Exum cautions against assuming that our military really knows its way around foreign countries:
Each semester, I teach a block of instruction on insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan to U.S. military officers who, having volunteered to serve in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of the “Af-Pak Hands” program, are learning Urdu, Dari and Pashto. And I always conclude with a warning: If these soldiers had been immersed in two years of intensive language training and an additional four years of education in the people, tribes, history and cultures of Afghanistan, at the end of those six years, they would still have only a fraction of the local knowledge of an illiterate subsistence farmer native to the region.
The Dish 