NATO and Tribal Elements in Afghanistan

For the media to portray Afghanistan in a manner easily understood by a wider audience they must inevitably reduce the complexities of the local and tribal relations to broad locations and groupings. For instance, stating that the Pashtuns largely occupy the south of Afghanistan and the north of Pakistan; whilst the Haraza, Aimak, Uzbek, Tajik, and Uzbek occupy the North. This is overly simplistic as shown by this map:

Note the pockets of Pashtun throughout the North (The light green colour if it is hard to see)

(The Pashtun pockets originate from the rule of Amir Abdur Rahman who uprooted many tribal communities with the goal of strengthening the central government and deliberately weakening the tribal system. He was a Pashtun himself but he resettled various Pashtun tribes and subtribes as punishment for rebellion or to use them as counterweights against hostile non-Pashtun tribes or ethnic groups.)

On the one hand, rather than analysing local tribal factors, it is this broad understanding that NATO and Afghan government forces have based their counter-insurgency policy upon. The work of Robert Gonzalez reiterates this understanding as he contends that a misguided focus on the ‘tribal’ features of Afghanistan is drawn from the ‘desperate political situation’ to identify a source of insurgency that may be rapidly resolved – tribes are ‘imagined’ collections of individuals.

Yet, this argument fails to appreciate the patrilineal segmentary lineage systems that operate in these regions for the ‘social structure of communities is based either on the tribe or the locality’ which unites together if faced by an external threat.

On the other hand, the Taliban use their pre-existing knowledge of tribes, subtribes, and clans to convince the tribes to co-opt and recruit local leaders who can convince their men to fight. The Afghan government has only served to deepen and strengthen this tactic through mismanagement, patronage, and corruption of local strongman not necessarily linked to the quam, a unit of identification and solidarity that could be based on kinship, residence, or occupation.

This is combined with an image of the U.S. and NATO that is at its lowest point since 2001 making the mobilisation of tribes on their side more unlikely.

Ergo, the US and NATO considered the Pashtun as a whole and failed to comprehend the vast web of tribes allowing the Taliban insurgency to rise within the population.