LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

How System Attributes Trumped Leadership
“not have a clue where that person derived his strong feelings against the United
States from.” 252 The sampling of influential scholarly literature we consulted
also tends to stress lack of cross-cultural knowledge as a major shortcoming
explaining poor results in Afghanistan and Iraq. 253
What DOD leaders came to understand over time was that social, political,
and cultural knowledge was just as important, if not more so, than information
on military, economic, infrastructure, and institutional issues. Such
country-specific expertise became a scarce commodity after Afghanistan and
Iraq were invaded and occupied. What is often called “regional expertise” was
suddenly needed in large quantities by the diplomatic, intelligence, and military
communities. Unlike some colonial powers dealing with insurgencies in
decades past, the United States did not have a ready-to-hand group of loyal
administrators savvy in the ways of the foreign populations. In fact, the United
States had few regional experts who could speak local languages and knew the
current social and political scenes well.
The need for sociocultural knowledge is a staple in literature on irregular
warfare, including counterterrorism. Assessing the 9/11 attacks, it was
evident terrorists were able to exploit both the conveniences of modern infrastructure
and their access to restricted social and political lines of communication
that the United States could not tap or even monitor well. Terrorists
used the hawala money transfer system and a global network of mosques to
share resources and information. They also recruited from family, ethnic,
and religious communities that were not easily penetrated by Western intelligence.
Whereas U.S. leaders tend to think of strategic communication
as a national-level enterprise, the terrorists promulgated their most effectual
propaganda largely at the level of the individual imam or tribal elder where
American credibility and influence are quite limited. Thus, in “security, recruiting,
and communicating, traditional social networks provide our enemies
with significant advantages.” 254
These same types of advantages were exploited by insurgents in Afghanistan
and Iraq. As General Myers noted, it was “nearly impossible for a Westerner
to penetrate the convoluted webs of tribal and clan loyalty that made
up Iraqi society,” 255 and thus to know how best to influence key decisionmakers
and local populations. Calls for sociocultural expertise grew more urgent
as it became clear there would be no early exits from Afghanistan or Iraq.
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