Be it true or false, imaginary or realistic, DEBKAfile's Giora Shamis can rest easy on Saturday, after having spun New York police into a frenzy following a Debka report that al-Qaeda might be plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the city.

Moments before updating his site with new information obtained from world-wide sources, Shamis talked with Ynet and refused to take full credit for the incident.

"The New York Police didn't have to take my information seriously," he said. "They had other information, additional to ours."

Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.

Instead, scientists like [Washington University archaeologist] Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.

While the view that tribe and clan -- the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies -- influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important "cultural intelligence," like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.

"Families, tribes these are the things that matter here," said Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. "Foreigners talk about these things, but it's only talk. They don't understand them."

Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.

"In and of itself you can't graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that's what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces," Dr. Frachetti said. "By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naive to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia."

The United States military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar Province to fight the leading insurgent group there, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Yet, despite calls for a deeper appreciation of cultures far from the mainstream, "the United States government hasn't been willing to pony up the money to educate" policy makers on "these areas with deep nomadic traditions," said a Central Asia specialist working for the United States government.

the downside of the whole exercise is Washington's understanding of the Taliban, who are perceived as Islamists whose natural rivals are secular Pashtun nationalists.

This might have been true some years ago, but in the past few years the mostly ethnic-Pashtun Taliban have positioned themselves as champions of Pashtun nationalism on both sides of border in their efforts to broaden their grassroots support. With some success, they have touted themselves as the real flag-bearers of Pashtun ethnical and honor codes (Pashtunwali).

The Taliban have played up their similarities with secular Pashtuns to soften their image as what has been described as their "strictest interpretation of sharia law ever".

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear.

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said factions that have broken away from radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army were believed responsible for most of the attacks.

"I think [attacks on U.S. troops are increasing] because the Iranians are surging support to the special groups," he said, referring to the American name for Iranian-backed cells here.

What we're seeing seems to be the escalating irrelevance of formal Iraqi institutions, or at least the escalating public admission of their irrelevance. The US military certainly seems to be acting on that assumption: Gates, Mullin and other top DOD officials seem to have publicly given up on political progress at the national level, while Petraeus is focusing on local level initiatives and tactical alliances which completely ignore - and often are opposed by - the Iraqi government.

Forget for a moment the admittedly vital question of whether the September Crocker/Petraeus report acknowledges these realities (I've been thinking that this report might be more honest than many people expect in that regard, even if few of my smart and well-connected colleagues agree with me). If this were really the trend, what kind of American strategy would follow from a tacit abandonment of the institutions of the Iraqi state and the formal political process? Would this make withdrawal easier and more likely, since the unresolvable political contradictions at the national level could just be ignored? Could the US really maintain its military presence while jettisoning the political system it has created and defended over the last four years?