The thistle and the drone

I just finished reading “The thistle and the drone” by Akbar Ahmed. I learned about this book when Noam Chomsky endorsed it in an interview I watched recently online. I wanted to learn more about the circumstances that led to 9/11 and the current “war on terror.”

The author is a former civil administrator in Pakistan charged with managing tribal affairs in Waziristan. He has built on the lessons he learned by immersing himself in the tribal culture and avoiding violent confrontations between the government and tribes through a deep understanding of the needs and circumstances of the people under his administration. In this book, he surveys the global conflicts of the past few centuries through this lens.

The “thistle” in the title refers to the prickly tribal people who have inhabited for centuries the deserts and mountains on the peripheries of modern nations. In isolation, they have devised their own laws, judges, and problem-solving strategies. Often, they are linked by lineage and marriage. The “drone” refers to the most recent measure used by the central government to impose control on the periphery through violence.

Ahmed draws on diverse examples in the Muslim world: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Iraq, Lybia, Algeria, the Sudan, Somalia, Senegal, Myanmar, Russia, China and the Philippines. In many cases, what we in the west are told to see as “Islamic terrorism” is really a tribal perversion of Islam that has grown out of the need to resolve conflicts between the Koran and tribal practice, or the need to pursue asymmetric warfare against a much better armed central government. Rape, suicide, killing of Muslims and killing of non-combatants are forbidding in the Koran, but since the practitioners of these heresies—like al Qaeda and ISIL/Daesh—claim the mantle of Islam and the western press is too lazy and/or ignorant to critique these claims, it has become the norm to demonize “Islamic terrorism” rather than to understand the circumstances that have led to these heretical practices.

Most of the book is consumed with incredibly detailed accounts of tribe vs center conflicts. Millions have died because of the impulse of the center to control tribal peripheries through overwhelming violence rather than through mutual understanding, negotiation and accommodation. The accounts of violence—killing, rape, mutilation—are horrifically drawn here, and repeated to the point of being mind-numbing. There really are no heroes here. But the modern central governments have a huge edge in delivering violence to the periphery, culminating in the use of drones, which are not the surgically precise tools they are described as in the press. The future for the tribal peoples on the periphery is bleak, and many—the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uyghurs in China, for two notable examples—are being ethnically cleansed.

This is an important book if you really want to understand the history, anthropology and geopolitical circumstances driving violence throughout the world. As global warming increases during the 21st centuries, these conflicts will only worsen as resources become ever scarcer in the marginal environments that previously sheltered tribes on the periphery. It is a difficult book to read, but I learned a lot.