What does an expert think about all these budding tribal alliances?

Wondering what an expert would say about the tribal alliances occurring in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and even Syria, I solicited the opinion of one of my favorite Middle East experts, F. Gregory Gause, at the University of Vermont.

Did the professor think the tribes could really deliver what they were suggesting they could - security and even democracy - to their areas of control? Was there really any basis to hope that such traditional leaders could be the modern governors - accountable, transparent, and fair to all, even the non-tribals within their domain - they were saying they could?

The professor was kind enough to respond, and here is what he wrote:

One could (almost) write the history of modern state development in the Arab world (or big chunks of it, not Egypt so much) as a long effort by central states to get control of the hinterlands, which means the tribes. Tribes have always been seen, and with good reason, as the opponents of centralized state authority. They have their own authority structures, their own law, their own loyalties (of which the state might be one, but might not trump tribal identity) and, sometimes, their own armed forces. As economy and technology have changed, the ability of tribes to maintain their autonomy from the state has dwindled.

Different states have handled this in different ways. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the state has adopted the trappings of tribalism, emphasizing it in social life, giving shaykhs an honored position in society, even recruiting some military formations along tribal lines, while absolutely gutting the autonomy of the tribes. The Saudis did this through a clever mixture of enforced settlement, money and the provision of a new loyalty that would trump tribal identity, Wahhabi Islam. But they never tried to humiliate tribal leaders (unless they opposed the Al Saud) or to deny the important role of tribal identity in social life. Contrast that to Ba'thist Iraq in the 1970's, where the use of tribal indicators in names (al-Shammari, al-Dulaimi, al-Duri, etc.) was outlawed. The Ba'th had a project to create a whole new Arab society, not just a new political regime, and tribalism was not part of it. We see how that worked out. Another contrasting case is Yemen, where the state has never really been strong enough to break the autonomous power of the tribes. The balance of power has shifted somewhat to the state with oil money, but not completely. In the 1970's, some of the tribes in North Yemen could field more competent armed forces than the state could. That is not the case any more, but the tribes have retained much more autonomy in Yemen because the efforts to build a centralized, bureaucratic state have not been that successful.

But the flip side of these efforts by centralizing state elites to exercise power over the tribes is that, when the state is weak, or becomes weak, or collapses, tribes come back to the fore as important and autonomous political actors. People need a place to look for protection and belonging and basic needs. In a crisis, where the state is absent or hostile, the tribe can fill that role. Back to Ba'thist Iraq. When Saddam was weakened by his defeat in the Gulf War and the sanctions in the 1990's, he turned to some of the Sunni tribes for political support. He armed them and gave them economic benefits, and most of them supported his rule in the 1990's. (Some, of course, did not and he put down tribal revolts brutally.)

Fast forward to Iraq today. The central government is basically an irrelevance. In Sunni Arab areas there is no government to speak of. There are American forces, there are militias (some of which have a tribal base), there is al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and there are the tribes. We have seen an effort recently by some tribal forces (the Anbar Salvation Council and some others) and some of the militias to ally with the US against AQI. That's great. It sure beats the alternative of them helping AQI. But we should be very cautious about what this means down the line. I don't think that it means that the tribes and Sunni militias want us in Iraq for anything but the very short term, to help them out. I am even more confident that it does not mean that the tribes and militias are going to cooperate with the central government. Maybe they will, but it will take lots of hard bargaining and quite a few concessions on constitutional and oil issues from al-Maliki and the Shi'a and Kurdish parties (and militias) to bring them on board.

When asked for his specific title, Professor Gause wrote back to say he was the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Vermont - or as he put it: "That's a bit like being the shaykh of a very small and poor tribe."