We see in ToM, Aviendha’s personal prophecy of a sequence of events triggered by the actions of her descendants that leads inevitably to the conquest of the wetlands and the complete and utter destruction of Aiel society by the Seanchan. Part of the problem suggested in discussions previously as well as in the text, and seemingly confirmed by a Wise One’s perspective of the conflict near the end, is that the Seanchan retain the superior forms of military organization and practices from Artur Hawkwing’s day, “long considered the pinnacle of military arts” according to the BWB, which are only shared by a few private military organizations and no other national force. The glimpses behind the curtain in KoD reveal how they have a system for establishing the government of conquered territories and assimilating the existing military forces into their own, and established standards and procedures. These procedures and organization allow them to supply large armies in the field on an enormous scale, that the slapdash wetlander habits and customs cannot match, and could not hope to assemble comparable numbers without the help of methods like Traveling. Rand alludes to this when he confirms Fedwin Morr’s report on the Seanchan preparations to attack Illian.

We see in Malden that standard Aiel practices have no such means for absorbing and ruling a territory. So far as is known, once the clans formed, presumably by absorbing the holdings of the septs whose leaders failed to agree to the Peace of Rhuidean, they appear to have become set in their number at 12, with that number never changing from war or conquest. While the Aiel might raid one another’s holds, custom and law prevents them from taking more than a certain amount of goods from the defeated. They fight over particular resources, like grazing areas or water sources, rather than territory or control of population, as most “territory” in the Waste is useless, and the population does not change sept or clan, except presumably in circumstances like marriage. As a result, a successful campaign by the Seanchan has the long term potential of augmenting their numbers and providing a source of supplies, while a successful campaign by the Aiel brings only some short-term materiel gains while costing them casualties that are disproportionately a higher price than the Seanchan would pay, even with the same losses. Even the conquest of people is limited to the year and a day that gai’shain may be required to serve, and some of the more lucrative professions are seen to have limits on exactly how much of their work a captor may demand.

This is partly a result of the Aiel’s outlook, as opposed to that of the Seanchan. To the Aiel, all people fall into one of two categories: Aiel and enemies. The Seanchan outlook is ostensibly similar in its duality, though based on their thousand year mission of bringing the world under the ruler of the heir of Artur Hawkwing, rather than tribal ancestry. While they might divide the world into the Empire and ‘future conquests,’ by the very definitions of those terms, people can move from one category into the other. The Aiel worldview locks you in at birth. The Seanchan make subjects and servants out of the enemies they defeat, and their sincerity and evenhanded approach to newly conquered lands induces cooperation. The Aiel have limitations on what they can do to one another, even in a blood feud, and no real limits on what they can do to outsiders, and as a result, no concept of economic exploitation. They might terrorize their captives into obsequious groveling, but fail to make full use of them. Even worse, the manner and type of use the Aiel do make of their foreign captives might actually degrade their own warrior qualities, and those qualities, forged by the necessary personal discipline & high skill levels of a harsh environment, are their sole advantage.

An Aiel army, rather than a highly-disciplined, cohesive and unified entity, is a collection of extremely capable warriors, who obey orders and cooperate out of an elite trooper’s recognition of the need for unity of action. There may be advantages to this approach over the unquestioning discipline no doubt imposed on the common Seanchan soldier, but it also renders the Aiel difficult to replace, and the process of generating new Aiel fighters is a lifelong one that begins at birth and is inculcated through their upbringing. You can’t train a wetlander subject, living in occupied territory, the skills and techniques of an Aiel warrior along with imbuing in him the same cultural loyalty and unity (or rather you could, but the Aiel don’t know how – they only know how to raise a child as an Aielman). The Aiel warrior learns from his parents and neighbors and is reinforced in his childhood play and lessons, and his lessons are further enforced by the necessities of survival in the Waste. An Aielman who fails to properly learn stealth skills is quickly spotted by an enemy, or frightens off his quarry, and is either slain or goes hungry. An Aielman who fails to learn to conserve food & water and maintain their standards of physical fitness, dies in the vast barren stretches between sources of water and shelter. An Aielman who does not learn their techniques of hand to hand combat and weapon skills, if he is not killed outright, will be humiliated in battle or taken prisoner and made to serve his enemies. He will have grown up bossing around gai’shain and have their example before his eyes throughout his childhood and adolescence and come to the ranks of the fighters with the consequences of failure firmly in his mind, in ways that tend to make more of an impact on an adolescent or young adult soldier than mere fear of death or pain.

