All Politics is Tribal

Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local.”  In Pashtun, the language of the majority of the rural tribesmen in Afghanistan, that translates into...I'm getting ahead of myself.  I don't speak Pashtun.  Rosetta Stone's doing it's best, but we're a long way from translating Tip. 

Politics has to start locally.  Things like "grass roots efforts" are the result of that understanding that in order to impact the national political scene, you have to be able to operate first at the local level. 

Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and a great blog called, “It’s the Tribes, Stupid,” has captured similar sentiments. 

In reading a paper written by a MAJ Jim Gant, called “One Tribe at a Time,” which Pressfield has published on his blog, I’m learning that O’Neill was right. 

It’s what every invader/emperor/colonizing entity has learned about Afghanistan over time:  If you don’t turn the hearts and minds of the tribes, you turn nothing. 

Afghanistan has been a tribal nation for thousands of years, and will continue to be a tribal nation for thousands of years after Karzai’s Krab Kache and Korruption Karnival has long since left town. 

See, his family owns a seafood restaurant in Maryland.  I learned that from a Civil Affairs course instructor.  Who, by the way, lived Shaw’s “those who can, do…” credo to the fullest in the finest form of its original intent. 

And Karzai’s government is corrupt.  He may not be, I mean to cast no personal aspersions here, but his government is, at least that's the perception of the people he's trying to govern. 

Plus the K looks funnier than a C, especially since his last name starts with a… “K.” 

I digress.

It’s a tribal place.

Tribal leaders have held sway in this country for generation after generation.

They’ve even suggested putting together a tribal police force, enabling the tribes to…wait for it…police themselves.  This got national coverage in Afghanistan.  

This makes sense.

At the local level you would then have tribal people fully responsible for their own protection, rather than imported Kabul flunkies spending their time extorting and beating the local population because at the end of the day, they’re not from there.

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

The exact opposite.

Working from the top down. 

That’s not how one climbs mountains, builds nations, or bakes cakes.

Wedding cakes…when’s the last time you saw the cake topper suspended in mid-air, then the cake built up underneath it?  Maybe on Ace of Cakes, they do some crazy stuff on that show, but nowhere else.

Why?  

Because it doesn’t make any sense.

If you work within the accepted framework, empowering those systems which are already there, then begin to tie those frameworks into the over-arching framework run by Kabul, eventually, albeit painfully, you get consensus. 

You don’t make a government, and then make the people deal with it.  

As it stands, the villages see a central government that’s ineffective at all levels, but especially the local one, because they want to make politics national.  Which it should be and ultimately is, but at the end of the day? 

Politics is tribal.