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READ THE COMMENTS BELOW - AND THE UPDATE “Army-Anthropologists don’t call Afghans “Savages”

Do you want to know what anthropologists who work for the US military in Afghanistan write about the people America is at war with? I resist to believe it but according to the Sydney Morning Herald they call some Afghan societies “utter savages".

Here is an excerpt from the report:

“The Zadran have been written up as a small tribe, but they are the biggest in the south-east. Their manners resemble the Waziris [who straddle the nearby border with Pakistan] and the Kharotis [also concentrated in the east], from which we may infer that they are utter savages. They live in small villages … they are great robbers and their country was a refuge for bad characters.”

Sydney Morning Herald correspondent David Brill who has travelled to Afghanistan’s south-east talked to an anonymous American analyst who refuses to endorse the report’s terminology and can’t believe what he is reading there.

Thomas Ruttig, a member of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, is also “shocked by the anthropologists’ assessment of the locals as savages” and says:

“I have been working in Afghanistan for 25 years. They might look like savages, but they have a sophisticated political understanding. ‘There is great hostility to the Americans, but it is not because the people are savages.”

The ‘’savage’s'’ point, and Ruttig’s, is that America’s military tactics have created so much local hostility that it has become difficult, if not impossible, for the locals to accept the US presence and what Washington calls “aid". The “savages” told Ruttig that they had no option but to join a tribal uprising after a controversial civilian “casualty” (meaning the locals were killed by Americans)

>> read the whole story in the Sydney Morning Herald

A few days ago, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson explained Why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won (by the Americans, I assume)

PS: Maybe this issue makes more sense when we remember what the researchers in militarized institutions like the Centre for Studies in Islamism and Radicalisation write about “Americas enemy”.

UPDATE: Much new information: “Army-Anthropologists don’t call Afghans “Savages”

SEE ALSO:

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How the Human Terrain System anthropologists think

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Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

“Anthropology = Smarter Counterinsurgency”

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Thesis: The limits of youth activism in Afghanistan

War in Iraq: Why are anthropologists so silent?