Some of you may recall that a while back, October 2006 to be exact, DNI ran an op-ed by Steve Pressfield on tribalism. Now, the novelist (Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign, Killing Rommel, etc.) has a new video blog series about tribalism.

He maintains that “The enemy in Afghanistan today (and in Iraq and Pakistan) is not Islamism or jihadism. It’s tribalism.  Think of this series as a crash course on tribalism.”

Retired Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone and who has a number of pieces on this site, notes:

Steven Pressfield is known to a generation of Marines for his book The Gates of Fire. In that work, he captured the essence of why western soldiers fight. With this video series, Pressfield draws on his research for The Afghan Campaign to provide essential insights into why tribal warriors fight. He discusses the unchanging aspects of two millenniums of western experiences fighting Afghan tribal warriors. He explains why, for very good reasons, western ideas about government simply do not apply to these tribal peoples.

DNI Reviews of Steven Pressfield:

• The Virtues of War
• The Afghan Campaign
• Killing Rommel

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