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Posted on 11/05/2001 9:31:36 AM PST by vrwc54

The 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."

Pashtun Killer

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