These are the times that try anthropologists' souls. Legal cases may force one to choose among contending ideas, public policies may test one's concepts against reality; but no greater challenge to one's theories exists than when they are applied in war.

The involvement of anthropologists in warfare is hardly new. Ruth Benedict's study-at-a-distance of the Japanese in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) may be the most famous instance, but it is hardly unique: Anthropologists have participated in war-related work since at least the time of World War I. It is not, however, the merits of anthropology's involvement in war that is at issue here but the assumptions, whether muted or explicit, that continue to affect the political and military decisions of the present administration in its pursuit of the Afghan war. The problems become more visible when a number of those assumptions are considered for the anthropological issues they incorporate, issues that include the nature of tribes in the region, whether the Afghan- Pakistani border is indeed the launching site for attacks on the US homeland, the sociological underpinnings of suicide bombings, the meaning of social differentiation in the cultures of the area, and the extent to which similarities at a professedly global level mask the realities of the local.1

Why Do Tribes Matter?

During his three-month review of the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama reportedly told his advisors: " I just want to say right now, I want to take off the table that we're leaving Afghanistan...What I'm looking for is a surge. This has to be a surge" (Baker 2009, see also Woodward 2010). Notwithstanding the enormous cultural differences posed by the Afghan situation-differences of which the administration is well aware-this would appear to remain quite close to the military strategy applied in Iraq. Even though it is a matter of disputed interpretation, many military and civilian figures now agree that whatever momentary diminution in violence may have occurred in Iraq has not simply been due to the insertion of additional troops.2 Not only was violence tailing off in urban areas already "cleansed" of competing religious groupings when additional troops were sent into those cities, but the more significant change came with the involvement of the nation's tribes.3

For years the US ignored the region's tribes, even though three-quarters of Iraqis identify with some 150 different tribes, most of the 40 percent of Afghans who are Pashtun identify with two major tribal groups, and those living along the Pakistani border are divided among 60 major tribes and an additional 77 in the region of Baluchistan.4 For years American soldiers referred to the tribes as part of "Indian country," while officers were ordered by Washington to stay out of tribal politics.5 Military and state department officials, who saw tribes at best as a pre-modern form of organization, neither understood the nature of tribes as a class of political forms nor why they mattered (Jaffe 2007). It was in large part when the tribes came to us-not the other way around-that things began to improve. This "Awakening Movement," which began in the Anbar Province in the winter of 2005-2006, involved tribal leaders who decided to cooperate with American forces to end the violence against them and other Sunnis that was being perpetrated mainly by foreign al-Qaeda militants-and then only after the Sunnis had lost what was effectively a civil war in the big cities. As American casualties declined, the program (which involved significant payments to the tribesmen) was expanded to include remunerations to Shiite militia as well.6 Thus, as a number of military officers have acknowledged, it was the desperate straits of the urban Sunnis and the connection made to the Western forces by the tribes, not the later surge, that accounted for the decline in killings, even in the Sunni heartland of Adhamiya Province.7

Tribes have, of course, been the classic subject for the anthropological study of kinship and political organization, as well as the test site for theories ranging from the evolutionary to the functional to the structuralist. A careful comparative study, however, suggests that, for all their variation, tribes possess a family resemblance that, when the insights of earlier studies are combined, reveals especially salient features that have affected the impact of those who have sought to insert themselves into tribal affairs. Thus Sahlins (1968:17) has shown that reciprocity is central to the " sectoral morality" that produces "a pattern of alliances and enmities, its design shaped by tactical considerations," Lowie that tribes are internally variable because they " sample alternate social forms" from other tribes (cited in Boon 1982:102), Fried (1966) that tribes often emerge and recede in response to the rise and effects of state structures,8 Dresch (1990:255) that the moral structure utilizes leveling mechanisms that yield "an avoidance of any absolute judgment," and (in the view of many scholars who have studied the Middle East in particular) that tribes are not simply organized around "balanced opposition" or segmentary structure but are capable of reconfiguring their histories and genealogies to suit changing ecological and political needs (Barth 1961, Geertz 1968, Waterbury 1970). Thus, notwithstanding significant differences between and among the tribes of Iraq and Afghanistan a range of variation on common themes is clearly discernible.9

Taken together these insights suggest that tribes are shape-shifters, amoeba-like in their capacity to adapt to the political forms surrounding them. Tribes, most analysts now believe, do not predate states in some evolutionary hierarchy but may, among other manifestations, arise in response to states; they coalesce and recede as the situation demands. They are not inherent democracies, but there are shared features, including that no one individual can claim moral superiority over any other, that tribesmen must usually demonstrate the qualities associated with a given position rather than merely inherit it, and that numerous devices exist for leveling power since it is commonly believed that too much power should not reside in too few hands for too long a period of time. Moreover, looking beyond formal structures based on kinship and descent, some of these features may inform the social and cultural life of the nations within which they are embedded: Just as one need not be a Protestant to be imbued with the Protestant Ethic, one need not be part of an actual tribe to identify with these features of a tribal ethos.10

