Concede Afghanistan and its neighbors have been living in situations of insecurity and disconnectedness now for hundreds of years? I suppose you would have to define that which they are disconnected from. We all tend to orient (internally connect and isolate as to an advantage) ourselves to that which we observe, and much that we observe is our local environment. At times in this modern world, I don’t feel very “connect” to my environment, local or otherwise, but it is hard for me to imagine that the Afghans and neighbors are disconnected from theirs. In fact, I imagine that their system of social “connective-ness” (tribes, religions, ethnic identity) is strong because of the environment they live in. On the other hand, they may be disconnected from other environments, which must be what you are getting at.

Even after reading “Kite runner”, it is also hard for me to think of Afghanistan in the terms of “insecure”. There are elements that are really messed-up inside the society, but that must be true for every society, even one so much connected as ours (USA). Go back and ask Alexander how insecure those Afghans are. What did the Afghans tell him, you have never dealt with our poverty before? I don’t know if the poverty is from the land or the people, but I imagine it is from the environment they live in. Bring an element willing to pay (Taliban, Nike) and perhaps you could start your own religion or shoe factory, but which would the environment support? Would the Afghans be willing to work in a shoe factory as entry into globalization or let the Taliban into a neighborhood with promises of support? The answer to both questions could be yes.

However, let’s talk environment. What does the environment support? Does the environment support entryway into globalization (by bringing in near slave-wages jobs) or does it support China’s effort in building an oil pipeline through the country, because that is the real connective-ness we are talking here.

The advantage of talking tribes is that the USA knows how to deal with tribes. I imagine that the US military has a highly documented and successful strategy in dealing with tribes; my guess is you start by building forts inside the environment of the tribes.

Instead of talking tribes we should talk orientations, at least on the academic level. The right question might be: how are they oriented to their environment? How have these people isolate their decision making to give themselves an advantage inside the environment they observe. Then we could ask ourselves: how is their orientation a threat to us? We know tribes.

I know who I’d trust.

Honestly, I don’t think that the way that Westerners deal with whatever this concept is needs to be too complicated. We need to keep in mind a few things: People care about local concerns; We aren’t trusted and can only build trust through repeated contacts and following through on promises; Leaders don’t dictate, they influence; Our actions can create winners and losers. And a really key way to avoiding a lot of problems is to arm oneself with lots and lots of local knowledge. I’m sure there are more, and I also think we could simplify this down to “Be nice, Be respectful, Be honest, and Drink a lot of tea.”

In regard to your other question, I agree and disagree. Certainly many generations of a condition leads to some kind of social embeddedness. However, I think cultural practices get more deeply rooted than social structures, which were already changing in some fairly drastic ways in Afghanistan prior to 1979.

Hi Nathan,

Alexander’s armies had quite a few Persians…..but they were probably shiny, moreso than the Macedonians toward the end.

Good to have you here. For Steve’s readers who may not be familiar with Mr. Hamm or Registan, Nathan has been an important voice on Central Asian affairs in the blogosphere for years on a number of respected regional sites and has extensive experience living in the region.

Let me try to address your concerns in reverse order:

“Mark, so what? This is a huge pet peeve of mine. I know I fall into that category, but from where I sit, I see neither interest nor inclination to engage or respond to these criticisms.”

The latter statement has to be addressed by Steven Pressfield rather than me. On the other part, as a learning aspect, when SME are writing to the uninitiated, there’s often a too large assumption about what the laymen know and a tendency to bring an overloading amount of complexity to the discussion. I am guilty of this myself at times when teaching or writing about my research interests. Pressfield is probably not writing for a typical reader at Registan but his readers may become interested enough in Afghanistan or tribalism that they may start reading articles, books and sites like yours as a result. Where you see a static end-state, I see a gateway or a hook.

