Challenging the Faith-based Narrative of Terrorism
By Priyanka Srinivasa
Washington, DC
On March 14 th, hundreds of people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a conference room at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC’s most prominent think tank, to discuss a pressing issue: the US drone program and its impact on tribal societies around the world.
The occasion marked the launch of the book The Thistle and the Drone: How the War on Terror became a Global War on Tribal Islam by Brookings non-Resident Senior Fellow Ambassador Akbar Ahmed.
In attendance were prominent guests including Pakistan’s Deputy Ambassador Dr. Asad Majeed Khan, Mohsin Chandna, the Economics Minister at the Embassy of Pakistan, Michael Caroe, the son of Sir Olaf Caroe, author of The Pathans and legendary British official in the old Frontier Province, Dean of Edwards College of Peshawar the Rev Titus Presler, and Stephan Richter, the editor-in-chief of the Globalist, as well as Ambassador Ahmed’s family, including Ahmed’s baby grandson Alexander to whom the book is dedicated.
I watched my guru Ambassador Akbar Ahmed study the crowd before the storm as he was introduced by Ambassador Martin Indyk, Vice President and Director of Brookings’ Foreign Policy program. The book, to say the least, is provocative.
The Thistle and the Drone examines the relationship between central governments and tribal societies on their peripheries and the impact the war on terrorism has had on this relationship. While the thistle, the flower adopted by the tribal peoples including the Scots as their symbol, represents tribal peoples the drone represents the modern technology used against them.
The book devotes a full chapter to Waziristan, where Ahmed served as Political Agent, the leading Pakistani government official running the area. Ahmed uses Waziristan, with its Pukhtun tribes, as a model to study the relations between other similar tribal societies on the peripheries of their nations and central governments. Ahmed draws upon 40 case studies across the world to demonstrate how the center’s incessant failed policies to conquer and control the periphery have led to the destruction of tribal society and contributed to terrorism.
Ahmed explained that the chaos in Muslim tribal societies — as seen in the frequent cases of suicide bombings – is not due to Islam; rather it is the result of the corrosion and destruction of tribal rights, sovereignty, and social structure that leads forgotten and misrepresented tribal elements to express their frustration through violence. After 9/11, it was these very tribes, including the Pukhtun, Somalis, and Yemenis, who were labeled “terrorists” and attacked by both central governments and the United States, which launched the vast majority of drone strikes in their areas.
People in tribal societies, Ahmed explained, commonly say “every day is like 9/11 for us” as they are attacked by their own government troops, suicide bombers, tribal rivals, and drones. President Obama’s drone program, Ahmed argued, has exacerbated the conflict between the center and periphery. The consequences of drones, Ahmed said, are not being debated in the United States: “We’re just hearing one side of a discussion…We really need to hear people from the other side. We need to talk to people from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, or where the drones are being used, on the impact it’s having there.” I could hear audience members shifting in their seats. It is not easy for the “heart” to deconstruct the “terrorist.” The post-9/11 bitterness is still strong.
Ahmed invited members of his team to read excerpts of The Thistle and the Drone, some of which described the atrocities that play out every day unnoticed in tribal communities. Harrison Akins, senior research fellow, confirmed that one in every four days Pakistani tribal communities are bombarded with drone missiles. Nafees Ahmed recounted how violence against peripheral women plays out all across the world. From Baluchistan in Pakistan where nationalist slogans are literally carved into people’s bodies to the Fulani in Nigeria who have been eaten by opposing tribes with the government looking the other way — no one is left without a scar. These are faces of tribal men, women, and children who are misunderstood and strewn together as “terrorists.” I heard a woman behind me inhale deeply as if she could not believe it. Where do we go from here? Aja Anderson, Ahmed’s chief of staff, read the final sentences of the book: “The test is to see a common humanity in the suffering of others. If people can rise above tribe, race, and religion to reach out to others not like them, it will save humankind in the twenty-first century”.
When I finally heard these words read aloud at Brookings, I felt as something heavy was lifted off of me. I have been waiting for this day ever since Ahmed requested that I join his research team for the Thistle and the Drone. As a South Asian torn from the region as part of the diaspora, I have had the opportunity to take a step back from an identity that I have inherited. My Indian roots have been the product of armed conflict and broken families across imposed borders. If there is one thing that Ambassador Ahmed has taught me, it is the power of dialogue. The debate about tribal Islam has been one-sided. Where are the communities that are on the periphery? Who are they? What is life like for them? The few accounts that do exist, unfortunately, seem to be tucked away in old ethnographies. Ahmed’s project lays the way for a public and inclusive discussion.
Members of the periphery were well-represented in the audience and gave emotional statements. A young Afghan woman, for example, asked if her nation was simply a “laboratory” for American weapons technology. Other prominent figures from these communities included Agri Verrija, former advisor to the Prime Minister of Albania as well as Zakaria Barsaqua, president of the Circassian Cultural Institute in New Jersey, and George Washington University professor Sufian Zhemukhov, both of the Circassian community of the Russian North Caucasus.
Ahmed was joined on the panel by Ambassador Indyk, Sally Quinn, editor of the Washington Post’s On Faith website, and Mowahid Shah, a former Pakistani minister. What enfolded was a fervent and heated discussion. Topics ranged from development to women’s rights to the justification of drone warfare as the speakers discussed America’s post-9/11 paradigm. After hearing the book passages read by the team, once monolithic, concrete narratives on the cause of terrorism lying in Islam did not seem so certain any more. When Sally Quinn asked about the status of women in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and whether Islam was to blame, Ambassador Ahmed told stories from Swat in Pakistan about women utilizing Islamic rhetoric to empower the community to fight off repressive forces like the Taliban.
Quinn spoke about the widespread ignorance of tribal societies and the need for Americans to understand them. “We need 100 Akbars in the State Department,” she said. “We need anthropologists, we need religion experts, and people who can understand the culture of a place we’re in. I mean, the reason that we are not accepted in Pakistan in the Tribal Areas is because we don’t understand them. We don’t have a clue.” That struck me. We need to penetrate the paradigms we have been acculturated to and look deep within. It is the only way we will be able to begin this dialogue.
After the launch, Ambassador Ahmed was reunited with his family after being flooded with interview requests and business cards. I watched him reach for his grandson Alexander – called Sikander in the East – and kiss him on the cheek and hold him tight. “We need to heal a fractured world,” he said, citing the Jewish shibbolethtikkun olam.
( Priyanka Srinivasa is a research assistant for the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC. She has assisted Ahmed on his new book “ The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam ” , Brookings Institution, 2013).
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