On COIN FM 3-24

"But no quantity of cultural sensitivity will make up for the fact that we are not Muslim, not Arab, and not in a position to dispense favours indefinitely. We are aliens to the Iraqis, as to the Afghans, and their cultures are rather more xenophobic than ours. Arabs and Pashtoons alike admire resolution, and despise irresolution: as most humans do. Having a short and comprehensible set of desiderata, and refusing to budge until they are fulfilled, makes, I think, a much better impression than playing the compassionate clown.

The British were adept at leaving room for “the natives” to follow their own customs, and live their own lives, while recruiting local soldiers to fight the British way. In the heyday of the East India Company, they benefited from officers who really could smoke a hookah, and prattle away in Hindi. But the Mutiny of 1857 was also brought on by excessive familiarity (see contemporary Parliamentary reports, passim).

To put this positively, there is no median position between two cultures utterly alien to each other. Communication is not achieved by compromise, as the postmodernists assume, but by a kind of dance and sign language, in which each is helped to guess what to expect from the other. “If you do this, we will do that,” is, harsh as it may sound, the beginning of real mutual understanding."