Listen to the words of this Pashtun fighter. Is he an Al Qaeda operative?
He is not. He is not a terrorist.
He does not care about what goes on in New York or Jerusalem or Chicago. He cares plenty about his tribe and his turf.
Obama declared that he would use military force against Al Qaeda operatives in tribal areas of Pakistan. He will send in US forces to try and hunt down such men as this. It will be the Obama equivalent of solving the energy crisis by topping up tires.
The junior inexperienced community organizer and Senator from Illinois said in 2007:
"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges," Obama said. "But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. ... If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will."
Obama, if elected President, will get more Americans killed in Afghanistan than Bush did in Iraq. He is ignorant about Afghanistan and Pakistan and painfully naive on foreign policy. He is however, very good at running a campaign. That is what a community organizer does. If his campaign is successful we will end up with a Jimmy Carter of color. We will pay hell for the folly. I urge you to read this:
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Current Afghan conflict finds echoes in centuries-old feud between tribes
Jul 24, 2008
Canadian Press
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — It's a centuries-old tribal feud pitting Afghanistan's noble clans against the perennial outsiders - and Canada and its allies have been dragged into the middle of it.
The current conflict in Afghanistan is only the latest chapter in three centuries of squabbling between the two main tribal clans of the country's dominant Pashtun ethnic group.
Experts say the West must make a better effort to understand the tribal complexities or its nation-building project in Afghanistan is doomed to fail.
It is no easy feat for an outsider.
The byzantine dynamics of Afghanistan's tribal system include ancient rivalries, election processes and legal codes that can vary from one village to the next.
There are about 60 main Pashtun tribes and they include roughly 400 smaller sub-tribal offshoots - some are tiny, some have hundreds of thousands of members, some break with the majority and some simply sit on the fence.
But boiled down to its simplest description, this is a rivalry between two giant sets of families: the Durrani and the Ghilzai. Their history of violence makes the vaunted Hatfield-McCoy feud look brief and blissful by comparison.
"I really think tribal factors are still important," said Nasir Islam, a University of Ottawa professor who provides a two-day training course on Afghan culture to Canadian soldiers before they deploy.
"It's the $64,000 question: How do you bring change to a society that is so tradition-bound?"
For most of the last three centuries, the blue-blooded Durrani tribal clan ruled Afghanistan, providing the country with its kings who periodically sought to exercise control and bring modernity to the hinterland.
Their attempts to create a modern, central government prompted several violent uprisings from the Ghilzai - a name loosely derived from the term "mountain swordsmen."
President Hamid Karzai is a Durrani.
More specifically, he is a Popalzai, the royal-blooded sub-branch of the Durrani family tree that traces its ancestry to Ahmad Shah Durrani, the 18th century king widely considered the founder of Afghanistan.
The Taliban regime was comprised almost exclusively of Ghilzai tribesmen.
Members of this tribal family are the backbone of today's insurgency, as were their ancestors who waged revolts against Durrani royalty.
The Ghilzai also rebelled against the communists, even though three of the country's Soviet-backed rulers belonged to their clan.
Before that, they rebelled against Durrani kings like Amir Abdurrahman, known as the Iron Amir for his often brutal efforts to reduce the power of tribal leaders and increase the presence of the state in the 19th century.
A Ghilzai uprising later derailed Amanullah Khan's plan to modernize the country with a new public school system for boys and girls, a constitution that guaranteed equal rights, and an end to the strict dress code for women.
After 10 years of trying, Khan was forced into exile in 1929.
It might be tempting for outsiders to see these ancient bloodline identities as an impediment to building a stable Afghan state.
But many of the country's most reputed observers argue the exact opposite: that foreigners and the central government need to better understand tribal realities and incorporate them into larger state structures.
They say that the current nation-building project is being undermined by a lack of cohesion with traditional structures.
Nasir Islam suggests that while a legal system develops, the state should recognize tribal dispute-resolution mechanisms. Plaintiffs could then be allowed to appeal tribal verdicts to a state-run court, he says.
One of the world's leading experts on Afghanistan makes a similar argument.
