As the Taliban rapidly crushed US-backed Afghan forces, many politicians, pundits, and military leaders expressed surprise at having overestimated an ally's will to fight - and underestimated the enemy's.
Similarly in 2014, after the Islamic State (ISIS) routed US-backed Iraqi forces, president Barack Obama endorsed the intelligence assessment that "predicting the will to fight…is an imponderable."
That attitude reflects political and military leaders' continual discounting of r...
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Scott Atran is an anthropologist and founding fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford. This article was first published in the 3 September 2021 issue of SCIENCE, Vol. 373, reprinted with permission from AAAS.