Notwithstanding the rejection by most anthropologists of a unilinear progression from band to tribe to chiefdom to state, President Obama, in his Nobel Prize speech, suggested that he thinks tribes do indeed occupy a place in some evolutionary scheme: "War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease-the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences." And though he may have meant it partly as a metaphor, he went on to quote- and then reiterate-John F. Kennedy's call for "a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions" (Obama 2009c). The administration thus appears to have continued their predecessor's belief that tribes are archaic entities-at best a step along some evolutionary path-entities that outsiders may try to skip over in attempting to forge democratic institutions or usefully manipulate, given their fissiparous and anachronistic structures. It is particularly striking that the administration adhered to this rather outdated view even after the Iraqi tribes re-emerged to make their political and military importance obvious.

While the current administration may finally have grasped the tribes' centrality, then, they still seem to operate under the mistaken view that tribes have unvarying forms into which an alien power can insert itself with reasonably predictable consequences: Tribal "leaders," for example, are sometimes still described as having institutional authority or only personal followings rather than being envisioned in terms of the means by which networks are assembled and constrained (US Army 2009). Caught between a theory of tribal entities as untrustworthy because of shifting alliances and a theory of tribes as calcified anachronisms, tribes tend to be regarded as possessing either some discernible hierarchy or constituting a mere assemblage of competing individuals. Because tribal structures are, however, malleable and may be either latent or manifest the mistake is often made-when they have been noticed at all-of focusing almost exclusively on issues of tribal structure or apparent leadership; an error that is compounded by thinking that all one must do is find the tribe and offer the bribe.11 General Petraeus, it is true, recognizes full well that Afghanistan is not Iraq-that there is no tradition of a powerful centralized government that reaches to the full extent of the country in modern Afghan history. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal reported: "Although he has said many times that Afghanistan isn't Iraq, Gen. Petraeus on Thursday [September 2, 2010] sketched out an Afghan strategy that literally took a page from his Iraq approach. Gen. Petraeus's diagram of his Afghan strategy was based on a slide he showed Congress during the Iraq surge and even uses the same name: 'Anaconda,' a title meant to evoke a snake encircling the insurgency."12 It therefore remains unclear whether a surge in Afghanistan that encompasses the tribes in a manner analogous to that of the Iraqi experience will, notwithstanding an appreciation of the differences between the two countries, prove to be effective: Simply "surging" additional troops without understanding the tribal ethos that suffuses the broader culture of each country is no more certain to bring about "success" in Afghanistan than it has been responsible for advances in Iraq.

Why Have There Been No Attacks Directed by al-Qaeda on the Homeland Since 9/11?

The key statement in the administration's announcement of its Afghan policy came in the president's speech in December 2009 at West Point when he said: " In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror" (Obama 2009a). Almost no commentators picked up on this statement because most people continue to assume it is true. But to whom was the President referring? If it was Najibullah Zazi, his father and friends, arrested for allegedly gathering bomb-making materials after a visit to Pakistan, the matter is at best ambiguous. The government acknowledged that the men went to fight in the area and that, even if the two al-Qaeda leaders they encountered there suggested they attack within the US, the plan to bomb the New York subways was entirely of the men's own making: The botched attack, as the New York Times reported, was neither initiated nor directed from al-Qaeda in Pakistan, a position not clearly controverted by the later-and somewhat ambiguous-claim in the indictment and plea bargain of contact with known al-Qaeda operatives (Rashbaum and Zraick 2010).13 Or the president may have had in mind Bryant Neal Vinas, a convert to Islam and the son of immigrants from Peru and Argentina, who pleaded guilty to being trained in an al-Qaeda camp, but who, like several others, fought against American troops in the region rather than carrying out a plot within our borders.

