Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam is a potentially life-transforming book. It is a book so instantly persuasive and recognizably honest that its findings should be described as obvious -- yet its ideas have never been allowed a foot in the door of post-9/11 U.S. policymaking, and they took me and I expect many others wholly by surprise. It is a book whose insights are reached almost entirely by synthesizing information many of us already half-knew, or quarter-remembered; yet they are insights that -- taken together -- provide a comprehensive reinterpretation not only of the "War on Terror" -- but of modern global history as a whole.
And it is a book, finally, whose conclusions -- though published five years ago now -- have only been borne out since.
Ahmed is a Cambridge-trained anthropologist who formerly served as a political agent for the newly independent Pakistan government in the tribal regions of the west of the country. (He is not unaware of the ironies of being a South Asian academic serving in a post that was created as a part of the structure of British colonial administration; yet a key theme of his book, as we will see, is precisely that the ostensible transition to independence in the mid-20th century was -- for many of the world's tribal peoples in the Global South -- a continuation of the colonial relationship. In all too many ways, the modern postcolonial state simply stepped into the jackboots of the departed masters.)
Writing with a controlled passion and deep indignation that never violates his commitment to fair accounting on all sides, Ahmed's profoundly researched book dispenses with nearly all one's likely expectations. Readers may be struck to find, for instance, in a book-long critique of the War on Terror, surprisingly little mention of the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, which devastated a country already scarred by decades of war and brutal dictatorship. Instead, Ahmed's subjects here are largely the parts of the "War on Terror" which far outlasted the Bush administration, and which many people still regard as its relatively benign or defensible aspects -- the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, and the drone warfare inflicted by the Obama administration and continuing to the present.
To understand these phenomena, Ahmed cuts away not only the fear-mongering "clash of civilizations" narrative about Islam and the West, but most of the other binaries by which historians have tended to interpret the last two centuries of human history. Zooming out to regard the modern world as a whole, Ahmed does not focus on the movement for decolonization or the great power conflicts of the Cold War; still less on any ostensible ideological struggle between capitalism and Communism. Rather, he sees the the War on Terror simply as the latest and in some ways most destructive chapter in a much longer story: that of efforts by urban-based modern central governments to impose direct rule over restive, self-governing and naturally autonomous tribal regions on their periphery.
It is these latter "ungovernable" tribes who are the "thistle" of the book's title -- borrowing an image from Tolstoy's Hadji Murad which has also become -- Ahmed points out -- a symbol of Scottish nationalism (MacDiarmid's "drunk man" spends a book-length poem looking at one, you may recall).
Focusing chiefly on Muslim tribal minorities in Europe, Asia, and Africa, Ahmed shows -- by charting their history of the last two centuries -- that nearly all have faced extreme repression -- if not outright genocide -- first at the hands of European colonial overlords, then by the modern central governments that took their place after decolonization (many of which were governed by dominant or majority ethnic groups with long-standing conflicts with the tribal minorities).
In case after case, the book reveals that efforts to subdue, conquer, oppress, culturally dissolve, forcibly relocate, or even annihilate tribal peoples have proceeded regardless of whether a European or "native" administration was at the helm (native to what? from whose perspective?); regardless of whether the central government was made up of fellow Muslims; and without respect to whether the central government in each case aligned with the U.S. or Soviet side of the Cold War.
However, the United States was not, for all the crimes of its twentieth-century foreign policy, a particular enemy to the aspirations of peripheral tribal peoples for much of that time. Ahmed argues in fact that it was perceived in some parts of the world as a natural ally and friend to their struggles for autonomy from oppressive central governments. These included the efforts of Kurdish peoples in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, as well as the U.S.-backed anti-Soviet "mujahideen" who descended on Afghanistan in the 1980s -- people for whom Ahmed has somewhat more sympathetic understanding than many critics of U.S. foreign policy (though he is not blind to their faults).
The U.S. role changed drastically, however, following 9/11, which placed the U.S. government wholly on the side of the central governments in the region.
Here is where Ahmed's reinterpretation becomes truly radical -- yet entirely obvious and convincing, as soon as it is uttered. Ahmed overthrows the entire paradigm through which the War on Terror has generally been understood, including by many people who would regard themselves as critics of the War on Terror frame, and by people who have been writing long after Bush was out of office. Let's examine it and its flaws in some detail.
