In a previous job as a consultant in Washington, DC, my employer trained me to think fundamentally. By that I mean, rather than looking at immediate events and filtering analysis through a “consciousness point” of history (that is, the moment at which I first became aware of a phenomenon), they trained me to dig deeper toward the fundamentals of change—why is a certain change taking place? What is driving it? What are the processes behind change? It is an exhausting process: the biggest factor in how I looked to the world until that point was watching from my office window as AA77 hit the Pentagon in 2001. Destroying several years of rigid thinking was not simple or painless, and I have not mastered it. But thinking about events in those terms is incredibly illuminating—it helps frame, say, social chaos in terms of how technology is changing personal relationships (explained decently well in this New York article).
Taking a process-level view of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas can be deeply illuminating as well. In a debate I recently enjoyed with William McCallister, one of the architects of the U.S. response to the Anbar Awakening, the contrast between examining surface similarities and fundamental drivers was made rather stark (Péter Marton added some keen insight as well). McCallister believed that, since most tribal societies tend to operate in similar ways, methods learned from coopting the tribal structure in one region could be applied to another. I argued otherwise, that the uniqueness of Pashtun tribal society makes adopting methods for an Arab society problematic at the least. Our debate petered out somewhat, but the difference in viewpoint remained the same throughout.
I’m going to begin looking at the fundamentals of conflict along the Durand Line, in part because it seems there has been so little research into what, exactly, is driving both the increase in speed of conflict cycles in the FATA, but also in part because current attempts to draw theoretical frameworks around these conflict drivers have all come up short. This isn’t going to be an academia-level quality of work, just some sketches of why people there are choosing militancy over accommodation, and if that might have further implications for U.S. policy in the area. In other words, by design or default, it will remain somewhat shallow for our purposes. But I hope it is nevertheless illuminating.
This is hugely important: once again, U.S. policymakers are making pronouncements about the tribal areas, and the nature of those tribes’ relationships with Islamabad. Yet, despite knowing since at least 1979 that they served as a jumping off point for militancy within both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there has been precious little research into what, exactly, those tribes believe and—even more importantly—why they act on certain stimuli. That has to change.
And as always, if you (my dear readers) have any insight into this topic, I would love to hear and quote from you.
This is part of a series examining the fundamentals of conflict around the Durand Line.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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