More recent attempts display similar characteristics. The Christmas Day 2009 attempt by Nigerian Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down an airliner near Detroit-even assuming it was seriously intended-was either an independent act or organized through a Yemeni group: It was not, according to the State Department's own spokesman, directed by al- Qaeda (Keyser 2010). Similarly, the attempted bombing by Faisal Shahzad at Times Square on May 1, 2010 cannot be said to have been directed by al-Qaeda. Indeed, early claims of involvement by the Taliban in Pakistan were subsequently retracted, and despite Attorney General Holder's initial statement that "he [Shahzad] was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack," later information showed that Shahzad was handed around by various Pakistani contacts (Sanger 2010), thus prompting the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, following Holder's closed-door testimony, to say, a propos any al-Qaeda direction: " I am not convinced by the information I've seen so far" (Miller 2010).14 Whatever opportunistic use elements in Pakistan may have made of Shahzad, then, there is insufficient evidence to assert that they initiated and controlled his actions. Similarly, three local Muslims convicted in Britain for planning airline attacks in 2006 were said by prosecutors to have been directed by al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, but clear evidence that they initiated the plot was not forthcoming (Burns 2010). The testimony by CIA analyst Marc Sageman to the Senate in October 2009 thus remains valid:

It is interesting to note that for all the fear of al Qaeda, the organization managed only two successful plots in the West in the last twenty years! The fact that they were so deadly overshadows this truth. It appears that either we are getting luckier or this terrorist threat is diminishing. In the United States, the last casualty dates back eight years to 9/11/01. There has not been even one plot that went to termination since then. In the rest of the West, there has not been a single casualty in the past four years...the majority of global neo-jihadi terrorist networks from 2004 onwards did not have any formal training from foreign terrorist groups, contrary to the statements of Intelligence agency chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic. They were purely homegrown. (Sageman 2009)15

Thus even if the Times Square attempt involved core al-Qaeda in the Af-Pak border region testimony by FBI and Homeland Security officials indicates that no real attack had been directed by al-Qaeda for as much as eight years following 9/11. Therefore the idea that al-Qaeda-as opposed to some of its imitators in Somalia and Yemen, or through "homegrown" terrorists in Canada, Europe, or the US-has continuously promoted attacks on the US from Afghanistan's borders is at best unproven.16

The central question that is not being asked, then, is: Why have there been so few if any attacks initiated by and clearly attributable to al-Qaeda within the US since 9/11? Indeed, what sociological assumptions are making this question so difficult for the administration to address?

The answer cannot possibly be that the terrorists have been pinned down in the Af-Pak border region or that Homeland Security has made us all safe. Surely the capacity of al-Qaeda to send the occasional terrorist is not nil. And with our borders so porous that nearly 1.5 million illegal migrants are added to the country each year-including, by State Department estimates, some 14,500-17,500 forced labor or sex slaves (Berger 2009)-and with drugs easily brought across our borders and illegal weapons readily available within them the idea that suicide bombers could not be sent to wreak havoc on public parks, shopping malls, or sports arenas is untenable. Yet it suits politicians not to ask why there have been no further attacks: They cannot afford to do so in case a subsequent assault makes them appear to have been naïve, insufficiently tough, or too cavalier about the threat. And while it is true that the leaders of al-Qaeda in southwest Asia have been seriously affected by air and ground attacks, it is not clear whether (as Sageman further testified) " the threat against the West is degenerating into a 'leaderless jihad'" (Sageman 2009), or if it is morphing into the type of acephalous organization found in many tribal situations. By not fully addressing the reasons why no attacks organized by al-Qaeda may have occurred in the US since 9/11, the risk is that policy becomes driven by unexamined myths and cultural assumptions, as was the case when it was believed that Saddam Hussein must have weapons of mass destruction or that Southeast Asian countries must fall like dominoes.

It is, therefore, worth considering a very different reason why there have been no further attacks within the US, namely that public opinion in the Muslim (particularly the Arab) world would not support such attacks. It may seem ironic that America's safety has lain in the "Arab street" but to understand why that might be so one must return to the context in which the attack of 9/11 occurred and to the failure of the administration to consider certain anthropological insights.

At the outset of his presidency George W. Bush made it clear that, unlike Bill Clinton, he would not involve himself deeply in the Arab-Israeli dispute and would simply leave matters in the hands of then Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon. To ordinary Arabs, this was tantamount to saying he did not regard them as real men. Two factors are crucial here- the way in which manhood is achieved and the way direct threats to it are commonly managed in the Arab world. In the Muslim countries of the Middle East, there are essentially no religious rituals that advance a man to adult status. Rather, what one must do-particularly in the Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian variants of Muslim cultures-is demonstrate that one can put together a network of people with whom one has a range of obligations: Society, like an electrical system that only works through pluses and minuses, is held together by the running imbalance of indebtedness. And the moment when this is most fully demonstrated in a young man's life is at the time of marriage. That is the time when alliances must be made by and for the groom, a time when a man may be said to have proved his capacity to maneuver in a world of relentless uncertainty. Moreover, all social ties must be constantly serviced and their capacity to be precipitated recurrently demonstrated; as an ally a man is, in this cultural system, only as reliable as his last performance.17 And one of the crucial indicators of this capacity to create safety in relationships is revealed in the way disputes are commonly addressed.

