Why states fail to understand the tribes

Tribal and religious leaders in southern Afghanistan Image: Mark O’Donald / Wikimedia Commons

Now reduced to impotency, tribal peoples saw the state encroach on their lands, forcing them to settle elsewhere while flooding their areas with settlers of different ethnicities linked to the center. Government officials mocked their customs and language and denied them employment. These minority communities were demonized by the majority. Children at school and even the press and government officials often referred to them as “monkeys without tails,” “reptiles,” or “animals.”

The problem was that many such tribes and communities wished to benefit from globalization but not to compromise their own tribal identity. They also had to contend with central governments more interested in monopolizing globalization’s many benefits—developments in information technology, transport and communications, medicine, trade, and commerce—and in the central government’ s policy of promoting the politics, language, and culture of the dominant group at the center. Little more than crumbs—a cell phone here, a job in a security firm there—fell to the periphery.

The sheer desperation of these communities and the brutality they faced from the center are highlighted in films like Turtles Can Fly (2004). An entire generation of young people on the periphery is growing up in a climate of fear and violence. Both Muslim and non-Muslim leaders who deal with Muslim populations need to keep this demographic reality in mind.

The center and the periphery are engaged in a mutually destructive confrontation across the globe that has been intensified by the war on terror. A clear principle of cause and effect shapes the relationship between the attacking central authority and the resisting tribes. The draconian and often indiscriminate measures enacted by the center’s security agencies and the military provoke the unrestrained retaliation of the desperate periphery.

Attacked one day by a drone strike, the next day by their own central government security forces, the next day by violent groups like the TTP, and the next by tribal rivals, these tribal societies say, “every day is like 9/11 for us.”

It is in the interest of central governments in the Muslim world and their international partners like the United States to understand the people of tribal societies, their leadership, history, culture, their relationship with the center, their social structures, and the role Islam plays in their lives. Without this understanding, the war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory as the current actions and policies, which stress military force over all else, are only exacerbating the conflict.