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In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States declared war on terrorism. More than ten years later, the results are decidedly mixed. Here world-renowned author, diplomat, and scholar Akbar Ahmed reveals an important yet largely ignored result of this war: in many nations it has exacerbated the already broken relationship between central governments and the largely rural Muslim tribal societies on the peripheries of both Muslim and non-Muslim nations. The center and the periphery are engaged in a mutually destructive civil war across the globe, a conflict that has been intensified by the war on terror.
Conflicts between governments and tribal societies predate the war on terror in many regions, from South Asia to the Middle East to North Africa, pitting those in the centers of power against those who live in the outlying provinces. Akbar Ahmed's unique study demonstrates that this conflict between the center and the periphery has entered a new and dangerous stage with U.S. involvement after 9/11 and the deployment of drones, in the hunt for al Qaeda, threatening the very existence of many tribal societies.
American firepower and its vast anti-terror network have turned the war on terror into a global war on tribal Islam. And too often the victims are innocent children at school, women in their homes, workers simply trying to earn a living, and worshipers in their mosques. Battered by military attacks or drone strikes one day and suicide bombers the next, the tribes bemoan, "Every day is like 9/11 for us."
In The Thistle and the Drone, the third volume in Ahmed's groundbreaking trilogy examining relations between America and the Muslim world, the author draws on forty case studies representing the global span of Islam to demonstrate how the U.S. has become involved directly or indirectly in each of these societies. The study provides the social and historical context necessary to understand how both central governments and tribal societies have become embroiled in America's war. Beginning with Waziristan and expanding to societies in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, Ahmed offers a fresh approach to the conflicts studied and presents an unprecedented paradigm for understanding and winning the war on terror.
The Thistle and the Drone was the 2013 Foreword Reviews Gold winner for Political Science.
- Sales Rank: #303606 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Brookings Institution Press
- Published on: 2013-03-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.60" h x 1.18" w x 6.41" l, 1.72 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 424 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"In the end, I was close to tears. Lagrimas caudales or "flowing tears," to use the apposite phrase of Blas de Otero, seems to be what the book's conclusions lead to.... Thus lagrimas for the tribes, for the soldiers, and for the United States.... Akbar Ahmed gives us the only way out of this dangerous dilemma, a way to coexist with the thistle without the drone."―Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary
"I am moved, horrified, and encouraged all at once. Above all, Professor Ahmed makes me proud to be an anthropologist!"―Professor Marilyn Strathern D.B.E., former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
"Ahmed's years of field experience and study, as a government official in tribal Pakistan, as an anthropologist, and as a leading authority on traditional Islam, make him uniquely qualified to offer this timely, balanced, and well-argued analysis of the interaction between modern drone warfare and the tribal peoples it targets. This book should be required reading for any policymaker, student, or military officer seeking to understand the risks and dilemmas of today's conflict."―Colonel David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerilla, reviewing a previous edition or volume
"From Akbar Ahmed, one of the wisest Muslim heads I know, a brilliant deconstruction of America's drone attacks on targets in Pakistan and other Muslim societies across the world. His cogent account of how each attack detonates tribal threads, alienating and radicalizing whole communities still further, is a must-read."―Jon Snow, presenter Channel 4/ITN News
" The Thistle and the Drone... makes a clear argument that the president and his advisers are putting the al-Qaeda cart before the tribal horse."―Malise Ruthven, The New York Review of Books
The Thistle and the Drone reminds the intelligence professional of the importance of understanding local culture and history as the start point for any successful counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operation....by far the greater value of this book lies in the detailed examples Ahmed provides of various tribal communities around the world. Avoiding the esoteric, he provides data useful to the diplomat, intelligence officer, or warrior engaged in political actions or operations in nearly every part of the Islamic world.J.R. Seeger, retired CIA National Clandestine Service officer, CIA. gov Library, Center for the Study of Intelligence
"This is an important book that deserves the attention of scholars as well as policy makers."―Thomas H. Johnson, Research Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, The Middle East Journal
About the Author
Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. He was the former Pakistani high commissioner to the United Kingdom, the first Distinguished Chair of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy, and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Among his previous books are Journey into Islam and Journey into America, both published by Brookings. He is also a published poet and playwright.
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Good but could have been great.
By Crackers
I wish I could give this book a better review, I really do. There is much information that simply is not talked about in Western government circles. This book looks at how tribal traditions, when confronted with modernity and globalization, have given birth to what we understand as Islamic terrorism. This understanding truly adds, in fact, completely challenges, what many decision makers in the West see as the root of Islamic terrorism.
Rather than a strong sense of orthodox Islam, terror networks draw their legitimacy from their tribal backgrounds. This is an important factor is we in the West want to achieve success in this ongoing conflict. Ahmed puts forward the idea that tribes in the Af-Pak boarder area have seen their governing structure destroyed by three factors. 1.Modernization. 2. The State, which views them as backwards and uses violence against them, and 3. Globalization. These three threats have destroyed the three pillars of what Ahmed call "The Waziristan Model" which consists of 1. Tribal Leaders. 2. Religious Leaders. 3. Representatives of the State, the Political Agent (PA) in the case of Pakistans frontier.