Disputes have an almost ritual-like pattern to them: Opponents will raise their voices enough so that others gather around and then, turning at right angles to each other, make their case to the assembled crowd. If, however, someone turns his back to the other it means he does not regard him even as a worthy opponent.18 Just as in poker where your cards are a function of the other person's cards, so, too, in these cultures it is often acknowledgment by an enemy that is vital to acceptance as a leading figure in one's own group. This pattern became evident in the weeks following 9/11, for the statement commonly heard in the "Arab street" was that Bush, by refusing to involve himself in the region, had turned his back on the Muslims as if they were unworthy of engagement as adult men. As a result, Osama Bin Laden no doubt understood very well that the people whose approval he needed would license an attack that they might not otherwise have been willing to tacitly support. The reaction, though strongly felt, was nevertheless transient: Once the US did re-engage people of the region-even in an oppositional way-popular legitimization for further attacks was gone. Additional attacks would not only lack such validation but would most likely be seen as counterproductive: Attacking the US and its civilians could only lead local regimes to tighten their controls, encourage Western nations to replace interaction with force, and undermine any man's claim to be a serious interlocutor. Here, then, may be another example of faulty anthropological assumptions at work in the war, for both the Bush and Obama administrations seem to have accepted the idea that Bin Laden's al-Qaeda is sociologically self-contained, that it is not really connected or responsive to a particular constituency since that " imagined" constituency is neither highly localized nor institutionalized. A more holistic approach, however, would suggest that the construct within which these terrorist groups operate is not unconnected to the virtual community upon which a portion of its legitimacy depends. The anthropological assumptions of the Bush and Obama administrations have thus left both of them strangely unaware of the forces at work in the region-the Bush people because they chose to willfully ignore such factors, the Obama administration because of its reluctance to consider the broader rationale that may account for the absence of further attacks on the US mainland.

By failing to credit the reasons people in the region readily express for believing that the US had turned its back on the Arabs or by simply regarding Arab rhetoric as meaningless exaggeration, both administrations have missed the import of what is being said. It is identical to assuming- as some in the administration and press have-that various regimes in the Middle East are regarded by their people as illegitimate when, in fact, a proper understanding of how legitimacy is attributed would lead to the more supportable conclusion that such regimes are often disliked but that the way any given leader accedes to power-by establishing a network of dependents-is the way anyone should do so, and hence that anyone who succeeds in putting together such a political network is ipso facto legitimate. This failure to understand what our actions have meant to people in the region has obscured our understanding of why Bin Laden-whose primary target is not the US but the nearby Arab regimes- had popular support for 9/11 but has not had it since. And failure to even ask why there may have been no more attacks on American soil by Bin Laden or those close to him can only perpetuate the myth that we are continually under attack from his base.

Suicide Bombers are Motivated by Their Hatred and Envy of Us

Speaking of Islamic extremists George W. Bush always said that " they hate us"-indeed " they hate our freedom." Various experts-few of whom speak the languages or have lived for extended periods in the region- have claimed that suicide bombers act only when provoked by foreign invaders (Pape and Feldman 2010), that because they come from all socioeconomic classes they are not motivated by poverty or relative deprivation (Roy 2004), that they are protesting their countries' lack of civil liberties (Krueger 2008), that they are psychologically affected by their powerlessness (Post 2007, Merari 2010), or that they kill themselves to achieve religious martyrdom (Bukay 2006), solidarity with fellow jihadists (Sageman 2004), or fulfillment as cultural heroes.19 Once again, the myths obscure the local dynamics, and the administration accepts uncritically the underlying anthropological assumptions embraced by these theories. The reality, it may be argued, is rather different.

If being a man means forming a network of indebtedness then the removal of those resources necessary to create such an index of one's manhood can have very serious repercussions. Older men will have established their ties and hence their standing as men, so they have nothing to prove by suicide bombing. Men of any age may participate vigorously in funeral processions to demonstrate involvement in their networks. Younger men, however, may need to prove they stand at the center of some network in part through the elaborate process of negotiating a marriage. 20 Nowadays, however, in many parts of the Middle East, younger men cannot easily get married because they do not have the financial wherewithal or other means by which to build the requisite obligational bonds. Indeed, the average age for marriage has climbed into the late 20s for men and into the mid-20s for most women (while in Iran 38 percent of men aged 25-29 remain unmarried), and the cost of marriage in Egypt, for example, is as much as 11 to 15 times annual per capita household expenditure (Whitaker 2010, Assaad et al. 2010, Singerman 2007, Slackman 2008). Barred from the usual avenues to substantiating adult status some men may choose, however, to demonstrate that they have formed bonds of indebtedness by being attached to a terrorist group. More than that, since any man's network is only as good as his capacity to maintain it there is always the risk that his allies will not be there when needed.

