The Imperial Sociology of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan

Abstract

The ‘tribe’ is a notion intimately related to the study of Afghanistan, used as a generic signifier for all things Afghan, it is through this notion that the co-constitution of coloniser and colonised is crystallised and foregrounded in Afghanistan. By tracing the way in which the term ‘tribe’ has been deployed in the Afghan context, the article performs two kinds of intellectual labour. First, by following the evolution of a concept from its use in the early 19th century to the literature on Afghanistan in the 21st century, wherein the ‘tribes’ seem to have acquired a newfound importance, it undertakes a genealogy or intellectual history of the term. The Afghan ‘tribes’ as an object of study, follow an interesting trajectory: initially likened to Scottish clans, they were soon seen as brave and loyal men but fundamentally different from their British interlocutors, to a ‘problem’ that needed to be managed and finally, as indispensable to a long-term ‘Afghan strategy’. And second, it endeavours to describe how that intellectual history is intimately connected to the exigencies of imperialism and the colonial politics of knowledge production.

The Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress… Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud…. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.

Winston Churchill (My Early Life – Chapter 11: The Mahmund Valley)

In common parlance, the term ‘tribe’ is used loosely to suggest affiliation with one’s community – as in ‘tribal loyalties’ to intimate affinity with a close-knit group – or more specifically to refer to a non-acephalous community of people in a delimited territory contrasted with central/state organisation. However, there appears to be no accepted definition of ‘tribe’. The term has been largely forsaken by anthropologists or used in very specific instances to delineate particular modes of social organisation and political formation, and never to refer to an entire nation’s social structure. ¹ Often used to signal anachronistic hordes of people seemingly resistant to centralised governance, even the New Oxford Dictionary contends that:

‘[i]n historical contexts the word tribe is broadly accepted (the area was inhabited by Slavic tribes), but in contemporary contexts it is problematic when used to refer to a community living within a traditional society. It is strongly associated with past attitudes of white colonialists towards so-called primitive or uncivilized peoples living in remote undeveloped places. For this reason it is generally preferable to use alternative terms such as community or people’ ²

Yet, the ‘tribe’ is a notion that is intimately connected to the study and knowledge of the people of Afghanistan. It is a concept with which we (in the ‘West’) make sense of Afghan social organisation, given that we are routinely confronted with images, popular accounts and media reports that depict Afghans (and also oftentimes Libyans and Yemenis) as fundamentally ‘tribal’. The ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan is alternately constructed as a security problem, a political threat and as something that needs ‘engaging with’. Often, in support of ‘nation-building’ projects, tribes have been understood as the ‘other’ against which the nation-state – still the prime unit of analysis for political scientists and international relations scholars – is posited.

This article undertakes a genealogy of the tribe to interrogate the reasons for the concept’s omnipresence in writings on Afghanistan and to question why exactly this problematic concept has become shorthand for all Afghan society. It considers the implications for the study of Afghanistan (a country which now has the privilege of being labelled the United States’ longest ever war) in particular, but of ‘other’ places deemed ‘alien’ more generally. It contends that this notion of ‘tribe’ can be added not only to the indefinite number of terms that are (essentially) contested and contentious, ³ but also to the list of terms that have been specifically mined for dubious political purposes. The article engages conceptual history and world politics in conversation by showing how ‘notions’ and ‘ideas’ can have direct and profound consequences for political praxis. And finally, in line with some of the most exciting developments in critical international relations, this article is a first-step towards decolonising ⁴ the concept of the tribe, by showing its implicated origins and continued use in the service, and at the behest, of empire and imperialism.

The contemporary manifestations of colonial knowledge and the ways in which the discursive framing of certain peoples, states, and conflicts invites, enables and inhibits international responses has recently been tackled by IR scholars working in places as diverse as the Congo, Somalia and Libya. ⁵ The construal of Afghanistan as a ‘tribal society’ can be seen as an iteration and continuation of the colonial impulse to simplify, classify and taxonomise and then to tailor responses based on those erroneous or at least impressionistic classifications.

We can see this at play in the blithe remark made in 2010 that ‘[t]o be a Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life, including the right to bear arms or defend the tribal homeland and protect its women, are threatened by foreign invaders’. ⁶ Over-simplifications like these end up over-determining the politics of the country by (re)presenting Afghanistan as a certain type of ‘intervenable object’, almost necessitating invasive restructuring through foreign intervention. It is through recourse to a discourse of tribalism that Afghanistan has become ‘fair game’ for intervention, invasion and nation-building. ⁷

By undertaking a short genealogy of the term, the article shows how, what was initially a particular (ill-defined and fluid) construct, which the early East India Company administrators used to make sense of the unfamiliar people they were encountering, ‘the tribes’ went on to become the irrefutable marker of Afghan society, polity, and culture. The ‘tribe’, as a generic signifier for most relations and identities in Afghanistan appears to have displaced the need for a deep theoretical engagement with the changing political and social configurations in the country. The concept, initially used in the British Empire to capture a specific network of relations at a given historical juncture, has become increasingly de-historicised, losing any analytical purchase and clarity it may once have had. The trope has instead been reincarnated to provide momentum to counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the face of concerns about the legitimacy of foreign intervention.

