Monthly Archives: March 2014

Another View of Drone Warfare II

ANOTHER VIEW OF DRONE WARFARE II

By William Urban

Akbar S. Ahmed’s highly praised book, the Thistle and the Drone, tells us that the War on Terror is failing because we have completely misunderstood the problem. Drones can kill people, but they are not effective against ideas. Ahmed says that our misunderstanding of the terrorists’ motivations has led several American administrations astray — the terrorists are motivated much less by Islam than by tribal pride and anger.
This is, he says, much like Scottish resistance to English efforts to break the clan system. The combination of English force and persuasion worked, after a fashion, but more in the Lowlands than in the Highlands. When Scots finally got the right to determine their own future, they voted to have their own parliament, their own soccer team, and God Knows What Else, except that religion has little to do with it. It’s all about ancient tribal identities and loyalties.
These sentiments can be self-destructive. Britain was a world soccer power, but now fields four so-so teams. That loss of prestige parallels Britain’s decline as a force in world politics and economic importance. Other peoples are willing to sacrifice much more in order to be independent and self-sufficient.
The first half of Ahmed’s book is very theoretical. The second half turns very dark. In his opinion all crude efforts to educate or modernize tribal peoples will fail. The “steamroller”, as he calls the forceful methods by which western or westernizing societies crush tribal practices, has so far resulted only in many millions of deaths, even larger numbers of displaced people, and many angry bearded men whom we call terrorists and therefore try to kill with drones.
Ahmed uses more space and more nasty adjectives to denounce America (and especially Barack Obama) than all the other countries put together, even though the total number of deaths by drones is far, far less than the slaughter of minority tribes in Kenya, Sudan, and several other African states; and urbanized, westernized Pakistanis have killed many more of the tribal peoples of the mountains than Obama has. Still, these wars are ours, too, he says, because the leaders of westernizing nations have seized upon the War on Terror to get American money and weapons which they use upon the tribal peoples who object to being subjected majority rule. When the politicians shout “al-Qaida,” we send special forces, drones, and lots of money.
This has caused the tribal peoples to see America behind all their problems and corruption; in their view, we have encouraged their governments to reduce them to look-alike, act-like robots with all the familiar vices of the modern western world, but with more slums and unemployment.
Ahmed’s solution to these problems is to back away from them. President Obama seems to have acted on this when he announced that “Osama bin Laden is dead and al-Qaida is on the run,” but then he had Benghazi. Now the Obama line is that there is a Core al-Qaida and a variety of wantabe local varieties, and that he has beaten the former. If we ignore the rest, they will ignore us. Forget Benghazi, which is now so long ago that who cares?
Ahmed would probably agree in principle. If America can deliver justice and respect, all we have to worry about are Muslims who have become persuaded that we are crusaders out to destroy Islam. But even more important are Muslims who dislike what they see of our society, with its loud music, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, alcoholism, drug addiction, and attacks on religion.
This is something I will want to think about. We know that rural girls who run away to the big city often end up on street corners in short skirts, but that argument could deprive all women of opportunities to get an education, hold a job, and to become self-sufficient. Clan leaders with too much power become tiny tyrants, and ignorant clerics can make you believe that the sun revolves around the earth. Besides, I like central heating, flush toilets, books, a variety of foods, and the ability to travel.
Still, the modern world is often so dysfunctional that western intellectuals dream about how nice it would be to return to the happy days when everything was simpler and no one knew what poverty was. Some like to observe happy primitive peoples in their native environments and don’t want them to escape to the big cities for jobs, entertainment and interesting vices. But more people want variety and change, and some women do not want to have to marry an unbathed elderly uncle or someone they’ve never met.
“Dream on,” is all that I can say to plans to return everyone to an imagined better past, because that is merely an uninformed dream. If someone wants to go live in a tepee in this year’s winter, I have no objection. Just “good luck” on finding some woman who will do all the work while you try to figure out how to get the dead buffalo home. If your values allow you to kill it. And if you can.
I am unwilling to release kidnappers and murderers just because they are carrying out an ancient tradition or revenging old wrongs. Whether it’s the Hatfields and McCoys or street toughs, we have to find ways to make ourselves safe while still allowing those who want to be different to do so in way that do not harm others.
Ahmed calls for specially trained administrators to join with clan leaders and clerics to find ways to made tribal areas peaceful. He advocates using anthropologists who have not been ruined by modern theories to help us understand what is going on, then applying their knowledge. Then put up a sign: Politicians stay out.
This takes us to Ahmed’s last recommendation (which might be his most controversial): Give the tribal peoples their own lands.
If only the world were so simple. Who would get America’s Great Plains, the Sioux or the tribes that were there before the Sioux got the horse in 1790, then thundered out of Minnesota? Then we have the big questions — the Celtic and Germanic migrations, the settlement of the New World, Russians in Siberia, and every other group that has migrated to lands once held by tribal groups.

