The Professor's Dilemma

The distinguished scholar, former Pakistani diplomat, anthropologist and filmmaker Professor Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed is out with the third book in his trilogy on the relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world after 9/11. He describes the book as ‘the missing part of the debate’ that expounds on an important relationship:

“The United States uses drones almost exclusively against Muslim tribes with strong codes of honor and revenge living on the borders between nations—the tribes on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen, Somalia, the southern Philippines, Turkey, and Mali. For these communities, the deadly drone is a symbol for America’s war on terror. It is constantly hovering above unseen, operated by Americans on the other side of the world, and with the ability to strike at will. The thistle is a symbol of these fierce tribes, invoking Leo Tolstoy’s novel Hadji Murad in which he compares the Caucasian tribes battling the advancing Imperial Russian army in the 19th century with this prickly flower.”

Prof. Ahmed states that he relied on “forty case studies of tribal societies across the Muslim world, from Morocco to the southern Philippines, The Thistle and the Drone shows that the war on terror across the Muslim world is being fuelled by the structural breakdown between the centre and periphery rather than any compulsion within the Islamic faith”. While presented in a highly readable contemporary English that is a hallmark of Prof. Ahmed, with events updated almost to the publication date, the thesis is not new. The idea that somehow the rest of the world has failed the tribal people by failing to understand the tribal code— Pukhtunwali in case of the Pak-Afghan Pashtuns— goes all the way back to Sir Olaf Caroe and Sir Evelyn Howell, whose works Prof. Ahmed refers to and seems to remind of. It was indeed a pleasure to see the transliteration/pronunciation ‘Pukhtun’ used by Prof. Ahmed for the Pashtuns.

Having once served as the Political Agent in the South Waziristan Agency, Prof. Ahmed comes very close to making a correct political diagnosis of the current morass in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. He writes: 

“The violent actions of the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) reflect such a departure from one of the normative principles, that of exacting revenge proportionate to the perceived wrong. Many people in Waziristan have come to believe everyone is now selfish, materialistic, corrupt, and bent on pushing their own interests. The maliks and the mashars (elders) have gone, they say; the Jirga is ineffective, and Pukhtunwali is dead.”

But somehow he lets that diagnosis slip from his grasp, which is perhaps why his prescriptions are elusive and nebulous despite a genuine effort and sincerity.

The book is divided into six chapters, three of which are eponymously titled Bin Laden, Musharraf and Obama’s Dilemmas. Prof. Ahmed writes about Bin Laden having to balance the tribal and Islamic identity, General Musharraf the centre and periphery, and Obama the security and human rights. He laments about the post-9/11 world that ‘the clash of civilizations, expressed through the war on terror, was now the dominant meta-narrative in world affairs.’ He is of the view that Professor Bernard Lewis’ very nuanced and complex thesis about a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Muslim world and the west has been reduced to the ‘us vs. them’ binary by the vested interests on both sides of the divide. But to him the west, especially under George W Bush is to blame for using this schism as an overarching meta-narrative to describe the events leading up to 9/11 and the course taken thereafter.

But it seems that in his quest to deconstruct an inaccurate meta-narrative and the false binaries, Prof. Ahmed may have ended up creating— or at least perpetuating— another meta-narrative i.e. the pristine tribal societies fighting a war of survival against a disproportionate and malicious enemy that threatens not just their survival but is bent on defacing the identity of whatever remains when it is through with them. He revives some of the stereotypes noted by the orientalists like Olaf Caroe about the Pashtuns of the settled area being different from the ones inhabiting the tribal areas. Citing an old Pashto proverb that the “Honour (nang) ate up the mountains, taxes and rents (qalang) ate up the plains’ Prof Ahmed likens the Pukhtunwali of the nang— read FATA— Pashtuns to Ibne Khaldun’s concept of the asabiyah or tribal social solidarity. He posits that “because the tribes of Waziristan— like those of the Tribal Areas— have been able to preserve Pukhtunwali, with its emphasis on nang, they have maintained the tribal spirit and its thistle-like nature”. I am afraid that here Prof. Ahmed has donned his Political Agent’s hat not the anthropologist’s. This distinction between the Pashtuns of various regions is arbitrary and also fails to explain why the tribes flush with nang did not exact revenge on those Pashtuns and foreigners who killed almost all their elders.

Reliance upon very small studies to support an anti-drone warfare thesis and focus exclusively on Waziristan to propose an umbrella paradigm that not only ignores the other tribal agencies, especially the Kurram Agency, results effectively in an "us vs. them” meta-narrative in reverse. While it suited Caroe, his predecessors or perhaps the US to draw such politically expedient distinctions in order to impose draconian laws, like the Frontier Crimes Regulation entailing collective punishments and create Guantanamo, now is the time to shatter such typecasts, not buttress them.

There are complex geopolitical questions that the book does not take into account. The role of the state and non-state actors in the Pak-Afghan region, especially the increasing radicalisation in the Pakistani heartland of Punjab, which antedates the drone wars and indeed 9/11, is almost ignored. While great for the purposes of a comparative study, using the examples of Somalia, Yemen and Waziristan to propose that the America’s War on Terror has become a global war on tribal Islam has resulted, perhaps inadvertently, in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that inevitably proposes similar solutions to widely divergent problems.

But the Prof. Ahmed we have known over the years is a man who has led the ageing Prof. Bernard Lewis on to the stage literally holding his hand, to open debate not close the door on dialogue. This book should open the discussion whether the tribes are frozen in time or is it a view of them that has not kept pace with the changing ground realities? Prof. Ahmed has covered a lot of areas, including from movies and popular culture to scriptures, in his quest for answers. If the thistle— azghakey or kaareza as the Pashtuns call it— of a solution has remained elusive in this work it is certainly not for lack of trying. The love of his people and seeking a swift solution to their problems, when there are no easy answers, is perhaps the dilemma that Prof. Ahmed faces.

Dr Mohammad Taqi is a regular columnist for the Daily Times, Pakistan. He tweets @mazdaki