Flying blind: US foreign policy's lack of expertise

Summary

American spy technologies gather intelligence in vast quantities, yet US foreign policy is rife with unqualified pseudo-experts. To know or not to know? This is the great conundrum of empire.


By Manan Ahmed, The National

... Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire - the "non-expert" insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an "expert".

Even a cursory examination of the archive dealing with the American efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrates that there has been no related growth in specific scholarly knowledge about those sites of conflict. The knowledge of Arabic, Urdu or Pashto remains at extremely low levels in official corridors. There is, one can surmise simply from reading the back and forth sway of military and political policy in Afghanistan, very little advancement in understanding of either the text or context of that nation.

In America's imperial theatre, Stewart and Mortenson exemplify a singular notion of "expert". We can build, based on the profiles of other specimens - Robert D Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan - a picture of what the ideal type looks like from the official point of view. Such an "expert" is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the "official" narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being "a critic" of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn't know enough.

At the same time there are greater claims, and greater efforts, towards satellite cameras and listening devices; drones which can hover for days; databases which can track all good Taliban and all bad Taliban. Yet who can decipher this data? When one considers the rise of "experts" such as Stewart or Mortenson against the growth of digitised data which remains elusive and overwhelming, one is left with a rather stark observation - that the American war effort prefers its human knowledge circumspect or circumscribed and its technical knowledge crudely totalised. ...

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