But if a man kills himself in pursuit of a holy endeavor he fixes, both in religion and in the public eye, that he did indeed have a network-and that, unlike ordinary men whose networks are subject to constant uncertainty, his own network now lies beyond risk of revision (Rosen 2008). It is not that "they" hate or envy us: It is that if men in this part of the world are not able to negotiate their webs of relationship freely there is no way they can see themselves as real men. The administration continues to assume that suicide bombing is an individual act, that it is attached to issues of religious fervor and resistance to occupation. As a result, the focus remains on personal disaffection rather than social situation. Such assumptions preclude consideration of the broader array of cultural implications that may lead to suicide bombing. But it is only if the forms of social arrangement in which these men become more recognizably adult-with jobs and other opportunities to build alliances-that their sense of free movement will be reaffirmed. In the absence of such opportunities-and with US policies aimed more at suppression than maturation-inappropriate anthropological assumptions can only lead to inapposite political results.

Many Bombers, Though Potentially Very Dangerous, Have been Failures

The factors that apply to clearly intended bombing attacks within the US apply as well to those that have failed. From the Shoe Bomber to the Christmas Day Bomber to the Times Square Bomber recent attempts have generally been regarded as blessedly unsuccessful. Chance, incompetent training, and possible loss of nerve may all have played a role. But success is a cultural construct, not just an explosive result. From their perspective, the bombers' success may lie primarily in the meaning of the attempt itself. Consider, in particular, two factors common to most of the bombers who have been captured and interrogated: the ready confession of involvement and the willingness to implicate others (Associated Press 2010). If the goal is to sacrifice oneself to the destruction of American targets, why would these bombers so quickly admit guilt and inform on their co-conspirators? The answers may lie in a fuller understanding of the cultural context of these acts.

My own interviews with Muslim judges as well as individual instances collected by several other scholars, indicate that, career offenders aside, criminal defendants quite frequently plead guilty.21 They do so not out of coercion or plea bargaining, however, but because they believe their acts to have been justified, and they know that, unlike American proceedings that end when a guilty plea is entered, in their own cultures they will generally still have the opportunity to explain their reasons in court. Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life imprisonment for aiding terrorists, pleaded guilty-to the mystification of his American attorneys and the judge in the case-but was outraged when he was not allowed by the rules of evidence to tell the jury his story in his own fashion. Similarly, terrorists may implicate others because, if their acts are to have meaning, they must demonstrate that they have indeed constructed a network of associates, a far more significant indicator of their adult status than the anonymous completion of their terrorist acts. A bombing attempt, then, need not necessarily result in a deadly explosion in order to prove that most important of factors-that the bomber is embedded in a network of consequence. And the admission of involvement is a statement of the justifiable basis for the attempt and hence a statement of one's standing as a rational man. Once again, if the implicit anthropological assumption is that the meaning of an act is a shared human phenomenon, immediately accessible to all regardless of cultural variation, the nuances of local meaning-and the mistakes attending such incomprehension- may have very serious consequences. Failure to appreciate what passes for reason and success in this cultural frame can, therefore, easily lead government officials and media commentators to misunderstand the very nature of the terrorists' acts.

If We Build Safe Settlements, Other Afghans Will Want to Emulate Them

This is a key doctrine of the counterinsurgency litany. But it fails to recognize the tremendous range of differences among regions and groups in this part of the world, the constant fractionation that is at once a hedge against centralized power and a vehicle for keeping open the range of ways a man may build his personal network. Far from wishing to emulate aspects of other settlements, emphasis is often placed on ways to distinguish oneself and one's group. The rivalry of cities and locales is a keystone of Middle Eastern cultures, differentiation being crucial to individual and collective identity. Thus the counterinsurgency attempt to establish baseline settlements is often undercut from the outset. American military personnel, many of whom still refer to the Afghans derisively as "hajjis," are not, as Nir Rosen has argued, even capable of carrying out their own professed counterinsurgency (COIN) policy:

The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN. They lack the curiosity to understand other cultures and the empathy to understand what motivates people. Counterinsurgency doesn't make sense. It asks soldiers, concerned primarily with survival, to mix Wyatt Earp and Mother Theresa. In public they pay lip service to COIN because that is the way to advance. Less publicly, officers speak of going in to villages and "doing that COIN shit." (Rosen 2010b)

Indeed, the guidelines are so inchoate that, as one army captain put it, " the word 'counterinsurgency' is like a Potemkin village satisfying the curiosity of a typical stranger but upon close examination by a serious interrogator, falling apart" (Hsia 2010, Sepp 2005). Or, as Marc Sageman told the Senate:

