In short, it wasn’t enough simply to kill and militarily defeat the enemy; soldiers needed to take part in building infrastructure, providing basic services, and being both “nation builders and warriors.” To aid this effort, the following year the Pentagon recruited anthropologists through a forty-million-dollar program called the "Human Terrain System." It sent these anthropologists to Iraq and Afghanistan to gather cultural information in order to better prosecute the War on Terror. They stated their goal clearly: "Empathy will become a weapon." Thus, the United States was following in the footsteps long ago blazed by Napoleon in trying to accumulate knowledge to use in controlling colonized populations ideologically.

XREF: Echoes the author's comparison to Napoleon's colonial knowledge-gathering, and connects to broader histories of anthropology's entanglement with empire. SEED: Could develop an essay on the ethical history of 'empathy as weapon' in modern counterinsurgency versus colonial predecessors.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 424