This dominant paradigm might be paraphrased as follows: (1) the attacks on 9/11 were carried out by members of an international terrorist network motivated by a fundamentalist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam that has been backed by the Saudi government. (2) Since then, the United States has been engaged in a series of low-level conflicts with offshoots of this terrorist network in various parts of the Muslim world, including by means of ongoing drone warfare. (3) On top of this mostly legitimate struggle against a foreign adversary that murdered thousands of innocent people on U.S. soil, the George W. Bush administration layered other irrelevant long-standing objectives which, however well-intentioned, were ultimately misguided and overweening. These included the objectives of overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and seeking to foment regime-change and a democratic transition in many other parts of the Muslim world.
I suspect if you were to present this paraphrase to any former member of the Obama administration, say, they would agree with every word. Even many in the human rights movement would accept it, who would of course oppose the use of drone assassinations, not to mention the Bush administration's policies of torture or extraordinary rendition. One could argue -- and so many of us did -- about what means were acceptable, justified, or legitimate within this War on Terror, without ever questioning the three fundamental tenets of the narrative given above.
I'd say that I too accepted most of this paradigm, with the possible exception of (3), until reading this book. Even though that last one, (3), made me gag, I'm not sure that is the same thing as confidently believing that it is not in fact the case. I did, throughout the last few decades, occasionally raise a peep against the Bush-was-trying-to-promote-democracy-and-just-went-about-it-the-wrong-way-or-maybe-tried-too-hard version of events. Democracy? I said. What about Uzbekistan? What about Mubarak? What about Musharraf? Didn't Bush seem to get along with dictators just great when it suited him?
It is in the nature of paradigms, however, to accept a certain number of exceptions to their rule without being overthrown. And even to me, the examples I could raise against (3) felt somewhat niggling. This is how paradigms preserve themselves. They admit exceptions, but only as one-offs. They become mere incidents, rather than a pattern.
It is really only from reading Ahmed's book that I was confronted with a narrative encompassing enough, comprehensively-argued enough, that these objections finally shook themselves into a pattern. He has presented a genuinely different paradigm. One that shows us that not only is (3) false, but so are (1) and (2). The entire edifice of ideology on which the "War on Terror" has been conducted across three administrations is, it would seem, built on sand.
To start with (1), Ahmed shows that the 9/11 attackers were not in fact representatives of a vastly larger apparatus, nor could their motives and ideology plausibly be linked back to Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalism -- no matter how many times conventional narratives of Al Qaeda's history begin with Sayyid Qutb and draw specious links to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni fundamentalist and Islamist movements.
In reality, Ahmed argues, Bin Laden and most of the other attackers were members of the Asir tribe of Saudi Arabia, who have been involved in a long struggle with the Sa'ud tribe that dominated the modern state in the Arabian peninsula as a result of their positioning with the outgoing British colonial power. Several of the attackers were fairly non-religious; all were opposed to the Saudi government and its ruling ideology; and Bin Laden himself, as Ahmed notes, acknowledged that in many ways the M.O. of the attacks was inimical to formal Islamic teaching, whether of the Wahhabi or any other variety-- as this teaching includes bans on killing civilians and on suicide (whether in the course of a kamikaze attack or otherwise).
The actions of Bin Laden and the other 9/11 conspirators and attackers could more plausibly be linked to tribal codes of honor, Ahmed argues, than to doctrinal Islam, which are profoundly different things. Indeed, these codes are often explicitly at odds with doctrinal Islam -- such as the imperative to take revenge (which Islam forbids, as Ahmed points out, as private revenge undermines the rule of law under Sharia). Ahmed notes that many customs still practiced in tribal areas of the Muslim world are forbidden under doctrinal Islam, such as female genital mutilation, and the tension -- even polarized conflict -- between clerical/doctrinal Islam and what he calls "tribal Islam" is one of the oldest and most obvious facts about the region, familiar to anyone who had bothered to read some ethnographies of the region where they would shortly be making war.
