Page 1 of 3 Pakistan's nut that
won't crack By Mark LeVine
The carnage that greeted former prime
minister Benazir Bhutto on her return to Pakistan
may have occurred in Karachi, but there is little
doubt about the address from whence the order for
the bloody attack was given: the badlands of the
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the
neighboring Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA), the home bases of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban. Those who gave the orders for the
bombing intended not merely to decapitate the soon
to be consecrated government before it could
assume
power. As important was the need to preempt the
well-advertised all-out assault on the militants
in the frontier and tribal regions by the
Pakistani military that was scheduled to start any
day. Bhutto's return was the public symbol of the
government's new, get tough attitude. "I know who
these people are, I know the forces behind them,"
she explained to the New York Times.
Left
unsaid, and unquestioned, was why Bhutto is so
familiar with "these people", most of whom are
hiding out in the NWFP: the governments she led
during the late 1980s and mid-1990s were, in
conjunction with Pakistan's Inter-Service
Intelligence, among the most important sponsors of
the Taliban.
Successive Pakistani
governments supported the Taliban and the
militants who would form the core of al-Qaeda not
just because of their role in expelling the
Soviets from Afghanistan. As important was the
need to coopt and keep busy this potentially
destabilizing new force in the complex political
landscape of the NWFP.
The problem is that
Pakistan's leaders were viewing the NWFP and FATA
through the same distorted lens as the British did
before them, seeing the region as a bastion of
backward tribes who could be manipulated and
cajoled into preserving a status quo that left
most of the people living in the region among the
most underdeveloped people on earth.
The trouble with tribes The
justification for such policies has long rested on
the view of the region by outsiders as a primitive
tribal system that is incapable of developing on
its own terms, if at all (as one friend in
Peshawar, a law professor and well-known rock
artist, complained last time I visited him that
"people call us 'walnuts;' that is, hard-headed
and stupid. I'm regularly asked by Pakistanis in
the south if I live in a mud hut."
This
negative perception of supposedly tribal peoples
is not unique to Pakistan. Ever since Europe
"discovered" the Americas and began to gain
control over Africa and South Asia over half a
millennium ago, tribes and tribalism have been the
object of fear, fascination, and above all
confusion. And American no less than Pakistani
fell prey easily to the allure of "tribes" as the
explanatory catch-all for what ails the world.
American history is unimaginable without
the ubiquitous image of the Indian "tribes" and
their role as "noble savage" against whom the
country's "frontier personality" developed. The
Dutch, British and French empires also had an
ambivalent relationship with what they defined as
the "tribes" living in the societies with whom
they came into contact. Dividing, classifying and
managing them (often against each other) was
central to successful European trade with, and
ultimately control over, the Americas, Africa and
South Asia.
Scholars have had a
particularly tough time defining the term. A 1963
article in the British Journal of Sociology well
summed up the problem, explaining that tribe was
"an everyday word with a vengeance: probably
everyone is quite sure what it means". The
problem, of course, was that most people,
including many academics, didn't quite know what
it meant, and still don't.
The views of
journalists, commentators and the public at large
have been even more problematic. By and large,
most people have simplistically assumed that any
society that possessed tribes was technologically,
politically and morally "inferior" to and
"backwards" with regard to Europe and later the
United States.
This view has changed
little in mainstream policy-making or journalism,
as demonstrated by the writings of many well-known
commentators, who have often had a
disproportionate influence on the formation of US
foreign policy in the Muslim world.
For
instance, Thomas Friedman famously argued in his
first best-seller, From Beirut to
Jerusalem, Arab peoples are fundamentally
different than the West because they "have not
fully broken from their primordial identities".
The best way to understand the "tribalism"
governing Arab societies, he argues, is to return
to the "nomadic Bedouins of the desert" in
7th-century Arabia. In other words, Arabs living
in the Moroccan Sahara in 1989, the year the book
was published, differed little from their
ancestors who migrated from Arabia 1,400 years ago
(later Friedman would come to believe that
globalization was the one force that could flatten
out local particularities and open the way for the
full modernization of the Arab/Muslim world).
Robert Kaplan, whose articles and
best-selling books have equally influenced
government policy-making, also draws on tribal
imagery for his analyses. In his Balkan
Ghosts, which influenced president Bill
Clinton's decision not to intervene in the
Yugoslav civil war, he agues that the war was the
result of irrational and irreconcilable "ancient
hatreds", which made Western intervention futile
and even foolhardy. More recently, Kaplan has
argued that the "lawless frontier" and
"unreconstructed" - that is, backward and
uncivilized - "tribal people" of the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier are principle causes for
the spread of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in these
regions.
Perhaps the most well-known and
influential tribalist argument is the clash of
civilizations thesis of Bernard Lewis and Samuel
Huntington. This theory enlarges the tribal model
to the level of civilization, and then argues that
Islamic civilization - as if Islam can be reduced
to one simplistic representation - is incapable of
change, development or even rational behavior.
Because of this, the Muslim world must inevitably
clash with the secularized, rational and
enlightened West.
Of course, this does not
mean that there aren't political groupings in the
Muslim world which define themselves in ways that
roughly correspond to the English word tribe. From
Pre-Islamic times through today, Arab and Muslim
societies more broadly have defined and
differentiated their identities through kinship
and similar relationships that fit the broad usage
of the term.
They trace their lineages to
common ancestors, and ensure communal solidarity -
what the great Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun
famously termed asabiyya - through
marriages to members of the same clan and other
mechanisms for securing loyalty to the tribe
(qabila, a word whose Arabic root connotes
hospitality and agreement). Tribal affiliations
and loyalties have long played a
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