“Coincidentally, some colleagues and I were recently trying to turn up academics who specialize in Afghanistan who say that tribe is the critical or even very useful factor for understanding how Afghan society organizes and behaves”

Richard Tapper has written on the negotiation of identity, with one of the major components being “qaum”, which if I recall has (or can have) a loose “tribal” meaning. I’m not qualified to rate experts in your field Nathan, but Nojumi describes the Parcham-Khalq Communists in Kabul thinking the tribes were important enough to warrant sending out the meddling Marxist officials to their villages ( incidentally, the Soviet advisers had cautioned the Taraki regime against it). Flipping through Ewans’ Afghanistan: A Short history, the tribes are present as at least a background political factor from Ahmed Shah Durrani to the fall of the Taliban. Here’s an analysis of warlordism and tribes in Afghanistan by Antonio Giustozzi and Noor Ullah (2006):

http://66.102.1.104/scholar?q=cache:_-hFB7AFp5gJ:scholar.google.com/&hl=en

I suppose point in the argument hinges on what you mean by “critical” or “useful”. That Afghanistan (or any society) is far more complex than one variable, is something I’ll agree with but for an “unimportant” factor, tribal structures in Afghanistan seem to enjoy considerable longevity.

“If we say in COIN theory that we should know the population, we shouldn’t stop halfway with a nice theory that doesn’t have sufficient predictive or explanatory power because of an aversion to academic particularism”

First I am not suggesting we stop halfway. I think that you and Josh fear that will happen with some readers. It will happen with some of them, you’re right. I’m more interested in those readers who are inspired to go further and keep learning.

I think also, on a methodological point regarding Social Science. “Predictive” is a high bar more suitable for hard science that can have appropriate experimental controls. For SS, I’d use “descriptive”, “speculative” and perhaps at best “probabilistic” analysis.

“At best, I understand this to be a descriptive model, and one that is hopelessly broad…and that “tribe” probably describes informal networks all humans create to deal with insecurity and uncertainty and that there is probably an inverse relationship between security in society outside the netowrk and the strength of bonds in these networks”

Tribes are a type of network structure and they can be artificial (social, legal, political) as well as being based on lineage. Most historical lineage tribes had provisions for adopting new members who were unrelated by means other than marriage ( though that was the most convenient device). Within sufficiently large tribes you can have both weak and strong ties or even other kinds of network structures present ( modular, hierarchy, scale-free etc). Network analysis is a useful tool for examining how people seek security and advantage within a group.

Being a long time advocate of horizontal thinking, I like broad comparisons and recognition of patterns and congruencies. They give us data that compartmentalizing, isolating and drilling down often does not ( those are useful tools as well. Granularity is a good thing -it is just not the only thing).

You keep using the word “tribal mindset” and “tribesman.” Since Pressfield keeps changing the definition of what that means (most recently to include religion), could you tell me what it is? Because so far the discussion on his end hasn’t rested on any settled or established ontology.

As for the alternate models… I’m sorry, Pressfield has refused to link to my blog posts where I have previous laid out this model. Here they are.

The Myth of Taliban Tribalism
Breaking the Tribal Model
Misinterpreting ‘Tribal’ Sabotage
‘Tribal’ Engagement, or How We Lost Kapisa Are Are (Slowly) Regaining It

I’d also suggest reading these pieces, which are easily found either on the Internet or Amazon, which explain the idea much more comprehensively.

Glatzer, Bernt (2001). “War and Boundaries in Afghanistan: Significance and Relativity of Local and Social Boundaries.” Weld des Islams, 41, 3, pp. 379-99

Glatzer, Bernt (2002). “The Pashtun Tribal System.” in Pfeffer, G., and D.K. Behra (eds.), Concept of Tribal Society (Contemporary Society: Tribal Studies, Vol 5), pp. 265-282.

Giustozzi, Antonio (2007). Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007.

Shahrani, Nazif (2002). “Factionalism, and the State in Afghanistan,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 104, No. 3.

That’s where you can see the specific reasons to drop the idea of a “tribal mindset” and a “tribal society” and start to see Afghanistan on its own terms, without any baggage we impose on it through these terms.

Bu that’s the whole point of the controversy, the good/bad tribe theory doesn’t significantly help understand what’s happening on the ground. We’re not helping a young marine by giving him broad theories devoid of practical use. Really, how does this help a marine?

Do tribes have structure and leaders? If so, then we need to find out who they are so that we can engage them. To answer the question for Afghanistan, they usually don’t. At the local level there are influential men and a lot of the time, very influential men who are concealed from outsiders. In other areas, influence and authority resides with religious figures. Either way, local influentials open the door to engaging the population. We take a shortcut and go to someone akin to a sheikh to strike a deal with a large tribe. Instead, we have to go village by village.

If you want a competing understanding of Afghans, I propose it to be that Afghans organize locally and have local concerns regardless of ethnicity, language, or sect.