I map the way in which the term has been employed in popular writings on Afghanistan, not only to problematise the notion of ‘tribe’ but also to show how a monolithic and unreflective body of work has become the norm in reference to Afghan social organisation. The article proceeds chronologically, following the evolution of the concept from its use in the early 19th century by the influential Mountstuart Elphinstone, and on to his most significant successors writing in the late colonial period. The article traces the conceptual hardening and reification of the term during the 20th century and its particular – and re-energised – deployment in the literature on Afghanistan in the 21st century. Drawing on scholarly literature on Afghanistan, the article argues that the ‘tribe’ has become a familiar and accessible idiom – another reductionist oversimplification in the argot of imperial expedience – used to make sense of Afghanistan’s diverse and complex social structure, but that in the process the term has veered far from the manner in which it was originally conceived and utilised. The term has not only become more thoroughly racialised; it now amounts to a conceptually vapid word that has paradoxically been credited with ever more importance in ‘understanding Afghanistan’. Through the articulation of this concept over time we can see old colonial logics reproduced. In this sense, the tribe belongs to a family of concepts used to make sense of the Other, to render him/her legible with important political consequences. ⁸ What is exceptional is the manner in which this particular concept has become fossilised, and the complete erasure of the colonial legacy that has led to this fossilisation.

Mountstuart Elphinstone and the ‘Discovery’ of the Afghan Tribe

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) is the first known scholar of Afghanistan, and his work was to be so pivotal that it would not be a stretch to call him the ‘founding father’ of modern Afghan studies. ⁹ In 1808 Elphinstone was appointed as the first British envoy to the court of Kabul under Shah Shuja by Indian governor-general Lord Minto. Elphinstone’s mission was the inceptive British diplomatic mission to what was to become Afghanistan. ¹⁰ Although Elphinstone failed to secure a friendly alliance with Shuja, his mission generated a wealth of material that he turned into a detailed report. This text, Elphinstone’s enormously influential Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies, was first published in 1815. It was his report of the first modern British contacts with the Afghan country, a voluminous exposé of all that he encountered and observed in the country. Elphinstone’s work was vastly influential in other 19th century literature on Afghanistan. From Sir Alexander Burnes ¹¹ to the last governor, Olaf Caroe, Elphinstone’s thought has had a perceptible impact on the work of an entire legion of Anglophone Afghan specialists. ¹² In Jon Anderson’s words, Elphinstone’s Account provided ‘the most synoptic and […] integrated account of Afghanistan and Pakhtun society, history, geography, tribal organization, government, and more briefly, economic life’. ¹³

What then are the major hallmarks of Elphinstone’s work? First, Elphinstone himself based his understanding of ‘the tribe’ on his own personal experience as a Scotsman. The notion of tribe for him was analogous to that of the Scottish notion of clan, and he argues that the Afghan kingdom was remarkably similar to Ancient Scotland in its social and political organisation:

[…] the situation of the Afghaun country appears to me to bear a strong resemblance to that of Scotland in ancient times; the direct power of the King over the towns and the country immediately around; the precarious submission of the nearest clans, and the independence of the remote ones; the inordinate power and faction of the nobility most connected with the court; and the relations borne by all the great lords to the crown, resemble each other so closely in the two states that it will throw light on the character of the Douraunee government to keep the parallel in view. ¹⁴

Elphinstone’s training in land survey practices – focused on the village – and his Scottish background gave form to his ‘republican’ interpretation of Afghan social organisation. Indeed, Elphinstone’s intellectual universe was delineated by the Scottish Enlightenment: ‘both his conceptualization and understanding of Afghan society were mediated by that universe’ ¹⁵ ; and the first British contacts with Afghanistan were a largely Scottish enterprise. ¹⁶

Scholars have since pointed out that Elphinstone was quite mistaken in the connections that he was making – the Scottish clan system was markedly different from the Afghan tribal code or pashtunwali. ¹⁷ As has now been verified by historians and ethnographers, the differences Elphinstone discerned between what he called ‘republican’ tribes and ‘monarchial’ ones were based on an amalgamation of hearsay evidence, his involvement not only with the Edinburgh Enlightenment but with ‘a Scotland of clearances’ in which clan leaders regularly exchanged kinship for proprietorship, and an affinity for the tribes who were resisting the Afghan monarchy at the court to which he was the company’s envoy. ¹⁸

Second, the work is characterised by an uneasy tension between nuance and sophistication on the one hand and a lack of rigour on the other. Much of what was written by Elphinstone was based on rumour and an ‘intuitive understanding’ of the ‘Afghaun culture’. Large parts of the Account are anecdotal: in effect the musings of one person’s situated experience that has only retrospectively been seen as the intellectual bedrock on which Afghanistan would be interpreted, known, and acted upon for many years to come. ¹⁹ Elphinstone’s ‘inductive’ approach to learning about Afghanistan is manifest throughout his writings. For instance, it was through his conversation with a local tribesman on the latter’s opinion on strong government that Elphinstone based his generalisation about the tribes’ innate vehemence towards central authority. ²⁰ The Pathan allegedly said: ‘[w]e are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood but we will never be content with a master’, and in response, Elphinstone perfunctorily asserted that there is a ‘reason to fear that the societies into which the nation is divided, possess within themselves a principle of revulsion and disunion, too strong to be overcome, except by such a force as, while it united the whole into one solid body, would crush and obliterate the features of every one of the parts’. ²¹

Nonetheless, Elphinstone had the political perspicacity to locate this innate republicanism in some of the particular tribes he encountered and in their equally particular history and geography – those on the South East of Afghanistan, along the ‘scientific frontier’ bordering India. Elphinstone was circumspect about the scope of his own work; his tome, nonetheless, has been understood as the key to apprehending all of Afghanistan. ²² Moreover, his arguments were more often than not explicitly contextualised and anchored to his particular frame of reference. For instance, he observed that the Pashtun tribes most directly under the rule of the Afghan king were likely to have a hierarchical structure and hereditary leaders. ²³ The minutiae of his rich work have been largely lost in the 200 years since.

