One of the features of systems of power is what Noam Chomsky has called “Manufacturing Consent” – or the insidious imprinting by national educational systems and media empires of simplistic stories of heroes, villains and other questionable narratives….. Unfortunately, however, for the powerful they end up believing their own propaganda – dissenters who suggest that the world is not as the official organs are portraying it are ridiculed and marginalised.
“Groupthink” came into our language as a result of a 1972
book - and Paul t’Hart’s subsequent “Groupthink
in Government” (1994) helped spawn a veritable industry…
Organisations and governments should therefore all be alive to the dangers of complacency and some indeed have gone to the lengths of appointing “devil’s advocates” to challenge the status quo…. “Rebel Ideas” is a recent good read on this.
But, somehow, all the checks consistently fail – as we have just seen, tragically, in Afghanistan. To many of us, of course, we should never have been there in the first place but the question on everyone’s lips these days is how on earth so-called “intelligence” – let alone the “chattering classes” - could have got things so wrong. It is a question that seems to have been recurring rather too frequently these past few years – vide Brexit and Trump
One
of the answers is that people have been looking in the wrong places – if they really wanted answers about
Afghanistan, they should have been asking basic questions about money flows and
social systems.
-
Take, for example, this report just issued by the
independent British Think-tank ODI – Lessons for Peace which
demonstrates that the cash from the poppy trade outstrips disbursements from
the Kabul government by a factor of 10 to 1.
- Or this short article from Anatol Lieven that explains the role that social networks have played in the collapse of any resistance to the Taliban
But
Presidents and governments prefer to
listen to the assured voices of the military who promise victory – and seem
to have a built-in resistance to listening to the doubtsayers who bring bad
news….. And, since the start of the Vietnam war, there have been any number of
voices questioning the conventional wisdom. One of the most prominent has been Paul Rogers
(suffering perhaps from his designation as Professor of Peace Studies –
although increasingly recognised by security advisers). Even before 9/11 he was
making the argument against the belief that military power could defeat guerrilla
tactics – as you can see from
his collected writing here
Update;
Of all the analysis I've seen since the weekend about the Afghan
tragedy, this is the best I've read. It's from a
marvellous small weekly E-journal Scottish Review
Tariq Ali has a good briefing - another excellent source of information is here
But perhaps the best is this recent briefing from a couple of anthropologists who worked in the country some decades ago and this one from an unknown pakistani
