working with tribes

The aardvark, citing Arabic media:

Sitar Abu Risha, head of the Anbar Salvation Council, has allegedly fled Iraq with $75 million that the Americans had given him to fight al-Qaeda. The story links his flight to the near-collapse of the Anbar Salvation Council over infighting among its leadership (which jibes with recent reporting in the Washington Post). It claims that he simply never distributed the American cash to the fighters, who are now threatening to go on strike if they don't get paid. Seeing as how the Anbar Salvation Council has for months now been portrayed as the great American hope in the battle against al-Qaeda, if this story turns out to be true - a big if, given the shaky sourcing to this point - then it would be a rather embarrassing fiasco. "The Anbar model", indeed. I haven't seen this officially reported anywhere, and right now I have no way of checking its accuracy - but thought it worth passing on a juicy rumour just in case it turns out to be true.

Comedy aside, The Anbar Model hasn’t been restricted to Iraq. One of the more interesting factors in recent conflicts is the re-emergence of tribes – the Dulaimi confederation in Iraq, the Hawiye in Somalia, the various Pashtun clans in Afghanistan – as major players and there seems to be an emerging military consensus that any kind of lasting victory involves working with and co-opting tribes.

There’s nothing new in that. It always formed part of the imperial expansion strategy of the British and others – arguably the main strategy in India during the John Company period. What it does do is point up the irony of an interlinked series of wars envisioned, amongst other things, as a forced modernization project in Islamic societies should increasingly rely on pre-modern forms of political and social organization.

That, too, has consequences. Pat Lang published a short paper on working with tribes back in April, mainly for the benefit of US troops in Anbar but meant to be applicable elsewhere. He wrote: (pdf)

Part of our (American) heritage is the notion that the past is dead and that the future leads onward and upward in a linear path in which we Americans are the model of future humanity. In order to work successfully with tribesman we have to abandon that idea or at least temporarily suppress it.

Such postmodernists, these retired Green Berets. He went on to give specific examples of tribal customs that people working with them should respect.

The kinds of cases in which ‘urf governs are things like; the shame induced in a family by the lack of chastity of a daughter. Tribesmen (and some town dwellers) will often feel so strongly dishonored by this that the girl’s brothers believe that they must kill her to erase the shame, and they often do. Another example would be a matter of the division of the profits from some tribal commercial transaction such as the sale of livestock. There is no sanction in Shariah law for either of these things any more than there is for the seclusion of women, but it is the customary law that determines what happens.

‘Urf here being the Arabic term for tribal customary law. OK, so you’re an idealistic junior officer convinced that the Middle East needs to be made safe for modernity if the Muslimonazi threat is to be finally thwarted. This quest leads you to some remote part of Iraq or Afghanistan where your job is to win the support of a local clan in the struggle. However, there’s a problem: someone’s daughter has been found out unsequestered on the street, and the boys are in the mood for a stoning. Given that the support of the tribe is essential for your mission, what do you do? Answers on a postcard to the authors of the Euston Manifesto.

Comments

[dsquared]

[Given that the support of the tribe is essential for your mission, what do you do? ]

Demonstrate (not uncritical) solidarity with the soldier, condemn the actions of the village boys and assert the rights of the young woman.

In related news, I am off to eat some solidarity, condemnation and assertion for my lunch, though I may also have a sandwich to fill in the gaps.

[ajay]

Given that the support of the tribe is essential for your mission, what do you do?

I think the DS solution would be: Let them get on with the stoning, and don't get in the way. It's not your job to be rampaging around the place asserting civil rights. You've got a mission to carry out.

To take an analogous example: if I was a British officer in 1943, over in Mississippi on some convoy or lend-lease-related duty, I'd keep my mouth shut about the natives' habit of lynching black people, and I certainly wouldn't try to interfere.

[Alex]

Off point, I've never believed very much in this Anbar model lark. I reckon the real effect at work here is that, as per Kagan's original surge plan, 2 brigades were moved from Anbar down to Baghdad, leaving a token presence. They 're not winning in Anbar - they just left.