Finally, Elphinstone’s work developed the notion of ‘clan’ or ‘tribe’ in a manner which was vastly different to the ways in which it was picked up and comprehended by future generations of East India Company and colonial administrators. Account lacked any explicit racialisation of ‘tribe’, setting apart Elphinstone’s work from that of his successors. Writing at a time before the ‘white man’s burden’ was fully formulated and internalised by European travellers in distant lands, Elphinstone’s account of the Afghan tribes displayed a fresh intellectual curiosity, drew upon notions of similarity (to an ancient Scottish past) as much as it did upon notions of difference. ²⁴ Although stadial theory was central to the Scottish Enlightenment, ²⁵ and Elphinstone’s text is a ‘conjectural history’ built upon ideas of sociocultural evolution, the ‘stagist’ notion of progress that underpins his work is based more on the mode of production or subsistence of the society in question than on the colour of the skin of its inhabitants. ²⁶ Although the image of ‘tribal disorder and corruption’ featured in his work, it remained relatively unburdened by the dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire and civilisation that took place from the end of the 18th to the mid-19th centuries, where theories of human progress became increasingly triumphalist, less nuanced and less accepting of cultural difference. ²⁷

Elphinstone’s work – although it should be noted that his embassy only reached as far as Peshawar, from where he dispatched a number of researchers (some European; some co-opted South Asian elites/collaborators) – still provides the touchstone for much of the academic work done on Afghanistan. Louis Dupree, the foremost scholar of Afghanistan of the Cold War era, said as recently as 1982 that anything articulated in reference to Afghan ‘peoples’ and ‘cultures’ since Elphinstone is merely a ‘footnote’. ²⁸ Benjamin Hopkins speaks of the ‘Elphinstonian episteme’ and credits him with the ‘tribalization of Afghan society’, by which he means that Elphinstone’s writings gave ‘the concept [of the tribe] an acceptable permanence which was taken up not only by subsequent imperial administrators, but also by later academics’. ²⁹ In 2001, Account was described as ‘arguably the best book on Afghanistan today’; ³⁰ in 2012, his understanding was said to be ‘intact and unassailable’. ³¹ In sum, therefore, we are to have an entire intellectual edifice constructed upon one man’s (mammoth) study of the land, people, flora and fauna he encountered in the early 19th century. ³² Our present-day understanding of Afghanistan as a predominantly tribal society can be traced back to him. Elphinstone’s ‘high spirited republics […] ready to defend their country against a tyrant’ have since become widely acknowledged as the basis of Afghan ‘tribal culture’. ³³ Meanwhile, the socio-political context of Elphinstone’s writing has been largely forgotten; instead we are presented with a timeless image of Afghanistan as a country of tribal disorder and corruption.

The Colonial Era and its Stereotypes

In the period after Elphinstone, knowledge of the Afghans became increasingly instrumentalised by semi-official colonial administrators wrestling with the problem of how to work with and/or control the Afghan population. These contingencies resulted in the development of stereotypes which were each aligned with two opposing courses of action. The first aspect of the colonial literature was therefore the concomitant development of two different stereotypes, each with its attendant policy, as personified in the opinions and work of two high profile British authors: administrator Sir George Campbell, and his contemporary, the political agent and prominent Afghan expert, Sir (Dr) Henry Walter Bellew. A second aspect of the colonial literature, seen particularly clearly in Campbell, was a further exacerbation of Elphinstone’s tendency to attribute differing and even contradictory character traits to different Afghan ‘tribes’. Below, I examine these different trends and their associated stereotypes.

Sir George Campbell (1824–92) was the lieutenant-governor of Bengal and a leading figure in the energetic ‘Punjab School’ of British Indian administrators who saw themselves as ‘looking to the happiness and welfare of the masses’. He said of himself that he was ‘in heart almost a Panjaubee’ and was criticised for being of a ‘revolutionary kind’ by his British peers in India. He published widely on ethnological subjects. ³⁴ Campbell acknowledged a significant intellectual debt to Elphinstone. ³⁵ But he nonetheless warned of the dangers of applying Elphinstone’s Scottish analogy to the Afghans, especially in a military context: ‘I have heard Afghanistan compared to our Scotch Highlands. I have heard it said, “You put down those troublesome Highlanders and turned their hills into delightful recreation and shooting grounds – why should not you put down the Afghan tribes in the way?”.’ ³⁶ Instead, Campbell argued that the problem of Afghanistan was of an entirely different scale: that the country was bigger, the mountains higher, and the people less acquiescent when faced with authority. Highly critical of the British equivocation with regard to taking a decision about Afghanistan, he believed that Britain ‘must either go back or go forward’. ³⁷ However, he asserted on more than one occasion that to ‘go back’ – that a ‘close’ policy – was the best option, in order to avoid a veritable hornet’s nest:

[m]y experience is, that if you have to deal with hornets only two courses are possible – one, not to stir them up or aggravate them, the other to smoke them out and take the nest. To stir them up, put your hand into the nest and keep it there is not what a wise man would do; yet that is what I am afraid of, if our present position is maintained. ³⁸

In keeping with his advocacy of a cautious policy towards the frontier, Campbell emphasised the ‘ungovernable’ nature of the Afghan tribes, borrowing selectively from sources available to him. For instance, he offered what has now become a banality:

[W]e know by painful experience that the Afghans are a people of a totally different character – turbulent – bred from infancy to the use of arms – and with a passion for independence in which they are exceeded by no people in this world. This love of independence is such as to make them intolerant, not only of foreign rule, but almost of any national, tribal or family rule. They are a people among whom every man would be a law unto himself. ³⁹