Review Atlas (March 14, 2014), 4.

Drone Warfare

ANOTHER VIEW OF DRONE WARFARE I

By William Urban

Akbar S. Ahmed currently holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University in Washington DC; earlier he was at the US Naval Academy and the Brookings Institute. He won the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2004 and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Therefore, he cannot be simply dismissed as another American-hating Muslim. He’s not even an Arab, but a Pakistani from the tribal highlands where many American drones have been employed. This tactic, he argues, is not only ineffective, but is counterproductive.
He has seen the effects first-hand. His first job, in 1966, was as a government representative to the highland tribes in Waziristan. He saw local society reflecting three institutions: 1) the tribal chiefs, 2) the local Mullahs, 3) the distant government as represented by local experts (in this case, by himself). The thesis of his book, The Thistle and the Drone, is that tribal societies are like thistles — they are hard to uproot, they stick back hard and they persist — and therefore any attempt to defeat them by assassination is not going to work.
This is a theme I had already been working on. My next book, Wars on the Periphery, deals with exactly such societies and the difficulties that urbanized centers encounter in dealing with them. It is not a new idea, but Ahmed deals with it more thoroughly and with more inside experience than most of the experts in the War on Terror.
All too often city sophisticates, both in the West and in westernizing nations, consider mountain folk stupid. I remember one example from right in the USA. In the summer of 2012 the United States Department of Agriculture praised its North Carolina agents for persuading more citizens to enroll in the food stamp program. Noting that one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but relatively few in the western part of the state, it emphasized the need to break “mountain pride.” Yes, pride in being self-reliant is depriving families of “healthy, nutritious food.”
There is something so bizarre about this that one cannot imagine any administration before Obama’s doing it. Except perhaps the Roosevelt era when the statement, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” became a laugh line.
Of course, the various levels of government usually do make our lives more comfortable and secure. It is hard to imagine private citizens being able to repair city streets or stop drunk drivers from racing down them. Once churches and communities could provide help for everyone in need, and big city political bosses could provide jobs. Those roles haven’t vanished, but our society has changed.
But has it changed so much that we want to take away people’s pride?
That is essentially Ahmed’s message. The tribal people of the world’s mountains and deserts may be poor in possessions, but they are rich in pride and traditions. They can support themselves, and when we freeze because our electricity grid is brought down by snow or terrorists, they will ask, “What is an electricity grid? And why would we want one?”
“Well,” we respond, “without electricity, Japanese television sets (or Chinese), German beer (or the St. Louis and Milwaukee copies), Iowa potato chips, Mexican tortilla chips, and American central heating, you couldn’t have watched the winter Olympics in Russia.”
“Why,” they might ask, “would we want to watch White people play in the snow? I didn’t know, half of the time, what they were doing.”
Hearing this, we might suspect they have sneaked a peak at the coverage.
Experts in modernization, encouraged by hearing this, might conclude that the tribesmen have heard something of the modern world, and therefore suggest that they watch porn.
Which brings us to Ahmed’s second point — tribal customs are very puritanical. First we want their women to uncover their hair, next to learn to drive, then to drive while talking on a cell phone and smoking. In this he agrees with Bernard Lewis, the long-time authority on the Middle East that modern Islamic scholars love to hate, in that the peaceful and compassionate religion of Islam has been hijacked by primitive demagogues.
Thus, both the jihadists and those who look to the Koran to understand the jihadists have misunderstood what is going on. Muslims who kill innocents or put on suicide vests are reflecting ancient primitive tribal customs, not the sophisticated theology of Islam.
There is nothing in the Koran to justify female genital mutilation or honor killings. These ideas grew out of internal Muslim disputes when leaders claimed leadership of Islam by being, as we say in the West, “More Catholic than the Pope.” One way to discredit opponents is to accuse them of being secular or corrupt or un-Islamic.
Some of these leaders are content to maintaining their petty tyrannies in the hills, but some want to reestablish the Caliphate that will supposedly bring in world peace, justice, and morality. But first they have to make themselves supreme over all Muslims, then over the entire world. Both of these themes play themselves out in al-Qaeda’s propaganda. Both can be achieved only by war.
The tactic is terrorism, which pits demands by the oppressed tribes for justice and revenge against the corruption and cowardliness of the West and its Middle Eastern imitators. Westernizing Muslims kill many more tribesmen than Americans do, as recent Pakistani air strikes demonstrated, but the tribes believe that without American money and weapons, those puppets of a foreign culture would quickly be overthrown. In short, the leaders of modernizing states such as Pakistan are as clueless as Barack Obama.
If this is so, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is of little importance. If that were settled by some means we cannot imagine, the contest of city and country would still be with us — and that is what drives jihadist terrorism.
Next week: the dark side of Ahmed’s view of America and the War on Terror.

Review Atlas (March 6, 2014), 4.