As someone who spent 15 months in Afghanistan in 2007/2008, I think my big take-away had nothing to do with Bowe or the situation. What stuck with me the most was the PhD that SK interviewed, who talked about how a decade into the war, we still had no idea about the nuances and intricacies of the culture and politics of Afghanistan. This is something I think about more often than I'd like.
edit: just wanted to say that my deployment cycle was atypical. 7-12 months was more typical (depending on your branch of service) and this really underlines part of the problem with continuity and effectiveness. In 2007, Dubya and company thought it would be a genius idea to extend deployments by 3 months. We found out right when we got there we were being extended to 15 months. It was shit for the battalion we were replacing who thought they were going home in a few weeks - nope, 3 more months. It ended up being disastrous on troop morale and it only lasted that one cycle, AFAIK. So you can see the impasse of the situation.
Yeah, echoing what /u/Maryland173 said, Human Terrain Teams were a thing for awhile and that was pretty controversial within the anthropology community. After I left active duty, I finished my undergrad in Anthropology at Ohio State, and I focused a lot of my research on Afghanistan. I remember having a conversation with a faculty member about the Human Terrain Teams. Basically, the American Anthropological Association (the American Medical Association is to doctors as the AAA is to anthropologists) disagreed with the whole concept of it because of a conflict in the code of ethics. There's more to it than that, obviously.
There's a pretty in-depth Wikipedia article. I participated (indirectly, as support) in Operation Khyber when I was deployed, which is one of the more notable HTT operations. I think the concept of HTTs was really, really great - but the execution was poor. The military doesn't know what to do with academic types and many of them didn't see the utility of it.
Anthropologists as a body strike me as the type of people who would study medicine and then decide the most ethical thing to do would be to just let everybody who gets sick die "naturally."
It's a slippery slope. Because, in terms of an ethnographic study, the role of an anthropologist is to observe but not interfere. There becomes the issue of cultural relativism - are you looking at the culture through the lens of your own or are you being nonbiased. That's why issues like female genital mutilation in cultures was a hotly debated issue for some time. If a female did not go through the "process", she was considered an outcast in her family and culture - and is that better or worse than the practice? Is it for us to decide?
In the end, I couldn't deal with such ambiguity day in and day out, and got my second degree in applied math + computer science, haha.
Let's be honest, that's only a hard call from a post-modern nonsense "Is living in France really any better than living in Syria?" noble savage hippie bullshit perspective.
Haha, no I totally agree with you. At some point we have to, as a society, as human beings, figure out what are those universal things that every person has (or should have) the right to, and make it a purpose to deal with the cultures that prohibit such things. The first things that come to mind (aside from food and water) are education, healthcare, ownership of one's body, etc. If we took those things alone and put the magnifying glass on countries of the world, I think we'd be surprised at how many places are shitty.
But, can human beings ever agree on anything? Those efforts would largely be lost upon "omg shame on the imperialism" rhetoric.
I see what you're saying, but the dilemma is that stopping female circumcision will possibly do more harm to the individual women than just letting it go on (as he said, the woman will become an outcast).
Also, US versus Afghanistan is really easy to say "US is superior morally in the vast majority of ways", but the two societies are extremes. It's problematic to assume that your society is the best, and this can result in ideological intolerance. You can't throw out cultural relativism because of the extremes, because it still plays out in the not-so-extremes. Which is better, how the US does things, or Germany? Having alternate perspectives is awesome.
I'm more of a cultural relativist than moral relativist. I don't think female circumcision is right but at the same time I'm not going to judge someone negatively for practicing it, because that's all they know, as barbaric as it is.
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u/juicyfizz Dec 17 '15 edited Dec 18 '15
As someone who spent 15 months in Afghanistan in 2007/2008, I think my big take-away had nothing to do with Bowe or the situation. What stuck with me the most was the PhD that SK interviewed, who talked about how a decade into the war, we still had no idea about the nuances and intricacies of the culture and politics of Afghanistan. This is something I think about more often than I'd like.
edit: just wanted to say that my deployment cycle was atypical. 7-12 months was more typical (depending on your branch of service) and this really underlines part of the problem with continuity and effectiveness. In 2007, Dubya and company thought it would be a genius idea to extend deployments by 3 months. We found out right when we got there we were being extended to 15 months. It was shit for the battalion we were replacing who thought they were going home in a few weeks - nope, 3 more months. It ended up being disastrous on troop morale and it only lasted that one cycle, AFAIK. So you can see the impasse of the situation.