Barnett Rubin says that in most of the country, the only law enforcement available to villagers rests with tribal councils and their crude interpretation of Islamic law.
The political scientist at New York University argued in a Foreign Affairs magazine article last year that there will be only two options available in the years to come, pending the development of a modern justice system: "Enforcement of such customary or Islamic law - or no law at all."
An incident just last week in northern Afghanistan illustrates his point.
A father in Sarpul province publicly threatened to make his entire family suicide-bombers unless he gets justice in the gang-rape of his 12-year-old girl.
He said the rapists had bribed their way out of trouble because they had powerful links to the police department and politicians.
One Afghan scholar describes how rural-dwellers consider their traditional legal system fairer than anything foreigners have to offer. It may crude by western standards, exceptionally harsh in some cases, and jaw-droppingly misogynistic - but at least the people will follow it.
For serious matters, like a murder trial or a treaty negotiation, Pashtun tribes will gather all adult men for a so-called shura.
In the case of an accidental killing, the trial begins with the placing of a stone on the ground between the houses of two feuding parties. It is a symbolic gesture that declares an inviolable truce period - with members of each home forbidden from crossing that stone to fight.
The adult men of the tribe deliver a verdict after gathering the facts of a case. The ultimate aim is to find a satisfactory solution for both families, and not to punish any individual but to establish some compensation to the injured parties.
Penalties for a crime can see one family forced to transfer land, money or one of its females to the injured parties.
A family that refuses to abide by the verdict can have its house burned down.
Two academics who described the process in a recent paper say foreigners are being led astray if they believe the current government can replace these systems.
"This is a dangerous and fundamentally bankrupt approach," say Afghanistan scholars Chris Mason and Thomas H. Johnson.
"(It is) arrived at by misguided bureaucrats, policy analysts, and westernized Afghan elites, who are the first to downplay the importance of tribalism ... Such elites (are) often the only contacts of western policy professionals."
In fact, the Canadian government is keenly aware of the powerful tribal dynamics at play in the rural areas.
Its analysts have closely studied the legal system and attempted to incorporate tribal realities into their interaction with locals.
If a public works contract is tendered in a village with different tribes, there is an effort to ensure that various clans each receive a share of it.
The Canadians have seen how tribal leaders can serve as the most reliable bulwark against the insurgency.
In areas where the tribal structure is weakest, the Taliban tends to be strongest. In the Kandahar districts of Sanzari and Arghandab, the number of Taliban attacks and incursions skyrocketed after the death of local leaders.
"When the leaders tell people, 'Stand against the Taliban,' they will stand," said a local Afghan who acts as a cultural adviser to the Canadian government.
"Now the Taliban are killing tribal leaders."
The Taliban have always railed against tribalism and described their own mission as a pan-Islamic one that should unite Muslims of different tribes.
However, they have used the symbolism and rules of tribal politics to their advantage.
When their leader Mullah Omar sought to assert his authority over the country in 1996, he repeated a grand gesture that cast him as a modern-day Ahmed Shah Durrani.
He headed over to a Kandahar shrine that supposedly holds a cloak that once belonged to the Prophet Muhammad - one that Durrani brought back from the Holy Land in 1768 - and draped it over his shoulders.
That symbolic gesture helped build Omar's reputation as "Leader of the Faithful," and cast him as a modern-day heir to the famous patriarch of the Durrani bloodline.
The Taliban also use the rules of Pashtun tribalism to their advantage on the battlefield. When they hide in villages and NATO planes bomb those villages, they know they are winning converts to their side.
The ancient principle of badal - vengeance - is among the core tenets of Pashtunwali, the ancient tribal code.
Human-rights groups estimate that by December of 2001, more innocent civilians had already been killed in coalition strikes than the total number who died on Sept. 11.
And when foreign soldiers forcibly enter a home, search a woman, and especially if they kill an innocent person, they have made new enemies.
The Taliban know the rules well.
"If your brother or my brother was killed by someone, we would not be happy," says Nasir Islam.
"(But in Pashtunwali) it's a question of honour. If you do not take revenge, you are dishonourable."
