Word: tribalism
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...quietly, the Obama Administration will need to get Karzai to clean up his act. "We need to turn the clock back - take Karzai back to where he was in 2003-'04," says the U.S. official. That was before the Afghan leader had made questionable deals with warlords and tribal chieftains and looked the other way as drug smugglers grew ever more powerful...
...Rose to assume command over the Khyber, Kurram and Orakzai tribal regions in Northwest Pakistan, where he moved to implement a stricter version of Islamic...
...senior Pakistani military official tells TIME a ground operation in the mountainous wilds of South Waziristan would be too difficult and would risk triggering a "tribal uprising" in a region over which Islamabad has little control...
...tied, with about 40% each. But few of those votes came from Karzai's Pashtun strongholds in the south, where turnout was light - owing to Taliban threats - but heavily managed. "It's not exactly one man, one vote out in the rural areas," a Western diplomat told me. "The tribal leader gathers everyone together and says, 'We're voting for Candidate X.'" In some cases, apparently, tribal leaders have simply stamped all the ballots themselves; with literacy rates running at less than 10% in many rural areas, that's not considered fraud but business as usual. And so it seems...
...from Kabul, a country that has always been governed from the bottom up, valley by valley, tribe by tribe. Karzai has many attributes, but a desire to provide effective governance is off his radar screen. He is good at the traditional form of Afghan politics, creating alliances among tribal and ethnic factions. The money distributed by the central government - inevitably, money contributed by the international community - is routinely received as tribute by Karzai's local allies, to be disbursed, or not, as they wish; a government job is assumed by many, especially the police, to be a license to collect...