Political Tribes

by Amy Chua

  Not only did Hoa wealth inflame local resentment; their attitude added fuel to the fire. The Hoa tended to live apart from the Vietnamese, often in wealthy enclaves, attending their own schools and temples, typically marrying only among other Chinese, and projecting a sense of “ethnic and cultural exclusivism.” Rightly or wrongly, the Hoa were seen as exploiting the native Vietnamese, the vast majority of whom were impoverished peasants. When the Vietnamese went to war against the French, the Chinese minority stayed “apolitical,” infuriating the Vietnamese.

  It does not appear that America knew anything about these ethnic realities when we went to war—or if we did, it certainly wasn’t reflected in our policies.

  THE AMERICAN INTERVENTION

  In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French after eight years of war. Under the U.S.-backed Geneva Accords, Vietnam was divided in two, with Ho’s Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) government ruling the north from Hanoi, and the America-backed Republic of Vietnam (ROV) ruling the south from Saigon.

  The Geneva Accords gave all Vietnamese people three hundred days to move freely to their zone of choice; while only about 120,000 moved from south to north, some 800,000 moved in the other direction. Cold warrior Americans no doubt saw the Vietnamese as voting with their feet for capitalism, but a more group-conscious lens reveals a very different picture. Many of those migrating south were Chinese (the vast majority of Chinese in the north relocated), and most of the ethnic Vietnamese who went south were Catholics, including the “Frenchified” Vietnamese elite, who feared Communist persecution. By the end of the relocation period, the overwhelming majority of the Hoa—about 1 million out of 1.2 million—lived in South Vietnam.

  Ho was a passionate believer in the idea of a unified Vietnamese tribe. “We have the same ancestors, we are of the same family, we are all brothers and sisters,” he once declared. “No one can divide the children of the same family. Likewise, no one can divide Viet-Nam.” In 1959, Ho committed North Vietnamese forces to “liberating” the South.

  The United States responded with escalating military involvement. In 1965, we began sending thousands of troops. We fought in Vietnam for a decade, and we lost. We weren’t prepared for, and didn’t adjust to, guerrilla warfare. We backed the wrong leaders. Some argue that we could have won had we only sent more troops. But one of the most important reasons for our devastating defeat remains largely unrecognized.

  Most of Vietnam’s “capitalists” were not Vietnamese. On the contrary, capitalism in Vietnam was associated with—and seen as chiefly benefiting—the Chinese, a fact that Hanoi repeatedly played up. Although there were also wealthy Vietnamese in the commercial class, Hanoi exaggerated the extent of Chinese dominance, claiming, for example, that “the ethnic Chinese controlled 100 per cent of South Vietnam’s domestic wholesale trade,” and at one point even calling the largely Chinese city of Cholon “the capitalist heart beating within socialist Vietnam’s body.”

  Our wartime policies intensified the wealth and power of the already resented Hoa. America poured more than $100 billion into the war effort, and insofar as this money reached the local population, it ended up wildly disproportionately in the pockets of the ethnic Chinese. Americans required enormous amounts of supplies and services, and the Chinese were in the best position to deliver. The Chinese “handled more than 60 per cent of the total volume of goods imported into South Vietnam through U.S. aid.” Many Chinese made fortunes as middlemen. Of the direct and indirect importers in Vietnam, 84 percent were ethnic Chinese in 1971. In addition, a flourishing black market controlled almost exclusively by the Chinese provided GIs with “[g]old watches, diamonds, cars, minks, marijuana, opium, heroin,” and prostitutes. (In 1966, Cholon’s red-light districts employed roughly thirty thousand “war-orphaned prostitutes,” and one out of every four GIs had venereal disease.)

  It wasn’t just American dollars enriching Vietnam’s Chinese minority. It was capitalism itself. In the financial sector, by 1972 the local Chinese effectively owned twenty-eight of the thirty-two banks in South Vietnam (although many of these banks were nominally owned by Vietnamese). Moreover, with economic power comes the ability to buy political influence, and the Chinese in Saigon notoriously cultivated and bribed South Vietnamese politicians and military leaders. “[T]he slime of corruption oozed into every crevice” of wartime South Vietnam.

