VIDEO BLOG
Episode 1: “It’s the Tribes, Stupid”
The real force in Afghanistan isn’t Islamism or jihadism. It’s tribalism. Mr. Pressfield compares Alexander the Great’s Afghan campaign (330-327 BC) to our own wars today.
View the credits and transcript for Episode 1.
The link was not accepted in the above post. Here it is:
Advice about our long war – ‘It’s the tribes, stupid’”
Steven, here’s the problem with how you’re defining “tribalism” — it doesn’t exclude non-tribal societies, and it doesn’t accurately describe the “tribal” societies we’re “fighting.”
Why all the scare quotes? Well, the Taliban is not tribal. In fact, it is explicitly NON-TRIBAL, and explicitly pan-Islamist. They fight for their version of Islam, to convert Afghanistan into a Islamist state. Ditto al Qaeda: their ultimate ideology isn’t some animalistic sense of tribalism the way you describe it, but pan-Islamism. When the wars the U.S. is fighting are against enemies who have organized and recruited using religion, you have to do more than a shallow tribal stereotype to argue that it’s not religion.
Then there is your actual definition of “tribal”:
If you replace “rather than” with “in addition to,” you’ve described Normal Mailer-esque small town America. At least, you’ve described a stereotype from the Coasts for which there are so many exceptions it is practically meaningless. Respect for elders? Adherence to tradition? Fighting an entire war with “Remember [the Alamo, Pearl Harbor]?” Having a code of honor? Good grief.
That doesn’t even describe Afghanistan, either. A code of honor IS a law, and in the west this was true in a midieval sense. Pashtunwali, the code of honor among Pashtuns (only 35% of Afghanistan) is not just a system for how to revenge killings—that is an ignorant thing to say. It is an entire system of conduct, with almost as much richness if not complexity as a western system of laws, with rulings enforced by a jury of elders and community-wide expectations adherence. It is nothing like how you describe it, which sounds more like a pack of dogs than a ancient and frankly successful social system.
Lastly, there’s your argument that the “tribal mindset” or whatever is fundamentally unchageable and intractable. Again: that is simply ignorance. Afghanistan has undergone substantial, fundamental social and political change over the past 30 years. It is that change that is making the fight there so difficult. I highly suggest reading The Fragmentation of Afghanistan by Barnett Rubin and anything by M. Nazif Shahrani.
And it’s still not appropriate to be discussing Iraq and Afghanistan in one breath while comparing both to Alexander’s campaign in Afghanistan. Again: that is simply not an informed thing to do. Not only are Iraq and Afghanistan different now, they were VERY different campaigns in 300 BC, and Alexander’s entire conquest of Persia was not a single story that can be transferred and limited to a single mountain range in the east.
“(In beginning) In sum, soldiers and warriors are not the same. They come from different traditions, fight with different tactics, see the role of combat through different eyes, are driven by different motivations, and measure defeat and victory by different yardsticks… (in closing) If we fail to take these key principles of warfare into consideration and grasp their importance when fighting armed groups in tradtional societies – the warriors of contemporary combat – we will encounter bloody suprises and make deadly miscalculations.” – from ‘Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias; The warriors of Contemporary Combat’ by Richard Shultz Jr. director of the International Securities Studies Program at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, and research associate Andrea Drew.
Published in 2006, I found it a major eye opener in an area of investigation even the “out-of-the box” 4GW writers had not touched on. More recently, David Killcullen’s new book ‘The Accidental Guerrilla” also discusses the major impact “tribal” has on both Afghanistan and Iraq, specifically addressing the fact that while a major context, it is distinctly different in the two environments and must therefore be addressed in country context.
Problems are hard to solve unless one understands both surface and subsurface context. Before writing off operations as “buying off the tribes” (as in al Anbar Awakening) one should read Killcullen’s tribal context in Chapter 3. So good on you Mr. Pressfield for stirring the pot.
Ed Beakley says: “soldiers and warriors are not the same”
No, they are not. The main difference being that warriors care about and believe in the cause they are fighting for, whereas soldiers are often mercenaries or conscripts who do not give a flip about the cause they are fighting for.
Roger, I believe you miss the context and point of my comment. “Soldiers” here is used in the sense of soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines as uniformed members of a state’s armed services. They are bound by rules- the Uniformed Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention. “Warriors” – despite our use of the word to indicate bravery, manly code of conduct, etc – are in the sense of the writers I quoted, tribal fighters with different sets of drivers/motivations and rules.
Mercenaries are an entirely different and given your “logo” I will add that my ancestors – Confererate Soldiers – would take offense.
