It's the Tribes (merged thread)

**Tom Odom** · 10-11-2006

Good post and good read. I would say he is half right--it is tribal and it is also religious, although the Shia-Sunni divide is in many ways tribal in its origin, the Shia seeking succession via "blood" or tribal lines. In his defense, he does state this with the critical sentence

"The enemy is tribalism articulated in terms of religion."

but he fails to follow up on the thought, which is really essential to understanding the AO.

The best sentence in this entire article is

"you can't sell "freedom" to tribesmen any more than you can sell "democracy."

It's funny (sad funny not ha ha funny) that this same article could be titled It's the Clans, Stupid, dated Oct 1992 (3) and we could be discussing Somalia.

Best

Tom

**Ray Levesque** · 10-11-2006

If you haven't seen it yet you may want to take a look at a new book out this year:

Shultz, Richard H., and Andrea J. Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 316 pp.

The strength of this book is its attempt to lay out a framework for analyzing tribal-based insurgents, terrorists, and militias in layman's terms. It presents a methodology for militarily analyzing how and why tribal-based groups fight.

They recommend the following criteria as a substitute for traditional Military Capabilities Analysis: the tribe's concept of warfare; its organization and command and control; its areas of operations; the types and targets of its operations; its constraints and limitations; and the role of outside actors. The authors make their argument by first discussing the differences between the western way of war and "primitive warfare," and then assessing the way wars have evolved since the end of the cold war.

It's a pretty good food for thought book.

Ray