Back to the agriculture issue:
1. Those anthropologists/social scientists who do not understand agriculture tend to be idiots who are not worth their weight as landfill. By "tend", I mean "they are, without a doubt". Ivory tower idiots with multiple degrees and no useful experience.
2. In some localities, there is zero knowledge of farming, because entire generations have been wiped out, and the locals are returnees with no ag experience or interlopers with no ag experience. It is not uncommon to see these guys make really bad ag decisions, like dumping a bag of seed on the ground in a pile in their field, or spraying melons for worms after they are infected. And then selling them in the market. These "farmers" then starve and can be picked up by the insurgents fairly easy as recruits to make ends meet.
3. The presence of someone with practical ag experience plus a bit of anthropological education might keep the US from doing stupid #### like the Helmand/Argandab Valley Authority project like we did in the 1950s and 1960s, which is precisely what others in this thread warns about. In other words, local ag standards, executed correctly, are often superior to 'Murrican methods.
Finally, on the subject of HTS personnel. In short, they suck. They suck because they tend to be morons and idiots. Most are catastrophically unqualified and the few that are "qualified" are unsuited for this sort of work. I know one actual social scientist who is currently deployed who really knows how to do this sort of work. I had the honor of working with him the last year and a half.
On a related topic, this HTSer, myself and an Afghan-American in another program outproduced the entire $227 million HTS program last year, in quantity of reports alone. Now, if you consider "quality" of reports, we outdistanced that $227 million program a hundred fold. Their reports tend to be recycled data and "I like poop. Do you like poop?" kind of quality, whereas ours was real data, collected, analyzed and given to grateful ISAF/DoS personnel. Or quashed by the chain of command as being just a little bit too much of an uncomfortable truth.
The problem with inserting Anthropologists/Social Science types into this situation is that the skillset and mindset are so shockingly rare that it isn't worth the pain. There are maybe a couple of people that could really do the job and would want to do the job.
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