The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam by Akbar Ahmed (review)

The Thistle and the Drone is the third and final book of a trilogy that examines the relationships between the United States and the Muslim world. This book specifically assesses Muslim tribal groups, which, in many cases, live in border areas and represent the periphery of their nations (p. 34). While the book presents “case studies” of 40 peripheral societies and their relationships to central states (p. 40), the “main focus” of the book is on the Pukhtun (known also as Pashtun), Yemenis, Somalis, and Kurds. All of these segmentary lineage societies, except for the Kurds, have been central to the focus of America’s “war on terror” (p. 3) and have “become the targets of the twenty-first century’s advanced kill technology” (p. 1): American drones.

This is an important book that deserves the attention of scholars as well as policy makers. The book spends considerable time arguing that Muslim tribal lineage systems have “thistle-like” characteristics such as love of freedom, egalitarianism, martial traditions, and a highly developed code of honor and revenge that we just do not understand. Ahmed argues that the “prickliest” of tribes are those honor-based societies [nang in Pashto and often represented by hill tribes] that are significantly different than those tribes often of the plains that are subject to rents and taxes [qalang]. The real “clash,” according to Ahmed, “is not between civilizations based on religion; rather, it is between central governments and the tribal [honor] communities of the periphery.” The war on terror has become a triangle formed by the US, states, and tribes (p. 9).

Numerous examples are presented of “thistle” tribal characteristics emanating from Pakhtunwali, i.e., the Pukhtun honor code and way of life prominent in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, especially Waziristan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (the Old North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan) and southern Afghanistan. In a manner that somewhat resembles a memoir, Professor Ahmed relates stories of nang societies based on his earlier experience as a political agent in these areas during the 1970s.

I suspect that many readers of this book will charge Ahmed with having adopted an orientalist perspective, claiming that he believes that the societies of his focus are static in their evolution. For the most part, however, Ahmed, avoids this pitfall by letting the tribal societies define themselves and suggests that all would become better informed by examining the anthropology and dynamism of the tribes. Indeed, he claims, “Oriental despotism is the exact opposite of the political, social, and economic structure of the tribal communities examined in this study.” (p. 11) He cites parallels of tribal groups with the ancient Greeks relative to their independent characteristics and democratic social organization.

He does argue that the United States has failed to understand both the nature of tribal society as well as the dimensions of the conflict between the periphery and center of the states under study. “As a result, Americans have never been clear as to where al Qaeda ends and where the tribe begins and why they resort to violence” (p. 10).

Professor Ahmed is clearly worried how the war against the tribes has led to disarray, and that drone attacks and assassinations have resulted in a chaotic situation that does not benefit anyone. While he believes that negotiation might be a way out, the disarray of the tribes has resulted in a situation where there are not clearly recognized and regarded leaders to negotiate on the tribal side. Moreover, whose interest would be ultimately served by negotiations? Negotiations pursued by the Pakistanis with the tribals surely did not stop the drone attacks and hence, we must ask ourselves who would really benefit through such dynamics.