‘These traits’, he wrote, ‘are not of a passing kind; the Afghans are not to be tamed by subjection and peace; nothing induces them to surrender that love of independence which seems to be the essence of their nature [and the][…] character of the people occupying so difficult and inaccessible a country’. ⁴⁰ Ironically enough, the conclusion he draws from these connate Afghan characteristics is that Afghans are inherently ‘democratic’ and that ‘indigenous self-governing institutions’ form the ‘ancient law of the Afghan race’. ⁴¹ For Campbell Afghans are not easily manipulated and are astute political actors rather than religious fanatics: ‘their religion sits very lightly on them. They are more governed by their own customary laws than by the Mahommedan Code, and seem just as ready to sell their swords to an unbeliever as to any one else, even though it is to fight against believers’. ⁴²

The writings of Campbell can be instructively read in opposition to those of Henry Walter Bellew (1834–92). Bellew was an army medical officer born in Nusserabad, India. As a civil surgeon in Peshawar he became ‘well-known among the Frontier peoples, whose language he spoke and with whose manners and feelings he was familiar’. Bellew allegedly belonged to ‘the school of dedicated Anglo-Indian officials who helped to build up and consolidate the British Empire in India by acquiring a thorough knowledge of indigenous customs and modes of thought’. ⁴³ H.W. Bellew was considered to be a leading expert on Afghanistan, his work extolled as some of the finest on the region. ⁴⁴ His famous Races of Afghanistan, first published in 1880, has been called the first real ethnography of the country and he is said to have been intimately familiar with the language, culture and politics of Afghanistan at a time when Afghanistan was still the land of mystery for most British officials. Bellew himself wrote in 1867 that ‘[t]he officials with the British force who could claim any acquaintance with the Afghan languages were to be counted on the digits’. ⁴⁵ To rectify this inadequacy, he went on to write the Pushto Instructor, which became the primary linguistic guide for British officers in Afghanistan. ⁴⁶

Bellew was more sanguine than Campbell about the prospect of taming the wild Afghan tribes, insisting that everything could be ‘put right’ by rectifying the frontier. He writes:

But what does the reconstruction of the frontier imply? By reconstruction of the frontier is implied the subjection of the border tribes[…] We must now change our policy entirely; we must now alter our tactics altogether. Instead of, as heretofore, settling our border quarrels by expeditions against the offending tribes, we must now, and for the future, take advantage of them to settle our border line. We must, in future, wage war with each offending tribe. We must annex their hills, disarm the people, and reduce the clans to subjection. We must tell them that they are bad neighbours, not fit to be free; that we have tried them for twenty years, and found them habitually abusing their independence; that they are no longer tolerable as neighbours; and that we now come to take their country under our rule, and to reduce them to subjection. ⁴⁷

Bellew was explicit in his desire not merely to hold the passes but to occupy and control the entire country. He therefore constructed the Afghans as unruly but not ungovernable, arguing that once civilised they would be grateful to be ruled by a legitimate authority. Bellew’s conviction about the urgent need to bring the frontier under British rule and the relative ease with which this could be achieved was not all that set him apart from Campbell. He also ascribed prime importance to the religiosity of the Afghan tribes. Bellew said of the Pathans in Races of Afghanistan, that ‘[t]he only common bond of union among them is that of religion, and to this their devotion is of a fanatic kind, owing to the blindness of their ignorance and the general barbarism of their social condition’. ⁴⁸

The contrast between Campbell and Bellew illuminates Paul Titus’ argument about how the British vacillated between two competing policies in Afghanistan – a ‘close border’ and a ‘forward policy’. Those administrators who experienced frequent confrontations with tribal groups whilst enforcing the more antagonistic ‘forward policy’ developed a negative opinion of the tribes. In contrast, the administrators following the ‘close border’ policies granted the tribes more autonomy and had friendlier relations and therefore a better perception of them. ⁴⁹ Bellew’s and Campbell’s both encapsulate one of the two main strategies formulated to grapple with the frontier peoples. One stressed the Afghans’ love of independence and democracy as evidence in favour of a less ambitious policy towards the tribes, the other belaboured the urgent need to bring civilisation to an intractable but not unmanageable people.

As Anderson argues, the British were equally guided, and divided, by ‘taken-for-granted, literally common-sense ideas’ that defined the racialised worldviews of high Victorian imperialists. ⁵⁰ Even as they arrived at opposing conclusions, Campbell and Bellew’s descriptions of the Afghans drew upon a familiar stock of stereotypes mostly inherited from their Scottish predecessors and reworked to align with Victorian preoccupations with ‘character’ and ‘human nature’. ⁵¹

The literature on the Afghan tribes in the post-Elphinstone 19th century era saw an increasing reification and stereotyping of the Pashtuns especially in relation to Baluch tribes, the other dominant inhabitants of the Kingdom of Kabul. Elphinstone was the first to draw a distinction between the Pakhtun (or ‘Afghan’) tribes and their Baluch compeers. Later 19th century work further ossified the Baluch/Pathan distinction and was quicker to attribute distinctions between these groups in terms of inherent character. Campbell himself notes: ‘I may say of the Belooches generally, that it is well-known to our political officers that they are in their character materially different from the Afghans, being much less rabidly independent […] and more amenable to be dealt with through their chiefs’. ⁵² He also added ‘and though not free from predatory habits, the Belooches are much more tractable and easy to manage than the Afghans. In fact, we have already both by treaty and by occupation complete access to the Belooch country’. ⁵³

The contrasting stereotypes of the Baluch and the Pashtun resulted from differences in the social organisation of the two peoples, differences which predated the colonial era but were crystallised and internalised thereafter. ⁵⁴ The British preferred to interact with the Baluch over the Pathan, because the former were thought of as honourable men with a ‘tribal organization’, and the latter as ‘shrewd and unethical’ – stereotypes commonly associated with ‘stranger communities and middlemen minorities’. ⁵⁵ Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the stereotype as a ‘form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’, can be seen at work in the British interaction with, and management of, the Pashtun and Baluch people. ⁵⁶ The repetitious assertion that the Pashtuns are basically ‘ungovernable’ can be attributed to this colonial anxiety.