  The Chinese not only profited from America’s intervention; they seemed ruthlessly impervious to the suffering of the Vietnamese around them. At one point, Chinese rice moguls intentionally created a rice shortage to jack up prices, compounding the hunger and malnourishment already caused by the war. They hoarded rice and even tried to throw it in the river to avoid government searches. Worse still, the Chinese systematically avoided the draft through bribery. Being police chief of the Cholon precinct became one of the most lucrative positions in the country; ultimately, more than one hundred thousand Chinese in Cholon dodged the draft. In effect, the U.S.-backed regime was asking the South Vietnamese to fight and die—and kill their northern brethren—in order to keep the Chinese rich.

  We completely missed this ethnic dimension. Most American military personnel on the ground in Vietnam couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Vietnamese; they may not even have been aware there was a difference. All Asians were “Dinks and Gooks, Slants and Slopes.” As one American in Vietnam put it, “We didn’t even think they were human—it was ‘Gooks don’t bleed, gooks don’t feel pain, gooks don’t have any sense of loyalty or love.’”

  —

  From Washington’s point of view, we were battling the evil of communism, sacrificing American soldiers for Vietnam’s freedom. But from the Vietnamese point of view, the idea that America was offering them “freedom” was absurd. Their experience of the American intervention was the destruction of their way of life. U.S. firepower destroyed the homes of more than 2 million South Vietnamese, most of whom were forced to relocate to urban areas, leaving behind their ancestors’ graves. In addition, they endured indiscriminate bombing, napalm, and horrific civilian deaths. In South Vietnam, a staggering 1 million civilians died and another million were wounded, mostly from U.S. “friendly fire.”

  And for what? The group identity America offered the Vietnamese was membership in a puppet state—the ultimate affront in a country where many Vietnamese soldiers wore trinkets dedicated to the Trung sisters, symbolizing resistance to foreign invaders at all costs. Henry Kissinger saw this as early as 1969, when he warned that “[u]nfortunately our military strength has no political corollary; we have been unable so far to create a political structure that could survive military opposition from Hanoi after we withdraw.” As Guenter Lewy wrote in 1978, “The South Vietnamese soldier, in the end, did not feel he was part of a political community worth the supreme sacrifice; he saw no reason to die” for the U.S.-backed regime.

  Materially, apart from a tiny upper crust, the Vietnamese people received no benefits from America; on the contrary, they lost their sons and their homes, and the only people they saw profiting were the hated Chinese and corrupt politicians. And yet as the war progressed, and more and more South Vietnamese went over to the other side, U.S. foreign policy makers were baffled; they couldn’t fathom why the Vietnamese hated us so much and didn’t want their “freedom.” If we’d understood Vietnam’s history and its ethnic realities, we wouldn’t have been so mystified.

  From a tribal politics perspective, virtually every step we took in Vietnam was guaranteed to turn the Vietnamese against us. The regimes we supported, the policies we promoted, the money we spent, and the attitudes we brought made the Vietnamese hate us, hate capitalism, and only enhanced the appeal and status of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh.

  THE AFTERMATH: ETHNIC CLEANSING

  The last U.S. troops left Saigon in 1973, and after that Americans tried to forget Vietnam. But it was then that the ethnonationalist dimension of the war became most glaringl
y clear.

  In September 1975, the new Socialist government launched an anticapitalist campaign under the code name “X1.” Chinese businesses were raided or shut down, and 250 wealthy Chinese were arrested. Many Chinese tycoons fled overseas; a number committed suicide. Chinese-language newspapers and Chinese-run schools were closed, and Chinese hospitals were taken over by the state. Although wealthy Vietnamese were also targeted, the Hoa suffered the most by far; 70 percent of those officially condemned in the campaign against “compradore bourgeoisie” were ethnic Chinese. All told, the Chinese in South Vietnam lost an estimated $2 billion because of the nationalization of their assets in the late 1970s—an astounding sum, considering Vietnam’s overall poverty at the time.

