See a photo of Amy Zalman, her bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2.
Q&A with Amy Zalman, Question 3:
Q: Why do you feel it’s important “to gain a holistic view of our own stories, those of others, and those that drive public events and perceptions” and to “bridge divergent narratives”?
A: I believe these two abilities are crucial. My thoughts on this come out
having watched the experience of the U.S. and later NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Here is an example of divergent narratives: for a long time, we characterized the accidental deaths of Afghan civilians, so called “collateral damage” as regrettable but necessary adjuncts to winning a war. And although Allied forces began after about 2009 to start taking the issue more seriously, issuing public apologies, and compensating families, the fundamental way that civilian deaths were understood never really changed because they were part of the Western understanding of the war. From the Afghan side, although I cannot claim to be inside the cultural contours, I believe that the calculus was different. First of all, Taliban are also Afghans. The line we’d like to draw between Taliban combatants and civilians is not so clear as we might think, from the Afghan vantage. Second, the “collateral” in question were sons and daughters, husbands and wives, children and grandparents — they were not just characters in the story of a war, but members of families and communities, to those who lost them.
If we cannot draw back and take a look from on high at how these different view points are clashing, interacting, and feeding each other, we cannot formulate a strategic response that gets us somewhere new. As for bridging divergent narratives, apologizing to someone for their loss is not the same as seeing the story from their vantage. This kind of empathy is not a humanistic luxury, but a strategic necessity. We failed to heed or even grasp the narrative as Afghans see it, and the accumulated grievance is now unfolding very violently.