The Anbar model is catching on. Following the success of the Anbar Awakening movement against AQI, which took up arms and joined the Coalition in the fight, the idea seems to emerge that local tribal stakeholders should be co-opted to fight the war in Afghanistan. Dan Green in Special Warfare (reproduced on SWJ) comments:

Afghanistan’s tribes must forcefully confront the insurgency and not be overwhelmed by it, while maintaining the active support of the people and reducing the tendency of the tribes to fight among themselves.
All of this must be done while building the capacity of the Afghan state without creating a parallel tribal system. Though this would seem to be an almost insurmountable challenge, it is not impossible, and to quote General David Petraeus’s view about creating security in Iraq: “Hard is not hopeless.”

Green points out that Afghanistan ain’t Iraq, and the tribal system there is significantly different. He notes three main differences:

• In Iraq, the tribal structure remained intact, while in Afghanistan, it was undermined by the Taliban and the Pakistanis.
• Iraq’s tribal leaders are more suited to leadership than Afghanistan’s, and better educated.
• Afghanistan has less resources, and thus more conflict over them.

That’s a cogent analysis of the differences, but, more importantly: what has worked in one place in counter-insurgency may not work in another that well. This is a fortiori so with reliance on the local tribes. It is hard to gauge what tribes think and do in the first place. Certainly the last time the Afghan tribes were ‘enlisted’ into the fight should serve as an example of what not to do. Operation Cyclone, the CIA-funded operation to channel cash and MANPADs to the Mujahideen against the Soviets, ended up with American money going to maniacs like Hekmatyar, who was chums with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, who the Americans relied upon in figuring out who should get the cash. Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami spent the civil war killing their political opponents (and civilians). How can we avoid that outcome in Afghanistan today? Any reliance on the tribes must be done with great circumspection. There is a consensus of sorts that the tribes are simple entities. That is a deceptive conclusion born of their relative lack of progress on Western terms, both social, political and physical/material. But tribes are complicated affairs. They are not children on a big stage, to be enlisted at will. As the experience from Operation Cyclone shows, enlisting the tribes cuts both ways - the tribes, too, enlist their newfound Western supporters, and it is far from easy to figure out what exactly to.