The New York Times: Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
Commentary: Abandoning a Misguided Boycott Is Only a First Step
The Chronicle: Abandoning a Misguided Boycott Is Only a First Step
By DAVID NEWMAN
I am sitting in a conference room, observing a group of 36 participants in a discussion. It is intense, and one can see the care with which the speakers choose their words. For this is no normal gathering. It involves two groups of teachersone Israeli and the other Palestinianwho, meeting each other for the first time, are not normally prepared to recognize even the basic legitimacy of each other’s claims.
We are in the neutral city of Istanbul during the first days of the Lebanon war. It took months of preparation to get the logistics right — to enable the Palestinian participants from the West Bank who did not have the permits to travel through Israel to leave via Jordan, for instance, and to arrange for kosher food for the religious Israeli participants. Then, right before they were all due to depart, hostilities broke out in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah fired the first Katyusha rockets into Haifa, and it looked as though all those preparations would count for nothing. But, with one exception, every participant has arrived.
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