The Imperial Sociology of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan - Notes

The Imperial Sociology of the ‘Tribe’ in Afghanistan

Abstract

The concept of the 'tribe' is intrinsically linked to the study of Afghanistan.
It serves as a broad signifier for Afghan identity.
It embodies the co-constitution of colonizer and colonized.
The article traces the term's deployment in Afghanistan to understand its evolution.
It examines the intellectual history of the term from the 19th to the 21st century.
The Afghan 'tribes' have undergone a trajectory:
- Initially compared to Scottish clans.
- Then viewed as brave and loyal but distinct from the British.
- Later seen as a 'problem' to be managed.
- Finally, considered essential for a long-term 'Afghan strategy'.
The article connects this intellectual history to imperialism and colonial knowledge production.

Keywords

Tribes, empire, Afghanistan

Winston Churchill Quote

Pathan tribes are always at war.
Every man is a warrior, politician, and theologian.
Large houses are feudal fortresses.
Families cultivate vendettas; clans, feuds.
Nothing is forgotten, and debts are repaid.

Defining the Term 'Tribe'

Commonly used to suggest community affiliation or affinity.
Specifically refers to non-acephalous communities in a territory, contrasted with central/state organization.
However, there is no accepted definition of 'tribe'.
Anthropologists largely avoid the term, using it only in specific instances to delineate particular modes of social organization and political formation.
It is rarely used to describe an entire nation’s social structure.
Often implies anachronistic groups resistant to centralized governance.

Problematic Usage of 'Tribe'

The New Oxford Dictionary acknowledges its broad acceptance in historical contexts.
However, it is problematic in contemporary contexts, especially when referring to communities in traditional societies, because:
- It is strongly associated with past attitudes of white colonialists towards so-called primitive or uncivilized peoples in remote, undeveloped places.
- Alternative terms like 'community' or 'people' are generally preferred.

The 'Tribe' in Afghanistan

The 'tribe' is intimately connected to the study and knowledge of the people of Afghanistan.
It's a concept used to understand Afghan social organization.
Afghans are frequently depicted as fundamentally 'tribal'.
The 'tribe' in Afghanistan is alternately constructed as a security problem, a political threat, and something that needs 'engaging with'.
Tribes are often understood as the 'other' against which the nation-state is posited, in support of 'nation-building' projects.

Article's Objectives

Undertakes a genealogy of the tribe to interrogate its omnipresence in writings on Afghanistan.
Questions why this problematic concept has become shorthand for all Afghan society.
Considers the implications for the study of Afghanistan and 'other' places deemed 'alien'.
Contends that the notion of 'tribe' is not only contested but also mined for dubious political purposes.
Engages conceptual history and world politics to show how 'notions' and 'ideas' can have profound consequences for political praxis.
Aims to decolonize the concept of the tribe by showing its implicated origins and continued use in the service of empire and imperialism.

Colonial Knowledge and Discursive Framing

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.
The construal of Afghanistan as a 'tribal society' is an iteration and continuation of the colonial impulse to simplify, classify, and taxonomize, and then to tailor responses based on those classifications.

Oversimplifications and Interventions

Oversimplifications like the notion that 'To be a Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life…are threatened by foreign invaders' over-determine the politics of the country.
Afghanistan is (re)presented as a certain type of 'intervenable object', 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.

Genealogy of the Term

The article traces how what was initially a particular (ill-defined and fluid) construct used by the early East India Company administrators 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-historicized, 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.

Imperial Origins of Concepts

The article maps how the term has been employed in popular writings on Afghanistan.
It problematizes the notion of 'tribe'.
It shows how a monolithic and unreflective body of work has become the norm in reference to Afghan social organisation.
The article argues that the 'tribe' has become a familiar and accessible idiom 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 utilized.
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’.
Colonial logics are reproduced through the articulation of this concept over time.
The tribe belongs to a family of concepts used to make sense of the Other, to render him/ her legible with important political consequences.

Mountstuart Elphinstone and the ‘Discovery’ of the Afghan Tribe

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) is considered the 'founding father' of modern Afghan studies.
In 1808, he 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.
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.
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’.

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.
He argues that the Afghan kingdom was remarkably similar to Ancient Scotland in its social and political organisation.
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.
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.
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.
Elphinstone’s ‘inductive’ approach to learning about Afghanistan is manifest throughout his writings.
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.
Although stadial theory was central to the Scottish Enlightenment, 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.

Influence of Elphinstone’s Account

Elphinstone’s work still provides the touchstone for much of the academic work done on Afghanistan.
Louis Dupree said as recently as 1982 that anything articulated in reference to Afghan ‘peoples’ and ‘cultures’ since Elphinstone is merely a ‘footnote’.
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’.
In 2001, Account was described as ‘arguably the best book on Afghanistan today’.
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’.
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’.

Sir George Campbell

Campbell acknowledged a significant intellectual debt to Elphinstone.
But he nonetheless warned of the dangers of applying Elphinstone’s Scottish analogy to the Afghans, especially in a military context.
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’.
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.

Campbell's View of Afghan Tribes

In keeping with his advocacy of a cautious policy towards the frontier, Campbell emphasized the ‘ungovernable’ nature of the Afghan tribes, borrowing selectively from sources available to him.
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’.
For Campbell Afghans are not easily manipulated and are astute political actors rather than religious fanatics.

Henry Walter Bellew

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.
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 civilized they would be grateful to be ruled by a legitimate authority.
He also ascribed prime importance to the religiosity of the Afghan tribes.

Contrasting Policies and Stereotypes

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’.
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.
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’.

Reification and Stereotyping

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.
Later 19th century work further ossified the Baluch/Pathan distinction and was quicker to attribute distinctions between these groups in terms of inherent character.

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.
Over this period, the theme of cyclical or countervailing manifestations, one frequently analysed by anthropologists, gave way to increasingly ‘innatist’ understandings of character.
While he keeps this distinction between the Baluch and the Pashtun alive, Holdich’s statements lack the subtlety that characterised Elphinstone’s work and are even less measured than Campbell’s.
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.
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.
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.
In the popular memory through films such as the 1988 blockbuster Rambo III the second burst of Pashtuns onto the world scene as freedom fighters battling imperialism and communism in the guise of the Soviet Union was preserved.
The latter half of the 20th century found the tribes placed, if momentarily, on a pedestal, lionized as holy warriors in the United States, in accordance with the logics of the Cold War.

'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’.
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.
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.

Current Trends and Counterinsurgency

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’.
These ideas have been most notoriously mobilized in Counter-insurgency doctrine, especially in the shape of the US Department of Defense’s Human Terrain System (HTS).
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 organization in its entirety.
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’, uncritically regurgitating the vocabulary that was devised to make Afghanistan’s diverse social structures legible in the colonial era.
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’.
This has fed into visual representations of Afghanistan as a country divided along tribal or ethnic lines.

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.
Tracing the genealogy of ‘tribe’ in Afghanistan, however, also reveals the ways in which Afghanistan as a discursive regime is exceptional.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on an outdated paradigm, they dangerously masquerade as a guide to practice.
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.
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.