This is an excellent piece by Joshua Foust in the National about the dangerousness of pursuing a tribal-based strategy in Afghanistan. The central point is easy enough to grasp: Not only is Afghanistan not a tribal society, you’re not going to be good at this dangerous game, Yanqui, and you can do more long-term damage to the fragile Afghan state than you can provide positive near-term benefit.

I have one quibble and one substantive point. The quibble comes when Foust writes: “Unlike the Iraqis in Anbar, however, the Shinwari do not support the central government.” Actually, the Anbar Awakening’s loyalties to the government in 2006 through 2009 were somewhere on the spectrum between dubious to nonexistent. Political participation in the 2009 provincial elections combined with consistent U.S. pressure to integrate Awakening fighters and include them on the payroll mitigated what was a mutually acrimonious relationship. But the fissures remain. I bring this up just because all of us need to take our own advice about not reading Iraq into Afghanistan and vice versa.

Substantively, Josh has sold me on the merits of his case. But what happens when a tribe tells the U.S. it’s ready to bandwagon with it and the Kabul government against the Taliban? Is there really no way of leveraging that opening? That’s been my impulse ever since this Shinwari thing started getting reported, and I keep trying to grope toward a synthesis between that opening and Josh’s cautions. Maybe it’s not possible. But shouldn’t we fieldtest that conclusion first?