All of these ideas make a lot of sense. And will enhance your understanding of the problems in Pakistan. However, the book as a giant weakness. The scope of the project is simply too large. Ahmed wants to show that this model rings true in most of the conflicts against terrorism around the world. He looks at dozens of tribes currently involved in conflict. So much so, that all of the location, names, tribes, histories, and reasons for war are simply overwhelming and yet, too brief to truly enhance your understanding of each conflict (save the Pakistani example, as he spends more time on it. Early on, the author makes a point of saying that each case study could demand a book in its own right. And he is correct. This book suffers for that. If he wanted to give an true analysis of all these case studies, this book would have been 1200 pages long. He would have been better to have stuck with 3 or so case studies and examined them in depth. Maybe Pakistan, Yemin and Mali.
And now to deal with the Drones. The drones in the title of this book are really just a metaphor for globalization. Ahmed does not go into detail about enough specific cases of drone strikes, how their targets are chosen, what the results are in terms of deaths, the true position of the Pakistani government on these weapons (they are against it on the surface, but their has been evidence showing they accept it). I bought this book to understand drones better. I now understand the tribes much better, and because of that I MIGHT understand the effects these weapons have on them. But I did not get a clear enough picture of the intent of these weapons by the USA from this book. Which brings me to the next glaring weakness of this book.
Ahmed insists that drone strikes and interventions by the Americans are the result of the Americans being swindled by other governments. He does not talk enough about the american Intelligence community, which is intimately tied to selecting targets for drone strikes. He should have. An understanding of how targets are chosen would do this volume a world of good.
My final criticism. Mr. Ahmed should have told more of his personal experience as a Political Agent in Pakistan, a position he held many years ago. He lets it be known that he had great success by engaging the tribes on their own terms, with their own traditions. He would have been wise to scrap the 110 page long chapter in which he talks about dozens and dozens of different tribes in dozens of countries, and instead include a more in depth account of how politics work in Pakistan with the tribes, especially since his final chapter, "How to win the War on Terror" provides very little suggestions for policy. At one point he spends 2-3 pages talking about the need for Anthropology (his profession). Yes, such experts will help us understand tribes, but the placement of this discussion in the final chapter felt like an interruption.
All in all, you will read this book and get a better understanding of Tribes and the challenges they face and thus the challenges the West faces as these tribes are finding themselves on the opposite side of the battlefield. You understanding of drones drone policy however, will not be much ore than it was before you started. Still worth the read, but be prepared, I can see why some people would disagree.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Vivid Call for Mutual Understanding
By Dr. Laurence Raw
Many years ago I used to work for the cultural wing of the British Embassy in a territory abroad. I frequently attended receptions and meetings with diplomats, and met the Ambassadors on several occasions. They were all thoroughly decent people - private-school educated on the whole, with Oxford degrees, who genuinely believed that they were engaged in the public service of promoting British interests.
Yet what most struck me about their cross-cultural awareness of the country where they worked was the alarming sense of ignorance. They read all the telexes sent by the Foreign Ministries, as well as the British Foreign Office, and exchange diplomatic small-talk with other embassy personnel at cocktail parties and other meetings; but they had little or no idea of what was really happening outside the goldfish-bowls of their Embassies. They had no understanding how ordinary people lived; how they thought; worshiped; felt, conducted family lives; organized their domestic and professional existences, and so on. Nor did they ever even try to enlighten themselves - after all, they were diplomats in the pay of their country's foreign service, so why did they need to consign themselves to the gutter to find out about people's true feelings?
While reading THE THISTLE AND THE DRONE, I was palpably reminded of this disconnect between diplomats and the people. Akbar Ahmed offers a penetrating study into the different traditions of Islam, and how they are lived, experienced and felt across different territories. Like all religions, it is a complex series of negotiations between personal, religious, cultural, tribal, familial and spiritual beliefs that can only be understood by talking to people and, more importantly, listening to them. Yet no one, not least the political and diplomatic leaders charged with ensuring the safety of the people they represent, has really made the effort to go out and undertake this task. Instead they have been content to remain imprisoned by their own prejudices, and thereby precipitated the "War on Terror," which is nothing else but an invention by a paranoid former US President.
I realize that some readers might accuse me of being anti-western here, of favoring a belief-system which, to many people, has become identified with atrocities beyond imagination. But I still maintain that the only way to reconcile conflict is not through increasing it, but by standing back a little and trying to address the fundamental issues underneath. That requires us to listen to one another - not just to what we are saying, but to what we are really saying. Akbar Ahmed's book calls for this kind of mutual understanding, but one wonders whether the conditions will actually ever exist for that negotiation to take place.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Completely reframes the West vs Islam debate
By BowedBookshelf
Ahmed starts out reframing the way the West views the Muslim world. Instead of looking at interactions in the world as a “clash of civilizations,” he posits that we should be looking at the Muslim diaspora as a set of tribal communities in conflict with their central governments. While some may think this is accepted thought already, it certainly was not when we went into Iraq in 1990, nor in 2003. Ahmed makes a compelling case with examples extending from Albania and Turkey to China and Indonesia, highlighting different models of organization and center-periphery relationships that apply throughout this huge area.
