We write mostly about the Constitution on this site but covert economics is what we do.

     Moses Sands was an old hand at ‘covert’ market operations, and he taught me much since I first met him on Moscow in 1991. He changed the entire focus of our business here simply by reminding me that conducting business as we know it in America has to be carried forward covertly almost everywhere else, for in one way or another, it is either illegal, frowned upon, or unseen forces want their cut. Since the 1960s he carried his little revolution forward in the USSR, East Europe, SE Asia, China, east Africa, even inner-city Cincinnati.
     In the Fall of 2004 he and I wrote a piece about democracy in Iraq (The Prospects for Democracy in Iraq) and published it right after the January 2005 elections. It’s re-printed on this site. In 2006 he followed that up with “The Arab House” (also posted on this site) laying out additional tactics for insinuating the building blocks of freedom into the Middle East. That postscript was brought on by his opinion that there was a growing antipathy by elements in the Iraqi and US government toward American-style democracy taking root in the hearts and minds of Arabs.
     We’re a hands-on consultancy, not a think tank, and offer this overview to anyone interested in its implications.

     Moses once stated that he was more comfortable scheming and operating in the tribal territories, “Pathan territory” he called them, than in the towns and cities of Iraq. Sky determines, he often said, and he knew more about the “sky” there. Using America’s own historical experience in “partially civilizing” out-of-the-way places such as Appalachia and the Ozarks, Moses believed, as I do, that the key to creating new democratic realities in Afghanistan has to be valley to valley and house-to-house, directed toward the house of the individual tribesman. The strings that bind a man to family, tribe and religion are universal, but America proves that so are the machines that can sever then re-weave them into the fabric of a more agreeable society.
     The war for Afghanistan can only be won by undermining the ties now held over hill people by tribal leaders and mullahs. In America that has been accomplished time and time again by increasing the opportunities for a man to build and own his own House. In the hills, history shows that Nature sometimes has to be pushed along a bit.

      Moses always looked for cultural keys that go beyond the signing of treaties or other more formal expressions of authority. In Iraq he believed that the tribal and religious faction set up of the government would eventually fail unless there was also instilled in the individual Iraqi how he or she might change that formula from within over time. The House.
     In Afghanistan a military victory and the military domination of the tribal territories will do little more good than the military decimation of the area…unless the seeds modifying tribal loyalties are also planted there. (The idea of laying the mountains waste has probably already been considered but if not it will be in a new left-leaning government in the US after 2008. Being averse to protracted fights no matter what the cause, an Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis will be able to justify the decimation of the mountain tribes simply as a cost saving measure. There are numerous ways they can spin this to the American people, most all of which will work.)

          There are only two questions that need to be asked about the tribal territories, and both are fairly simple to answer.
          First, how did these people get there in the first place?
          The short answer is, not voluntarily. When you go to the head of a watershed and find people who have lived there for generations then you see a people who were either driven there by force or were the last to arrive and were unable to drive off the owner’s of the bottom land. In a country where even the bottom lands are less than desirable by most world standards, you can appreciate how mean those circumstances must be.
          Over time a certain group psychology sets in. There is a stronger than normal sense of insularity, them versus us. There is also a type of self-consciousness about speech, dress, and basic culture, resulting in avoidance, distrust, dislike, and finally violence against people from the outside.
          This results in one of history’s most enduring forms of social warfare, the urban versus the rural, and the flatlanders versus the hill folk. (At another level this even defines politics in America today.) From time to time some tribes will come roaring out of the mountains and wasteland to take all that land away from the flatlanders, as did the son of Philip of Macedon and Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in Arabia. Still others are quick to join any get-even scapegoat philosophy or political group, as did the people of the Alpine regions in Europe in the 1920s and the KKK in the rural South. Getting even, real or imagined, was always part of the psychology of the tribal territories.
          The bottom line is that none of the people who originally settled the tribal regions of Waziristan did so voluntarily, although, over time a kind of heroic myth surrounds the founding fathers of every valley. It’s more than just “God willed it” (Insha’allah), or as they say in Arizona, “the deal of the cards”. It is difficult to dislodge any misfortune that takes on the aura of heroic myth, for the myths are a form of social control.

