Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (35 page)

This social structure means that there can be no suspicion that the male pedigree (often traceable in lineages spanning centuries) is “corrupted” by doubtful paternity. Thus, revenge for sexual misbehavior (rape, adultery, abduction) warrants killing seven members of the offending group and often the “offending” woman. Yet hospitality trumps vengeance: If a group accepts a guest, all must honor him, even if prior grounds justify revenge. That’s one reason American offers of millions for betraying Osama Bin Laden continued to fail.

Afghan hill societies have withstood many would-be conquests and bouts of turmoil by keeping order with Pashtunwali in the absence of central authority and state institutions.
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When seemingly intractable conflicts arise, like repeating cycles of revenge or problems caused by hosting guests and giving sanctuary, rival parties convene councils
(Jirgas)
of elders and third parties to seek solutions through consensus.
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Although the Taliban argue that Sharia always supersedes Pashtunwali, in fact the Taliban’s idiosyncratic version of Sharia incorporates Pashtunwali’s main tenets. For example, in allowing executions for murder or violations of women to be carried out by members of the aggrieved family, state punishment is confounded with personal revenge.

A common view in the West is that the blood feuds and the restriction of women “to the home or the tomb” are intrinsic to the Muslim religion or to the primitiveness of the Pashtun. But anthropologists will tell you that the constant fission and fusion of the tribes, and stringent enforcement of women’s isolation from men, have more to do with the way some societies at the margins of the desert have adapted their social structures to extreme fluctuations in the availability of resources and the intense competition for them. Arabs and Kurds,
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Pashtuns and Pathans,
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Persian Bakhtiaris and Baluchis,
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all share this basic social structure.

This social structure, which resembles a constantly branching tree, but where the branches become ever more entangled through marriage alliances, generates myriad ways of maneuvering for control over women, flocks, land, political allies, and other resources. When resources become scarce and competition intensifies, tribal relationships may contract and the patrilineages begin to tear apart at their branching points—and so the saying: “Me against my brother, brothers against cousins, cousins against the clan, clans against the tribe, the tribes against the world.” These tribal segments, or factions, may then go on to seek out alliances of convenience even with distant and unrelated groups—hence, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” even if the enemies of the moment are from one’s own kin group and the friends are from another.
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A structural corollary to maintaining this flexible system of alliances is the honor-bound duty to harbor the “guest,” whether friend or foe (because any foe is also a potential friend, and vice versa). As Pennell noted, “the relationship between host and guest is inviolable.” He leveraged this fact to get the mullahs, who otherwise would have had his head, to tolerate his medical missionary work: “After having offered us hospitality and broken bread with us, we should be recognized as guests of the Mullah, and any opposition which he might have been contemplating against us would be seen at once by the observant Afghans around to have been laid aside in favour of the reception due to an honoured guest.”
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Here is how anthropologist Thomas Barfield analyzed the internal Taliban debate over what to do with their Qaeda guests shortly after 9/11:

With a nuanced approach that would have done credit to any Pashtun tribal
jirga,
the assembled clerics told Omar that he must indeed protect his guest, but that because a guest should not cause his host problems, Osama should be asked to leave Afghanistan voluntarily as soon as possible. It is notable that the question Omar tabled was not one of
sharia
jurisprudence, but rather an issue of Pashtunwali. Very fittingly, the last major policy decision of the Taliban before they were driven from Afghanistan was based on good customary law standards in which religious law provided only window dressing.
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While Mullah Omar readily gave sanctuary to Bin Laden after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the 2000 bombing of the USS
Cole
focused intense international hostility on the Taliban. In June 2001, Omar declared that Bin Laden had no authority to issue fatwas, confiscated the Qaeda leader’s satellite phone, and put him under armed guard. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that Omar had previously “invited” Bin Laden to move to where he might be easier to control after the Qaeda leader gave an inflammatory interview on CNN in 1997. For their part, a number of jihadi leaders denounced Bin Laden’s association with the “infidel” Taliban, religious deviants “created and controlled by Pakistan” and its intelligence services and thus worthy of excommunication
(takfir).
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Instead of keeping pressure on the Taliban to resolve the issue in ways they could live with, the United States ridiculed their deliberation and bombed them into a closer alliance with Al Qaeda. Pakistani Pashtun then offered sanctuary to their Afghan brethren and guests.

Recently, someone who served with the U.S. Afghan mission for some years asked if I would be willing to help evaluate America’s success in winning hearts and minds. The first thing I asked her was: “Do the Afghans you’re in contact with accept Americans as guests, and do the Americans act as if they were guests?” A bit startled, she answered, “Of course not, we’re here because we have to be.” I then asked, “Do they act as if they are the hosts and masters?” She didn’t respond at first, so I gave her this scenario: “Surely you must have seen or heard about accidents on the road involving a U.S. military vehicle colliding with some Afghan’s donkey-drawn cart. What happened? Do the American military personnel come out of the vehicle and try to help the poor fellow?” Her answer: “Never. They leave the scene, those are the rules of the engagement; any Afghan knows where to find us to lodge a complaint or make a claim.” I told her that I’d bet my bottom dollar that Al Qaeda doesn’t behave that way, because they understand what it means to be a guest, and that’s one good reason why they survive among the Pashtun tribes.