Further, I don't think there is a trend towards tribes; it's just that that's where the war is.

This was brought to you by Null Hypothesis Watch Ltd.

BTW: my answer to your question is "take cover". I think you'll find that after stoning, the usual practice is to haul out the 23mm ZSU flak gun from under your bed and let off a few thousand rounds at the stars, and what goes up must come down.

[dan]

I suspect that there is another option for the idealistic young lieutenant, which involves offering to marry the lass and paying a handsome bride price.

It may require conversion to Islam, but that's relatively easy to arrange.

[ajay]

Dan, that's inspired.

I should point out that marrying local girls is a time-hallowed tradition of imperialists (goes all the way back to Alexander the Great, who pacified Afghanistan in just that way).

[Alex]

I know somebody did back in the beginning in Iraq. Perhaps not enough. Concentration in time, space, and chicks, right?

[jamie]

"two wives you may have in the army dear -
but one's too many for me!

and the drums are goin' a ratatatat
and the fifes they loudly play

so fare thee well Polly me dear,
I must be gone away!"

[Alex]

I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!..

Christ, this thread is going to turn into a mawkish Kiplingfest if you're not careful

[Dan Hardie]

Btw, anybody here apart from Alex prepared to say whether they are for or against a continued deployment of British troops to Afghanistan?

Instead of any discussion of this we're still on 'Eustonians: ridiculous people! Wrong on Iraq!' Which they are, and saying which is a lot easier and a lot less important than starting some kind of debate on whether this country should continue to fight a war in Afghanistan.

My view, for the tiny amount that it's worth: we should stay in Afghanistan if it's feasible to have military operations which don't rely on huge amounts of air and artillery support (good for killing civilians) and if it's possible to have some kind of non-Taliban (or ex-Taliban, realistically) political authority in Helmand that is going to be acceptable to the majority of Pashtuns.

Drugs policy seems as confused as hell too, and I would devoutly oppose any damnfool idea of going out and forcibly burning poppy crops- which will inevitably lead to the local farmers taking up arms. Buy their opium stocks or subsidise the growing of alternate crops or both, but killing peasants because they want to grow something that westerners will consume is obscene. It's very obvious from Christina Lamb's reporting of Afghanistan from last year that both General Richards and the 3 Para battlegroup thought this was a mad idea and simply didn't do it, but it's the kind of 'anti-narcotics' idiocy that appeals to the US and to various international bureaucracies. Lamb was also pretty scathing about the DfID aid people in Helmand and their failure to get money to the Afghans who needed it, but this sounds like a matter that could be fixed with a change in personnel and operational policy.

What I'm saying- again, for the tiny amount this is worth- seems to be a more detailed version of what Dsquared said: that he didn't feel well-informed enough to express a view right now. This view strikes me as intelligent and honest, but also not one that can be held indefinitely, since it's quite clear that UK troops are there, are killing and being killed, and that there will be serious consequences whether they go or stay.

[dsquared]

[Which they are, and saying which is a lot easier and a lot less important than starting some kind of debate on whether this country should continue to fight a war in Afghanistan]

I haven't learned anything worthwhile in the meantime, but I'd note that although slagging off the Eustonauts is intrinsically less important than having a debate about Afghanistan, the fact that it's both easier and more likely to have a definite and favourable outcome should not be dismissed entirely. I feel a trite analogy with the question of Afghanistan versus Iraq coming on, somebody slap me.

[dsquared]

btw, is Afghanistan an all-or-nothing question? As in, is a "mayor of Kabul" strategy, completely abandoning Helmand, even a possibility? Kabul is 10% of the population of Afghanistan, and I would guess a much higher proportion of that part of the population whose lives were very significantly altered by the Taliban's presence. I don't even have a map of the country in my head, although I dimly remember that Helmand is pretty important for the pipeline interests.

I suppose the argument against would be that a non-state in the rest of Afghanistan would allow the Al-Qaeda training camps to be rebuilt, but how serious a danger is this, given all that we've learned about terrorism in the last six years?