A key development in political use of the ‘tribe’ during this period can be seen in the ‘pacification’ and control of the frontier and its population. The operationalisation of ‘tribe’ by frontier officers reflects the impact that colonial administration had on the genealogy of tribe, of which the reification of the Baluch/Pashtun distinction is one example. However, there was still a tendency at this time to account for differences between tribes and the political, economic and social backdrops against which these tribes operated. In an instructive passage on Pathan tribes, Campbell claimed that ‘[t]hey have the character of being avaricious, mercenary, treacherous, and predatory’. He, nonetheless goes on to explain in considerable detail how each of these characteristics developed – as a result of ‘nature’, ‘necessity’ and ‘situation’. ⁵⁷ Moreover, even as, over time and with enough anxious repetition, British assessments of the people of the frontier began to harden, on the whole, the tribes were not written off as beyond the pale of civilisation. The British in the colonial era still operated with the assumption that ‘their [the tribes’] faults were caused by their institutions and could be alleviated by humanitarian reforms’. ⁵⁸

The 20th Century: the Increasing Essentialisation of the Tribe

Campbell and Bellew represent a kind of intermediate step between a fairly fluid conception of tribes under Elphinstone and an essentialising discourse on the tribe that matured in the 20th century. In the late 19th and early 20th century, these significant differences between how the British dealt with the Southern and the Northern tribes, and between the Pashtun and the Baluch, while periodically registered by 19th century observers, gradually stopped playing a role in explaining why these tribes were so different from one another. ⁵⁹ Over this period, the theme of cyclical or countervailing manifestations, one frequently analysed by anthropologists, gave way to increasingly ‘innatist’ understandings of character. ⁶⁰ Whilst ‘character’ was a prominent leitmotif of many mid to late 19th century texts, even including Elphinstone, and not exclusively a 20th century shift, the mutation of the discourse into a water-tight classification of the Afghan people is evident by the early 20th century. This is best exemplified in Thomas Holdich’s’ account of his 20 year career as a surveyor and military officer on India’s Western frontier. ⁶¹

Holdich distinguishes between the Baluch and the Pathan on the basis of their way of fighting, their organisation and their ‘character’. The Pashtuns are portrayed as entrepreneurial, religious and treacherous even towards their relatives, while the Baluch are portrayed as forthright, honest and especially concerned with honour. Holdich echoes the observations of many other colonial officials, missionaries and journalists before him, albeit in an ever more essentialist fashion:

[T]he Baluch is easier to deal with and to control than the Pathan, owing to his tribal organization, and his freedom from bigoted fanaticism or blind allegiance to his priest. He respects and honours the chief of his clan, who possesses far greater authority in the tribal councils than is the case with the Pathan. The Pathan is a republican of the worst type. He is a law unto himself, and although he is very much under the influence of the Mullah, he has always an eye to business even in his most fanatical outbursts. ⁶²

While he keeps this distinction between the Baluch and the Pashtun alive, Holdich’s statements lack the subtlety that characterised Elphinstone’s work ⁶³ and are even less measured than Campbell’s. He continues: ‘[t]he Pathan will make use of any stratagem or subterfuge that suits his purpose. He will shoot his own relations just as soon as his enemy, possibly sooner – and he will shoot them from behind’. ⁶⁴

If Holdich represents the culmination of the shift in colonial writing by focusing on the inherent ‘character’ of the Afghan people with its ‘natural’ locus in tribalism, then Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans, written in 1957, represents its apogee. The last British governor of the North-West Frontier, Caroe’s exemplary text, part memoir, part cultural historiography, ostensibly covers the period from 550 BC to AD 1957 and claims to document the life and times of the Pashtun people through the ages. His descriptions are in no way wholly negative, ⁶⁵ but they typify the uniformity with which the Afghans, and the Pathans in particular, came to be viewed by their British overlords. Caroe’s extended metaphorical references to the tribesmen as wild predatory creatures have been instrumental in carrying forward and cementing the allegorical construction of Afghanistan as the land of beasts that either need taming or are unsalvageable. ⁶⁶ Not unsurprisingly, the period also saw the development of the political use of ‘tribe’ in the ‘pacification’ and control of the frontier and its population. The operationalisation of ‘tribe’ by frontier officers shows the ways in which colonial knowledge impacted on the genealogy of the term and its subsequent use.

After the three Anglo-Afghan wars and with the dismemberment of the British Empire in the mid-20th century, strategic and military interest in Afghanistan petered out and it came to be viewed as a useful, if largely unimportant, laboratory for experiments with ‘modernization’ theory. ⁶⁷ To most observers in the West, from the time of the British withdrawal to the early 21st century, Afghanistan was largely considered a blip on the world map, except for the brief interlude that was the Soviet intervention. ⁶⁸ This second burst of Pashtuns onto the world scene as freedom fighters battling imperialism and communism in the guise of the Soviet Union was preserved in popular memory through films such as the 1988 blockbuster Rambo III. Although much of the fighting was conducted by non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan, including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and the Pashtuns who were most vocal in opposition to the occupation were in fact in Pakistan, the image of the Pathan as ferocious defender of the homeland endured. ⁶⁹ Not only does this one-dimensional image mistakenly conflate all Afghan identity with Pathan identity, ⁷⁰ it also completely bypasses an entire strand of non-violent Pashtun tradition embodied by the Khudai Khidmatgar, or the Red Shirts. As Mukulika Banerjee explains:

between 1930 and 1947 the Pathans, quite against their wild and martial reputation, had employed not rifles and guerrilla tactics but rather the method of disciplined non-violent civil disobedience against the British. Moreover, belying their reputation for feuding and factionalism, they had remained united for almost two decades. ⁷¹

The latter half of the 20th century found the tribes placed, if momentarily, on a pedestal, lionised as holy warriors in the United States, in accordance with the logics of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was vilified, and Afghan ‘freedom fighters’ became romanticised in Anglophone public discourse. Thus, on what was celebrated as the second ‘Afghanistan Observance Day’, 21 March 1983, Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States, could remark ‘[T]o watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson – that there are things in this world worth defending’. ⁷² Whilst the collapse of the USSR saw Western interest in Afghanistan dissipate, the events of 11 September 2001 brought the country firmly back on the ‘map’. This led to a resuscitation of the dualisms and stereotypes discussed above, albeit buttressed by a new grammar of difference and enunciated by more insidious vocabularies of power.

