My friend Jeb Koogler and I co-wrote an op-ed in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor, titled, “Myths in Al Qaeda’s ‘home’.” This matters tremendously as we ponder what to do (if anything) about the latest round of peace talks. A brief excerpt of our argument:
Given the growing reach of FATA-affiliated militants, it is becoming clear that developments in the tribal areas are central to NATO’s success in Afghanistan, as well as an important factor in the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan and the security of both Europe and the United States. Yet many Western policymakers and pundits misread current events, espousing views and prescribing policies that are based more on stereotypes than on a solid grasp of the region’s history and culture.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Pakistani Taliban pose a unique and insurmountable threat, that the Pashtuns are the problem, that the tribal areas are lawless and chaotic, and that the targeted assassinations are an effective deterrent against Islamic militancy. But none of these assertions are accurate.
Although the conventional thinking holds that the Pakistani Taliban and their leader Baitullah Mehsud are a formidable and unprecedented threat to the region, the movement is neither historically unique nor overwhelmingly powerful.
And so on (read the whole thing, natch). I anticipate many will quibble with our argument over targeted assassinations; I welcome any such discussion, so long as it’s kept civil.
Update: Here is another example of how perception can matter tremendously, and how pitiful U.S. planning has been in the area. It takes nine paragraphs of Eric Schmitt quoting a press conference until he quotes anonymous officials urging caution that the problem isn’t quite as bad as it was sold to the media. He then quotes anonymous officials in Pakistan who complain that things are just harder to do without a friendly dictator to bark orders at. Finally, in the last paragraph of a two-page story, he quotes another anonymous official who complains that U.S. relations with Pakistan are “toxic.”
Why is that, do you think? Could it be because the current civilian government doesn’t like that we supported the country’s military dictator through several rounds of stolen elections, the imposition of martial law and the cancellation of the country’s civil liberties? That, after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, we supported him cancelling free press and arresting lawyers who were protesting for the reinstatement of the judicial system, instead of going after Baitullah Mehsud’s group?
It should be no surprise relations with Pakistan are tense. We are dealing with a popularly elected government that is at least somewhat in tune with its generally poor and generally uneducated population, and is not a disconnected, whiskey-swilling, Oxford-educated dictator. Instead of bothering to learn how we can make U.S. policy congruous with Pakistan’s needs and problems over the past eight years, we just short-cut our way through using an autocracy… and now complain viciously when it is deposed and democracy is restored and we have to actually argue our case. Like it or not, much of the world does not view our cause as self-evidently good and just and righteous—we need to argue that it is so. That we haven’t bothered so speaks legions about how we view the people who live in the areas we invade.
In other words, we are our own worst enemies.
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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{ 2 comments }
I read your op-ed and found it pretty strong. Here are some comments I felt compelled to make:
{You Wrote}
1.“FATA’s history shows many charismatic, Islamic fundamentalist tribal leaders waging war against foreign powers – and none of them successfully. In 1672, Khushal Khan Khattak led a rebellion against the Mughal emperor, but was undermined as his tribal alliance crumbled. In 1936, the Faqir of Ipi led an insurgency against the British…”
{My Comments}
First, to use the term “Islamic fundamentalist” in reference to Khushal Khattak is an indication of you guys knowing something that no one else does. Or at least I and a few other s don’t. To me, he was more of an ethno-romantic. Picture some of the ANP leaders, say Asfandyar Wali, holding a sword while riding a horse and chanting poetry.
Next, it is a bit too curious to look at the current insurgency/militancy in the tribal areas through such deep historic perspective as that going all the way back to Khushal Khattak (17th century!!!) and the Faqir of Ipi. One sober prophet of perceptiveness, Nietzsche, has a very thoughtful essay on how to go about the role of history in life—On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life—and there he warns explicitly against monumentalizing events or characters from history by detaching them from their contexts. Yes there was Khushal Khan, and the Faqir or Ipi, but that really doesn’t mean a trend. There was about a three hundred years long gap between them. To me, your reference to the historical suggests there is such a trend and one ought to be considerate of it. Not really. Both those insurrections were in response to direct rule of their lands, and by some accounts both were triggered by complications around, and abuse of, women… It is waste trying to contextualize the behaviors of Faqir Mohamamd and Mangal Bagh in Khushal Khan’s poems or the very few and romantic accounts of the Faqir of Ipi. And if history is to be invoked in order to keep a perspective on why there is a Baitullah Mehsud or Mullah Omar-Pakistani today, then let us look at the developments in these areas starting in 1970s. It is close enough, and documented enough, for us—you and I and the few others concerned with this saga—to understand.