From 1861 to 1865 most Southerners’ primary loyalty was to their individual state, not to the Confederate States of America. The Confederate States of America was an alliance of convenience. Confederate nationalism, if it existed at all, was weak and insignificant. My ancestors also fought in the Confederate States Army. But they considered themselves to be Georgians and Alabamans, not Confederates.
Mr. Pressfield: You make the point that the tribe is the basic unit of social organziation in the ancient societies of much of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, while the nation is the basic unit of organization of the modern western peoples. Even assuming this formulation is true, the nation-state itself is under assault from the forces of globalism, modernism, technology and more, at least according to Martin Van Creveld. As the state loses influence in the lives of many of its citizens, they will trasnfer their loyalties elsewhere, to whatever gives them meaning, and fills the vacuum left by the departted nation-state. One would imagine this would include tribes.
Thus the question: Is the way to fight tribes to become more tribal again ourselves?
For the most part I agree totally with what Mr. Pressfield states, except for the part where he defines Hamas and Hezbollah as “tribal” movements/organizations. I believe these two groups are more political in nature and have a level of political sophistication that don’t necessarily allow them to fall under the tribal umbrella.
As a pashtoon tribel man i would like to say that i agree with Mr pressfiled. almost 7 years ago on 17 october 2002 i started worke as a linguist for US Armed forces in Afghnistan. at that time i strongly belived that the people who are fighting against the US were Al qeda and religious Taliban. but later and later that was changing pretty quick.
i saw people that were even not able to read the Holy Quran and i found him fighting against the the US . the only reasone for that i found was BADAL not Islam .
iam sure if Mr pressfiled work with the leadership of the US Armed forces in Afghnistan and the people who make the stretegy for the war in Afghanistsan , the US will win the war
the only reasone that the Taliban are getting stronger and stronger is that the Taliban are working with the Tribes. according to the DOD only in the past one week US and Afghans forces were attacked 400 times which have never been so high.
i wana finished this with ” who ever win the hearts of the pashtoon Tribes , win the war “
First, I’d like to pick a nit about the US “sacking” Afghan cities like the ancient Greeks. Loot was the primary motivator of the ancient Greek warriors, not modern US GIs. I’m not buying that GIs looted Afghan cities. My guess is that if you put that to a GI who served in Afghanistan, he’d say, “Loot what?”
Your thesis that we’re fighting tribalism rather than Islam has been made in another context, the Muslim immigration into Europe and the problems that come with it, specifically the epidemic of rape by Muslim immigrants in the Scandinavian countries. Most of the rapists locked up in countries like Denmark and Sweden are Muslim immigrants, who claim it was their right to rape unaccompanied women weary scanty clothes. One argument being made is that this criminality is not so much an expression of Islam but rather the tribal culture of North African villages.
Nicholas Wade argues in “Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors” that religion was an evolutionary advantage for early humans engaged in continual raiding and ambushing because it allowed them to organize themselves in groups larger than blood kinship groups. Islam certainly springs from these conditions and is clearly a fighting religion. Perhaps Pushtunwali can be seen as a sort of religion which confers the same advantage in a hostile environment.
I have to say that your focus is too narrow here, tribalism, im sure, is a factor in the particular situations we have in Iraq and Afghanistan(tactical level), but not on the broad Grand strategic level. On the highest level,it is basically an idealogical war, secular western values of reason, a fundamental orientation to reality, INDIVIDUALISM, freedom, rights,capitalism VS. faith, an orientation on another higher “better world” TRIBALISM(collectivism) and theocracy.
Also, I don’t agree that we have the same goals as Alexander had in Afghanistan, what the US is trying to do is fundamentally altruistic endeavor to somehow gring democracy to these backward savages. Bush had a false notion that all people are fundamentally the same and that they all want freedomwhich is false. Bush completly ignored the realm of ideas and culture. Imagine if we could go back in time to Europe during the dark ages and tried to bring them a secular constitutional republic based on individual rights….They would reject it and fight us off just as visiously as the arabs do today except that they would do it int he name of Christ.
Instead of being altruistic christians, we should have been selfish individualist and after 9/11we should have bombed ALL major population centers, bombed every mosque in the country, killed all the leaders, and declaredour absolute right to defend ourselves and the superiority of western values over religious values and then we should have LEFT, and not rebuilt that stupid worthless country.
The US Army is just an invader trying to grab at something that does not belong to the US; and the people of the land (you can call them tribes or any other thing) are just doing their best to kick the invader’s ass and throw it out of the land. That simple. The US is fighting it own lust of power. Good luck, guys…