‘Tribal’ Afghanistan in the War Against Terror

In a post 9/11 world, writings that focused on the ‘difficult’ or obdurate nature of the Afghan ‘tribes’ came to be favoured because they helped to devise a cogent plan of action vis-à-vis the abiding ‘problem of the tribes’. We can see the burgeoning of literature that focuses on tribal structure as the key to understanding Afghanistan’s social, political and economic organisation that borrows from but also caricatures the experience of the British administrators. In the 21st century, Afghanistan is still an object of inquiry about which definitive claims are made by political administrators in need of a ‘quick-fix’ to whatever mess they find themselves in. The problem is compounded by the fact that the work of these modern-day administrators relies heavily on the scholarship of their predecessors, which was either written close to two centuries previously or is presented in the form of travelogues and personal memoirs. ⁷³ This is especially the case with the literature on the tribes in Afghanistan, but eventually influences the way in which all aspects of the country are studied, contributing to what M. Jamil Hanifi, with regard to work on Afghanistan, has called the metaphorical black hole or ‘Bermuda Triangle’ that absorbs much and produces little. ⁷⁴

Exemplifying this trend in 2009, Major Jim Gant asserted that: ‘the central cultural fact about Afghanistan is that it is constituted of tribes. Not individuals, not Western-style citizens – but tribes and tribesmen’, and that ‘the answer to the problems that face the Afghan people, as well as other future threats to US security in the region, will be found in understanding […] the tribal system of Afghanistan’. ⁷⁵ The fact that these words have been written by a US Army Major who wields significant influence in the country is not incidental. Gant’s paper, titled ‘A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan: One Tribe at a Time’, has been circulated widely within the US military, the Pentagon and Congress, and, in the words of The Washington Post, ‘lays out a strategy focused on empowering Afghanistan’s ancient tribal system’. Although Gant is not an uncontroversial figure, he has been described as none other than the ‘Lawrence of Afghanistan’. ⁷⁶

Gant had been assigned to deploy in Iraq, but with senior military and civilian leaders, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, General Stanley McChrystal (the top US commander in Afghanistan at the time) and General David Petraeus (the head of the US Central Command) expressly endorsing Gant’s views, he was instead sent back to Afghanistan in 2010 to ‘work on tribal issues’. ⁷⁷ McChrystal distributed a copy of ‘One Tribe at a Time’ to all the commanders in Afghanistan, while Petraeus similarly claimed ‘Major Jim Gant’s paper is very impressive – so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely’. ⁷⁸ We are told that ‘[i]ntellectually, Gant is driven by a belief that Special Forces soldiers should immerse themselves in the culture of foreign fighters’, and that in Afghanistan’s case this ‘culture’ is overwhelmingly, even exclusively, ‘tribal’. ⁷⁹

In a similar vein, Dr Mike Martin, former British Army Officer, whose self-proclaimed intention was to write a ‘non-Orientalist’ account of the war in Helmand, can write without a trace of irony: ‘[t]he early adoption of Islam has generated an exceptional degree of interwovenness between religion and culture that is an enduring theme of Pushtun politics and identity. This feeds into the sense of superiority felt by the Pushtun, particularly those who inhabit the south-west of Afghanistan’. ⁸⁰ Equally unselfconsciously, Thomas Johnson, director of the Culture and Conflict Studies programme at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and ‘a leading expert on the Pashtun tribal areas’, declares: ‘[t]he problem of course is finding people willing to negotiate. Pashtuns generally will not negotiate when they sense they are winning. Hence, you see that the Taliban are “willing” to negotiate, but only after international forces leave the country’. ⁸¹ These ideas have been most notoriously mobilised in Counter-insurgency doctrine, especially in the shape of the US Department of Defense’s Human Terrain System (HTS).

The HTS is a United States Army, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) support programme employing personnel from the social sciences – disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, regional studies and linguistics – to provide military commanders and staff with a particular and instrumentalised understanding of the local population (i.e. the ‘human terrain’) in the regions in which they are deployed. The Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) have come under intense criticism because they have deployed anthropological knowledge for dubious (neocolonial) violent ends. This ‘weaponisation of knowledge’ whilst certainly not new, is crucial to understanding how information and knowledge has been used to control, influence and depict certain peoples as ‘alien others’. This has led to a highly racialised and asymmetrical postcolonial world order that is reproduced through our subconscious biases and ingrained prejudices. The HTS undergirded by ‘social science’s’ purportedly ‘authentic’ claims about Afghan society and culture, reaffirms our biases and prejudices and revivifies the colonial episteme in the War against Terror. The capstone of this colonial episteme is none other than the discourse of ‘tribe’ configured and utilised as a fixed marker of Afghan identity and society. The ‘tribe’ as ‘unchanging dimension of Afghan society’ ⁸² provides impetus and legitimacy to foreign intervention as a necessary modernising impulse in the face of retrograde barbarism.

