Word: tribalisms
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Last spring, Richard Holbrooke outlined his prescription for what ails Pakistan in the Washington Post. In U.S. dealings with Islamabad, Holbrooke argued, "the message should be clear and consistent: democracy, reconciliation, the military out of politics, a new policy for the tribal areas--and more democracy...
...love to build unsustainable sprawl roads to nowhere. There's $4.5 billion for the Army Corps, which loves to build water projects that destroy wetlands and induce development in vulnerable floodplains. There's $14 billion for school modernization, $2 billion for rural-business loans, $8.4 billion in "state and tribal assistance grants" - and who can say how it would all be spent...
...through the disease and malnutrition that have accompanied it. In 1998, the war sucked six countries into a smash-and-grab for Congo's minerals and timber. And it has spawned a plethora of new rebel groups, collectively known as the Mai Mai, founded on a mix of genuine tribal grievances and criminal and murderous intent. Everyone--the Mai Mai, the Congolese army, Hutu and Tutsi, Congolese and Rwandan--fights everyone else...
...Nouri alarms many who knew the old Jawad. Sunni and Kurdish leaders have accused him of employing tribal councils to shore up his personal standing at the expense of rivals, just as Saddam did. Vice President Adel Abdel-Mahdi, a prominent Shi'ite, has openly criticized the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's office. "We don't want another dictator in Baghdad," says Maysoon al-Damluji, a secular Member of Parliament. "It worries us all that [Maliki] is beginning to behave like a tyrant...
...example, two key Taliban commanders in South Waziristan, Maulvi Muhammad Nazir - who helped the Pakistani army mount an attack on his tribal rival, Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud - and Hafiz Gul Bahadur have nonaggression pacts with the Pakistani army. The military defends these arrangements on the grounds that it is unable to operate in areas where there are "hostile tribes" like Mehsud's and that it is prioritizing offensives in other parts of the border region. Some are unconvinced. "It appears that unless the militants are attacking Pakistani forces, the army doesn't consider them a problem," says one senior...