Johnston, Gorka and the need for specialist knowledges
[ by Charles Cameron — religious knowledge, foreign policy, military ]
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Dr. Douglas M. Johnston just posted a piece titled Religion a crucial tool in U.S. foreign policy in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog, and in it he quoted Dr. Sebastian Gorka‘s recent testimony to the HASC Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities:
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to provide the contextual knowledge we need to understand and defeat our enemy if we rely solely upon anthropologists and social scientists…. Today our multi-disciplinary analysis of the enemy and his doctrine just as much requires — if not more so — the expertise of the regional historian and theologian, the specialist who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran. We should ask ourselves honestly, how many national security practitioners know the answers to these questions, or at least have somewhere to turn to within government to provide them such essential expertise.
I do appreciate that this was written by Dr Gorka for an audience that needs to keep up to speed on many, many topics. What dismays me here isn’t the idea that “national security practitioners” should know these things — they should indeed, and should certainly also know specialists who know a great deal more — but that the bar is set so low, “a specialist” being, for that audience, someone “who knows when and how Sunni Islam split from Shia Islam and what the difference is between the Meccan and Medinan verses of the Koran”.
Let’s back up a bit. Here’s a report on the Senate hearing on the appointment of GEN. Dempsey as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, tapped by the White House to be the next top military officer, acknowledged Tuesday that he and other senior officers failed to grasp the power dynamics among Islamic-based groups in Iraq.
After the U.S. military toppled the Saddam Hussein-led regime there in 2003, a powder keg erupted that was driven, in large part, by centuries-old power struggles and distrust among Iraq’s various Islamic sects.
It took American civilian and military leaders years to adapt and understand these dynamics, which experts say played a major role in both the length and violent nature of the Iraq war.
Driving the lack of understanding was a tendency of the military to “take five minutes to understand” an issue while immediately spending the next “55 minutes trying to solve it,” Dempsey said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Those “five minutes to understand” might get you the basic difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras — but a specialist knows a little more than that, as one can gather from comments Dr Timothy Furnish posted just the other day on his MahdiWatch blog, commenting on Dempsey’s remarks:
One might reasonably wonder whether the US military and intelligence community (not to mention the State Department) truly does, finally, realize the importance of sectarian differences in the Islamic world. For example, the Syrian case pitting the pseudo-Shi`i Alawi rulers against the country’s Sunni majority only recently came to Washington’s attention; neither Libya’s history of Sanusiyah Sufi jihad against occupation, nor Mua`amar al-Qadhafi’s heretical Islamic teachings and rule, has been fully considered or acknowledged by the American government; and there are still commanders deploying to and from Afghanistan who seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that that country is 19% Shi`i (and that a substantial subset of that is not Twelver but Sevener, or Isma’ili, Shi`i).
But that’s one paragraph from a single blog post, and Furnish has written a book — has written, as they say, “the book” on Mahdism. And that’s just one book, you don’t suppose Furnish’s knowledge is limited to what he managed to compress into a few hundred pages, do you?
Furnish is a specialist — that’s why I read and correspond with him. I’m a generalist with, I hope, some decent insights into what to watch for and who to read for background — but Furnish is a specialist.
And the solution isn’t to add “specialist” to a checklist, find one on LinkedIn and check it off — the solution is widespread, ongoing conversation among specialists, with the help of generalists, across all silos and disciplinary boundaries, of the sort we try to promote here from time to time… until there are enough people, with enough parts of the puzzle, that we don’t get blindsided by our ignorances.
Ignorances, plural. Knowledges, plural.
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This just in… Dr Furnish’s second book — The Caliphate: Threat or Opportunity? — is now available for pre-order. I hope to review it at some point here on ZP.
August 10th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Score!
I’m heading over to LinkedIn to add "Middle East Area Specialist" to my profile right now!
