Tribal Engagement Workshop: the Time dimension
Posted By Marc on April 16, 2010
On March 24-25, 2010, the Small Wars Foundation brought together a group of current and former military, academics, think tank members and policy people for a two-day focused workshop on what is being called the Tribal Engagement Strategy in Afghanistan. The workshop was co-sponsored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command Joint Irregular Warfare Center, the U.S. Marine Corps Center for Irregular Warfare, the U.S. Army / U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, and Noetic Group. The summary report of the event, along with background information and some of the commentary from participants, has now been published.
If you are thinking that the Tribal Engagement Workshop (TEW 2010) was anything like an academic conference with set presentations, you would be wrong; it wasn’t. The emphasis was on workshopping the following questions as part of three breakout groups (tactical, operational and strategic):
- Evaluate the value and feasibility of a tribal engagement approach in Afghanistan.
- Assess what secondary effects adoption of a tribal engagement approach would have on the political and military situation.
- Identify the operational components of a tribal engagement approach in Afghanistan.
As one of the few Canadians in attendance, I found it to be a very interesting but, at times, frustrating experience. I was part of the strategic working group which, admittedly, was more amorphous than either the tactical or operational foci. All too often, I was reminded of why we (Anthropologists) often describe culture as sub-conscious and internalized. Occasionally, I could even empathize with my archaeological colleagues and their use of the term “ritual object” for something that they couldn’t make sense of. I know that I certainly heard a number of terms – Whole of Government, National Interest, Strategy - being used as “ritual objects”! (NB: Joshua Foust, who was also there, has commented on this as well).
I’m not going to comment on most of the substantive recommendations made at the TEW 2010 since they are ably covered in the summary report and other post-event commentary (available here with more to come). What I do want to comment on is the time dimension.
Most Anthropologists would agree, or, at least, not strongly disagree, with the idea that concepts of “time” and “space” are core components of a culture. They are conceptualized in a variety of ways but, since I’m only going to look at time, let’s just say that it may be seen in a variety of configurations (lineal, circular, spiral) and of varying duration in cultural memory (what is “yesterday”? A day? A year? A century? A millennium?).
From my point of view as a member of the strategy working group, conceptualizations of time were a crucial stumbling block to a successful engagement strategy for one, simple, reason: many of the people in the strategy group – high powered, intelligent and in influential positions – had a linear conception of time, and a definition of “yesterday as “the previous day”.
So, what is wrong with that? Well, the simple reason is that it is totally unlikely that many of the Afghans who would / will be involved in any engagement strategy will have the same conceptualization of time. Indeed, I was chatting with MAJ Jim Gant after the first day, and, as he was describing the tribe he worked with that led him to write about Tribal Engagement, I was struck by how they conceptualized the last century as “yesterday”. A second point, which is related, is that tribal engagement is personal, not institutional, where “personal” means both an individual and their bloodline (how the individual transcends time).
So, what’s the problem? Well, what happens when you have one group of people who believe that a “long time” is a decade and another who believes that a “long time” is a millennium? Where one believes that relationships are personal, while the other believes they are institutional? These oppositions are, obviously, a gross oversimplification, but they do highlight a central problem in designing a “strategy” for engagement.
Marc on 
Pascale Siegel on 
JWC on 
Daniel Gallant on 
MM on
Are you saying that they still don’t get it after almost a decade of war there? Did anybody even notice that when Bush was about to attack Iraq that Saddam compared him to Hulugu? The press in the US, when they did pick it up, made a joke about how silly Saddam was to refer to history that they had no knowledge of, in their infinite database of what is important.
Dig me up and tell me when they stop naming their horses Bucephalus in Afghanistan. Maybe that will happen tomorrow.
Where would I find the report from this conference?
Thanks
MM
Yeah, a lot of the top people didn’t get it, unfortunately. Then again, the very conceptualization of time is different so, while it doesn’t really surprise me, it does concern me. You can get the report which, BTW, is only a summary that is extended by individual contributions, at http://smallwarsjournal.com/events/tew/.
I’m struck by the contextual reference that time is a segment of something (day, month, year, etc) when, it seems to me that time is less a physical or geometric function and more a lineage, ethos function: time is the bottle that carries the ship (tribal lineage). Having it closer in reference gives credence to what embodies the tribe and keeps it together. It is empowering to have ones heritiage and belief in their family systems as near to them as is convient and a natural way to keep traditional beliefs and values tied to the present.