This project examines the transformation of the concept of capacity from roughly the last decade of the Cold War until the present (1977– 2017)— a span of 40 years. In unpacking this transformation of capacity within the policies and practices of donors, perhaps the most striking aspect upon review of these frameworks is that one might not have any idea of where we are in history or of the context surrounding the relationships between donors and recipients or “beneficiaries” when reading them. There are, of course, references to containing the Soviet threat, developing the emerging markets of post-Soviet countries, and now references to violent extremism and terror— but we do not see these references in capacity development methodology or the conceptual design of projects. This very methodology for change— to build capacity— is seemingly devoid of any deeper engagement with the societies targeted for transformation. Capacity development both as a method and in practice is distinct from the identification of capacity (or lack thereof) as a source of state stability and fragility.

The processes and sites of capacity development are largely abstract even as there are significant shifts in the macro-historical context as well as in project design to assess, monitor, and evaluate programs. As Roxborough (2012) remarks upon review of the US Field Army Manual FM 3-07 on stabilization, in spite of calls for the necessity of the analysis of local social and cultural environments in design and execution to cultivate local ownership, there is little actual instruction on how to do so. I argue that this is in part due to a “trained incapacity” of the donor, inhibiting the donor's ability to recognize the distance between agenda-setting elites and kinship-based groups in subnational spaces. Instead, donors conceptualize capacity in discrete units— usually skills based (e.g., management, entrepreneurship, technical, or vocational-based skills) and designed to build relationships to expand the operational reach of the state. These so-called beneficiaries of capacity development are hoped to be the carriers of networks into subnational spaces, cultivating local linkages with the state and, by extension, with the broader system of state, regional, and global markets.

This project addresses a series of complex questions around how concepts such as capacity gain salience in donor spaces, the foreign policy priorities of donor states, and the rise of transnational militancy. By examining the transformation of capacity within the example of USAID frameworks and projects, I expose conceptual and discursive shifts that mask the political project of development, particularly as it pertains to threats to global security. Capacity development is now a permanent part of the lexicon of the development space.

What does it actually mean to build capacity in Afghanistan or Pakistan? This question is at the heart of the work of development. There are few cases in the world where a global collision of capitalist and communist projects coalesced with the struggles of postcolonial statehood to create a perfect storm of transnational infrastructure enabling the globalization of terrorism. The situation(s) of Afghanistan and Pakistan reveal an epicenter of global, transnational, and national religious, political, and economic intersection that challenges the very notions of governance that the international system is dependent upon.

Development does not exist in a vacuum. Attempts to consider contextual factors in project design and to make development initiatives locally owned processes, while laudable, are dwarfed by the reality of how development assistance coexists alongside military aid, political alliances, and foreign occupation. These greater macro-relationships between nations engaged in global conflict impact the meso-and micro-level institutional and organizational relationships that make up the so-called partnerships of development. They impact who can be considered a partner, a beneficiary, and where capacity needs to be built.

Projects of development cannot actually be divorced from the transnational tribal conflicts that challenge the structures of market and statehood. Both states have toiled through these struggles of statehood as recipients of development aid. The objective of this chapter is to situate the capacity project within this complexity in order to parse out its meaning and function as a project of development. This chapter is divided into five sections in an attempt to coherently consolidate the complexity of the challenges facing the development of capacity in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Most rational people reject supernatural claims by the founders of recently developed religions, sects, and cults such as Mormonism, the Christian Science Church, Scientology, Peoples Temple, Order of the Solar Temple, and Heavens Gate because details about how those belief systems originated are well-known. These religions, like all others, also claim supernatural origins, cosmic significance, as well as espousing mysteries and miracles. However, the deceitful character and motives of the creators of these dogmas are wellknown. For this reason, aside from the indoctrinated, few others will accept their supernatural truth claims and cosmic significance. Yet, the assertions and tenets of these recently created religions are no different and no less implausible than those associated with the older, established faiths. These also claim celestial significance and promote beliefs in divine appearances, talking fiery bushes, seas parting, people transmuted into globs of salt, serpents that hold conversations and engage in conspiracies, global deluges, angelic visitations, virgin births, the dead coming back to life, and other miraculous and supernatural happenings.

Why are these beliefs not treated with skepticism in the same way as Scientology, Mormonism, and the others mentioned? A significant reason is that these religions have been around for thousands of years and no contemporary eyewitnesses were present when they were formulated (Coyne 2015: 83).

There are no actual witnesses to the greatest miracles of Christianity, namely that a risen Jesus walked out of the tomb in which his lifeless body had been placed. These events are a product of imagination. The belief that he rose from the dead originates from reports by his disciples that they had seen visions of their rabbi alive after his execution. For this reason, the ancient historian Robin Lane Fox (1986: 379) states that early Christianity was “born from visionary experience.” Accounts of this event, however, were not recorded by the disciples or anyone else at the time and come down as second-and third-hand reports by others of what these individuals may have experienced.

Adding to these difficulties, as Ehrman (2014: 135) has summed it up, is the fact that these reports contain contradictions and are at variance with each other in numerous crucial details (see below).

The term “paranormal” was adopted by researchers during the first half of the twentieth century to define the subject matter of the emergent field of parapsychology (Thouless 1942). Parapsychology represents the continuation of the scientific search for ghosts, spirits, and the soul that started in 1882 with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in Britain. The counterpart of this organization was the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), established in the United States in 1884 (Beloff 1977: 4– 16; Kurtz 1985b: 192– 209).

The three major world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, possess revealed texts, the Old Testament, The New Testament, and the Qur'an. These are the purported written records of God's communication to humans by way of a selected emissary, messiah, prophet, vatic, and so forth. While humans are involved in the transmission process, the ultimate author of these books is claimed to be none other than God himself.