Once the framing is stated, it almost seems obvious, which is perhaps the strongest argument for reading this book. Ahmed goes further to explain how the West has exacerbated regional tensions by inserting themselves into this conflict under the aegis of “the war on terror,” and turned the fight into a global affair against westernization and globalization as defined by Tom Friedman. The unintentional “bug splat” of drone strikes, or the civilian deaths coincident with targeted killings of terrorists, means tribal leaders have a moral responsibility to fight back, aligning with whomever has the strength and willingness to see that fight through. As long as the drone strikes and collateral damage continues, the fight will continue.
The author uses the metaphor of the drone to represent Western technology and power and points out that the thistle captures the essence of tribal societies. The thistle is prickly, hardy, and very hard to uproot. It has an unusual beauty, and it roots in poor soil. Long after all is destroyed, the thistle will abound. Ahmed tells us that the West was used in some cases by “central governments who cynically and ruthlessly exploited the war on terror to pursue their own agenda against the periphery.” We know it is true.
”It is in the interest of the United States to understand, in all the tribal societies with which it is engaged, the people, the leadership, history, culture, their relationship with the center, their social structures, and the role Islam plays in their lives, These issues are, in face, the subject matter of anthropology…Without this understanding, the war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory as current military actions and policies are only exacerbating the conflict."
Ahmed has met Presidents Bush and Obama in his role as academic and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Bush’s administration, I felt, was spectacularly wrong because it was imposing a prefabricated frame of different cultures and societies…Obama’s administration was spectacularly unsure…Both administrations were driven by issues almost wholly on a political level, neglecting the moral and social dimensions and their implications.” Ahmed’s insights may be one of the reasons President Obama did not bomb Syria when the conflict began there. But much damage had been and continues to be done to the relationship tribal groups have with the United States. When the U.S. government put human and civil rights to the service of security, any admiration the U.S. had garnered began to erode.
Ahmed is a huge fan of America’s founding fathers, and the U.S. Constitution. He points out that America itself has wrestled with the center-periphery issue itself in dealing with Native American Indians. Benjamin Franklin wrote that Europeans could learn a great deal from tribal societies: when a Native American elder was offered the opportunity to have several of his tribe educated at a local Virginia college, the elder thanked the government and replied:
"Our Ideas of this Kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours…Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy, spoke our Language imperfectly; were therefore neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, or Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing… however…if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their Sons, we will take great Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them."
The rise of “instant terror experts” that arose in and around the think tanks sprinkling Washington after 9/11 fueled a distorted view of Islam and seeded Islamophobia throughout the U.S., mistakenly defining Islam as the enemy in the global war on terror. Ahmed gives the U.S. Army credit for gaining a greater understanding of the importance of tribal culture as the war in Afghanistan dragged on, but the strategy of working with tribes as a partner came too late: “The United States did not have the time, the resources, or the temperament to create an effective and neutral tribal administration…”
The solution, according to Ahmed, is using the tribal structure and code to repair “mutations into violence:”
"If the tribal code promotes the notion of revenge, then it just as surely advocates the resolution of conflict through a council of elders based on justice and tradition…While the state must express its ideas of nationhood by providing education and other benefits to its peoples, the leaders of the periphery need to encourage their followers to participate in the processes of change and take advantage of them. The state must understand that its components have different customs and traditions, and it needs to acknowledge them, granting communities on the periphery the full rights and privileges enjoyed by its other citizens…however good the intentions on both sides, there is still the matter of how the each sees the other…each side must appreciate the perception the other side has of it.
"...People on periphery have been traumatized beyond imagination in recent years…They face widespread famine and disease and are voiceless and friendless in a hostile world…They have been robbed of their dignity and honor…Yet the world seems indifferent to their suffering and is barely aware of its scale…The test is to see a common humanity in the suffering of others.”
Ahmed is an academic and he writes fulsomely, with many examples and vignettes. The argument is strong and logical enough to be stated simply in a few pages, though, and we quickly recognize the value of this recast of the conflict in which we are embroiled. I really appreciate his taking the time to write his thesis and I come away with a fresh perspective and appreciation of conflict and amity in our world.
This book is Part III of a trilogy examining relations between America and the Muslim world. It is self-contained, however, individuals may find it worthwhile to look at Ahmed's previous work, JOURNEY INTO ISLAM and JOURNEY INTO AMERICA. Colonel David Kilcullen, author of THE ACCIDENTAL GUERRILLA blurbs praise on the back: "...required reading..."
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