[ejh]

Btw, anybody here apart from Alex prepared to say whether they are for or against a continued deployment of British troops to Afghanistan?

I was against the war in the first place and it's not like anything has happened recently to alter that view.

[dan]

DH

You raise a good question. Unfortunately, there isn't a good answer to it.

As far as I can see, we're in Afghanistan because of a series of counter-terrorism and aviation security failures by the US on its own soil. Part of the outcome of having-to-be-in-Afghanistan is that we destroyed the "government". Whilst few would shed a tear for the Taliban, we do seem to have turned them into a be-turbaned version of Obi Wan Kenobi.

Now there are some perfectly "decent" arguments for doing the Taliban in, but the flip side of the "decent" equation is that there needs to be an "investment" of diplomatic, political, monetary and military resources commensurate with the task of re-building Afghanistan. My guess is that we're under-resourcing this by at least a factor of 5.

Obviously, the strategic thinkers and doers in Whitehall and Washington have never really been that serious about Afghanistan, as it has been a box that needed to be ticked before the serious business could commence.

Unless we're ( ie US, UN, neighbours, Nato ) prepared to make the committment, then all we're doing is getting sucked into the entropy trap - which is indeed what is currently happening.

It might have been politically possible to allocate the necessary resources to start the process of getting Afghanistan to function in 2002 and 2003 - but this option would have precluded doing Iraq.

Now it strikes me that the road to Kabul goes through Pakistan - and no one really has a clue as to how to walk that path.

So we're left in the position of "faffing about" fighting an insurgency in the Pashtun areas that can continue indefinitely, that has broadly secure rear areas in the Pakistan tribal agencies, that has the financial means to sustain itself, and in the process, we're nudging Pakistan further down the road to state failure.

Given the umbilical connection - on personal levels - between Pakistan and the UK, I'd argue that we're likely to get bitten in the arse on the home front a few more times before Gord or whoever realise that whilst the US has no over-riding strategic interests in Afghanistan, the UK, arguably, does.

[Dan Hardie]

Dan, Alex Harrowell was convinced that you and I were the same person and reading a comment like that I can see why: I can't see anything to disagree with. I do think that Blair's failure to get a decent reconstruction programme in place in Afghan' was probably his single worst act, worse even than the invasion of Iraq. As you note, the neglect of Afghan' stemmed from the Mesopotamian adventure, and it's horrifying to remember how often one heard the Hitchensian argument 'oh, but those people who say they care about Afghanistan and not Iraq are just appeasers, etc'...

And I agree with everything you say about Pakistan. Where do you get the 'factor of five' for development underfunding in Afghanistan? Recommended, btw, on Afghan subjects is Rory Stewart's 'The Places in between'.

Good question from Dsquared. My guess is that whilst at least some of the Taliban footsoldiers are currently just Pashtuns who don't want foreign soldiers on their soil- and would not therefore march on Kabul if NATO pulled out of the Pashtun provinces- the Taliban leadership did successfully conquer Kabul last time round, and there's no reason to think that they won't want to do so again: particularly since if they are getting backing from the wider Sunni extremist world, or from the hardliners in the ISI, who also want to see Karzai and all Westerners ejected from Kabul.

It's a horrible war and it could get worse, but it's very likely that a decent reconstruction policy in 2002 would have prevented all this. Blair's neglect of Afghanistan has been criminal, which is why I do think we should all give Brown a very hard time until he comes up with a decent Afghan policy.

[dsquared]

hmmm, Kabul is pretty defensible though isn't it - the post-Russian government managed to hold on to it for three years against the mujahideen after the Russians left. Enclave strategies did pretty badly in Vietnam I admit, but the main problem there was that they fostered a learned helplessness in the Vietnamese government (as in, support was meant to be gradually withdrawn as things got better, creating a big incentive to make sure that things didn't get better) and AFAICS with respect to the Karzai government, that boat sailed quite some time ago.

btw, from an economic development point of view, I'd be very suspicious of a) quantified underfunding factors and b) the general presumption that more resources would have helped or will help. Semi-nomadic animal husbandry is a notorious bottomless pit when it comes to development projects.

