Looking at Pakistan, and How To Tackle Tribal Militancy

As a bit of a follow-up to how Pakistan is exploding Cold War-era realism, here is Barnett Rubin’s take on the election last week:

The ANP (about which more later) is closely allied to the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul and opposed to both military rule in Pakistan and a mainly military approach to the challenge of militancy. Its victory poses an insoluble problem to the Cold-War minded Bush clique, which cannot conceive that a non-violent democratic party could be a better partner for opposing jihadi terrorism than a military dictator. (John McCain has shown his faithful following of this delusion, calling for continued support for Musharraf, while no Democratic candidate has yet shown an understanding of the possibilities created by the Pakistan elections)…

These persistent stereotypes make me wonder: why did a Taliban “Pashtun insurgency” kill hundreds of Pashtuns in Kandahar, while Tajiks and Uzbeks quietly went about their business from Badakhshan to Bukhara? Who are the foreign occupiers in Charsadda and Swat? Why are Uzbek and Chechen “Taliban” terrorizing Pashtun schoolgirls in Mardan, NWFP (threatening to attack their schools if they did not wear burqas, as I was told by a young Pashtun from Mardan in Islamabad in November, who feared for his sister)? Because they resent the fact that the Panjshiri Tajik Marshall Muhammad Qasim Fahim was Afghan Minister of Defense from December 2001 to December 2004? To drive the Canadians out of Kandahar? If Taliban are “just Pashtuns” (as a researcher at a Pakistani think tank told me recently), then who was voting in NWFP on February 18?

This brings up an interesting point: how does one go about tackling militancy in a tribal society, when only part of that society is tribalized, and there are far too many other local factors to make a broad theory very applicable? This is a problem particularly evident in Afghanistan, which has a fairly unique history in terms of both social factors and conflict. Luckily, Péter Marton is on the case, and I look forward to reading his thoughts on the debate fomented by a blog-clash between William McCallister and, of all people, Afghanistanica. In the meantime, however, McCallister has posted his “Theory of Applied Strategy in Tribal Society.” It offers some good grist for thought, though as noted above, has limited applicability.

The gist of McCallister’s idea, near as I can tell, is transforming strategy from a hierarchy to a network. It sounds great, until you take a step back and ponder:

The paramount sheikh of a given tribe is assisted by a number of confidential advisors and principal lieutenants consisting predominantly of senior nobles and a few outstanding commoners. His brothers and paternal uncles, in particular, are everywhere entitled and expected to assist him and thus have special authority over portions of the tribe as a whole. In carrying out his specific duties the paramount sheik, in addition to his immediate family, is also assisted by various grades of local authority. The tribe is therefore administered not so much by the paramount sheikh alone as by the whole of his family and local authority, though as holder of the office he personally has distinctive powers and privileges. In terms of tribal strategy development, all factions represent powerful interests whether based on familial politics, economic or security considerations competing for position and influence.

This sounds like he is describing Arab tribal structure. That’s all fine and good, but it doesn’t help with Afghani tribes, which tend to be more hierarchical—think of the role men like Padsha Khan Zadran and Jalaludin Haqqani play, and then imagine how that represents a networked structure (it doesn’t in the way McCallister intends it)—and doesn’t address other forms of tribal societies, from Africa to Southeast Asia.

Regardless, though it might not as general a theory as the name would suggest, McCallister offers some good thoughts:

The Achilles Heel of western hierarchical strategy may well be exposed when confronted by a networked tribal strategic design…

The strategist planning for operations in a tribal society must early on gain an appreciation for the historical, cultural, traditional and sociopolitical context of the environment she or he is attempting to shape. He should therefore begin to think in terms of social and cultural operating codes and coordinating messages. The social codes and coordinating messages are the foundation for the existing social contract upon which the existing political formula is based. The political formula in turn greatly influences the form and function of indigenous social institutions and organizations and reflects the accepted norms of behavior between individuals and groups. Although we will never gain a detailed understanding of cultures and societies different from our own, an appreciation for the cultural operating environment will go a long way in achieving political objectives in cooperation or competition with others pursuing their own objectives.

So if this is instead a call for a more flexible structure, if not necessary a networked one, that would make a great deal of sense (and, since this framework is still half-formed in my head, the two may very well be the same thing). And in this sense, the framework above demonstrates the possibly-fatal conceit of the initial invasion of Afghanistan: no one knew what the hell they were diving into—think of embarrassing episodes like the battle of Pol-i Khomri, in which two rival warlords used American assistance to fight each other for control of a town.

