That we are still doing this in Afghanistan after fighting there for nearly 11 years tells me that we should be doing this in lots of places right now--just in case:
The United States has a very important intelligence effort going on in Afghanistan that is little reported. This work is called human topography, and collects large quantities of tribe, family and economic data. Put into databases and analyzed with powerful software, otherwise hidden relationships are discovered. ...
Gaining a better understanding of the culture and local politics makes it possible to gain allies and make negotiate peace deals without lots of violence.
Obviously, we can't make in-depth databases everywhere and keep them up to date everywhere. But wouldn't it be a good idea to have such databases at least in skeletal form for lots of places?
Instead of drawing up nice plans of governing structures and new roads, why don't we spend our pre-war preparation time building up similar databases of leaders and groups in the target nation? This might be a good task for the CIA and other intelligence agencies to focus on, building on those country studies.
Such detailed knowledge of the society and political elites of a potential enemy would be useful for a lot more than just suppressing an insurgency. We could use it to target sanctions, foster a revolt or revolution, or sow dissent and suspicion among the ruling elites.
If we had a database of local actors anywhere near what we have today, we'd have rolled up the insurgency a lot faster and perhaps prevented al Qaeda from effectively invading Iraq and dragging the killing out years longer.
We'd save a lot of lives if we knew who the local actors were before we set major footprint on the ground. We'd save lives if we just had a head start on that knowledge.