{You Wrote}
2.“Furthermore, although Pashtunwali – the unwritten code of conduct similar to medieval chivalry – receives much attention for being capricious and violent, it is nonetheless a stable method of self-rule that has long governed the area.”
{My Comments}
And you could not fight the temptation to throw that P. word (Pashtunwali) there since the article was somewhat about Pushtoons. How does an unwritten ‘CODE OF CONDUCT’ become a ‘STABLE’ method of self-rule?
There is another set of codes and rules that have actually both governed and remained stable in that area—for real and not in the imagination of theorists trying to explain chaos. The 40 FCR.
{You Wrote}
3. “Although the conventional thinking holds that the Pakistani Taliban and their leader Baitullah Mehsud are a formidable and unprecedented threat to the region, the movement is neither historically unique nor overwhelmingly powerful.”
{My Comments}
Perhaps not so overwhelmingly powerful—but believe me they can really overwhelm with their lethalness. They have proven to have a sustainable capacity of seducing young man with the promise of seventy virgins, or even immortality despite blowing fucking—excuse my language—loads of explosives on their chests. They are historically unique because the context they are in is unique. If I start laying out the context, it will be preaching to the choir. Just consult Ahmad Rashid’s Decent into Chaos.
—I will return with a response to the targeted assassinations bit of your article. If I forget, I don’t mind a reminder if you are curious.
Qumandan, thanks for the feedback!
I think a general response to much of what you wrote is, “we had limited space.” There is a ton of nuance to what we were trying to argue that simply had to be cut in the interest of fitting on the newspaper page. That being said, I think your comments are good ones, so let me see if I can respond.
About Khattak. The dynamic I wanted to get at in bringing him up was the way in which Auranzeb eventually undermined him: through the manipulation of tribal rivalries (at least according to the histories I’ve read, which were written by Europeans, so I admit there might be some biases there). In other words, military confrontation did not stop the tribal uprising, but rather a keen knowledge of the local political dynamic. I’d say this is reflected pretty well in some of Khattak’s almost amusingly vicious anti-Pathan poetry (like when he calls the Mohmands no better than dogs and the Afridi no better than Mohmands). While I think you’re right that calling him Islamist is a bit of a stretch, he still fought in the name of Islam — and again, space considerations required perhaps an excess of brevity.
About filtering through history… this isn’t meant to say that history is the only factor determining the situation in the FATA today, but rather to highlight that historically methods other than what the U.S. is using — military strikes — have been more effective in quelling tribal uprisings amongst the Pashtuns. That was the idea we were trying to get at, not that the Pashtuns are still simmering with hatred because the British did something in 1888 (I’m going to be posting soon on the problems of filtering everything through badal).
Ahh, pashtunwali. It is an abused concept, used to needlessly exoticize the Pashtuns while explaining away barbarity. I recognize it is unwritten, extremely fluid, situationally dependent, and extremely selectively applied. However, concepts like the jirga are a part of it, and these offer non-violent solutions and reconciliations to honor violations. Even if they’re not non-violent, one thing the British remarked on was how sanguine many Pashtuns can be about a community-determined death penalty. In other words, this is more saying they have a community system of justice, even if it is not officially codified and institutionalized the way it would be in the West, and it is important to recognize that before we write them off, Stanley Kurtz-style, as bloodthirsty suicide monkeys.
And the FCR governs their relations with the outside world, I thought?
The last bit about Mehsud: there is no doubt he is a serious problem. Jeb and I were not trying to argue that nothing should be done to counter his group, merely that we need to take a sober look at what it is, what it can do, and whether or not it’s a big deal. From what I’ve seen, something as simple as providing non-Saudi-funded madrassa education for these young Pashtun boys could go an enormous way toward breaking the cycle of militant training. There are other lessons from history, such as aggressively marginalizing him politically and tribally, that can also go a long way toward decreasing his deadliness. But I just don’t see how lobbing hellfire missiles or artillery shells across the border really addresses the issue.
I haven’t read Rashid’s latest book, but his last one was not very good. Taliban was a good starting point for studying that group, but his book on Central Asia was way to shallow, biased, and racist for my tastes (esp. the bit about Uzbeks selling Kyrgyz baby meat… seriously, come on).