As should be obvious, these means of producing Aiel soldiers are NOT readily duplicated at all. We even see this in the one known attempt to make a wetlander into an Aiel soldier. Shaiel might have done well enough to appear to conform to a degree satisfactory to even the exacting standards of an Aiel, but when a real crisis of decisions came upon her, she broke with custom and law and failed to heed her clan chief. She stayed with the army throughout her pregnancy and died as a result, and her child was lost. No doubt the Aiel could not conceive of a general having the ability to dictate to a free woman where she will go or live, and thus they had no way of ordering her home, as would be a matter of course for any wetlander army. Such a level of authority would not be necessary among the Aiel who would never break with custom as Shaiel does, and would follow the dictates of honor and fulfill the obligation incurred upon becoming pregnant. But Shaiel did not grow up with that value system – she only learned to mimic the forms of it and as a result, can break the rules more easily and manipulate the system of personal interaction by inducing her lover to grant her an exemption. A wetlander authority figure would be expected to refrain from allowing his personal feelings for a subordinate to interfere with his decision, but among the Aiel, sexual relationships between men and women are sometimes the very basis of authority. A chief’s lover is a potential roofmistress and candidate for a position like governor or administrator, and so it is not so much of a scandal that he gives Shaiel her way in this issue, unless she gives up the spear, a Maiden’s child is presumably no business of a man anyway. Wetlander commanders, on the other hand, are given a great deal of control over their subordinates, because wetlanders are not raised to be soldiers. They are raised to the lifestyle appropriate to their parents’ circumstances, and choose or are forced to become soldiers upon reaching adulthood with their characters and minds already formed, and so a great deal of control is needed to make them into acceptable components of a fighting unit. Their lives do not require the same degree of personal discipline as daily survival in the Waste, so they need to be trained to the higher standard a soldier’s life demands.

Unfortunately for the Aiel, the unique and highly successful social mechanism that produces such exemplary warriors, breeds in them another quality – awareness of their superiority. Personal discipline as is demanded by life in the Waste can handle the worst effects of such awareness, but with it so widespread throughout their entire culture, a society-wide meme forms, whereby Aiel fall into the intellectual trap of assuming their superior skills in some areas translate into a universal superiority. Because they have the aforementioned inherent superiority to wetlander warriors in the skills of that profession, and because those skills are so necessary to day-to-day survival in the Threefold Land, they easily make the error of assuming that these skills trump all others in importance, and as a result, the wetlanders who lack them, have no skills of value, and have nothing important to bring to the table. Thus, even were they to conquer a wetlander nation, they would have no idea what to do with it, or with its people. At best, their leadership might make the decision to interfere as little as possible in the smooth function of their subjects, and settle for extracting tribute, but given the example in Malden, and the reasons why Aiel see no value in others’ ways or practices, Aiel rule over wetlanders would result in constant cultural clashes, with the military superiority and violent responses by the Aiel leading inevitably to the abuse and terrorizing of their subjects, and the loss of those techniques of commerce, agriculture and industry the wetlanders might be able to provide to augment an Aiel Empire’s military power.

The violence among the Aiel themselves, which would be so deadly to wetlanders who bumped up against the edges of their society, is kept in check by a strict code of honor, which also performs a needed function in such a harsh environment as the Aiel live. It serves to keep everyone trustworthy, so you can count on a person with much ji to be capable of helping you survive, and you can trust that one who meets his toh is someone you can rely on to uphold his part. The wetlanders have no such system, or at least none the Aiel can perceive or translate, and so a wetlander manifestly cannot be trusted or relied upon. When Aviendha tells Rand he should not take wetlanders on the attack on Rahvin because “they cannot be trusted” she is not just speaking out of prejudice, or universally condemning their character, she is judging them by the standards of the Three Fold Land, where trust is only extended to one who grasps the same set of requirements and duties as you, and from whom you know exactly what you can expect.

Rand, unlike Aviendha, CAN count on wetlanders like Dobraine, because he knows what he can expect of Dobraine, and vice versa, whereas Aviendha does not understand his system, and cannot understand why he does what he does, and knows wetlanders do not know the rules under which she operates, so she cannot know what one will do. SHE cannot trust them, but she does not yet grasp the extent to which Rand can. In the Waste, with the necessities of life so dear, and such dangerous flora, fauna, climate and enemies all ready to kill at the slightest mistake, there is much less margin of error for tolerating the untrustworthy. Rather than give water or share precious shade with a man who may turn on you or betray you tomorrow, better to kill him when he proves unreliable and save those resources for people you CAN count on. From there, of course, we get the Aiel readiness to kill over fine points of honor, which all too many wetlanders might fall afoul of when they mix in large numbers.

What is more, thanks to the attitude of superiority they develop, since they are manifestly superior at what is necessary to live in the only place they have any experience living, Aiel are unlikely to see any point in learning the ways of so inferior and soft a people. After all, the survival techniques from their home will still work in the wetlands, only better. The combat skills will still kill wetlanders, they will merely die more easily. Their honor system only seems to highlight the worthlessness of the wetlanders, as they do not behave in any manner which can be measured by the Aiel scales. And the sense of superiority which they are already inclined to feel gets worse as their experience with wetlanders only serves to reinforce this perception, not because wetlanders are truly inferior, but because the Aiel have learned to focus exclusively on the very narrow areas of activity in which they are supreme, and are incapable of recognizing the other culture’s advancements. Amys once makes a comment comparing a character’s ignorant request of her to “a girl demanding a silver bracelet from her father” immediately, while lacking the knowledge to understand what he must do to fulfill her request. That is how the Aiel seem to view those things the wetlanders have that they lack. That they are capable of creating the wealth and beauty and wonderful or greatly impractical things the Aiel observe in the wetlands, should at least give them pause, but none among them ever seem to consider where things like palaces or aqueducts or closets full of silk come from, or how much wealth moves around wetland society to enable such things to be created. The few times we get any view of the matter, all they can seem to think of is the looting potential, not out of avarice, but simply because that is how their economical minds process things according to the habits of the Waste – they simply cannot fathom the financial transactions or labor required to procure these accumulations of wealth, so they mentally frame it in terms of how rewarding it would be to plunder.