It would be a grave mistake, however, to interpret Ahmed as an apologist for doctrinal Islam. He is not trying to separate a putatively "good" clerical religion, which forbids the slaughter of innocents, from a "bad" tribal ethic that allows for bloody revenge-taking. Rather, Ahmed sees much to admire in the tribal code of honor, and urges that any negotiation with the tribes should work within the framework of this code, rather than seeking to overthrow it. If Bin Laden's murder of thousands of innocent people can more plausibly be linked to a tribal ethic of vendetta than to a properly Islamic one, Ahmed argues, it is nevertheless a "mutation" of the tribal ethic, rather than a straightforward application of it.
The tribal societies that have long existed on the periphery of the Muslim world, Ahmed argues, developed a code that is remarkably consistent across them, and which has allowed them to manage social conflict and survive in often hostile settings for centuries -- if not millennia. While the code of honor does include a mandate to take revenge for wrongs one's own clan has suffered -- often by means of a brutal standard of "an eye for an eye" -- this imperative could be negotiated among tribal elders in order to reach a peaceful settlement. And, where this was not possible, the revenge was still supposed to be "proportionate," in however rough a sense.
What has happened in recent years, Ahmed tells us, is that many of these tribal societies have been so squeezed by the forces of globalization and their own central government's efforts to assert direct rule over them and incorporate them into the modern state and economy, that their own internal system of navigating conflicts has broken down. Without elders and other respected sources of tribal authority to provide a check, the revenge-imperative has mutated -- with alienated young people often turning it precisely against the traditional sources of authority in the tribe (elders, clerics, and others) who might previously have channeled it in ways less destructive of social norms.
This, in Ahmed's view, is the reason for the rise of suicide bombings and other terrorist atrocities in so many areas of the world were a tribal periphery is engaged in conflict with its central government -- atrocities that in many cases, due to their lack of proportionality and their targeting of the weak and helpless (including children), violate the traditional tribal ethic as surely as they do the prohibitions of Islam.
As much as these innumerable struggles among tribal peoples resemble one another and obey a similar pattern, however, they are not -- Ahmed insists -- linked together in a shared "terrorist network" with any unified goal of overthrowing the United States.
Here is where he takes aim at point (2) of the dominant paradigm described above. What is actually going on, he plausibly suggests, is that most of the organizations engaged in suicide bombings, mass kidnapping, and other atrocities -- whether in Somalia (al-Shabab), Nigeria (Boko Haram), etc. -- are engaged in long-standing conflicts with their central governments, who have also inflicted similar if not worse atrocities on them. As their traditional societies have broken down and their conventional means of negotiating conflict and revenge-taking have dissolved in the melt of modernity, they have resorted to increasingly desperate and horrific measures.
In each case, their goal is to achieve relative autonomy and end the oppression that has been inflicted on them as tribal minorities by the central government. Even when some of these groups label themselves as Al Qaeda, they have little contact with one another, and certainly are not united by any global apocalyptic agenda.
In his effort to understand the motivations of peripheral tribal peoples, and to make sense of (though explicitly not to excuse) the violence in which some of their members are currently engaged, Ahmed discovers that he is not well served by virtually any recent scholarly or popular treatment of the "War on Terror," nor much of modern political theory. Instead, he looks back all the way to the medieval Islamic theorist Ibn Khaldun, who described in his Muqaddimah a cyclical pattern of history, in which a relatively egalitarian, autonomous, free, nomadic tribal people -- who practice a more austere and absolutist ethic -- come into conflict with a stratified, relativistic, cosmopolitan, and urban society represented by the central government.
While, from the perspective of the urban center, the tribal periphery's code of honor is often seen as cruel, barbaric, and dangerous, there is also within this code -- Ahmed argues -- a profound strain of chivalry. Running across nearly every tribal society he researches in this book is a belief that a man's honor is best displayed in ensuring justice and providing shelter for the weak. An absolute and inviolable ethic of hospitality results of this, and it is a trait that comes up time and again in Ahmed's account. Whether it is Albanian tribesmen who harbored Jews from the Nazis or the morally problematic instances of tribal leaders refusing to hand over people implicated in violent acts to government authorities, Ahmed's notes that most tribal honor systems recognize an absolute prohibition against turning someone away who has come to one's home seeking refuge.
