What does the triumph of the Taliban over America in Afghanistan reveal about our reliance on expertise and specialization--and their limits? Perhaps a great deal. Quote:
Imagine that the US was competing in a space race with some third world country, say Zambia, for whatever reason. Americans of course would have orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem, and the most respected aerospace engineers in the world, with degrees from the best universities and publications in the top journals. Zambia would have none of this. What should our reaction be if, after a decade, Zambia had made more progress?
Obviously, it would call into question the entire field of aerospace engineering. What good were all those Google Scholar pages filled with thousands of citations, all the knowledge gained from our labs and universities, if Western science gets outcompeted by the third world?
For all that has been said about Afghanistan, no one has noticed that this is precisely what just happened to political science. The American-led coalition had countless experts with backgrounds pertaining to every part of the mission on their side: people who had done their dissertations on topics like state building, terrorism, military-civilian relations, and gender in the military. General David Petraeus, who helped sell Obama on the troop surge that made everything in Afghanistan worse, earned a PhD from Princeton and was supposedly an expert in “counterinsurgency theory.” Ashraf Ghani, the just deposed president of the country, has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia and is the co-author of a book literally called Fixing Failed States. This was his territory. It’s as if Wernher von Braun had been given all the resources in the world to run a space program and had been beaten to the moon by an African witch doctor.
Meanwhile, the Taliban did not have a Western PhD among them. Their leadership was highly selected though. As Ahmed Rashid notes in his book The Taliban, in February 1999, the school that provided the leadership for the movement “had a staggering 15,000 applicants for some 400 new places making it the most popular madrassa in northern Pakistan." Yet they certainly didn’t publish in or read the top political science journals. Consider this a data point in the question of whether intelligence or subject-matter expertise is more important.
