Anthropologists at war
The Economist
This evening, Barack Obama will announce America’s new strategy for pursuing the war in Afghanistan. Recent reports indicate the new approach has been influenced by advocates of a “tribal strategy”, which would seek to build security using local tribes as the unit of agency and point of contact, rather than directing all aid and security efforts through Afghanistan’s corrupt central government and fledgling national army. One document that has been circulating lately among supporters of the tribal strategy is a paper called “One Tribe at a Time”, by Major Jim Gant of the Army’s special forces. (the paper can be accessed [here]: )
Major Gant has spent years fighting in Afghanistan, and developed a close relationship with a tribal leader in a town he deployed to in 2003, whom he nicknamed “Sitting Bull”. (Er…no comment.) His paper sings the praises of the Afghans he lived with, and of their tribal institutions, and—well, goes a bit overboard:
A tribe is a “natural democracy.” In Afghan shuras and jirgas (tribal councils), every man’s voice has a chance to be heard. The fact that women and minority groups have no say in the process does not make it less effective nor less of a democracy to them.
This is a bit rich. It is one thing to say that tribes are the effective unit of social organisation in Afghanistan and must be our points of contact for pragmatic reasons, but to pretend that they are democratic is to fool oneself, and no one else.
However, it is not at all clear that Major Gant is right to claim that tribes are the effective unit of social organisation in Afghanistan. “We must support the tribal system,” he writes, “because it is the single, unchanging political, social and cultural reality in Afghan society and the one system that all Afghans understand, even if we don’t.” Major Gant is not a political scientist or an anthropologist, but a lot of the people who are in the business of analysing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan these days are, and writing the words “unchanging political, social and cultural reality” for an audience of modern academics is like laying a platter of ground beef in front of a pack of pit bulls. For the past week, Major Gant’s approach has been getting torn apart for, basically, the cardinal sin of post-structuralist, post-Levi-Straussian anthropology: essentialism.
In September, the Army’s amazingly named Human Terrain System (apparently just a research department, not a fleet of computer-controlled robot anthropologists) published a paper called “My Cousin’s Enemy is My Friend”. The paper reports a unanimous consensus among researchers that non-Pashtun Afghans do not belong to tribes at all, and that even Pashtun “tribes” do not actually function as coherent groups capable of coordinated action: “Anthropologists have long noted the tendency of Pashtuns to form relationships that don’t break down along tribal lines.” The title comes from the uniquely Pashtun phenomenon of “first-cousin hostility”, caused by competition between father’s-side first cousins over inheritance of scarce arable land, which contributes to a tendency to form flexible alliances with members of other tribes against members of one’s own. To the extent that tribes were important, their cohesion has been sapped by 30 years of Soviet-backed central government, mujahedin warfare and warlordism, Taliban-led ideological organisation and NATO-led nation-building. And the paper notes that the tribes themselves are not primal kinship units out of the primordial past, but historical creations, often fostered by neighbouring states:
The British made great efforts to engage Pashtuns along tribal lines to the exclusion of other methods…The British believed that establishing clear tribal regulations by imposing standards on customary law institutions (like Pashtunwali) would help them better control the Pashtun populations of the “tribal areas”. That approach was unsuccessful.
This is highly similar to the methods of colonial administration through local “traditional” proxies deployed by the British throughout South Asia and Africa. It is also similar to American attempts to enlist “traditional” local power structures (churches, highland ethnic tribes, etc) in counterinsurgencies in Vietnam and elsewhere. There’s a structural reason why such alliances are tempting: local tribes and traditional leaders rarely define their interests in ways that conflict with those of a faraway power like Britain or America. In contrast, state-building ideological movements like the Vietnamese Communists or the Taliban often do define interests that entail geopolitical conflict with other states. It’s important to recognise that the Taliban are trying to build a state in Afghanistan—a bad state, one inimical to the values and interests of the free world, but a state nonetheless. To oppose a state-building movement by backing local power structures that maintain national fragmentation is a strategy that may run against the current of modernisation.
There are a number of other disturbing elements in Major Gant’s paper. On first meeting “Sitting Bull”, he quickly decided to aid him in recovering territory the elder claimed had been seized by a rival tribe—a decision one critic called participating in “tribal cleansing”. His description of his Afghan experience is shot through with an exoticist enjoyment of gazing at himself dressed up in local clothes, his arm flung around the shoulder of a tribal elder. But mostly, what the “tribal strategy” needs is a clearer sense of what exactly it is fighting for. In the age of empire, colonial support for tribal authorities gave the lie to the “white man’s burden”, “mission civilisatrice” fiction that European powers were running Nigeria and Vietnam for their own good. American and European state-building efforts in Afghanistan were initially sold as an effort to build a fairer, more modern, more prosperous, safer state for Afghans (especially Afghan women) to enjoy. If Afghanistan is instead to have a backward, traditional, patriarchal tribal society, should America be helping it to get there?
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(Submitted by reader)