August 10th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Mr. Fouche,
Good luck–but I think a big part of the problem is that far too many working in the government and military already bill themselves (or have been billed) as such, when in fact they know very little about the Middle East or Islamic world. I know a number of analysts working the Middle East, South Asia and/or Islamic Africa who are, sorry to say, retrofitted Sovietologists or Russia experts or have degrees in similarly unrelated areas (like–I kid you not–Macedonian Studies). Charles is dead on–and I would say that even if he didn’t say such nice things about me.
August 10th, 2011 at 10:15 pm
AND let me say: thanks for the kind words here on my birthday, Charles!
August 10th, 2011 at 11:44 pm
Actually, Charles, I wonder if expertism and credentialism in Washington isn’t the problem, rather than the answer.
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There is no substitute for our officials and politicos thinking, thinking hard, and doing due diligence to their jobs. Good old human curiousity is a powerful educational tool and a person that is really paying attention ought to be able to learn a bit about this stuff on his or her own and then ask help from experts when needed.
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It’s almost as if people have learned to go on intellectual autopilot (this is the phrase for me today, used it at Inkspots) and instead think calling an expert will save the day.
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For heaven’s sake. Think! Ask questions! Read! Be curious!
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Look how far I’ve come in these years reading this blog and others like Abu Muqawama. If I can do it, why not people that are supposed to pay attention for a living?
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Also, sometimes "gora" South Asian experts in DC give me the hives. It’s like it only counts if a PhD says it, not when someone in my community says it. People really need to learn to listen to their own communities sometimes.
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– Madhu
August 10th, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Er, "gora" might not be very nice. I apologize, except I think my point is important. I really do.
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– Madhu
August 10th, 2011 at 11:49 pm
The perfect example is the OBL and Abbottabad (sorry, my hobby-horse.) It’s a military cantonment! Jeez, the stuff I read by Australian and English and DC "experts" about all of that.
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I mean, really. A cantonment! In this case, a great deal of experts would lead you down a garden path when good old human curiousity would do the trick much better….
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I spent enough time in Boston and Chicago and Palo Alto and etc., to know that sometimes academics are as goofy as the letters behind their names.
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Sorry. I’m in the mood to ramble. Your nice posts always make me think in a million directions….
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– Madhu
August 10th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Charles – or others – if a goof like me would like to learn to write up blog posts the way someone might right up an intelligence report, how might an open-source gal like me learn to do that? I ask because I ran across a Herbert E. Meyer intelligence report written in 1983 (on National Review) that predicted how weak the Soviet Union was.
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I’m fascinated by the quality of the writing and the aesthetic. I want to practice writing blog posts the way Pundita does or you do. With an eye toward analysis….
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– Madhu
August 11th, 2011 at 12:01 am
Hi Madhu, You said: "For heaven’s sake. Think! Ask questions! Read! Be curious!" I live in the DC area, and the folks to whom you direct this (I’m presuming) are too busy to think or be curious. DC is populated with folks who rely on magic and react accordingly. If you’ve not had opportunity to read Derek Leebaert’s excellent Magic and Mayhem, I believe you would be amused—or maybe disgusted…
August 11th, 2011 at 12:02 am
What are they so busy about that they can’t think about their jobs?
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Pundita is correct. We must pay attention, all of us citizens. If they haven’t time, we must find the time. A republic if you can keep it….
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– Madhu
August 11th, 2011 at 12:04 am
Good question…perhaps it is "someone else’s" job…very few objective player with knowledge and influence as the ideological and those confirming the magic gain access in most cases…
August 11th, 2011 at 12:08 am
I see. Thanks for the pointer to that book. I will pick it up although my overdue book queue is enormous.
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Doctors are this way, too. I actually left Boston in disgust because I just couldn’t hack it anymore. They really believe they are masters of the universe and that everything can bend to their intellectual will. Haaavahd and all that.
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I mean, I had mouse droppings in my office my part of the hospital was so creaky and old. And this crew was going to save American medicine?
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You caught me on a bad day, I guess. Poor zen. I’ll stop pestering you people.