           That understood, the second question then, do they want to stay there with things as they are?
          Again the short answer: Only until something better comes along.
          This is not to say there aren’t people there who want them to stay. No matter how small the pond at the headwaters of the watershed, there will always be a big duck on it. And as likely as not, that big duck will be the descendant of one of the founding fathers, or a very tough duck who replaced them. The first rule of being a big duck on a small pond is to ensure no other big ducks come onto your pond, and the second is to make sure none of your little ducks are lured away from the pond.
          While this definition might also fit the mullahs in the tribal regions, my own view is that money, e.g. bin Laden’s money, is a more compelling source of loyalty than Allah’s blessings, in securing the tribes’ antipathy toward the governments in Kabul and Islamabad and strangers in general.
          But the key is to keep the little ducks in line. So as to the state of mind of the little ducks themselves, the common hill tribesman, (who should be the greater object of our strategies in the region) try to recall the old WWI refrain, "How’re you going to get them back on the farm?" I’m not sure if it was the sight of French flush toilets or French naked women, but many returning doughboys found it hard to settle back into mundane farm life after returning home in 1919. This was magnified in 1940, and onward, when millions of American country boys were called up, among other things to use their first indoor toilet or eat white bread, or to take a shower. Seeing Rome, or naked women probably was less indelible.
        Likewise, the womenfolk’s lives changed, as much for that steady allotment check…and the things it could buy…than anything else. It’s ludicrous to believe that Muslim wives living in the tribal territories would not like to have hardwood floors, electric heaters, mix-masters, hot and cold running water…if they only knew such things existed. How they will handle that information inside their homes once learned is another matter, we can’t know, but we know that such knowledge, alone, creates a irresistible drift from the center toward the edge of the pond.
           Clearly, it’s the primary mission of tribal elders to insure their little ducks never know these things. And, since it’s not likely tribal men will anytime soon enlist to go fight the Boche in France, bringing home wondrous tales of Paris, we have to help things along.
          Again, we have precedence in America. Tribal elders in Afghanistan want the same sort of control Boss Hogg did (there actually was one, a whole family in fact) in America, valley by valley, house by house, but once other choices come into their neighborhoods, options such as jobs, a rail line, roads, all bringing new men, families, electricity and indoor plumbing, some of the native tribal families will begin to out of the hollows for some of those creature benefits.
          I can’t say what the reach of a single jobs project like a road, or a mine, would be in such terrain, (in Appalachia the migratory seismic effect of coal mining was about 100 miles) but the impact on the existing social structure would be devastating. It would take time and could be ugly, but there can be no doubt as to the outcome. From the Shenandoah’s to Paiute country in Nevada, John Sears’ catalogue and two world wars advanced rural America’s dreams of the possible against the same kinds of preachments from local reverends and Boss Hogg’s as the tribal areas of Afghanistan feel today. Probably executed there’s no way they can stop it…even if left to nature’s own devices. But we can help it along, both logistically and socially.
            I have no concrete suggestions here, as that depends on factors beyond my control, but I can state without equivocation the prospects of being able to build and own and pass on his own House is the only set of shears that will cut the ties of autocratic tribal and religious control. Every time it has been tried, it works.
            Using historical evidence in the really tough rural neighborhoods of America, these prospects increase with the advent of some new economic resource. In Appalachia it was mining, which today brings cries of outrage. Yes, it was just a bit sad. There has been much gnashing of teeth (listen to Judy Collins sing Billy Ed Wheeler’s “Coming of the Roads, c1967). But these lamentations are always on behalf on those left behind, or those who came three generations later wanting to revel in a pristine world that quite frankly never existed. Interestingly, in Appalachia most of those who linger on there now are the descendants of those early waves of coal miners, not the native hill folk, whose children seem to have scattered to the four winds….voluntarily, I might add, something the people of Waziristan can't yet do.
          In Appalachia, tribal elders named Hogg, Hensley, Slusher, et al, all determined they would be far more wealthy by laying down the mantle of tribal chief and becoming the county’s first family of politics, owning the newspaper, the saw-mill, and having a piece of every small business up and down the hollow…than by trying to charge a toll on every pack mule that came along the switch-backs, while a new paved highway was being built just 20 miles away.
         Everything that radical Islam fears will occur…people (only a few at first…the dynamics of that will be hidden away from public view) will leave the village for the towns where there will be work, money, and greater prospects for building their House. The power of the mullahs will weaken, even as their exhortations will intensify, for the choir will be smaller and smaller. The drift will widen, and some will even move to the cities as far away as Kabul, to become engineers, doctors, maybe even music stars. In time, three- four generations, the tribal leaders will be no more, and men whose families were total strangers 75 years ago will be elected officials. Someone will then write a song lamenting the old days and the old ways, looking at the sad backwardness of that region in say, 2080. And it will still be backward and primitive, but a man will be able to stop for gas and not be shot while pumping it, or for having blue eyes. That is the prize, remember.

          I can think of several things that could bring about such change. Making such things happen are a little beyond our pocketbooks here, but for our part we do suggest, as we have done for Iraq, that there accompany these changes a village psy-ops campaign centered around two themes of American democracy; 1) that a man is only free when he can build and own his own house and pass it on to his children and 2) that in America all men can freely choose to come before God, and that no man can be forced before God with a knife at his throat, for this is hateful in the eyes God. God wishes to be worshipped, and gives no man authority over another to force him to bow before Him against his will. Men have the right to choose hell, and when they do, God will oblige them
        I’m sure you can think of more. Just don’t lose sight of the prize.

For the team:

          Vassar Bushmills