Even those critical of the US led intervention and the foreign policies of most Western states on Afghanistan, use the ‘tribe’ as a crutch or as a way to describe Afghan socio-political organisation in its entirety. Professor Akbar Ahmed, hailed by the BBC as ‘the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam’, ⁸³ is one singularly prolific example of this sympathetic (to Afghans) group. Much of his sizable oeuvre has been dedicated to the study of the population straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and, as Political Agent of Waziristan in the 1970s, he has had the benefit of considerable first-hand experience in the region. He is a fervent proponent of interfaith dialogue and a dedicated critic of the US drone programme, However, despite all this, Ahmed nevertheless frames his strident denunciation of US foreign policy in Afghanistan as a defence of the long-standing tribal systems in place in the country. ⁸⁴ Of the recent drone offensives he writes: ‘[f]or a Muslim tribesman, this manner of combat was not only dishonorable but also smacked of sacrilege. By appropriating the powers of God through the drone, in its capacity to see and not be seen and deliver death without warning, trial, or judgment, Americans were by definition blasphemous’. ⁸⁵

More problematically, Ahmed’s writings consciously and perhaps subconsciously draw on the imperial literature which this article has catalogued. He cites British colonial administrators including H.W. Bellew and Olaf Caroe on multiple occasions to make a case for ‘the Pathan’s’ fine appearance and indomitable spirit. ⁸⁶ Ahmed makes a distinction between nang (honour) and qalang (rent, taxation) Pashtuns, which is strongly reminiscent of Elphinstone’s report of hearsay to the effect that remoter tribes were more ‘republican’ than those he had encountered directly. ⁸⁷ Moreover, Ahmed’s reification of the Pakhtun into these two types is strangely based on an old Pashtun proverb: ‘Honor (nang) ate up the mountains, taxes (qalang) ate up the plains’, which in his own words ‘sums up the historical divide well’. ⁸⁸ Ahmed maintains that nang Pashtuns represent tribal purity and that the qalang are examples of the inevitable corruption of idyllic tribal lifestyle by the rapacious modern state. ⁸⁹ He postulates: ‘[M]ore than anything, the nang prize their freedom. Even under British rule, the authority’s jurisdiction rarely exceeded more than 100 yards on either side of the main roads. In the most profound sense, the nang people were probably among the freest in the world’. ⁹⁰ Ahmed, then, unwittingly contributes to the buoying up of an ill-fitting anthropological term, one that is employed and harnessed by Western militaries to placate the Afghan populace in counterinsurgency operations. ⁹¹

Ahmed also invokes the popular trope of Pashtun people as inherently revenge-seeking. On Ahmed’s account, the United States is perceived as being on ‘the warpath against Islam’, and therefore has activated ‘the code of revenge’ against itself. As evidence adduced to support this argument, Ahmed makes recourse to an old Pashtun saying: ‘I took revenge after 100 years, and I took it too soon’. ⁹² Ahmed, the good-willed defender of the Pashtun people, ends up essentialising them by reducing them to tribal, unassuming, god-fearing, simple men. In romanticising the lifeways of these ‘tribal’ peoples, he merely reproduces the fissure between ‘us’ and ‘them’, even while claiming to be on ‘their’ side. As is the norm in traditional ‘Orientalist’ narratives, ‘their’ worlds are accessed through antiquated traditions and their thoughts deciphered through anachronistic proverbs and dubious aphorisms.

There are other ‘sympathisers’ whose writing on Afghanistan is equally problematic. In his Wars of Afghanistan, historian Peter Tomsen describes Afghanistan’s political community as a ‘tribal incubator’, ⁹³ uncritically regurgitating the vocabulary that was devised to make Afghanistan’s diverse social structures legible in the colonial era. In his diplomatic history, Tomsen posits that violence was ‘an accepted and expected option in Afghan tribal politics when consensus was out of reach’, ⁹⁴ claims that the country is ‘the land of the blood feud’, ⁹⁵ frequently invokes references to Afghanistan’s ‘tribal fighters’ and goes as far as to argue that ‘fragmented, tribal Afghanistan’ exists in a ‘Hobbesian state of chaos’. ⁹⁶ Stephen Tanner, who similarly identifies the ‘tribes’ as the major obstacle to Afghan nationhood, argues: ‘In the early 1800s the tribes fell away from the concept of Afghan nationhood that had once seemed so promising under Ahmad Shah Durrani. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the people actually devolved back into local tribal government, blissfully unaware of how the rest of the world was evolving’. ⁹⁷ For him the ‘tribes’ – and how to manage them – remains Afghanistan’s ‘enduring problem’.

While the British ex-Foreign Secretary David Miliband can hardly be said to command the authority and expertise of the authors cited above, he nevertheless advances an argument strongly redolent of colonial scholarship in his 2010 article for The New York Review of Books. Citing lessons from Britain’s experience in the 19th century and the Soviet Union’s in the 20th, he dwells on the vital importance of ‘working with the tribes’. ⁹⁸ As I have sought to show here, this has increasingly become the standard story: ‘working with the tribes’, ‘engaging the tribes’ and ‘understanding tribal matters’ are the sine qua non of a ‘successful Afghan strategy’. This has fed into visual representations of Afghanistan as a country divided along tribal or ethnic lines. ‘Ethnic maps’ now proliferate and figure prominently in country reports published by the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), among other organisations. The Naval Postgraduate School, operated by the United States Navy, in its programme on ‘Culture and Conflict Studies’ uses many of these maps – with homogenous colour to ‘locate’ tribal peoples – to help its students navigate social difference in its courses on Afghanistan. Not only are these maps unavoidably arbitrary political acts, but, in an effort to render Afghanistan legible, they also serve to reify difference on the basis of categories that may have little resonance on the ground. ⁹⁹ And while (neo)colonial practices of cartography are problematic for a number of reasons, and continue to be the subject of critique, ¹⁰⁰ given the lack of sustained surveys and data in Afghanistan, even the nominal accuracy of these ‘tribal’ maps is disputable.