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– Madhu
August 11th, 2011 at 12:51 am
Er, I take back a big chunk of what I just wrote above. Dr. Gorka’s testinomy is pretty damn impressive.
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But the Cold War was all European and the US has, primarily, and still, European roots.
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How ya gonna do the narrative thing for global jihadism?
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If I say what I think you’ll all roll your eyes.
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India. Lots of muslims. Muslim Bollywood stars. Her constitution – and beginnings in secularism, if a bit battered at the moment – is radical in that part of the world. As radical as our own revolution was.
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No one in the West reported on all the Bollywood Muslim actors at President Obama’s dinner.
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Indonesia, too. Or focus on the Middle East may be harming us in lots of ways. We sort of mirror the Saudis because we make them the center.
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Break the center. Diffuse it.
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– Madhu
August 11th, 2011 at 1:06 am
Citoyen Fouche, always a pleasure…
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Happy birthday, Timothy!
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Scott — thanks for the pointer to Magic and Mayhem…
August 11th, 2011 at 1:20 am
Hi Charles, Zen reviewed the book last year: https://zenpundit.com/?p=3612
August 11th, 2011 at 1:43 am
Madhu:
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When I talk about specialists, I’m certainly not arguing for "expertism and credentialism" — I’m actually wanting exchange, discussion, cross-fertilization between people who know their fields inside and out, with an eager willingness to keep on learning and teaching as they interact with others of similar but different gifts.
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I imagine that when you mentioned Meyer, you were thinking of this brief [ downloadable .pdf ] — thanks for the pointer. I came across some other interesting writings of his during my search for that one, and one quotation in particular struck me:
I don’t think they all have to be inside the IC, I think an "open source" version can (and will) self-organize here in the blogosphere — where "sometimes bizarre work habits" won’t be a problem.
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As to methodology and writing, I’m with Meyer in thinking that hypothesis formation comes first, except that I’d call it pattern-recognition — then research, confirmation or disconfirmation (rinse and repeat), then clarification of the through-line and marshaling of persuasive details in forceful order.
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And somewhere in there, I personally want a sense of form — a feeling that I’ve built to the point I want to stress, or matched two data points in a way that makes a pattern clear, completed a circle in such a way that the integrity of the logic is assured — or told a story with just that balance of emotion and intellect, humanity and clarity, that convinces on both levels.
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But that’s just me.
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And I have another post in preparation that addresses the ways in which a wide casual reading can provide nutrients for leaps of insight… up soon!
August 11th, 2011 at 2:35 am
I agree with your statement of the need for specialists, but I also think that the emphasis on the importance of religion is often misplaced when operators (those being people trying to conduct operations, whether military or diplomatic, not the SOF shorthand) believe that they must focus on understanding things such as the difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras. Many military and diplomatic officials, and too often their cultural advisors, get lost in the feel-good exercise of getting lost in theological inanities (or for some the mission to understand and pick the other apart). We don’t need to know, beyond a very basic knowledge, "what the Quran says," a misconception in and of itself. We need to know what religious, cultural, and other markers divide or unify groups in a society and how those markers line up with political and economic power struggles or distributions. The important things for us to understand aren’t in doctrine and theology, but in how people interact with their understanding of their own religious and other identities and how those are used in the conduct of politics and socio-economic life.
August 11th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Peter,
I don’t think the issue is a narrow "focus on….the difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras" per se–but that folks making policy understand the ramifications thereof, such as the crucial point that since Sura al-Tawbah [IX]:5 is believed to be one of the very last alleged revelations to Muhammad, it abrogates all the prior peaceful passages in the Qur’an. This is of paramount importance to jihadists, basum itself–not some "theological inanity" of how many jinn can dance on the head of a pin. Your contention that "important things for us to understand aren’t in doctrine and theology" is simply wrong. How else can we differentiate between Deobandi-influence Taliban and, say, Barelwis; or between Isma’ilis and Twelver Shi`is; or why there continues to be such widespread support in much of the Islamic world for the imposition of shari`ah and the reestablishment of the caliphate? By all means, we need to understand political, social, economic and other non-religious matters–BUT we also need to study and understand religious drivers, which are probably more important in the Islamic world than any other cultural zone. Thus, as Seb testified (paraphrasing), we need more T.E. Lawrences and Richard Burtons (the one that didn’t marry Elizabeth Taylor), not more Poly Sci/IR experts who can’t read Arabic, Turkish, Farsi or Urdu and who have never cracked open a Qur’an.
