|
 he
hoped for early collapse of the Taliban has not materialized. That
prompts some realistic reflections on the nature of our enemy. The
Taliban are Pashtuns, and Pashtuns — the dominant ethnic group
in Afghanistan — are not like us. The Pashtuns can be —
and have been — defeated by outsiders, but only with difficulty
and only by facing the truth of who they are.
Not since the
ancient Spartans has the world seen a people more fitted for war
than the Pashtuns. The Spartans trained their boys from birth to
be soldiers — to show courage and obedience, to endure pain,
discomfort, and deprivation. To create their society of warriors,
the Spartans did everything in their power to collapse the difference
between the individual and the state. Privacy was sacrificed, meals
were taken in common, luxury was prohibited, and the law allowed
and even encouraged the Spartans to kill their slaves (by whom they
were outnumbered) — to keep those slaves under control, and
to build the courage and fortitude of the Spartans themselves.
Like the Spartans,
the Pashtun are trained as warriors from birth. But the technique
is not collectivist. Although the Pashtun are powerfully constrained
by kinship and custom, in an important sense, a Pashtun boy is raised
in a state of nature — forced to learn toughness, and self-reliance
in a world self-consciously understood as violent, deceitful, and
cruel. A Pashtun boy is actively encouraged to respond to the harshness
of his world by himself becoming violent, deceitful, and cruel.
And although the severity of Pashtun life is moderated by an ideal
of friendship, and by the famous Pashtun code of honor, what emerges
out of a Pashtun's early training is an almost Hobbesian society
— Hobbes with a Kalashnikov — in which every man is ready
to stand alone against the world. It is hardly surprising that the
Taliban have refused to collapse under the weight of our bombing.
We have to be realistic about what will be required in order to
subdue the Taliban, and that realism must stem from an understanding
of who the Pashtun are.
Charles Lindholm,
an anthropologist at Boston University, has written an important
but little-known account of Pashtun life in Northern Pakistan (which
is all but indistinguishable from Pashtun life in Afghanistan).
In Generosity
and Jealousy, Lindholm describes the rearing of Pashtun
boys and girls — particularly boys — and the picture Lindholm
paints will surprise, puzzle, and distress most Americans.
The Pashtun
unhesitatingly beat their children — slapping them hard across
the face simply for stumbling or bumping into something. For coming
home late, spilling tea, or for almost any other reason, a Pashtun
child may find himself tied up and hung from the rafters of the
house. Not only do adults see nothing wrong with publicly beating
a child, they freely show pleasure in doing so. Children are encouraged
to beat each other as well. Lindholm gives the example of a six-year-old
girl who spilled a bowl of curd. Her father punished her by making
her do deep-knee bends while holding her ears until she collapsed.
"He then asked her elder siblings to kick her, which they did
with gusto." The story itself was told to Lindholm with pride
and glee, much as are stories of Pashtun wife beating (and by the
way, Pashtun wives give almost as good as they get).
It might seem
odd to mete out such severe punishments for stumbling or for dropping
some food. But Pashtuns don't sanction behaviors that might disturb
an American — stealing from outsiders, lying, or fighting.
On the contrary, a boy who steals a toy from his uncle's house might
find his own father helping him to pull off the theft. For the Pashtun,
the world is filled with deceit, and one must learn to fend for
oneself, with only immediate family immune from betrayal (and sometimes
not even them). What is odious to a Pashtun is not theft, or lying,
or fighting, but weakness, carelessness, and clumsiness — anything
which diminishes an individual's power and self-command.
Boys roam in
groups in which they constantly jockey for power and learn to fight.
A boy running to his family when he's been beaten by a playmate
may be beaten again by his father for his weakness. Mothers make
no effort to see that playthings are shared. On the contrary, the
stronger children will be encouraged to take from the weaker. Siblings
regularly betray each other's misdeeds to their parents and are
rewarded by being allowed to beat the miscreant. Children lie and
pass blame without qualm. "Survival of the fittest," says
Lindholm.
Older children
are generally left to themselves. They huddle and shiver in the
rain, since no one tells them to change into dry clothes. In summer
the dirt and heat cause boils and running sores, which the children
accept as of a piece with the ordinary depredations of life. In
effect, Pashtun children are left to toughen themselves up, so as
to endure without complaint the stresses of existence in a hostile
and dangerous world. They learn that all men are equal — equally
free to dominate their weaker fellows. The Pashtun therefore cultivate
a fierce and defiant independence, a thirst for dominance, and a
reluctant but occasionally necessary willingness to acknowledge
a stronger hand.
