My last word on bribing Pashtun tribes

Fred Kaplan, one of the first journalists to write approvingly of bribing Pashtun tribes, doubled down on the idea in his Slate column yesterday. Kaplan says he's encouraged by recent reports on the Community Defense Initiative, a U.S. program to arm and fund Afghan tribal militias.

Kevin Drum, a blogger at Mother Jones magazine, reads Kaplan's article and declares tribal militias "pretty much our only hope."

If that's the case, NATO might as well pack up and go home, because the war is definitely unwinnable.

Here's how Kaplan summarizes the bribe-the-tribes strategy:

Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will." Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes--and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well.

The United States' approach of the last seven years--focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan's national army and police force--is wrongheaded and doomed. The tribal approach also has many risks. But the case for it, Gant argues, is this: "Nothing else will work."

First of all, even if this was a good idea, it doesn't seem to be current U.S. policy. Go back and reread Dexter Filkins' article on the tribal militias. You'll see that the U.S. envisions them as a small force complementing the Afghan national army. They might play a role in securing Afghanistan, but Gen. Stanley McChrystal doesn't seem intent on abandoning his plans for a 250,000-man Afghan army.

The U.S. military also keeps making allusions to the Awakening militias in Iraq, which are now under the control of the central government.

So Kaplan's premise is flawed; then again, so is his whole argument. The notion that Afghanistan is defined by rigid tribal identities is simply wrong, as is the belief that a weak central government can exercise any meaningful control over territory populated by well-armed tribal militias.

Consider the Shinwari tribe, the one profiled in Filkins' piece. The Shinwari are a Pashtun tribe centered around Jalalabad and the Khyber Pass; they have traditionally rejected Kabul's Durrani rule. In the 1930s, for example, the Shinwari staged a rebellion against Mohammad Nadir Shah, the then-king of Afghanistan.

The Shinwari have also been linked to the "transportation mafia," the powerful cabal of transportation firms in Pakistan which helped to bankroll the Taliban in the 1990s. (The Taliban provided security in Afghanistan, which reopened the "mafia's" smuggling routes to Iran and Central Asia.)

Kaplan proposes creating a "network" of tribal militias across the country. But even a cursory reading of the Shinwari's history -- or any tribe's history -- suggests that Afghan tribes are chiefly motivated by self-interest. They want to secure their valley, they want to control major transportation routes, they want access to arable land and water. Kaplan doesn't really explain how these tribes, with their competing self-interests, can be drawn into a regional or national "network."

This is a really, really bad idea, and yet we can't seem to banish it from our public discourse. (Earlier complaints about the CDI are here.)

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