Tribes: Pakistan

The West has never taken the time to truly understand the tribe structure of the Middle East but on to the article...

Until gangs (or lashkars) like my friend’s formed, not even the police dared to stand against the Taliban. Now, just a year later, posses and tribal militias are the backbone of Pakistan’s aggressive new counterinsurgency campaign. The use of the lashkars hopes to mimic the Anbar Awakening in Iraq, where Sunni tribes left the insurgency and banded together with the U.S. military to drive out al-Qaeda. But will feuding gangs accomplish American security goals, or create even nastier problems down the road?

But rather than siding with tribes against the Taliban, Pakistan often tries to play one Taliban faction off another. It distinguishes between “good” and “bad” Taliban: the “good” ones focus on fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the "bad" ones target Pakistani troops and politicians.

In April 2007, a mini-civil war in South Waziristan pitted “good” Taliban fighters from the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe, under the command of Maulvi Nazir, against several hundred “bad” Uzbek militants belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and to al-Qaeda. The Uzbeks had killed scores of Pakistani tribal chiefs. When the fighting began, the Pakistani army sided with the Taliban and provided helicopter- and artillery-fire. The ranking general later told me that he ordered soldiers to strip off their uniforms, don a shalwar kameez, and lead the "good" Taliban to victory. (The incident, while encouraging, highlighted the degree to which Washington and Islamabad’s security priorities are mismatched. Among the rash of recent drone attacks in the tribal areas, several missiles have targeted "good" Talib Maulvi Nazir and his associates in South Waziristan.)

Lashkars in the tribal regions face a significantly greater challenge than did the Sunni tribes in Anbar. Al-Qaeda had undermined tribal authority in Anbar for not even three years when the tribes fought back. The Pashtun tribes of northwestern Pakistan have been undermined for three decades, ever since the arrival of thousands of foreigners in the 1980s for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

No lashkar will achieve swift and decisive victory over the Talibs. But as more and more tribesmen turn against the militants, the comfort zone for Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal areas since 2001 could shrink. And the lashkars could distract the Taliban from fighting U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the strategy could create even more serious problems later. The medium- and long-term effects of the “Awakening” in Iraq are unclear. After all, Anbar’s Sunni tribes are fickle: they switched from al-Qaeda to the United States in a matter of months. Why not switch sides again? New tactics should be treated with caution. The tribal areas are, after all, already rife with weapons and gangs. Men walk to the grocery store with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. Taking sides will have consequences.

And there’s another reason to be wary of comparing Pakistan's tribal areas and Anbar: there are no U.S. soldiers in Pakistan to buttress the embattled tribes. We've seen what happens when posses are left to fight over a lawless space. You get mujahideen factionalism, as in Afghanistan's protracted civil war in the early- and mid-1990s. Eventually, a force bigger and badder than anyone—Mullah Omar’s Taliban—swept in on the beds of Toyota pickups to subdue warring clans, eradicate highways bandits, and establish peace. The Taliban are already partisans in the current struggle in the tribal areas.