Pashtun men
emerge from their childhood hardened to the strains of their harsh
physical environment and "prepared for a life of struggle,
betrayal, and cruelty." Lindholm quotes a popular proverb:
"The eye of the dove is lovely my son, but the sky is made
for the hawk. So cover your dovelike eyes and grow claws."
Although the quest for independence, honor, and dominance greatly
strains the inner life of Pashtun men, the archetype that inspires
the Pashtun remains, "the lone man standing his vigil against
the might of the rest of the world." Bin Laden (although an
Arab and not a Pashtun) is clearly the embodiment of that archetype,
and surely the Taliban see in their alliance with bin Laden against
the United States a fulfillment of their cultural ideal.
The Pashtun
are accustomed to a life of suffering and violence in a way that
few Americans can imagine. Toughness — the willingness to bear
hardship and to inflict pain — are valued traditional traits.
The Pashtun actually characterize themselves as cruel, and sensual
pleasure in violence is considered an entirely normal and legitimate
good in life. In a Hobbesian world, betrayal is a constant threat
and secrecy the norm. The Pashtun are notorious for concealing their
travel plans — both route and time of departure. This is not
an environment in which even the best human intelligence will be
able to tell us much about the whereabouts of our enemies.
So the soldiers
of the Taliban come from a society of pitiless, hardened, independent,
and untrustworthy warriors. The Pashtun call war their "hobby,"
their pleasure, and their "play." They are eager to demonstrate
their bravery through acts of violence and valor, and are convinced
that if they can just get the soft Americans to engage with them
on the ground, they will rip them up and make them run. The Pashtun
believe that the Americans will lose because Americans can accept
neither casualties, nor the harshness of Afghanistan itself.
The strength
of the Pashtun is also their weakness. Their Hobbesian treachery
— perhaps demonstrated recently week in the betrayal of Abdul
Haq — has more than once been their undoing. The Pashtun regularly
dissolve into factions, which just as regularly betray their agreements
and dissolve yet again. And typically, a weaker faction will invite
a stronger third party to combine and dispose of an opponent. The
British preferred to use a variant of this technique against the
Pashtun, fighting by proxy and buying off leaders, who were seldom
loyal to anything but themselves — but not before they first
deployed overwhelming force against the Pashtun, defeating them
in the greatest pitched battle ever fought by the British on the
frontier. Prior to that decisive defeat by the British, religious
leaders succeeded in uniting the ever-fractious Pashtun against
the massive external threat that the British represented.
So I fear that
we are putting the cart before the horse. We want to fight and win
by proxy and political manipulation, before having shown our willingness
and ability to prevail on the ground. Worse, the British won their
great victory against the Pashtun in defense of well-fortified garrisons.
They did not try to root out hidden and well-dispersed forces like
those of al Qaeda. Of course our technology gives us advantages
the British never had. But technology is on the side of the enemy
as well, in that even a small surviving terrorist network is still
capable of deploying weapons of mass destruction.
So in the end,
it will come down to political will. Perhaps, if we're lucky, a
bit more bombing and some help from the Northern Alliance will save
us from having to seriously bloody our hands in Afghanistan. But
that seems increasingly unlikely. The Taliban plan to hang on until
they can put us to a test they are convinced we shall fail. They
have prepared from earliest childhood for the battle they now face.
They can be defeated, but perhaps only by the deployment of overwhelming
force on the ground. Until the Pashtun prove to themselves the futility
of resistance (as they did with the British) by suffering massive
loss of life in a courageous but doomed land assault against a technologically
superior enemy, they will hold on, in the conviction that despite
our superiority, we will not be able to endure significant casualties.
This is not
a pretty picture. Yet there is no doubt that our way of life —
nay our lives themselves — are at stake. Who could have imagined
that so seemingly slight, so "primitive," and so insignificant
a faraway enemy could have threatened our very existence? But the
very technological magic upon which our society rests has now been
turned against us by a dogged foe — a foe who has conjured
the ultimate magic of determined strength out of the kaleidoscope
of human nature. If we cannot find the courage to rise to the challenge,
our society will not survive in its present form. So fight we must,
keeping in mind the Pashtun proverb: "Where there is the sound
of a blow, there is respect."
CORRECTION
Regarding my earlier piece, "Crimson
Shame": George Washington took command of the Continental
Army in Cambridge, not just before Bunker Hill, but two and a half
weeks after the battle.
|
