Tribalism, Anarchy, and All Sorts of Commitment

This could also be titled: Interesting things I read today.

-Bush and Maliki have been negotiating plans for a permanent US presence in Iraq. When the tunnel fills with water, keep digging and plug the door? Rachel-my-boss pointed out this could make Iraq an effective non-issue in the 2008 campaign by hamstringing the candidates.

-This article appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1957. It was written by a Smith grad about the dating challenges faced by the modern co-ed. What I find so surprising about it is how cold and calculating the relationships she describes seem. It feels like some contemporary ideas (romantic love, not dating around) are more "traditional" (word choice) than the fifties relationships she describes. I guess there's room for more complicated stories once women are not something to be gotten or won.

-I've been trying to learn about the Afghan-Pakistan border and I came across this article by Robert Kaplan. (A similar, older piece by him was more helpful.)I've had to do battle against "The Coming Anarchy" five or six times by now in political science classes, and these essays have a very similar theme: "globalization is allowing tribes to mess with national borders. Doom!" I sort of like reading Kaplan, because I think he's a very good writer, but I disagree with the way he builds his arguments and his conculsions make me furious. He counts on certain key phrases (backward, primate, tribal, mideavil) to do all the work in indicating the "harm" he describes rather than explaining the problems with tribalism or what "backwards" means. (A Uzbek translator who slurps his soup is crude, but I wonder if the decidedly untribal Japanese would get the same treatment.)

His take-home conculsion from this piece is that democratization efforts should take into account the social structure on the ground rather than try to impose one from the top down. Great. So far, so good. I get a little irritated when he describes Iraq as "among the most backward parts of the Ottoman empire." Because it was backward, it was tribal, apparently. He goes on to explain that the Durand line is a very tribal area and while there are nice things about tribes, they are very mideavil and anti-democratic and therefore we should be prepared to bribe them and accept second best solutions to build peace.

I don't want to sugarcoat the situation-- and I don't know enough to put a very accurate glaze on it anyway-- but my understanding is that Pashtun political customs like the Loya Jirga are based on representative decision-making through consensus. (Because of the emphasis on agreement, meetings can last for days, and there's no nuclear option for you, Senator Lott.) I think if we go around looking for elections as the hallmark of democracy in largely illiterate societies, we're going to be disappointed (many of the electorate in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Afghanistan didn't know who they were voting for). We have to stop behaving as though Western style democracy, anarchy and authoritarianism are the only options. His conculsion reads like: "because they are tribal over there, we can't expect them to get our democracy and therefore, let's settle for something less." I think a more flexible idea of what a democratic institution looks like would result in a more successful, less imperalist approach.