Jirga: Pashtun Participatory Governance
Intro Continued
“The jirga tradition, which was so well-developed among the frontier tribes generally, appears to have been particularly flourishing among the Mahsuds. Jirgas had various responsibilities depending on the context, including representative, legislative, and mediatory ones. A group of men who negotiated on the tribe’s behalf with some external authority could also be referred to as a jirga. The representative function was evident among the Mahsuds, as there were different levels of jirga, culminating in grand tribal councils comprised of delegates chosen by lower-level jirgas to speak on their behalf. These councils mat at Kaniguram, presumably because, being inhabited almost entirely by Umars, it was not associated with any Mahsud section in particular and so was in a sense neutral territory. Mahsud jirgas traditionally had some sort of executive role as well. They could choose tribal representatives… and empower them to enforce jirga decisions (no retaliation being allowed for this), or call on each section to provide men for a campaign against an external enemy.
“…unlike most other Pashtun tribes, among which each section tended to have its own separate territory, members of the three Mahsud sections often lived close together in the same areas. Partly as a result, ‘sectional feuds’ did not occur often among them, by contrast with the Afridi and Orakzai tribes living in the north, for instance, being ‘locally divided,’ they did….
“Another very important feature of Mahsud society appears to have been its egalitarian ethos among the men at least), and the absence of institutionalized, hereditary leadership… in Mahsud society, there was only the largely achieved status of malik, which gave men some influence but not much power. Authority was fluid and had to be continually created and recreated by negotiation and power-brokering. The weakness of the maliks may have been partly due to the fact that the sections did not have their own territories, as this made it difficult for two rivals to emerge in each one and build up their own factional networks (as they did among the Afridis, for example.
“Nor did the genealogical segments often form actual political groups. The principal reason for this appears to have been the fact that tarburwali, the rivalry between patrilineal cousins … was so pervasive.”
The remaining Pashtun tribes have jirgas that are between these two extremes. Land distribution and location of villages in relation to other tribes are major factors in tribal cohesion and in the creation of the jirgas that play a major governance role. There are large differences between the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan and those in adjacent Pakistan that are important in tribal levels governed by jirgas. Tribes in Afghanistan were dispersed widely across the region