In the summer of 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared: “We and our Afghan allies stand ready to welcome anyone supporting the Taliban who renounces Al Qaeda, lays down their arms, and is willing to participate in the free and open society that is enshrined in the Afghan constitution.”
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To get the tribesmen to lay down arms for a flag that many do not even know represents the country is about as farfetched as getting the National Rifle Association to support a constitutional repeal of Americans’ right to bear arms. Moreover, as Marc Sageman observes, “There’s no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and no Afghans in Al Qaeda.”
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The original alliance between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was largely one of convenience between a poverty-stricken national movement and a transnational cause that brought material help. U.S. pressure on Pakistan to hit the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their current sanctuary birthed the Pakistani Taliban, who forge their own ties to Al Qaeda to undermine the Pakistani state that has attacked them. While some Taliban use the rhetoric of global jihad to inspire their ranks or enlist foreign fighters into their insurgency, they showed no inclination to hit Western interests abroad before 2010. The continued presence of Qaeda remnants in Pakistan, and Pakistani Taliban attacks on the state, including at least three attacks on nuclear facilities,
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warrants concerted action in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan understands this and engages unaligned Taliban against antigovernment and pro-Qaeda Taliban to meet the threat (well aware that all Taliban support insurgency against foreign troops in Afghanistan).

Here, despite U.S. pressure, Pakistan prefers a policy, seasoned by wars, of “respect for the independence and sentiment of the tribes” advised by Lord Curzon: as “we are dealing with an enemy habituated to every form and habit of guerrilla warfare, even if [military action] attended with maximum success, no permanent results can be obtained,” while the Afghan frontier would be “ablaze from one end to the other [causing] an intolerable burden on finances.”
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U.S.-sponsored “reconciliation” may be fatally flawed in demanding that Pashtun hill tribes give up the arms that have kept them independent (or that they join progovernment militia), and support a constitution that values Western-inspired rights and judicial institutions over customary canons and forms of consensus that have sustained the tribes against all enemies. U.S. presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke suggests that victory in Afghanistan is possible if those Taliban who pursue self-interest, rather than “ideology,” can be co-opted with material incentives. But as veteran war correspondent Jason Burke said to me: “Today, the logical thing for the Pashtun conservatives is to stop fighting and get rich through narcotics or Western aid, the latter being much lower risk. But many won’t sell out.”
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Although newer, fair-weather Taliban are deep into the drug trade, as are government allies who help to make it Afghanistan’s main economy, committed veteran Taliban have tended to avoid at least internal trafficking on moral grounds (whereas producing and selling drugs for consumption by infidels is righteous).

Outsiders who do not understand local cultural and group dynamics tend to ride roughshod over values they don’t grasp. To improve women’s status in Pashtun lands may take time (it took women’s suffrage a century in our country), and as the Soviets learned there, not by foreign programs. As we find again and again—in our research in Morocco, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia—helping to materially improve lives will not reduce support for violence, and can even increase it, if people feel such help compromises their most cherished values. And do we really want to build up a society with so-called friendlies or recon-cilables who can turn to or away from us on a dime?

WHEN LESS IS MORE

Al Qaeda is already on the ropes globally, with ever-dwindling financial and popular support and a drastically diminished ability to work with other extremists worldwide, much less command them in major operations. Its lethal agents are being systematically hunted down, while those Muslims whose souls it seeks to save are increasingly revolted by its methods.

Unfortunately, this weakening viral movement that abuses religion may have a new lease on life in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we are pushing the Taliban into its arms. By overestimating the threat from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, we are making it a greater threat to Pakistan and the world. Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan are unlike Iraq, the ancient birthplace of central government, or 1960s Vietnam, where a strong state was backing the Communist insurgents. Afghanistan and Pakistan must be dealt with on their own terms.

We’re winning against Al Qaeda in places where antiterrorism efforts are local and built on the understanding that the ties binding terror networks now are more cultural and familial than political. Take Southeast Asia. The three sets of factors that our research found to be responsible for operations prepared by Jemaah Islamiyah-affiliated extremists—friendship through fighting (Afghan Alumni), kinship and marriage, and school ties and discipleship (madrassah connections)—were also implicitly understood by local security forces and used to track and break up the terrorist networks.
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Similarly, security officials in the Philippines have combined intelligence from American and Australian sources with similar tracking efforts to crack down on their terrorist networks, and as a result most extremist groups are either seeking reconciliation with the government—including the deadly Moro Islamic Liberation Front on the island of Mindanao—or have devolved into kidnap-ping-and-extortion gangs with no ideological focus. The separatist Abu Sayyaf group, once the most feared force in the region, now has no overall spiritual or military leaders, few weapons, and only a hundred or so fighters.
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In the West, Al Qaeda’s main focus, there hasn’t been a successful attack directly commanded by Bin Laden and company since 9/11. The American invasion of Afghanistan devastated Al Qaeda’s core of top personnel and its training camps. In an October 2009 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sageman testified that “seventy-eight percent of all global neo-jihadi terrorist plots in the West in the past five years came from autonomous homegrown groups without any connection, direction or control from al Qaeda Core or its allies [and] refutes claims by some heads of the intelligence community that all Islamist plots in the West can be traced back to the Afghan-Pakistani border.”
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The real threat is homegrown youths who gain inspiration from Bin Laden but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.