These mighty tomes are the basis of the theological “argument from Scripture” for the existence of God. Given that this is part of the arsenal theists and religious apologists employ in their invectives against naturalism and science, claims about the miraculous nature, inerrancy, and supernatural origins of these books are legitimate issues for scrutiny according to the tradition of systematic skepticism in science.

Proposed Evidence of the Divine Origins of Sacred Texts

How do we know that these books are of divine origins? First, the very fact that such texts exist becomes proof for the reality of their supernatural author. In other words, if God does not exist, then how can the existence of the holy book be explained? What this involves, of course, is the question-begging assertion that God wrote the book; therefore, the book is evidence that God exists.

As discussed in the previous chapter, two concurrent processes came into play to generate the resurrection beliefs of the early Christians: (1) grief hallucinations; (2) the psychological process involved in coming to terms with the disconfirmation of deeply held beliefs. In this chapter, I shall look specifically at how the Jesus cultists came to terms with their shattered dreams and disappointment after the unexpected execution of their rabbi and how these efforts contributed to the development of Christianity.

Seeing the apparition of Jesus was a powerful force that convinced the cultists what they already anticipated based on their background beliefs that their teacher had been glorified and ascended to heaven to remain with the Most High but would shortly after that return to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth.

At the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a large proportion of the American public does not know that the earth orbits the sun in a year-long cycle. Over half of the people are unaware that dinosaurs died before the appearance of humans, and about as many affirm that the earth was created during the Bronze Age (Otto 2016: 224). Astonishingly, an equal number of our citizens believe in the existence of ghosts, extraterrestrial beings, paranormal monsters, alien abductions, Bigfoot, hauntings, demonic possession, angels, miracles, and so forth (Chapman University Survey of American Fears 2018; Smith 2010: 22– 23). This mostly scientifically illiterate public seems to lack the rudimentary skills to distinguish between contending claims to knowledge. We now live in a scary and confusing “post-truth” era of disinformation, “fake news,” “counter-knowledge,” “weaponized lies,” conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and sheer irrationalism (Sidky 2018).

Even the paragons of our political system are unashamedly declaring that it is impossible to distinguish between fact and opinion, that for every fact there is “an alternative fact,” that truth is whatever people want it to be, and that science is just another story (Otto 2016: 175– 76; Sidky 2004: 394– 412, 2007a). These political doyens have normalized anti-science rhetoric and irrationalism in US politics. Their main objective is to circumvent input from scientific experts and exclude scientific studies from the policymaking process, thereby jeopardizing the ability of the United States to cope with current and future public health and environmental problems (Carter et al. 2019; Otto 2016: 29).

Introduction

Much of the aid to developing countries in recent decades has fallen under the broad umbrella of building capacity. Buzzwords such as “capacity building” and “capacity development” have permeated the development discourse and are employed in a variety of ways, typically identified as an issue, a need, and a solution to the challenges of “growth and progress.” Furthermore, the wide-ranging and all-encompassing nature of the usage of the term “capacity” obscures how exactly it is manifested in projects. For this reason, there is a need for clarification of the concept of capacity, in both its theoretical origins and the way in which it has been applied as a project of development.

With this aim in mind, this project explores a particular case of the transformation of capacity as a concept and a practice within international development, tracing the relationship between this transformation and the rise of transnational militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I situate my analysis of this transformation through a close examination of the policies and projects to build capacity in these two countries between 1977 and 2017, implemented by the largest institutional donor driving them— the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

As we near the end of the second decade in this new century, the donor community faces significant global security challenges. In spite of a concentrated so-called Global War on Terror, global terrorism continues to threaten the livelihoods of individuals, communities, and the system of states. As these security challenges become more complex, so does development.

There is a close linkage between memory, thought patterns, human perception, and why we believe we have had supernatural and paranormal experiences and encounters. Some scholars have suggested that cognitive biases that distort perception and memory are at the foundation of many paranormal beliefs (Goode 2012: 296).

Memory, Cognition, and Supernatural and Paranormal Ideation

One such set of cognitive biases are “quick and dirty rules of thumb” called heuristics (see Kahneman 2011: 97– 195). These allow us to rapidly sift through messy, random, and ambiguous data and arrive at workable solutions. There are several such rules. The “representative heuristics” permit us to recognize patterns and categorize data by assessing the similarities between objects and events according to some common striking attribute. Thus, when trying to determine cause-and-effect relationships, we use such guidelines as “like goes with like” or “big events must have big causes.” Another set of rules is known as the “availability heuristics” and entail the tendency to use past examples or events that come to mind immediately to render judgments in a current situation, such as using a recently viewed paranormal television show to explain an anomalous event one has encountered (French and Stone 2014: 126).

The crux of the religionist assault on science and anthropology is the assertion that their supernatural and paranormal view of the world and universe based upon a Christian “evidence base” and “positive theistic arguments” provides a superior explanatory framework. In doing so, as noted before, religionists have made their theistic premises a legitimate subject for scientific and anthropological scrutiny in the tradition of systematic skepticism. In this chapter, therefore, I focus on the core premises of this “evidence base” and attempt to find out how well they hold up under such scrutiny and whether or not the religionist claim about the superiority of their supernatural framework, or what the theistic philosopher Plantinga calls an “Augustinian Science,” has any evidentiary justification. The approach is the same one I use when evaluating similar types of evidence in the context of any other anthropological analyses of supernatural and paranormal claims. This entails an examination of historical records, textual analysis in relation to anthropological findings, use of the principles of evolutionary and cognitive psychology, prior probabilities, the presence or absence of disconfirming evidence, and the availability of non-supernatural explanations that accord with the empirical evidence.