The proposed counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan is at present irrelevant to the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, which is located in Pakistan. None of the plots in the West has any connection to any Afghan insurgent group...Taliban return to power will not mean an automatic new sanctuary for al Qaeda. [C]ounter-insurgency in Afghanistan has little to do with global neojihadi terrorism and protecting the homeland. (Sageman 2009)

But even where safe havens are constructed the belief that others will seek to emulate them is misguided. The assumption of relative uniformity among local groupings in the region and the concomitant assumptions that successful economic and security advances for one will become the object of envy for all simply fly in the face of local diversity. Indeed, in the cultures of the region it is precisely in such diversity that some degree of safety resides: By being able to reach out in all directions to a wide range of possible allies one retains a significant degree of maneuverability that is lost in constraints of social uniformity and state-controlled regularization. In the Quran (V:54) it is said: "If God had willed, He would have made you one nation." Or, as a Muslim character in a Conrad novel explains: "In the variety of knowledge lies safety"-knowledge of others' customs and contacts being the crucial knowledge to garner. It is precisely in difference, then, that men, imbued with God-endowed reason, are expected to make their way, and reveling in difference is an integral part of the cultural pattern that characterizes the area. The assumption that everyone wants to follow the model of an American-created settlement simply ignores the crucial value placed on differentiation throughout the region.

Underneath, We All Really Want the Same Things and Are All Really Alike

This was President George W. Bush's rationale for not having to think about what happens after the former regime is removed. For him it was as much a matter of natural law that, wanting to be like us, the Iraqis and Afghans would simply welcome American troops with flowers and candy, and would then proceed automatically to welcome our institutions and our goals. Just as Bush believed that the market is always self-regulating so too the political thicket, once cleared of the brush, was thought to yield a "human terrain" in which democracy would seed itself and (as Ron Chernow has said of the Marquis de Lafayette's attitude towards the Terror following the French Revolution) "that liberty would somehow thrive in the vacuum."

President Obama does not subscribe to Bush's natural law vision but he does appear to accept a functional equivalent-that everyone who wants safety must want it in much the same way. This is a truly remarkable position for someone who, in many other respects, has followed in the intellectual footsteps of his anthropologist mother. As he stated in his letter of July 8, 2009 celebrating the award of the James Smithson Medal to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: "My mother earned her Ph.D. in anthropology and instilled in me a deep appreciation for finding the universal common ground among all people and societies, while at the same time studying and celebrating what makes each unique." 22 Indeed, in a number of other instances the president has clearly demonstrated his anthropological orientation: his near-yet-distant way of choosing his religious and ethnic attachment is consonant with the anthropologist's pose of participant/ observer; his partial apology for his countrymen's past deeds bespeaks his relativist propensities; his bowing to the Emperor of Japan and the Saudi king demonstrates not the abasement of his office but engagement in others' practices without accepting their meanings as his own. Yet on some continuum running from the universal to the particular the president tends to lean towards the former orientation in most instances. By now ignoring the differences we encounter in Afghanistan, however, he sets most of the particularistic tendencies of anthropological theory aside and directs the army to engage in community development as if those communities could be anywhere in the world.

It is true that in his Nobel lecture President Obama noted that "somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities-their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion." But he prefaced that remark by saying that "we're all basically seeking the same things" (Obama 2009b). Clearly, the president is trying to walk a fine line between the universal and the particular, individual desires and group identity, respectful relativism and the need to make choices as commander-in-chief. The American propulsion to regard everyone as basically the same may make Americans feel that we are really just being "friendly" and selfless. But by trying to have it both ways, we set ourselves up to be shocked and disappointed when we discover that everyone does not, in fact, always want what we want. By focusing too much on the universalistic side of the anthropological equation, one may readily slide into the myth that the likable American is simply helping those who naturally want to be just like us.

President Obama has allowed his policies to become associated with unarticulated orientations in anthropology that are woefully outmoded: The kind of holism and functionalism to which his administration has attached itself is seriously flawed. Holism's assumption that everything is connected to everything may have influenced the administration's attempt to solve multiple issues of domestic policy, economic structure, and international relations simultaneously, but in truth all parts of a cultural system do not cohere equally. One cannot simply change the structure of centralized power and expect all concepts of, say, personhood and morality to fall into line accordingly. And functionalism's assumption that everything works to the maintenance of the totality fails in its incapacity to account for historical change, and thus negates any serious consideration of the relevance of cultural history in the assessment of one's actions in the region.

