It's ironical how such concepts of honour are usually being considered by Westerner in a context of violence.

Their purpose is actually to avoid violence to make living in a society more possible. Such concepts of honour and the likewise disrespected primitive justice systems such as known from Old Testament or Sharia are meant to maintain peace through deterrence. They also encourage the solution of conflicts through peaceful agreements including compensation for offences.

It's only the cases were the system fails and actually leads to the harsh consequences that create the bad reputation. It's like judging nuclear deterrence by eventual nuclear war. Not entirely unfair, but not exactly satisfactory either.


The really, really bad problems created by such primitive deterrence systems arise when cultures are being mixed. Cultures represent in large part a system of suppressing violent conflicts. To mix multiple cultures in a random way leads to an inferior suppressive effect and consequently to major problems. We can see the same with non-integrating, non-ethnic_ghetto ('China Town') immigrants from alien cultures in Europe.

The elaborate Western approach towards suppression of violence can only be imposed with enough resources (tricky in Afghanistan) and enough acceptance (tricky when the competing approach is based on religion or other ideology).