and allowed them to take over the Arabian peninsula and all its oil.)
Compare figures like Burton and Lawrence to Paul Bremer, Bush's choice to lead America's occupation of Iraq. With his ignorance of Arab culture, language and history, Bremer is doomed to fail. He was hired through the old boy network, just because he went to the right schools and knew the right people. He is unqualified and incompetent and the price for this is being paid every day with lives of allied soldiers and Iraqis.
Some people claim that the post 9/11 world is entering a neocolonial period in which America and its allies will have to take an increasingly assertive role in establishing more open, democratic societies. To meet this neocolonial need great applied ethnographers in the mould of those from the bygone Victorian era are once again in demand.
One might expect that American academic anthropologists would be able to give people the right training in applied ethnography. Unfortunately this is just not the case.
Most American anthropologists are theoreticians, not great ethnographers. They produce very conceptual, abstract, jargonistic works that are more anthropological philosophy than real ethnography. Most of them do not produce richly detailed, ethnographically authoritative works because, quite simply, they can't. They just do not have the necessary linguistic and fieldwork skills.
Instead of owning up to this, most American academic anthropologists have sunk into a state of denial, insecurity and defensiveness. They insist that theoretical sophistication is the hallmark of the highest-level professional anthropology and denigrate fieldwork as "something that can be done by anyone." Linguistic expertise is similarly de-emphasized and written off. They continue to insist on this even though a comparison of current American anthropological works with the ethnographically authoritative classics of 60 years ago and more (the books of Evans-Pritchard and Edward Sapir for example) show immediately how far American anthropology has fallen.
The de-emphasis on fieldwork and language skills began in the 1960s. At that time graduate anthropology programs in America expanded greatly to fill a growing number of academic positions. As the number of anthropology PhDs being produced went up, their overall quality declined significantly.
Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, many graduate anthropology programs became more selective in their admissions. However, by then the pool of talented applicants had shrunk considerably as many of the brightest students rejected anthropology for fields with more job opportunities. As a result the overall level of talent in the field continued to decline.
The overall deterioration in standards, and corresponding de-emphasis on fieldwork and linguistic expertise, was greatly exacerbated, in the 1970s, by the work of Clifford Geertz, the most influential American anthropologist of his generation. Geertz argued (most specifically in his well-known article, 'From The Native's Point of View; On The Nature of Anthropological Understanding.') that intensive fieldwork, characterized by "deep" cross-cultural immersion, was not necessary, or even desirable, to produce good anthropology. On the contrary, Geertz concluded that that a more "detached" approach, that achieved an understanding of the symbolic system through which natives interpreted the world, was the right way to approach anthropological research. Geertz's work had a very significant impact on other American anthropologists, and greatly hastened the decline in language and fieldwork standards in American academic anthropology.
A final cause of the de-emphasis on linguistic expertise and fieldwork was the feminist movement. From the 1960s through the 1980s, more and more older married women with children went into anthropology. Because of family responsibilities, many of them were unable to spend enough time in the field to really master the natives' language and immerse themselves in native life.
In a desperate attempt to maintain the mystique, the myth, that professional-level anthropology can only be done by PhD-holding academics, most American anthropology professors ignore great early ethnographers like Sir Richard Burton. In addition, they are making anthropological writing increasingly jargonistic in an attempt to maintain their monopoly over anthropological knowledge. They argue that one can only make a contribution to anthropology if they write a particular kind of academic language.
In this era of globalization, with linguistic, ethnographic and cross-cultural assimilation skills becoming increasingly important, talented students should be rejecting the increasingly irrelevant American version of anthropology. They should be going into the more enlightened European school of anthropology or leave academia altogether and forge their own more ethnographically-sound version of the discipline.