[Dan Hardie]

'hmmm, Kabul is pretty defensible though isn't it'?

Yes, so long as your idea of an optimal policy is a lot of artillery firing in and out of a densely-populated city.

I'd agree with your points on development, though I wondered if the Other Dan had some stats he was basing his 'factor of five' stuff on. I think that in Afghanistan and a whole lot of other places you're looking at judging development- and stability, which is probably at least as important- by locals who know what they're talking about. Are the roads safer than they were last year? Do we have a food reserves for if the harvest fails? That kind of thing. Implementing a proper set of security and development policies in Afghanistan doesn't strike me as necessarily impossible but it will take nerve and effort and intelligence. And it needs time, which we have been happily squandering since December 2001.

[Alex]

Essentially, we got out of the "mayor of Kabul" problem by pushing PRTs out to the northern and eastern bits of Afghanistan with bags of money, starting in 2004. And it worked rather well (I blug about it a while ago) in bringing the various warlords on side. I would suspect that this is worth hanging on to, especially as doing so is not consuming very much military force.

Up to a point, there's an argument that in the end, whatever central government there is will have to tolerate having part of its territory essentially under the control of Taliban-like militia, under some form of words.

Pipeline? Don't make me laugh.

[dsquared]

... glancing at a map (I am currently in the process of promoting myself to armchair general) I see that there's a bloody big copper mine to the immediate east of Kabul, in Logar province which would usefully form the third point of a triangular enclave with Kabul and Jalalabad.

The other idea I am coming up with is "Pipelineistan", but on the face of it this looks wildly unfeasible compared to the amount of resources anyone has to spend on it.

[Dan Hardie]

I read the pipeline thing years ago, in Ahmed Rashid's 'Taliban', and for once the obvious joke is the aptest one: it's a pipe dream. It works if and only if there's a pre-existing peace in all provinces it travels through, in a country that has been at war, in some regions continuously, since 1978.

Improved roads between villages and towns, towns and provincial capitals, and finally linking provincial capitals with Kabul: now that's a good idea in a country with a lot of farmland which used to be famous for its textiles. It's something that could be energetically pursued in the more peaceful provinces regardless of what's happening elsewhere. It would also funnel benefits down to at least some local communities rather than providing a rent to be disposed of by central government, as per the pipeline. I know that money has been spent on a roads programme but I can't yet give you any useful details. Reading suggestions gratefully received.

[ejh]

Why would Blair have introduced a policy of reconstruction? Who and what would have induced or forced the man to do so? How would such a policy have been compatible with the stated aims of the invasion which did not envisage and could not have proposed a long-term presence?

Who would have been in a position to implement such a policy? Would it have been the locals or the occupiers? If the locals, which ones? If the occupiers, how would the locals have been induced to co-operate? What would have happened had they proven unwilling to do so?

You can surely only operate a successful policy of reconstruction if you have widespread support for that policy among the local population: and yet you will never have widespread support among the local population for a prolonged foreign occupation. It's really hard to think of exceptions to that rule: the examples of postwar Germany and Japan don't really stand up since in either case the locals had been bombed into submission (which we'll assume is a bad idea, I think) rendering resistance essentially impossible and in each case there was a lot of support for the policy implemented, to wit the creation of a modern democratic state that would be friendly to the US. In Afghanistan there is no reason to think that such a situation exists.

For these reasons and a fair number of others it strikes me as pointless to dicsuss this or that change of direction, this or that nuance of policy: you can't have a successful occupation of Afghanistan (even if we were to assume that the reconstruction of Afghanistan was the purpose of the invasion, which plainly it was not). It's broken because it doesn't work.

[jamie]

I think Justin's probably put his finger on it here in that there wasn't really any rational objective behind either the Afghan or the Iraqi ventures, as opposed to rationalizations of essentially magical thinking. We would change their regimes and paint their schools and the natives would bow down in awe and imitate our enlightened ways. There wasn't even a formal programme of exploitation behind it, which would at least have tied the occupations down to theoretically realizable goals and objectives.

