The triumph of tribe over nation-state

 

Anyone who's lived or worked in a tribal environment understands what's going on in Afghanistan right now.  To old Africa hands like Lawdog and myself, it's "deja vu all over again", to coin a phrase.

Daniel Greenberg puts it nicely in perspective.

The Afghan army, like its Iraqi counterpart, was a wholly artificial western institution. When faced with a tribal crisis, its members revert to their first duty, which is going to the defense of their tribe.

The Afghan army didn't "surrender". 

Its Pashtun members surrendered to the Taliban who are fellow Pashtuns. Hazaras fled to Iran and took our equipment with them for the benefit of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and any other Shiite terrorists. The Uzbeks fled to Uzbekistan. 

There's no Afghanistan. It's a collection of tribes whose members are loyal to their own. 

The only group invested in Afghanistan, aside from the State Department, are the Pashtuns.  

But the Taliban are a much more effective Pashtun bid for taking over the country than the pathetic shambles of a free and democratic Afghanistan. 

And for those tribes and subtribes who want to resist the Taliban, they'll do so because they oppose that particular tribe by siding with their tribe and the warlords leading the fight. They won't do so while wearing army uniforms or toting around a lot of our equipment which we thought was absolutely vital to a modern armed force, which the locals aren't culturally compatible with, but is not especially useful for raiding tactics, which the locals are quite good at.

The Afghan army didn't surrender. Much of it never existed. The parts that did exist rejoined their tribes and are waiting for the next move which will come as the Taliban overextends itself and gets too deep in bed with the Chinese. 

Our inability to understand this was the problem all along.

We insisted on building up an imaginary military for an imaginary nation. The whole farce collapsed the moment we decamped because there was no longer anything holding it together.

The people we wrongly call the Afghans reverted to who they had been all along before we demanded that they adopt the same political trappings in which we dress our political system. 

Our system works well enough for us, or at least, as Churchill put it, less badly than any other system.

But the Afghans are not Americans. They're not in it for democracy or human rights. What they want is to gain power through their tribe, their subtribe, their family, and their chosen bosses. 

That's what the war was about for 75% of them. It's what the endless war will be about going forward.

Afghanistan is in a perpetual state of tribal warfare. We never understood that and to the extent that we did, we tried to apply solutions that the locals didn't want and weren't especially interested in.

Now that we're gone, the forever war will continue without our overlay of myths and illusions.

There's more at the link.

However, those tribes are now going to be extraordinarily well armed with the latest Western technology - so much so that they'll be able to supply terrorist movements like Al Qaeda or ISIS with as much as they want, courtesy of the US taxpayer.  We left literally tens of billions of dollars' worth of weapons, ammunition, vehicles, aircraft and electronics in Afghanistan, including thermal imaging night sights, anti-tank man-portable missiles, "smart" bombs and missiles, and the like.  The Taliban certainly won't need them for internal use - so guess where they're going to end up?  Uh-huh.  Payback's a bitch.

My "spider sense" for internal terrorism in the USA just got ratcheted up several notches.  It'll be child's play for terrorists to smuggle such weapons across our almost unguarded southern border . . . and then hell's coming to breakfast.

Peter