Afghanistan, Mali, the Paradox of Expertise, and the Chimera of Analytical Objectivity

For the longest time, I believed the French, because of their great expertise in West Africa, knew what they were doing and could not make the same kind of ignorance-driven mistakes the U.S. made in Afghanistan, among other places. I was familiar with those blunders having worked on Afghanistan while in the CIA, where I had a front-row seat to U.S. policymaking. I also knew what America’s best analysts knew, which frankly was very little. To be more precise, they knew what they saw on their workstations, which is rather like navigating a car while looking through a straw. It turns out I was wrong: The French blundered in the Sahel, although not entirely for the same reasons we did. It turns out that “expertise” can be a trap nearly as much as ignorance.

Blundering in Afghanistan

Speaking in broad terms here, the United States made significant mistakes in Afghanistan owing in large measure to Americans’ deep ignorance of the country. U.S. officials made major decisions relating to things like whether to restore Afghanistan’s monarchy, the choice of whom to install as President (Hamid Karzai) and then re-install, or how Afghan politics work at nearly all levels, based on ignorance, misconception, and unfounded conceptions. This was true at the highest diplomatic levels. It also was true at the working level, among the worker-bee analysts like myself toiling away in cubical hives in northern Virginia and elsewhere. In the field, platoon leaders and company commanders blundered around as if through a dense jungle. Often it worked like this: Upon rolling into a valley, they would ask locals (through imperfect translators) where the Taliban was. The locals would point to the other village, with which they happened to have poor relations. The Americans would attack the other village. If that other village’s residents were never Taliban, they sure were now.

Expertise versus “objectivity”

Part of the problem in Afghanistan is that, understandably, very few Americans involved in the war had any reason to know anything about the country. No one majored in Afghanistan studies; no one had spent their junior year abroad there. Even in academia, the number of “experts” could be counted on one hand, and frankly, their credibility was questionable (though too seldom questioned). Another part of the problem is the ethos of the CIA, which as an institution was (is?) leery of expertise. A main reason for this was the belief that expertise lends itself to bias. There were exceptions, of course. I met Russia analysts who were fluent in Russian and steeped in all things Russian; African analysts with graduate degrees in African studies and copious time on the continent, etc. But on the whole, the institution preferred to bet on functional expertise rather than subject matter expertise. The ideal was the plug-and-play analyst whose proficiency in analytical tradecraft enabled him or her to think critically and tackle any topic objectively and free of any sort of idées reçues, received ideas. The best analysis, so the thinking went, starts with a blank piece of paper.

In practice, this did not work out as well as one might hope. For one thing, the lack of expertise or even experience with expertise meant that analysts and their managers were not aware of how little they knew. As an analogy, if one does not know any language other than English, one has no cause to know the limitations of translators or of English subtitles in movies. One thinks one’s getting all the information conveyed in the original language, when in fact one is getting at best only a portion. This pained me: I had expertise—not related to Afghanistan, but to France, whose history I’ve studied and language I speak, etc. etc. I knew what expertise was, and I knew that, regarding Afghanistan, I did not have it. This self-awareness was not common. I do not wish to imply that my colleagues and I knew nothing: We all earnestly strove to learn as much as we could and quickly became far more expert than most Americans, but this sort of expertise was not the same thing as that of someone who had studied a country for years, lived there, spoke a local language, read its literature, etc.

Moreover, aspirations for bias-free objectivity were foiled by the prevalence of groupthink and new analysts’ rapid adoption of received ideas. When starting as an Afghanistan analyst, I was handed a few books, the same books everyone else read. We also were influenced by the work of American anthropologists like Louis Dupree, whose work was both profoundly out of date and colored by all the limitations and weaknesses of his discipline. Dupree, like all of America’s small number of Afghanistan experts, had only spent time in that country before the Soviet wars. They also preferred to exoticize their objects of study, focusing on the most backward aspects rather than the most modern ones. A result was that my colleagues tended to view Afghanis as archaic rural illiterates who only responded per Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, unwittingly replicating Karl Marx’s inaccurate assessment of French peasants as so many potatoes in a sack of potatoes. Yet Afghanistan was increasingly literate and urban. It was profoundly altered by the traumas and displacements of the 1980s and 1990s. In many ways, the Afghanistan of the 1970s and that of the 2000s were two different countries. We naturally misunderstood Afghan politics and tended to favor policies that undermined the very democracy the United States ostensibly was trying to build.

French Expertise

One thing that haunted me during my time working on Afghanistan was that intel reports I read from actors in the field were vastly inferior to reports I had read in French archives as part of my dissertation research, reports written by French officers in Algeria in the 1850s. These were officers attached to the famous colonial Bureaux Arabes, which arguably were the ancestors of our contemporary Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). The Second Empire Bureaux Arabes provided better intel than the PRTs and various other civilian and military sources. They appeared to have a better understanding of the society around them. There were good reasons for this: French officers served for two-year tours, lived among local people, and often spoke local languages.

I believed that with this kind of institutional memory and rather different practices, the French, at least in their former Empire, knew their stuff. To my mind, this expertise did not make the French infallible, but at least they would not blunder out of ignorance. They were, I believed, making rational and informed calculations. We would pick a partner because we did not know better (I’m convinced we chose Karzai for no better reason than that he looked and acted what we imagined to be the part); the French picked partners after rationally weighing the pros and cons of doing so. The French, in other words, made informed choices. Perhaps those choices proved to be mistakes, but surely informed choices were better than uninformed ones?

Knowing Enough to Do Oneself Harm

The French turned out to be ill-served by their expertise. It tricked them into making grave errors because they understood what was going on less well than they thought they did; they were too comfortable with their insights to challenge important assumptions. They were guilty of precisely the sort of bias that made the CIA suspicious of expertise. Examples include a failure to understand the significance of recent developments in Malian public opinion, and their tendency to hear only what they wanted to hear from the Francophile elites they trusted for guidance. The French had, for instance, missed a critical generational shift in attitudes and did not grasp the importance of that shift for their Africa strategy. Basically, Mali had changed, and the French, to the extent that they were aware, dismissed the importance of the changes.

Expertise versus Ignorance

The wrong conclusion to draw is that expertise is no better than ignorance. I would always choose the former over the latter. Yet at the same time, the American idea that analytic rigor and tradecraft go a long way is valid, so long as one is not naïve about the best-intentioned analytical shop’s vulnerability to groupthink, and analysts’ receptivity to idées reçues, or, to borrow another French term, idées prêtes à penser. Perhaps there needs to be more thought put into the sociology of the analytical shop, where new analysts brandishing their virgin white paper quickly assume the analytical lines of their veteran peers. Americans need to be more cognizant of the limits of their knowledge, and less confident about the conclusions they draw.

The French, in turn, demonstrate the need to open analysis to a wider range of ideas. Especially when it comes to Africa, French government analysts betray habits of mind that are far older than the analysts themselves, patterns of thinking that go back decades if not to the colonial era. This must stop.