Man-has-Tan/ War-is-Tan

Wretchard's post 'By the Sword' references an article by Bill Roggio outlining the Taliban’s most recent military gains in North and South Waristan intimates that the Taliban forces unleashed westward have now become uncontrollable and are now threatening the Pakistani state. Thus; "He who lives by the sword shall die by it". Bill Roggio describes how a Pakistani military eager to demonstrate control on the eve of the Bush visit has succumbed to ‘blowback’ from a vigorous Al Qaeda/Taliban counter offensive. I raise the question as to whether this will galvanize the tepid Pakistani into a more vigorous expression of national sovereignty.

“The fact that President Bush was able to visit Islamabad(Karachi) suggests that Musharraf has at least tentative control of Pakistan, a comment that I would not have been willing to make a week ago. One could hope that the recent escalation between regular forces and foreign fighters might make it politically acceptable for the Pakistani forces to more vigorously engage them in the future. This appears to run counter to previous efforts by the Pakistani army generals who made deals with the tribal warlords but failed to effectively take control of the region. The local tribal leaders are either in cahoots with the foreigners or they are incapable of maintaining control.”

Marxist ideology split Korea North and South, then later Vietnam. While the Vietnam conflict was resolved with the ascendancy of the Ho Chi Min government, Korea remains split to this day.

If Lebanon is the prime example of factionalization within a state then the Balkans has been the poster child of regional destabilization.

Political, ethnic, and religious identity are the forces that draw together nations and they are the forces that pull nations apart when those nations are founded on less cohesive principles.

Marxism provided the organizing principles of state for North Korea and Viet Nam, ethnic identification for the Balkans, religion for the Taliban, but perhaps the strongest organizing principle and threat to national unity in the Middle East is tribal identity.

Rivalry can be exploited to create instability amongst tribes but a nation can never expect to gain the loyalty of one at the expense of the other. In part, geography and the reach of civilization will determine if tribes can be made a part of a national identity.

The reach of Iran’s multi-tiered totalitarian state within the boundaries of its geography enables it to spawn non-state actors while being able to maintain plausible deniability and resistance to blowback. Pakistan has dabbled with the same experiment and has failed because its ideology of state is not as strong as the tribes that it seeks to organize and its civilizing reach cannot penetrate the geography nor the hearts and minds of its tribal inhabitants.