Quote Originally Posted by Voodoun View Post
Absolutely. Studying Islam, radical or not, will absolutely help one gain insights into the Taliban. Cultural fluency is critical if we're going to reshape the middle east.
OK, you may gain some insights, but are they useful, timely or relevant?
Why not just study the Taliban behaviour, as a matter or empirical record? That is how the vast majority of insurgencies have been defeated.

What is more, my understanding was that we are talking about the professional education of military officers, so their primary requirement is to be skilled in the application of force. The cultural insights they need are extremely context specific and part of pre-deployment training, not an education package at AWC.

MARCT I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. For me, the problem lies not with studying your opponents philosophy, etc., but for confusing that philosophy with its pragmatic applications in the field of conflict.
I can't see where we disagree. I concur. Having studied what is laughingly called "Soviet Operational Art," it was entirely a product of both insightful, and flawed, experimentation and operational analysis - which is why PU was re-written 3 times in 15 years. If you wanted to understand the Soviet Army, you read PU, stuff from the Rayzan/Frunze and some Isby, not the collected works of Lenin.