Ahmed's point in alluding to Ibn Khaldun's pattern of urban and tribal conflict is not to suggest that one way of life is better than the other -- the tribal periphery and the urban center both embody certain values that serve legitimate human needs and make worthy contributions to human society. When they can tolerate and coexist with one another, we all can benefit from the sort of wisdom that can only be attained through the persistence of radically different ways of life in the world.
Disaster arises, however, when one of the two groups and its representative value system seeks to assert total dominance over the other. And in modern history, with the full force of modern weapons and technology at its command, it is the urban center -- represented by powerful central governments -- that has been able to pursue this dominance without a meaningful check.
Though Ahmed refers to Khaldun as one source of his framework, he notes that the Western literary and political tradition is also not devoid of respect for the tribal ethic. He points to passages from the U.S. Founding Fathers that argue for peaceful coexistence with Native American nations (values to which their successors obviously did not live up); he notes Benjamin Franklin's call for the United States to model itself on the Iroquois Confederacy and its tried-and-true methods of negotiating dissension and conflict among multiple interests and kin groups.
I would add that Machiavelli's Discourses, as I recall, in some ways also offers a thesis very similar to that of Ibn Khaldun. He too portrays self-governing tribal societies as a source of an egalitarian and freedom-loving ethic that is perpetually in danger of being forgotten by the members of urban republics who -- as they grow more comfortable and take their liberty for granted, become vulnerable to succumbing to the allure of dictatorial rulers. The passage in Tolstoy (I forget where it occurs) of the Cossack who saves the man from drowning; Ilya Repin's unforgettable depiction of a tribal people's life-loving freedom and defiance of tyranny in his painting, the "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire" -- these too might be cited as examples of writers and artists from the "center" who have recognized the virtues of the periphery.
I also see some of this respect for the tribal ethic even in the Romantic notion of the so-called "noble savage." While often rightly pilloried today as a sentimental and belittling view of tribal societies than did nothing to prevent the genocides being perpetrated against them, Ahmed's account of the contemporary arrogance of central governments and the violence it justifies (including the violence being inflicted by the U.S. military) suggests that it may be a bolder stance than people think for "central" writers to attribute anything of value to the tribal periphery.
Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," for one, reads today as an uneasily mixed effort to -- on the one hand -- present a sympathetic ethnography and heroic epic about Native peoples, while -- on the other -- ultimately blaming the victims of the coming genocides (Longfellow attributes an insufferably twee "prophecy" to his Hiawatha, for instance, about the arrival of Europeans with the power to make industry and prosperity bloom at their feet, if only his people will provide them a kind welcome).
Yet after reading Ahmed's book, Longfellow's description of Hiawatha's ethic of unconditional hospitality, for instance, rings more true than it does as a sentimental idealization. In the poem's unmistakable trochaic meter, he describes Hiawatha's family's response to the arrival of a pair of rapacious ghosts, who proceed to help themselves to the family's board:
Never once had Laughing Water
Shown resentment at the outrage.
All had they endured in silence,
That the rights of guest and stranger,
That the virtue of free-giving,
By a look might not be lessened,
By a word might not be broken.
Time and again in Ahmed's book, he shows how -- had U.S. officials developed any respect for the tribal ethic; had they shown any understanding of the value systems of the places in which they were suddenly conducting war -- they might have negotiated conflicts within this code of honor and its notions of decency, chivalry, and hospitality.
He notes, for instance, that the refusal of Afghan tribal leaders to hand over Osama Bin Laden to U.S. authorities is explicable more by the tribal code of absolute and unconditional hospitality than by any ideological network linked together with a shared commitment to violent jihad against the United States. Ahmed provides examples from his own career as a political administrator in Waziristan of instances in which the release of criminal actors from tribal territories could be successfully negotiated, through a sympathetic and deep ethnographic understanding of the tribal code of honor and a willingness to act within its terms.