The Obama administration (including the top echelon of the military) would appear, then, to have accepted several cultural assumptions that are highly questionable: 1) that tribes are structurally rigid entities and/or obdurate precursors to desired democratic governance; 2) that under the current policy of "clear, hold, build" (which Mr. Obama prefers to call " target, train, and transfer" ) the example set in one village will be readily transferable to any other village since they share a common aspirational and organizational structure; and 3) that in a supposed age of globalization the local is either unimportant or will be overwhelmed by the need or desire of local people to be incorporated in a process of ineluctable uniformity. The first assumption is grounded on a view of tribal organization that is at least 50 years out of date, the second on a belief that there is very little variation among indigenous groupings, and the third on the assumption that the local is overwhelmed by the global when in fact the human quest for variation renders such uniformity illusory. The Human Terrain projects-which have involved anthropologists as key figures in discerning local leadership and patterns of opposition-are favored by both Secretary of Defense Gates and General Petraeus.23 Even if we leave aside the propriety of anthropologists' involvement in such operations it is, however, clear that the assumptions that are receiving favor in the manuals and implementation are highly questionable and may prove dangerously unreliable.

War tests our theories, no less than our received assumptions, our creativity, and our courage. The administration has promised to begin withdrawing some troops from Afghanistan by July 2011. But-whether knowingly and hopefully, or naively and dangerously, whether as the rationalization for a planned withdrawal or a sincere belief that we can do an end-run on the Karzai government and build decentralized communities in strategic locales (implanting what then commanding General McChrystal called a "government in a box" )-what has been left on the table are many of the same socio-cultural assumptions that have endured since at least 9/11.24 Moreover, these assumptions may become entrenched in military doctrine if the current war is seen as an instance in which US forces were not defeated, leading a generation of future commanders and cadets to a misguided view of anthropology's contribution to counterinsurgency ideology. Without an understanding of why we were attacked and why actions do not mean the same to our opponents as we assume they must to any human being, we may wind up as mystified by our lack of success in this part of the world as we have often remained insensible to our failures in other such localized wars.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Portions of this paper were delivered as the 2010 Lt. Jones-Huffman Memorial Lecture at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD. The author is grateful for comments made on points raised in this essay by numerous military officers, diplomats, and NGO workers who have served in the region. Because none was interviewed for attribution they are not identified here. The essay was prepared during my tenure as a Mellon Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I am grateful to the Center and its fellows for comments on earlier drafts.

ENDNOTES

1 For a comparison of the issues analyzed in this essay with a series of myths about our involvement in Afghanistan as enumerated by a blue-ribbon panel, see Afghanistan Study Group (2010).

2 Andrew Bacevich-a West Point graduate, veteran of the Gulf War, and professor of history-thus wrote: "The surge...functions chiefly as a smoke-screen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and waste that politician, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget" (Rich 2010). See also Kilcullen 2009 and 2010. In its list of "Myths and Realities in the Afghan Debate," the prestigious Afghanistan Study Group (2010) states categorically that the surge failed in most respects. See also West 2011. A member of Congress who serves on two intelligence committees also told me in a private phone conversation: "The surge was not what turned things around."

3 It should be noted, for example, that ethnic killing continued after the surge and actually heightened the flight abroad of some two million Iraqis, including most of the country's middle class (Amos 2010:26-29). The United Nations refugee office reports that, as of late 2010, of the 100,000 refugees who have returned to Baghdad, 61 percent said they regretted coming back and 87 percent said they could not support their families upon returning (Leland 2010).

4 A listing and map of the tribes of Iraq, translated from Arabic sources, are most accessible for English readers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_tribes_in_Iraq; a listing of the Pashtun tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan region, also based on original sources, can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashtun_tribes.

5 On the "Indian country" metaphor, see Silliman 2008. See generally, Economist 2010, and Bumiller 2010. The controversial anthropologist/defense analyst Montgomery McFate (2005) was, whatever her other faults, accurate when she wrote in 2004: "Once the Sunni Ba'thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba'thification, the tribal network became the backbone of the insurgency. The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding of Iraqi culture."

6 See Goode 2008. To appreciate the full complexities of the Awakening see the interviews in McWilliams and Kurtis 2009, and Montgomery and McWilliams 2009. Having failed to form a unified winning coalition in the elections of March, 2010 the Awakening Movement itself began to fractionate and come under increasing attack from insurgent forces (Arango 2010).

7 As an army colonel with a Ph.D. from Stanford who teaches at West Point has said: "To think the reduction of violence [in Iraq] was primarily the result of American military action is hubris run amuck [sic]" (Gentile 2009:10-11). See also Simon 2008. Interviews with former insurgents support this claim, as do published statements by British commanders and the American soldier who stated that, " it was the Awakening, not the surge, that was 'the game changer'" (Collyns and Jones 2010). Whether it is true that without the surge other allegedly successful operations by General Petraeus would not have been possible is, of course, impossible to demonstrate, as one can never prove a negative. Compare Zakaria 2009 for the claim that: "The surge in Iraq was a success in military terms." See also Ricks 2009.

