The new approach looks like British Imperialism. That's good, because the British approach was something that evolved into a successful method before the suicide of Europe cut the legs out from under it, while the top-down American approach was a dogmatic failure.

As usual, I see that the jihadist gorilla in the room is not mentioned. That's probably inevitable. That's the way our forced consensus has come out.

Neither Sunni nor Shia are tribes. A mayor is not intended to be the head of the tribe. Warlords often don't rule over tribes, but gangs; Iraqis are not a tribe, but the citizens of a nation...

This guy is mixing the local collaboration approach in a war, fully admitted and put into practice many times, for instance in Sicily during 1943, with some other ideas used by Nationalist groups across the world to promote their agendas.

BTW, the British empire worked as long as the British ruled it, that is, they were on top balancing the relations among the "tribes". The Spanish colonies in America lasted 300 years for the same reason.

Moreover, nations are a way to set clear responsibilities: to create rules that allow commerce, to establish a citizenship above racial or cultural differences that grants a full economic development, to guarantee the value of the currency, to set up a capable army... No warlord can fight his enemies with advanced weapons: the Somali tribal approach had to be "modified" by the Etiopian army...

Globalization might have downplayed the necessity of a nation, at least from the economic and cultural point of view. Nevertheless, they are as important as ever, because as the more links between countries, the more the issues that have to be negotiated, and it is far easier to negotiate with one that with twenty.

Hi J,

I used "Nation-Tribe" to denote a range of non-state actors. "Nation" defined as a people sharing common heritage (such as Turks, Kurds, Arabs). "Tribe" defined as a group related by blood.

The Nation-State is great at enforcing sovereignty, when it works. However, not all nations are states, and not all states Nation-States. There are plenty of failed states, and nationalism/tribalism is driving functioning states toward failed states. How do we deal with them effectively if our policy remains trapped by the Nation-State paradigm?

As John Robb commented, as non-state actors become more destructive, the state will have to evolve. In many cases, the state will collapse. How do we effectively deal with these "Global Guerrilas"?

So we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. Like all paradigm shifts, it is driven by changes in reality and our understanding of it.

J. Aguilar,

BTW, the British empire worked as long as the British ruled it

I'm curious what you mean by "worked." Certainly, it functioned after a fashion. But the same could be said of, say, the Mafia. The thing is, though, in many places, such as what is now the USA, it didn't "work" for very long, about a 100 years. Likewise, all of the BE's African holdings were ruled for less than 100 years. Hardly a model of lasting endurance. In places like Canada and Australia, the British were ruling expatriate Brits, not "tribes."

The BE was based solely on the economic interests of Britian, not on its national security. In protecting its economic interests, it did acquire certain humanitarian responsibilities, but those were never its aim or purpose.

In any case, the BE doesn't provide any sort of model for US foreign policy. The US simply doesn't have the resources to manage "tribes" in failed states around the world.

A failed state is often, in reality, a dynamic collection of principalities and fiefdoms. So we need to treat them that way. For example, is Somaliland as failed as the rest of Somalia? Is the Transitional Federal Government the legitimate successor to Somalia sovereignty, or should we treat it more like the "Holy Roman Empire", which it resembles?

Mark: We don't have the resource to manage all tribes, nor should we. We should identify tribes that we should engage, who are our worthy allies.

Jimmy,

If we are talking about managing "tribes" inside a failed state then, obviously, those conditions would require a substantial military presence on our part. If the theory is that number of failed states is going to increase, then we are talking about a substantial military presence in more and more areas. Given the numbers required to barely manage things in Iraq and Afghanistan, this plan seems somewhat unrealistic--to be polite about it.

mark,

Afraid you're wrong re: numbers of troops.

For instance, the main task of special forces troops is not to act like Rambo, but to do things like engaging local tribes or groups in areas of interest, getting them what they need (be it weapons, medicine, training...), and turning them into an effective force. The CIA can also do things like this, and have.

So no, a major military presence is not required. If that effort is part of a major covert action policy to either topple a regime or carve a piece off of it, then the existence or credible threat of nearby military force may be required in order to protect whatever havens you carve out.

Within a completely failed state, however, that is not necessary aside from providing backup to whatever teams you have deployed. That can be pretty low footprint, low numbers.

If the new nation tribe paradigm fits anywhere, it fits in Europe which has been breaking into smaller units at a very rapid pace. The FSU, the Balkans, Scotland and Wallonia-Flanders come to mind.

