Indirect and Direct components to strategy for the Long War

[marct]

Hi Eden,

It would seem to me that restoring the tribes' influence - if the social fabric is not yet, in fact, irreparably damaged - would go a long way in stabilizing the country.

I spent about a year and a half working on a database for CIDA that tracked Afghanistan in the early part of the war there. The person who worked with was an Afghan doctor who had grown up in the refugee camps of Pakistan and was now living in Canada. We spent a lot of time talking about what the political structure of the state should be leading up to the Loya Jirga of 2003. We both hoped that it would come out as a moderately strongish central government with the King's grandson as the new King and head of state, but where the tribes would have a lot of power both nationally and locally.

This, of course, is not in line with the stated goals of NATO, the UN, or the US. But a weak central government in Afghanistan has always improved the stability of that country. The many power brokers in Afghanistan have preferred a central government strong enough to take on one of their competitors without being able to dominate the political or military life of the country. Thus the central government can be a source of largesse or protection from foreign/domestic competitors, but doesn't seriously interfere with the power brokers own activities (illegal or not) so long as he stays within certain parameters.

Yup, and it also meant that the central government had to persuade, rather than try to order, the tribes. In some ways, at least in terms of power, the tribes are the equivalent of provincial/state governments in a confederated system.

These two things produced a relatively stable society - if you define 'stable' not as 'violence-free' but as 'self-regulating' - for several centuries until the Marxists took over.

Agreed; it's also why I made that point about thinking of "stability" using the metaphor of homeostasis (from biology) rather than motionlessness or absolute predictability (from Newtonian physics). Anyway, I can't think of a single society that is "violence free", so that is, IMHO, a red herring. What societies have is a variable tolerance for and conventions for the practice of violence.

Our knee-jerk reaction to stabilizing places is to strengthen the central government. I think there are places in the world where extra-governmental or even commercial entities might be better candidates for our assistance.

Well, personally, I believe that there is ample evidence to show that "governments" of any form can and have operated against the best interests of the population they claim to represent / govern. Then again, the same is pretty much true of any form of human organization. As an historical note, "government" in the sense of a centralized authority, is a quit recent invention in species terms - it only goes back about 12,000 years or so. As a species, we have had governance (not government) for most of our history (~2.2 million years if we only go back to H. Erectus and H. Habilis), but this type of governance was based around kinship systems - clans and tribes if you will - and used oral history and tradition as its "laws". I don't find it surprising that in some places in the world, we are "going back" to this type of governance system .