8 For comparative updates and applications of this thesis, see Chou and Benjamin 2003 and Scott 2010.

9 On the tribal structures of the Afghan region, see Barfield 2010, Edwards 1996 and 2002, and Hart 2001.

10 This analysis of tribal structures, and support for such a view in the literature, is elaborated in detail in Rosen 2002.

11 For example, in its approach to the Afghan tribes: "One hallmark of the American agreement with the Shinwari tribe is that $1 million in American development aid will go directly to Shinwari elders. The money will bypass Karzai government officials, whom Shinwari elders dismiss as corrupt and ineffective" (Khapalwak and Rohde 2010). Just what will constitute "development," of course, remains to be seen. Moreover, as another report on the same tribe's decision states: "But no one expects to be able to duplicate the scale of the Iraq effort, because in many parts of Afghanistan the Taliban have not only intimidated or killed local tribal leaders but insinuated themselves into the very fabric of the hierarchies of the tribes" (Filkins 2010). As for the Sunni tribes of Iraq, by the fall of 2010 many of those paid to remain part of the "Awakening Movement" had begun to drift back to support of al-Qaeda elements (Williams and Adnan 2010).

12 Barnes 2010. For support see West 2011. See also Petraeus' key statement about tribes in Military Times 2010. Petraeus also seems to contradict claims that he sees Afghanistan as fundamentally different from Iraq:

"We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq," the general said. In Iraq, Petraeus recalled, U.S. and coalition military commanders knew who the local tribal power brokers were, how the social systems were supposed to work and how they actually functioned. "That enabled us enormously," he said. "We are just completing the process of getting the inputs right here and now [and] we have to employ those inputs." (Garamone 2010).

For a comparison of whether Afghan tribes are really portrayed as fundamentally different from the way the military has seen them in Iraq a careful reading of a recent Army study can prove valuable (US Army 2009).

13 See also, Smith 2010: " 'The charges reveal that the plot...was directed by senior al- Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and was also directly related to a scheme by al-Qaeda plotters in Pakistan to use Western operatives to attack a target in the United Kingdom,' the Department of Justice said in a statement....All three 'organized' the Zazi plot, although only El Shukrijumah is charged, the justice department said." On September 22, 2010 the director of the FBI strikingly stated in his Congressional testimony: "The 2009 plot led by Najibullah Zazi to attack the New York subway was the first known instance since 9/11 that al Qaeda had successfully deployed a trained operative into the United States."

14 On the Attorney General's claim, see Savage 2010. See also Keller 2010.

15" In June 2010, CIA Director Leon Panetta estimated that, "at most," only 50 to 100 al- Qaeda operatives were present in Afghanistan. His assessment echoed those given by other senior US officials. In October, national security adviser James L. Jones said the US government's "maximum estimate" was that al-Qaeda had fewer than 100 members in Afghanistan, with no bases and "no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies" (Whitlock 2010). The same points were emphasized in the September 2010 report to the 9/11 Commission.

16 The involvement of al-Qaeda from the Af-Pak border in more recent planned attacks is equally murky. Three British Muslims, said to have connections to al-Qaeda, were convicted in July 2010 on secondary charges of plotting an attack after one jury failed to reach a verdict and a second acquitted the men on more serious charges (Burns 2010). Similarly, Norway arrested three men said to be connected to al-Qaida, Najibullah Zazi, and a plot in Manchester in April 2009 (Shane and Schmitt 2010).

17 These points are elaborated in Rosen 1984.

18 Conflicts may, of course, be negotiated in a wide range of ways in Muslim cultures. See, e.g., Ayoub 1965, Huxley 1978, Shahar 2008, and Dupret et al. 1999.

19 For a variety of explanations see generally, Spataro 2008, Stern 2010, and Kershaw 2010.

20 As a recent report states: "Marriage...is widely perceived [in Muslim cultures] as the main marker of adulthood" (Assaad et al. 2010).

21 See, e.g., Liebesny 1975:234-39, Peters 2005.

22 On President Obama's connections to anthropology, see Behar 2008.

23 As Petraeus has stated: "The human terrain is the decisive terrain" (Bowden 2010). See also Human Terrain Team Handbook 2008. See generally, Axe 2010, Lucas 2009, and Packer 2006. For critiques of anthropologists' involvement in human terrain projects, see González 2009a, 2009b; and Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009.

24 On setting up local governments see Dowd 2010: "A Pentagon report also shows that General McChrystal's boast that he could wheel 'a government in a box' into Marja was premature." General McChrystal was fired by the President after remarks the general and members of his staff made were reported in Hastings 2010.

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Author affiliation:

Lawrence Rosen

Princeton University