If you have a continent wide super state, like the EU hopes to be, what is the use of interposing another, Nations State, level of government between the Scots, the Flemish, the Basques and for that matter the Bavarians, Lombards, Catalans, etc and Brussels.

That being said, as far as Foreign Policy is concerned, and especially in those states that were created by the west, Including all in the Middle East and Africa as well as Central Asia, the West has been using the divide and conquer approach of turning one group against the other for time immemorial. On this basis, it is hard for me to see what has changed.

I'll go one further- major military force is likely to be counterproductive in that kind of warfare. It worries me that we are apparently going to bulk up our footprint in Afghanistan considerably. To some degree that is inevitable and necessary- COIN requires a certain density of reliable boots and we don't have near that. But if the wrong people are pulling the strings in the new administration those extra troops could easily be a liability instead of an asset.

The entire theater needs to be dealt with as a single entity- militarily, politically, economically, and socially. We didn't get that right in Iraq for years... in fact we never really got it right. Reconstruction is just as effective a weapon as laser guided bombs- even more-so.

Hearts and minds isnt about getting people to wave flags and eat your hershy bars, its about providing enough security that the locals can stand up to the bad guys, and giving the people something to lose so that they'll want to.

Its a lot less complicated than its made out to be, and a lot harder to execute than it sounds. You go out there, shoot the bad guys when you can, and when you can't you build something the locals don't want blown up. Then you proceed to teach them how to protect it. We're good at the first part and the last part, its that middle part that we don't do very well. And like the great TE Lawrence said (who would understand our dilemma in Afghanistan perfectly), better for the locals to something adequately than for you to do it perfectly.

The seminal article on this topic was J.P. Nettl's "The State As A Conceptual Variable," written during the Cold War. He attempted to define the state in terms of the functions it performs, so that there are degrees of "stateness." He makes the following observations, toward the end of the article:

Apart from the question of deliberate borrowing, which has played quite an important part in the development of sociopolitical ideas and their application in developing countries, there are probably good reasons why no idea of state is likely to develop from the increasingly unique and particular political experience of these countries. As they develop their own autonomous traditions in coping with their particular problems, which in turn are very unlike those of historical Europe, it seems improbable that any adequate concept of state will appear. The European experience of stateness was essentially the product of a particularization or narrowing of sovereignty into ethnically homogenious or at least ethnically defined areas. The transformation of postmedieval sovereignty into stateness and nationality has, with some exceptions such as Austria and Russia, generally resulted in an overall shrinking of significant territoriality and in all cases in a narrowing of potential references--the almost boundless European horizons available to those few who broke out of the parochialism of isolated geographical communities up to the end of the eighteenth century gave way to the specificity of national references shared by all. The process can be described as an implosion--with all the increasing intensity implied by that word.... Developing countries, on the other hand, have in common the extension of central authority across ethnic boundaries and particular, hitherto "sovereign" communities. The colonial experience was not in itself productive of nationhood, except in a dissociative or antipathetic sense of opposition to foreign domination. The real incorporation into new units of the arbitrary areas carved up by colonial powers followed and did not precede the attainment of independence. The process here was one of explosion, in which the concentration of power resulting from antipathy to colonial rule, structured successfully either through political independence parties or disciplined military-political insurrectionary organizations, was then applied to the new "inherited" territory--the nation trouvée [roughly, "the nation found"]. The metaphor accurately directs attention to the opposing notions of inward concentration and otward extension and hence scattering of energy. Obviously the opposite movement of energy in the two experiences is hardly likely to give rise to the same phenomenon of state.

Seymour Martin Lipset observed that "political science" mainly involves examining the way the state affects society, while political sociology works in the other direction... examining how society and culture affect the "formal institutions for the distribution and exercise of power." It seems to me that the primary issue here is simply the difference between these two disciplines.

Yes to nation-tribes and other non-(central)state actors.

Tribal cantons in a federated state should be more encouraged, and Afghanistan would be a good place to find a local Western oriented top guy to promote cantonizing.

A big central state is primarily needed for defense from other states aggression.

Oh, and for the ego satisfaction of the leaders.

The new Bolivian constitution is interesting in this regard. there appears to be a democratic rejection of the Bolivian, Western style nation state in favor of a sort of tribal federation.