A Study of Pashtun "Tribes" in Afghanistan
I checked up on Ghosts of Alexander today and saw that it has been declared dead (who knew that ghosts could die again?). D'oh.
But, I re-read a couple of his older posts, including Petraeus and McChrystal Drink Major Gant's Snake Oil and Gravediggers Disinter Tribal Militia Corpse. In doing so, I came across something that I had overlooked before. In his critique of the writings of the Jim Gants's of the world, he posted this piece from the Human Terrain System, published in September 2009.
My Cousin’s Enemy is My Friend: A Study of Pashtun “Tribes” in Afghanistan
I read through it and found it to be a good explanation for why tribes may not be a good (or even less bad) conduit for us to work through or not a good / less bad unit to empower. That is, it's a good explanation if the observations are valid and the reasoning is sound. It made sense to me, but I'm not an anthropologist and I've never been to Afghanistan.
My question to the board: Is anyone aware of any informed critiques of this paper - positive or negative? Or, for those with relevant knowledge/experience, what are your thoughts on the paper?
Helmand's head of council for tribal elders
This BBC story fits here IMHO:
Quote:
As the biggest offensive in Afghanistan since 2001 continues in southern Helmand province, the head of council for Helmand's tribal elders, Haji Abdurahman Sabir, tells BBC Pashto's Emal Pasarly about the frustrations of local residents.
More on this:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8522176.stm
When Taliban fighters change sides
Again the BBC:
Quote:
When Taliban fighters change sides. The Afghan government is having some success in winning over pro-Taliban fighters but the difficulty then is how to guarantee the security of those who give up their arms, as Martin Patience discovered.
More on link:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...nt/8520754.stm
Paktia & Khost: where tribes matter
Hat tip to FRI for this description of how engagement works and is apparently ignored by officialdom:
Quote:
While the battle for Marjah plays out I want to go back and talk tribes with a post about one of the few places in Afghanistan where the traditional tribal system is relevant – the border area with Pakistan in the southeastern provinces of Paktia and Khost.
See:http://freerangeinternational.com/blog/?p=2604
Essential reading on Pashtun culture
Hat tip to Circling the Lion's Den, who commend reading 'Doing Pashto
Pashtunwali as the ideal of honourable behaviour and tribal life
among the Pashtuns' on:http://www.aan-afghanistan.org/uploa...wali-FINAL.pdf
I am sure there is a thread on such culture matters, but dropped in here. Ah, it was a 2009 RFI and has other sources:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=7941
I don’t know enough about Afghan social organization to speak to it specifically
but what I know about the study of social organization in general might throw some light on the initial posters’ query. Elman Service codified the traditional neo-evolutionary band –> tribe –> chiefdom –> state sequence in 1962. The inclusion of tribe within the model was critiqued by otherwise sympathetic scholars due to the lack of a unified definition for the term (Fried 1966; Hymes 1968). In 1985 Joan Townsend proposed ‘autonomous village’ as an alternative (see Carneiro 1987:760–61).
The band/tribe/chiefdom/state typology is still commonly trotted out in Anthro 101 lectures and introductory level textbooks but I personally find the substitution of autonomous village for tribe to be a vast refinement for the following reason: the terms autonomous village, band, and state are consistently used to refer to institutions that have governance as their primary function while the referents of the term tribe typically do not. There certainly do exist tribes which are about the doing of politics. Historical research of such an institution will typically reveal that it emerged out of colonial administrators’ need to have a formally delimited and vetted group with whom to transact business. Such is the case with those tribes recognized by the BIA as well as with the Montagnards (for which, see Salemink 1991). Correct me if I am wrong, but don’t the Tribal Areas of Pakistan have an analogous history?
All of that to allow me to say that if you are a representative and/or policy maker from a foreign land looking for parties with whom to negotiate, tribes—excepting of course those you know to be of the sort built to interface with colonial administrators—are probably not the best place to look.
Carneiro, Robert L. 1987. “Cross-currents in the theory of state formation.” American Ethnologist 14 (4): 756–70. doi:10.1525/ae.1987.14.4.02a00110.
Fried, Morton H. 1966. “On the concepts of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal society.’” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, ser. 2 28 (4): 527–40.
Hymes, Dell H. 1968. Linguistic problems in defining the concept of ‘tribe.’ In Essays on the problem of tribe, ed. June Helm, 23–48. Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Meeting, American Ethnological Society. Seattle: American Ethnological Society and University of Washington Press. Reprint, Language in use: readings in sociolinguistics, ed. John Baugh and Joel Sherzer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1984, 7–27.
Salemink, Oscar. 1991. Mois and Maquis: the invention and appropriation of Vietnam’s Montagnards from Sabatier to the CIA. In Colonial situations: essays on the contextualization of ethnographic knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking, 243–84. Vol. 7 in History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Service, Elman. 1962. Primitive social organization. An evolutionary perspective. Random House Studies in Anthropology, AS3. New York.