Article

2002-06-09 Afghanistan

Taliban official warned U.S. of al-Qaida in 1999

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Posted by Fred Pruitt 2002-06-09 02:49 pm|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 (A rant). I agree that this is the sort of story that has the ring of truth. Somebody with hands-on experience who isn't calling the shots realizes that things are starting to turn sour, but they aren't taken seriously by the big players / decisionmakers when they come forward. Like Zhores Medvedev explained in his book on the nuclear accident at Chelyabinsk, when there's something really big going on, there comes a point where it starts leaving traces that can't be covered up. It will take a much larger investment of human attention span, above and beyond technological data crunching, to pick up these early warning signs. It will also require more tolerance for dissenting viewpoints. (No way will we spot anomalies if all we hear is the recycled opinions of irate warbloggers.) Naturally, this is exactly the moment when people start demanding cuts in funding for area studies programs. Can't have the taxpayers funding students or scholars to consort with the enemy! And yet, leaving area studies in the hands of American immigrants who maintain their old mother tongue can result in some pretty strange distortions of perspective ... We need fresh sets of eyes, and reports from the little people out digging rocks from the field, if we want to spot the really noxious weeds early. Not all of those unknown seeds and weeds turn into something, but every so often something catches on, like the cultish Bin Laden craze. The signs have been there, but the willingness to listen wasn't.

Posted by sassafrass 2002-06-09 20:32:06|| [sassafrass.pitas.com] 2002-06-09 20:32:06|| Front Page Top

#2 You raise some good points, though don't discount the value of technological data crunching. First you have to have information before you can evaluate it and do something with it. 'Tis the nature of bureaucracy that promotions are a desirable thing. That's one of the ways we reward people, and the primary way we reward our best people. In well-run bureaucracies - which isn't really a contradiction in terms - the talented are promoted, usually out of the areas in which they have talent and into the managerial chain. This has the effect of taking someone with talent in one field and putting him into another field in which he may or may not have any talent.

Your point about area studies is well taken. I would point out, though, that the number of people who are interested in area studies probably isn't as great as the number who drift into, say, peace studies and womyn's studies. I'm not up on university curricula, but in my day, back in the mesolithic, the school that offered an area studies concentration was rare indeed. It looks like it should be a soft-skill area, but you really have to know something, and anyone who says speaking, reading and writing a foreign language isn't a hard skill has never tried to become bilingual, much less multilingual. "I had some French in high school" doesn't cut it; somewhere you've got to pick up the words for "cyclotron," "base direction of fire," and similar things that are out of the "I have a red pencil" category. On top of that, you need to have a knowledge of history and a wide reading that skims the surface, at least, of technical fields; if you don't know what "anthropozoonosis" refers to, you can't attach any significance to it. And then, on graduation, area studies is found to be almost exclusively the area of interest of the government, so you can't get a high-paying job with IBM and you end up as a GS-5 in a basement cubicle somewhere near Washington, waiting for promotion.

Is that the way to do it? Probably not. On a business trip to Japan once, when I was working as an analyst and before seriously climbing onto the managerial track, I met with my counterpart in their office. We exchanged notes and ideas, and he knew his subject matter inside out and upside down. As well as he should have; he'd been working the problem since the early 1940s, and was officially designated a National Treasure.

Posted by Fred 2002-06-10 07:42:55|| 2002-06-10 07:42:55|| Front Page Top

07:42 Fred
20:32 sassafrass