As you said the tribal situation is much more complex than Iraq. Even at the district level you can have many groups vying for power, and its like an eternal struggle there, you dont stop and say 'okay, you guys win, we'll try again next year', you dont accept losing the power struggle because over there it really is abject poverty, if you get left out in the cold you're dead.
What we have trouble wrapping our heads around, as westerners, is just how big the world still is to them. The guys from 10k down the road are foreigners to them, you grabroad
your family, MAYBE, just maybe you've grabroad
your village, and then as sort of an abstract background, you've grabroad
your tribe, and then you've grabroad
Pashtuns and Afghanistan as a whole is like an afterthought.
The fundamental flaw of what we're doing is trying to create a country with a huge centralized government. Here's the problem with that: what's going to unite this country?
I mean, you've grabroad
Pashtuns and Dari and Hazara and Tajiks and allthatshit. The Pashtuns are probably the strongest and most likely to rule, but which Pashtuns? The Durrani are the classic rulers but all the rabroad
her ethnicities dont like them right now, and then you've grabroad
dozens of tribes for each ethnic affiliation and shit and its really just mind boggling. How do you unite a country like this?
The only thing these all have in common is ISLAM, and lets be honest, can we really claim to be the party repping for fucking Islam? Against the Taliban (aka the Students (of Islam)). Thats part of the reason its hard for that government to gain credibility (rampant corruption doesn't help, although its an entirely different concept for them, but thats anrabroad
her thread).
So the tribal militias IMO is a good start to a new approach. Stop trying to unite all of these people with some vague concept of Afghanistan (we dont really know what we stand for, but it'll be awesome!). Most people who lived back when Afghanistan was a peaceful, growing country are fucking dead now. To those who remain, Afghanistan means Soviets and Americans and Taliban coming to fuck their shit up.
So now we focus on meeting the smaller objectives, village by village, it can be done. When you start operating bigger, even at the district level, you have multiple parties who want power, and choosing sides results in new enemies, every time, because, like I said above, you dont stop struggling unless you want to die.