  Anti-Chinese sentiment worsened as relations between China and Vietnam deteriorated. In 1977, “the campaign against all ethnic Chinese in Vietnam was stepped up and became nationwide in scope.” In the south, the Chinese were physically harassed, their homes and property seized. In the north, all working Chinese were placed under surveillance and prohibited from speaking Chinese—even though most of the relatively few Chinese who remained in the north were not wealthy capitalists, but fishermen, foresters, craftsmen, and laborers. In the provinces abutting China, Hanoi began “purifying the border areas,” expelling the Chinese for alleged security reasons.

  But the real ethnic-cleansing policies began under “X2,” a second anticapitalist campaign, launched in early 1978. On March 23, a paramilitary force of thirty thousand cordoned off Cholon—the Chinese area of Saigon—and ransacked every house and shop there. Goods and valuables were confiscated from fifty thousand Chinese businesses, and clashes between the Chinese and the police left the streets of Cholon “full of corpses.” Similar raids took place all over the country, and ethnic Chinese were purged from the party, government administration, and the army. The government began arresting and relocating Chinese at alarming rates; “thousands of Chinese either died laboring in Vietnam’s ‘new economic zones’ or fled the country.” Even Chinese in the north who had been loyal revolutionaries were arrested as spies. “My uncle was arrested at that time,” one Vietnamese Chinese later recalled. “He had been working for the revolution . . . at least forty years. He had been awarded the First Rank Revolution Medal [by the Vietnamese Communists themselves].” Employing “techniques Hitler used to inflame hatred against the Jews,” reported U.S. News & World Report in 1979, “Hanoi is blaming day-to-day problems in Vietnam on resented Chinese control of commerce and the Mekong Delta.”

  Beijing accused Hanoi of mass killings and atrocities committed against the ethnic Chinese. Although long denied by Vietnam, experts agree that “China’s allegations have now been largely substantiated.” By late 1978, more than 250,000 ethnic Chinese had been driven out of Vietnam, and an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 had died at sea. Americans heard in the late 1970s a great deal about “Vietnamese boat people”;* rarely, if ever, was it reported that most of those refugees were in fact ethnic Chinese. In 1978, for example, 85 percent were Chinese. In 1979, Vietnamese foreign ministry officials effectively admitted to foreign journalists that Vietnam “intended to get rid of all Chinese in Vietnam.”

  Thus Vietnam’s Communist revolution was not only nationalist but intensely ethnonationalist. We completely missed the heart of Vietnamese political tribalism. Far from being a pawn of Communist China, as the United States imagined, Vietnam would by 1979 be at war with China. It would be difficult to come up with a more effective strategy for shooting ourselves in the foot, undermining our own objectives, and maximizing popular resistance against us.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Afghanistan

  In Afghanistan, you don’t understand yourself solely as an individual . . . . You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

  —KHALED HOSSEINI

  May God keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans.

  —PROVERB

  For most Americans, Afghanistan is a black box. We know that our soldiers have died there, that there are mullahs and caves, and that both may have harbored Osama bin Laden. We’re vaguely aware that the war we’re fighting in Afghanistan is the longest in our history. We’ve all heard of the Taliban, an organization that destroys art and bans girls from school, and that wears black or possibly white. Our dim memory is that we beat them once, but now for some reason they are back, and we have no idea what’s going on, and we just want to forget about the whole country.

  Yet we keep hearing ominous warnings from people in the know that things are going badly there and are likely to get worse—that Afghanistan is “a foreign policy disaster,” a “never-ending war.” Or as one congressman recently wrote in the National Interest, “Fifteen years, thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars later, the United States has failed to meet most of its key objectives in Afghanistan. Mission failed.”