We've probably reached the stage now where the existential shock of 9/11 has just about worn off, but it's like trying to convince someone with a blazing hangover that, yes, they did run naked through the streets last night howling at the moon. They're more likely to just walk away and try and forget about it.

There are probably things you can do in Afghanistan, but the precondition for these is changing the basic assumptions behind all the things we've already done, but that creates a kind of crisis of legitimacy here. It's hard enough for a government to acknowledge that it was wrong but much harder for it to acknowledge that it had taken leave of its collective senses.

And still has. Blair to Palestine. Jesus fucking wept...

[ejh]

I don't even think there was that rationalisation, bearing in mind that "changing Afghanistan" wasn't the stated or (as far as anyone can see) the true reason behind the invasion. It was stated that it was to try and recover the people responsible for 9/11, destroy their camps and remove their backers: as far as it goes I've no reason to disbelieve that. No doubt the keenness to display American power may have played a role, though it's not a necessary thesis. But Rebuilding Afghanistan weren't nothing to do with it.

It was understandable in the way that Iraq most certainly wasn't, which I think is why many people who are deeply opposed to the Iraq occupation are sympathetic to the one in Afghanistan. But just because a decision is understandable doesn't mean it's not wrong and stupid.

[dan]

I've just done a check back on some of the metrics with regards to the levels of hostility to the foreign presence in Afghanistan - the 2002-2004 period resulted in just a touch fewer than 100 combat related coalition forces deaths in 36 months - ie the current going rate for a month in Iraq. I suspect that if the level of violence in Iraq was 3% of the current level, it would be deemed a "catastrophic success" rather than a catastrophuck.

Since spring 2005 the level of violence has sky-rocketed to the extent that Afghanistan is, for MoD forces, arguably twice as lethal as Basra ( although the last few months there suggest that the "quiet" Basra period is over ).

My conclusion from this is that there was a substantive opportunity in the 2002-2004 period to do something positive if an appropriate level of resources had been allocated. Obviously this would have required a serious plan and the political will to implement it - no such thing seems to have existed outside the area of Iranian influence.

In the end it reminds me of Rumsfeld's reported comments that there weren't any good targets in Afghanistan; and it emphasises that few understood the perils of strategic blowback into Pakistan - which is precisely what has happened.

[Dan Hardie]

So, Jamie, to clarify matters, do you support:

a)the immediate withdrawal of all British troops, the acceptance of all and any consequences up to and including a Taliban reconquest of some non-Pashtun areas and the prompt ending of all UK government aid to Afghanistan on the grounds that it is useless?

b)the immediate withdrawal of all British trops, but the continuation of governmental aid to Afghanistan in the hope that development policies - which you believe to have been completely irrational and ineffective so far- can be reformed?

c) no definite policy whatsoever, as that would make it harder for you to produce apocalyptic but vague rhetoric which is so lacking in specific detail that it can never be tested against subsequent events?

[ejh]

I think you'd need far more than a low level of violence to get something substantial done in a military occupation (unless you're building an empire and are expecting to be there indefinitely). You need the support of the people whose lands you are occupying, and that's something you're unlikely to get - you can get acquiescence for a time, but that's very far from support. Because it still leave the question as to "who", as well as "what". If the locals can and will do it - why (they will ask) are you there? If they can't and won't - how are you going to get it done?

Secondly, in order for this "something positive" to be done I think it would have required something more than "political will". It would have required the appreciation that there was a project underway, not just an Osama-hunting expedition but a whole munificient Rebuilding. There's nothing to suggest that anybody had that in mind, not even the neo-cons - who at any rate wouldn't have accepted a democratic Afghan government that wasn't pro-US (unlikely) and pro-Israel (inconceivable).

So to me there wasn't an opportunity of any kind - it's really a fantasy on more than one level. In reality the US and NATO forces weren't ever going to do much more than hang around hunting jihadis while pissing off ever wider sections of the population and giving time for their armed adversaries to get their act together. Hence the current quagmire, but there wasn't really an alternative. Save withdrawal.