All of this suggests the chilling conclusion that the United States might have been able to negotiate a bloodless surrender of the architect of the 9/11 attacks, had it relied on knowledge and understanding rather than military hardware. It suggests that -- having obtained Osama Bin Laden -- there would have been little if any "international terrorist network" beyond him and a few close followers to hunt down and destroy. It suggests that the United States could have achieved its supposed objectives in the "War on Terror" without deploying a single drone or troop carrier. It means, most fundamentally, that the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed in the name of this war might never have been lost.
Why did the United States not take this route? Perhaps because it was too ignorant of the people with whom it was interacting. Why then didn't it spend the time to get to know them?
Perhaps because this "War on Terror" was never primarily about ensuring that the people who committed the 9/11 atrocities were brought to justice. Perhaps because it was initiated in a sort of blind rage by a nation that suddenly felt themselves to be more powerless and insecure than they had realized. Perhaps because it was undertaken in a spirit of bloody revenge; because it was itself a mutation of the principle of an "eye for an eye."
In which case, the United States has all the less justification for misunderstanding how a tribal ethic of revenge can mutate. We have witnessed it in ourselves. As Ahmed notes, toward the end of his book, "This study [...] provides irrefutable evidence of the strength of primeval emotions in societies today and the weakness of modern political thought with its ideas about democracy, civil liberties, and human rights in checking the violence and corruption of the state." (p. 358).
In heartbreaking detail, Ahmed documents how U.S. policies have wreaked inexpressible violence on tribal societies in recent years. He shows that this goes far beyond occasional civilian casualties who are "accidentally" caught in explosions aimed at otherwise "legitimate targets." Rather, whole tribal peoples have been cast as presumptively "terrorist." In tribal areas of Pakistan, for instance -- drones are a 24-hour a day presence, hovering in the air, possibly conducting "surveillance," possibly poised to annihilate virtually anyone in the vicinity, with U.S. drone operators back home referring to their victims as "bug-splats." The reasons why some are targeted and killed are wholly opaque to the people in these communities, who as a result live each day with the threat of extermination by unseen, distant, and unaccountable hands.
The question of which tribes and peoples get designated as potential "terrorist havens" -- and therefore slated for drone strikes -- has little to do with any "global terrorist network" or "international Al Qaeda network" -- since such a thing does not meaningfully exist (at least not with the degree of power and coordination that Western analysts have attributed to it). Rather, Ahmed argues, the U.S. government has since 9/11 taken its cues as to where the "terrorist hotspots" are to be found from the advice of authoritarian central governments -- who have their own reasons to wish to crush tribal peripheries, with whom they have in many cases been immersed in long-standing conflicts, and who have seen in the "War on Terror" an opportunity to enlist U.S. funds and support in order to do so.
This is the sense, then, in which point (3) of the dominant paradigm is not just wrong, it is dead wrong. Like points (1) and (2) it is not just in need of slight correction, it is the precise opposite of the truth. The United States' policies across the last three administrations (and I believe that Ahmed's theses all still apply today, even though he was writing before Trump) have consistently aligned with the goals of repressive central governments, and not with the aspirations for democracy and autonomy of any of their subject populations.
Obviously, private motivations are unknowable, whether those of George Bush or of anyone else. But at the level of the real consequences of people's actions, we can say with certainty that from Bush on, U.S. administrations have consistently empowered rather than undermined authoritarian regimes throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, in the name of "fighting terror."
This new, or at least strengthened, partnership between authoritarian central governments and the United States, Ahmed shows, bore its most evil fruit in the program of extraordinary rendition, which created a network of secret prisons throughout the world through which U.S. officials -- when not committing torture themselves directly -- could place prisoners in the hands of despotic governments with the intent that they would be tortured there. This program included cooperating with Chinese authorities in the torture, intimidation, and indefinite detention of Uighur "suspects" in Guantanamo Bay, feeding people into Muammar Qaddafi's secret prisons in Libya, disappearing innocent travelers in Pakistan, and numerous similar atrocities.
Ahmed's accounts of the individual people caught up and vanished inside this system are some of the most heart-rending and disturbing parts of the book.
In addition to extraordinary rendition, however -- and lasting beyond the end of the Bush administration -- the U.S. government has also tactically aligned itself with -- and provided military support to -- a seemingly endless list of authoritarian governments engaged in long-running conflicts with peripheral tribal peoples who -- usually because they were Muslims, and for no better reason -- could be portrayed to U.S. officials as likely "terrorist havens."