Applying this further to Afghanistan, one gets a not-very-clear picture. There are obvious hierarchies in many communities in the country, with strongmen like Ahmed Shah Massoud or Mullah Naqibullah or Abdul Rashid Dostum. Most recently, the terrible suicide bombings just outside Kandahar seemed targeted at Abdul Hakim Jan, a follower of Naqibullah and a leading figure in the Afghan National Auxiliary Police (and a brilliant tactician). His death is most likely meant, much like Massoud’s in 2001, to be the first step in a campaign to sweep Arghandab and Kandahar.

This would lend credence to the idea that Afghan society, though certainly at least as networked as any other, is not as reliant on a specifically network-centric model of social organization. Such a statement requires a few grains of salt, of course—very thickly written books have addressed the role of organizations as primary units of conflict in Afghanistan. Still, the point remains that there is no basic, “tribal” way of going about handling the fighting in Afghanistan: the society is simply too complex for any really generalized theory to properly cover it. This is where Rubin’s post comes in again:

For years, the Pashtun nationalists led by the Awami National Party have argued that support for the Taliban comes not from the Pashtun population but from the Pakistani security services and jihadi parties that use Pashtun lands, and especially the tribal agencies, as platforms for covert operations. Even if the military has lost control of some of these actors, who now threaten the army itself, many of its strategists still consider jihadis a tool against the threat posed not only by India but by a potential US-India alliance…

The Pashtun nationalists (unlike Baluch separatists) have always supported non-violent resistance to Pakistani dictatorships and central domination. They have tended to look to the Afghan government as a protector of Pashtun interests – they had good relations with the royal regime, with President Daud Khan, the Soviet-supported regime (especially Najibullah), and, since 2001, with the government of Hamid Karzai.

Following further, Rubin highlights the very real debate within border Pashtun society—with the ANP on one side, and Mutahhida Majlis-i Amal on the other—between whether and how violence can ever be used for political purposes, and the specific roles of certain ideas of Pashtunwali in forming political thought. While this tends to devolve into the ANP accusing Pakistan’s security apparatus of creating and using the Taliban as a proxy force for Pakistani ends (a curious charge, given the Taliban’s, and Mullah Omar’s, origins in Kandahar), it speaks to a larger, and so far unexplored, rift.

Now that the ANP has finally won a majority of seats over the MMA, there is suddenly the very real possibility that “Pakhtunkhwa,” or a province for Pashtuns within Pakistan (just as there are provinces for Sindhs, Punjabs, and Balochs), an old idea amongst the ANP but rejected by the MMA, might be approved, and the ridiculously denigrating terms used to describe Pashtun lands—frontier, tribal, and so on—might drop. Here is Rubin’s take on this rather exciting idea:

If Pashtuns received such recognition of their identity and guarantees of their participation within Pakistan, the ANP would reverse the long history of Pashtun nationalism by recognizing the Durand Line as a border distributing Pashtuns between two states, and it would urge Kabul to do likewise. Once Pashtuns could participate as full citizens in both states, an open border could become a focus of cooperation rather than conflict. Such a settlement of issues surrounding the border could also help calm inter-ethnic relations in Afghanistan, where non-Pashtuns have at times feared the use by Kabul of the tribes across the Durand Line to suppress them and rulers have exploited the historic grievance over colonial borders as a symbol in ethnic politics.

This matters so much because Pervez Musharraf is highly unlikely to let this happen. So long as he is in charge, the exhilarating possibility of calming the border issues of Pashtunistan—and thus, of ever calming the problem of Taliban militancy—is off the table. The possibility, however remote, that a civilian ruling coalition in Pakistan might take this dramatic step is surely worth the small hit American strategic short term goals might take.

Of course, major issues would remain. The current governor in Peshawar seems much more interested in strengthening tribal, rather than the civic, power structures. There is still the narrative of Pashtunistan as bravely resisting foreign occupation. But the point remains:

the most sincere and potentially effective allies the US has in Pakistan are secular, non-violent opponents of military rule, not the generals in Islamabad. The generals were willing to send troops to and drop bombs on FATA. But the ANP and its allies are willing to mobilize the people of the area to try to take back control of their own land, something a military regime neither would nor could do. As the Taliban and al-Qaida launch their spring operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the political challenge to control of their base areas is their greatest vulnerability. Is the Bush administration capable of exploiting it?

The answer, sadly, is most likely “no.” But it has only a bit to do with Bush: while he has shown the usual head-shaking understanding of short-term versus long-term interest throughout his administration, within the U.S. itself we do not yet have the tools to institutionalize the exploitation of a unique tribal structure. It sort of exists in the Army units stationed in Iraq; but as the recent bevy of stories out of the Korengal Valley attest, in Afghanistan that institutional understanding is a long ways off. Furthermore, American institutions remains hopelessly immovable and ill-suited to handling small-scale, nimble problems.

Which means, I think, that the real question is: can we hold things stable long enough to get our butts into gear?