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.