These included the warming relationship between Bush and Putin around the bloody Second Chechen War (remember the era when the U.S. president looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul?); Bush and Obama's strategic partnerships with the dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov -- known for boiling dissidents alive; Bush and Obama's alliance with the government of Ethiopia in its repressive conflict with various tribal peoples in the region, including the Oromo; warming relations with the increasingly authoritarian Turkey in its conflict with the PKK; not to mention the more usual suspects: the U.S.'s close ties to the ruling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the military government of Pakistan, etc.
This dynamic has been so global in reach, in fact, that -- Ahmed demonstrates -- even the government of Cambodia could frame repressive measures against members of its Cham minority community (who are among the groups particularly targeted by the genocidal former Khmer Rouge regime) in a "War on Terror" rhetoric that won it approval from the FBI. Likewise, the Burmese government could attempt to place its relentless oppression of the Rohingya minority in a "War on Terror" framework -- a process abetted, Ahmed shows, by the work of several irresponsible Western journalists.
At the close of his book and this litany of horrors, Ahmed offers an impassioned cry from the heart to the world's nations to respect human rights and to seek with knowledge and sympathy to understand other societies and their ways of life, rather than to destroy them. It is a profoundly moving end to a work of great humanity and scholarship.
Within his plea, however, is also a warning. He notes that many of the tribal peoples with whom his study is concerned have already been the victims of genocide or attempted genocide -- in some cases, quite recently. He warns that the groundwork for genocide against many of them, at the hands of their central governments, may already have been laid.
Since this book was published in 2013, these warnings have in every instance been chillingly borne out. In case after case that Ahmed examines, the situation has gotten even worse, now that five years have elapsed.
The Burmese government has escalated its violence against the Rohingya, including in orchestrated military acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The Chinese government, whose relations to the Muslim Uighur people on its Western periphery Ahmed examines in some detail, has erected an apparatus of surveillance and repression against them that is in some ways among the most extensive in history. This includes a network of "reeducation camps" in Xinjiang province believed to imprison between half a million and a million people, as well as a totalitarian program of "home stays" in which a "sibling" is assigned by the state to live with a Uighur family and monitor them for signs of ideological deviation (a program that puts a new meaning to the term "Big Brother").
And in Yemen, which was long the theater of the United States' illegal drone assassination program, the situation has deteriorated still further due to a U.S.-supported Saudi-led air war that has devastating the country, contributing to famine and disease that have left in their wake the world's largest contemporary humanitarian crisis.
But how about in the United States? Have we reassessed our recent actions? Have we taken heed of the book's warning, in the five years since it was published, and decided to pursue a foreign policy more informed by knowledge and sympathy than by military technology?
Long before Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump gave the term its current valence, Ahmed issues us a warning about the tendency in the American character signified by the words "zero tolerance."
"[T]he phrase," writes Ahmed, "exposed a predatory strain in American society. It was precisely to check this impulse that the perceptive Founding Fathers outlined a vision of society based in knowledge, justice, civility, and respect for all religions that formed its pluralist identity. The tension between American predatory and pluralist identity provides the dynamic propelling history after 9/11." (p. 258).
From the perspective of 2018, it is all too easy to see which side is winning out at present. The predatory tendency "is in the saddle, and rides mankind," to borrow a phrase from Emerson. Ahmed's book has shown how profoundly U.S. human rights commitments deteriorated under Bush and Obama. And with Trump, we have a president who expressly repudiates and shreds these commitments. Trump's detestation of human rights is palpable in both his words and actions -- whether these take the form of implementing a "Muslim Ban" or seeking to close the border to asylum-seekers, encouraging police brutality and defending torture, or doubling down on the worst aspects of U.S. foreign policy.
Ahmed, who -- among his many virtues -- is also one of the most humane commentators I have come across in recent times -- would still not be convinced, I take it, that the predatory tendency has permanently won out over the other elements of the American identity. I hope that before another five years have been lost, we can do something more to justify that faith, and to revive the "pluralist identity" within our national ethos.
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