Hi Stu,
Well, the Sahlins book Tribesmen is pretty short and there is another in the same series call Pastoralists that would also work. You could read either one of them in a couple of hours with a six-pack .
I do agree that complex ideas need to be simplified depending on the audience, but there is a real difference between simplification and drek. Probably the best model of what I think would work for most people involvced in Afghanistan and/or Iraq would be something similar to the old quicky ethnographies produced by the US Army Special Warfare School at Ft. Bragg. I believe there was an even simpler version produced for the various Pacific Islander groups during WWII in comic book form, but I've never seen any of them.
Marc
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