Conclusions and Wider Implications

Through the particular articulation of the concept of ‘tribe’, this article has shown that the discourse on Afghanistan is both typical and atypical of imperial modes of thought. It is typical in that the notion of ‘tribe’, not unlike those of ‘race’, ‘caste’ and ‘ethnicity’ found elsewhere in the colonies, has been mined and instrumentalised in the service of empire. ¹⁰¹ This has far-reaching implications for the study of imperialism in IR and for knowledge production in global politics more generally which resonates with important work done on colonial concepts, framing and imaginings. Tracing the genealogy of ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan, however, also reveals the ways in which Afghanistan as a discursive regime is exceptional. It is distinctive in the way it has been carved out in accordance with the cadences of colonial interest in the region. Unlike colonial India, imperial interest in Afghanistan ebbed and flowed, alternating between long periods of apathy and short concentrated bouts of intense concern and involvement. As such, this has led to a sort of ‘emergency episteme’ of the Afghan tribe, a familiar convocation of alterity at the behest of empire, but without the intellectual, economic and emotional energies that were expended in the construction of other idioms of difference such as race, caste and ethno-nationalism. Moreover, the colonial genealogy of this concept has been largely elided.

There has been a distinct paucity of resources devoted to studying the region and therefore only limited local knowledge, a lack (until recently) of any profound academic engagement with the country, and most importantly, a disconnect between practitioners, scholars and local populations. Even at the height of imperial involvement in Afghanistan, there were no monographic studies of tribes, few or no income and production surveys, and no colonial ethnography on religious leadership and other networks of the kind that were vital in mobilising armed resistance to the British. ¹⁰² Consequently, the imperative to churn out massive amounts of ‘knowledge’ and be acquainted with the ‘facts’ about Afghanistan – in a compressed period of time, for immediate political purposes – has become an enduring feature of the scholarship on Afghanistan. As Anderson has indicated, nearly all the colonial ethnography that emerged on the Northwest Frontier of British India, and Afghanistan more generally, was gathered, sifted and culled for political intelligence. In his own words: ‘in direct service of imperial design, it [the ethnography of the frontier] was a genuine handmaiden of imperialism by comparison to the camp follower of anthropological ethnography’. ¹⁰³ Anderson characterises the change in the literature from a state of multiplicity to one of conformity. ¹⁰⁴

Over time and with repetition, any nuanced appreciations of social relations, intuitive and incomplete as they may have been, gave way to a generalised and abstracted understanding of tribal or Afghan ‘character’ that in effect was ‘a list of traits that only restated the problem’. ¹⁰⁵ The abstracted conception of Afghan character came to figure prominently in the official colonial institutional memory, and by the time the British Empire collapsed, all understanding of Afghanistan came to rely heavily on this trope, as a ‘common-sense’ crutch for the necessary articulation of difference. ¹⁰⁶ As Bhabha reminds us, the processes of subjectification that these tropes and stereotypes unleash always affect both colonial subjects – coloniser and colonised. ¹⁰⁷ But while the practices of citation, reusing and rehashing old material, have led to a less subtle, more slipshod understanding of Afghan social relations, they have also unwittingly compounded a problem that has plagued the study of Afghanistan from the outset: that of limited data and weak scholarly engagement. We now inhabit an intellectual world in which ‘Afghan tribes’ are studied and acted upon unproblematically – paying no heed to the fact that both those terms have contestable and profoundly complex histories. ¹⁰⁸ Counterinsurgency doctrines are contemporary manifestations of colonial knowledge and current practices in the arsenal of (neo)imperial power that have reinvigorated these forms of knowledge.

It should thus come as no surprise that, in a context of social distance that marks the current intervention, hastily-applied and decontextualised notions of ‘tribal character’ have continued to obscure more than they reveal. Based on an outdated paradigm, they dangerously masquerade as a guide to practice. Against the politically charged backdrop of war and an invasion in which foreign forces are committed to an avid restructuring of the Afghan polity, in a way that is sensitive to prevailing cultural mores and customs, any new account of Afghanistan that overlooks the shaky architectures of colonial power/knowledge – built around personal memoirs, travelogues and hearsay – that have given shape to the claims about Afghan ‘tribalism’, constitutes a lapse that is bound to have a mighty material fallout.

The upshot of this tortured historical and contemporary understanding of the ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan – and its use as the dominant optic with which to make sense of the country – extends much beyond Afghanistan itself. The ‘tribe’ as a concept emerged as a legacy of colonial knowledge but now functions as part of the wider grammar of neo-colonial power. Contemporary imperial practices have reinvigorated these forms of knowledge, something we can see in racialised dynamics and demands of the bolstered ‘far right’ in Western Europe and North America. The tribe as an ‘invented tradition’ ¹⁰⁹ is a political project, one which has profound implications for the USA’s longest war. ¹¹⁰ Whilst these ‘imagined communities’ ¹¹¹ may indeed have salience on the ground, the manner in which ‘tribes’ are denied a synchronicity – they are ‘unchanging’ and ‘different’ to us – contributes to a distancing and reification that does a disservice both to the Afghan peoples and to more fine-grained understandings of ‘tribe’ as a term. In order to overcome these provincial colonial knowledges and the violence they perform in the Global South, we must question what constitutes legitimate ‘knowledge’ and ‘authority’ and be aware of, and agitate against the multiple and layered prejudices, violences, and erasures that structure the lives on the ‘wrong’ side of the colonial equation. This attempt to dethrone the concept of the tribe in Afghanistan is but a small step in that direction.