  As in Vietnam, the core reason for America’s failures in Afghanistan is that we were oblivious to the most important group identities in the region, which do not fall along national lines, but instead are ethnic, tribal, and clan based. Afghanistan’s national anthem mentions fourteen ethnic groups, the largest four being the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. There is a long history of animosity among these groups. For more than two hundred years, the Pashtuns dominated Afghanistan, but during the Cold War their dominance began to decline, and in 1992, a Tajik- and Uzbek-led coalition seized control. The Taliban, supported by Pakistan, emerged against this background.

  The Taliban is not only an Islamist movement but also an ethnic movement. The vast majority of its members are Pashtuns. It was founded by Pashtuns, it is led by Pashtuns, and it arose out of—and derives its staying power because of—threats to Pashtun dominance.

  American leaders and policy makers entirely missed these ethnic realities, and the results have been calamitous. Our blindness to tribal politics allowed Pakistan to play us badly, turned large numbers of Afghans against us, and led us inadvertently to help create the Taliban, arming, funding, and training many of its key figures.

  The problem in Afghanistan is not just radical Islam. It’s also an ethnic problem. And it’s rooted in a cardinal rule of tribal politics: once in power, groups do not give up their dominance easily.

  AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

  Afghanistan is landlocked. It shares its western border with Iran (indeed, Afghanistan’s Tajiks speak Dari Persian and are often described as “Eastern Iranians”). To its north lie the former Soviet Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. To its east and southeast sits Pakistan, with which it shares a fifteen-hundred-mile-long border, known as the Durand Line.

  The state of Afghanistan was established in 1747 by a Pashtun, the celebrated king Ahmad Shah Durrani. From 1747 to 1973, Pashtun leaders ruled Afghanistan almost continuously. Pashtuns pride themselves on being great warriors; Europeans never conquered Afghanistan—although the British and Russians certainly tried. Pashto is the mother tongue of the Pashtuns, who also have their own code of conduct, known as Pashtunwali, which is difficult to translate into Western terms but roughly includes honor, hospitality, reciprocity, and revenge among its key components. Many Pashtuns think of Afghanistan as “their country,” and even today, the terms “Afghan” and “Pashtun” are often used interchangeably.

  But Pashtuns don’t live only in Afghanistan; they also live in Pakistan. Indeed, the name “Pakistan” is an acronym, invented in Cambridge, England, in 1933, denoting the country’s major ethnic regions. P stands for Punjab, A for Afghan (referring to Pashtuns), K for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and tan for Balochistan.

  While Pashtuns have politically dominated Afghanistan, Punjabis have politically dominated Pakistan. Representing somewhere around half the population, Punjabis control Pakistan’s famous military as well as mos
t state institutions. Punjabis are also intensely ethnocentric. They speak Punjabi, and they are highly endogamous, typically marrying other Punjabis, often their own cousins. This practice is common even among Punjabis in Great Britain, where first-cousin marriages among Pakistanis are leading to an “appalling” and “absolutely unacceptable” incidence of “disability among children,” as a (Lahore-born) member of the House of Lords recently warned.

  Ever since independence, the Pakistani government has viewed the Pashtuns as a major threat. This is because there are a lot of Pashtuns in Pakistan. In fact, although Pashtuns comprise only 15 percent of Pakistan’s total population, there are actually more Pashtuns in Pakistan (about 28 million) than in Afghanistan (about 15 million). Worse, most of Pakistan’s Pashtuns live clustered near the Afghanistan border, along the Durand Line, which British colonialists drew in 1893 and which Pashtuns scorn as illegitimate. Indeed, Pashtuns on both sides of the border cross the Durand Line at will, which is not difficult given that the “line” runs through rugged terrain practically impossible to police. A common saying among Pashtuns holds that “[y]ou cannot separate water with a stick,” and many Pashtuns in Pakistan still identify themselves as Afghan.

  Pakistani fear of Pashtun nationalism and irredentism grew even more acute after 1971, when Pakistan’s Bengalis broke away in a violent, successful attempt to establish Bangladesh as an independent country. Pakistan’s Punjabi elites were determined not to let that happen again with the Pashtuns.