August 11th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Apologies–I have no idea what that extraneous "basum itself" is, or how I managed to insert it. I blame it on a lack of caffeine.
August 11th, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Thank you for your thoughtful reply, Charles.
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– Madhu
August 11th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Tim,
I certainly do understand the value of people who read Arabic and have cracked a Qur’an, since I’m one of them that the military has created. I also value the specialists that get into the details of what doctrinally separates the various groups you mention. I do think these are important to understand at some level. Yet I stand by my statement that operators do not need to understand the details. Operators just need to understand that there is a self-recognized/imposed differentiation between these groups and seek to determine what these groups interests and aims are. Finally, I don’t think you need to know thing one about Sura al-Tawbah at an operator level to understand that jihadists see in the Qur’an, the hadith, and so on justification for their jihad. Summing up, I’m not arguing that specialists should not understand these things and inform policy-makers on them when decisions are made. I’m saying that this specialist focus has led operators down a path where they think that understanding others means getting into the primary sources and debating theology based on their reading, when all that matters is what the subject understands and how that drives the subject’s actions. And often, these actions are highly colored by things other than religion. With all the things an operator needs to understand, indepth theological reading is a diversion.
August 11th, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Peter,
I agree with you totally on the operator knowledgeablility level. I was talking about at the policy-maker level.
August 11th, 2011 at 4:47 pm
Sebastian Gorka was discussing "our multi-disciplinary analysis of the enemy and his doctrine" and pondered "how many national security practitioners know the answers to these questions, or at least have somewhere to turn to within government to provide them such essential expertise." Similarly, GEN Dempsey testified that "It took American civilian and military leaders years to adapt and understand these dynamics, which experts say played a major role in both the length and violent nature of the Iraq war" and spoke of "a tendency of the military" to "take five minutes to understand" complex issues.
This phrasing ("our analysis" and "national security practitioners", "civilian and military leaders" and "a tendency of the military") really covers a wide range of people, and thus a wide range of necessary levels of knowledge. Peter Munson (whose own book I really must read) focuses on "operators (those being people trying to conduct operations, whether military or diplomatic, not the SOF shorthand)" and says they sometimes get bogged down in needless theological detail…
I guess my own focus is wide-angle in the sense that I am addressing an issue that will be read differently at different levels and in different places, and Munson’s comments sound to me to be offering an appropriate qualification with regard to some operators under his (relatively wide) definition.
What I don’t think any of us want to see is more blunders that occur because the right person didn’t have access to the right information, context or emphasis, at the moment when it was needed.
For some people, that will mean knowing enough to know when to call for informed help. For some, it will mean having the relevant knowledge and the right contacts requesting it, to ensure it gets passed along. For some (Madhu’s point) it will mean not giving oneself "expert" status that suggests one has that knowledge when in fact one doesn’t…
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[ edited to add: ]
Most of which, I now see, Tim Furnish has managed to express a great deal more concisely that I : )
August 11th, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Madhu,
Excellent points re Indian and Indonesian Muslims (esp. the former).
But did you mean "diffuse" or "defuse?"
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Tim
August 11th, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Charles,
Please do read the book! It got lost in the Iraq noise when it came out, but I think it still is a great resource on Iraq with some broader implications that can be drawn about the complexity, groups, and motivations that I alluded to in my comment here.
August 11th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Thanks, Peter — I will.
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For all those following along who may not know it, the book is Peter J Munson, Iraq in Transition: The Legacy of Dictatorship and the Prospects for Democracy. Highly recommended by Steven Metz, who wrote the Foreword, btw.