It is thanks to this limited mentality that the Aiel progress along the course that leads to their own damnation. While nothing can really be effectively determined about Rand’s supposed guilt and responsibility for their predicament (as noted above, even when Rand perceives a difficulty or culture clash with the Aiel, they don’t necessarily understand his reasons or the point of his efforts to avert the problem), it is plain that the Aiel found themselves in a position of superior strength among the wetlander nations, but found no purpose to apply that strength. In the Three Fold Land, the entirety of their efforts was dedicated to survival, and having no other skills as a community besides violence, when their needs are met and there are no threats, they naturally start casting a war-like eye on potential threats. In the case of the Seanchan, they were the biggest and worst enemy available. There was more honor to be gained in defeats of the Seanchan than any other foe, and they had fewer ties or alliances connecting them to the Seanchan than to many of the wetlanders. At the very least the complex alliances among the nations led or influenced by the main characters hinted at in Perrin & Elayne’s negotiations in ToM would have been bad form for Rand’s children to agree to an attack on, with their own father-siblings in such a prominent position in that network. For the Aiel to adjust, adapt or change their lifestyle or customs to accommodate their new situation is simply not within their capabilities. Thus, they pick a fight with the Seanchan over what seems to be a nonsensical issue – the refusal of the Seanchan to act according to ji’e’toh in the disposition of their Aiel da’covale. Never mind that by violating ji’e’toh themselves, the Shaido had placed themselves beyond all considerations or protections of that system by any reasonable moral judgment – for the Aiel, nothing has changed, because nothing CAN change. They can be made to adapt by something much greater and more powerful, as when they first embraced the use of force, or later in their future history when we are shown how much of their culture and customs they must jettison in the urgency to survive their war with the Seanchan, but without actual power over the Aiel, no one can make them give up their assumptions and view of what they are owed or make them from refrain from resorting to violence in pursuit of those ends.

Because of their inability to back down or accept changes in their ways or methods, and the cultural differences with the Seanchan leaving each side unable to offer mutually acceptable terms, the Aiel cannot back away from their ill-conceived war short of victory. They realize an expansion of the war is needed to break the stalemate and overcome the Seanchan advantages. Unfortunately, broadening the war is what kills the Aiel in the end. By bringing the wetlanders into the fight, they gain more allies and numbers in the short term, but make it possible for the Seanchan to gain the edge in the long run.

Once the Peace is broken and they are free to counter-attack the wetlands, the Seanchan can do more than try to match the Aiel at their game of raid and counter-raid, and begin to tip the balance in their favor. Because they take over the military, government and population of the territory they conquer, the Seanchan grow more powerful as they advance. When the Seanchan conquer a nation, they can replace their losses from new levies among their conquests, and leash new damane from among the conquered. The Aiel might hypothetically drive the Seanchan from Amadicia, but their own arrogance and xenophobia would preclude their making effective use of the territory or the liberated population, and it would simply be one more region for their army to guard and patrol, and with an organized opponent that makes excellent use of spies and covert agents, their newly taken territory would become a source of insurgencies and infiltrations. Particularly given the much greater success of the Seanchan in winning over conquered populations. While the orthodox Aiel might not have degenerated to the extremes of the Shaido in Malden, they give no sign of appeasing or ameliorating the suspicions and reflexive hostility of their new wetlander neighbors, and Aiel have long been the boogiemen for wetlanders, second at best to the Shadow, and in the southern regions where the Seanchan are consolidating their hold, not even that much, as few of the new subjects of the Seanchan Empire even believe in Trollocs. Yet men from Ghealdan and Altara fought in the Aiel War, and the latter nation took heavy casualties. That alone would give the Aiel in uphill battle in winning over the population as liberators, even without taking into consideration the Seanchan superiority in exploiting their conquests and gaining the trust of the commoners.

Later on, as the war winds down and the Aiel are faced with the certainty of their defeat, they lament that they are left with no options but surrender or flight and once their nation is shattered, the straggling survivors appear to be oppressed by the Seanchan who still persist in making their lives miserable, but it is entirely in keeping with the practices of both groups. The Seanchan take peace, order and unity in their society very seriously. Letting a rebellion or military threat go unanswered is no more in their frame of reference than ignoring survival practices in the Three-Fold Land is for the Aiel. Given that the Aiel have initiated and waged a multi-generation war against the Seanchan, how can they be permitted to quit the field and regain their strength? While being forced to flee to a desert might be considered unmitigated defeat to many nations, for the Aiel, it would simply be a case of falling back on their base of strength and making it possible for the war to flare up again at the convenience of the Aiel, when they feel best able to hurt the Seanchan. Not only that, the strong implication is that the Aiel played a leadership role in the world war against the Empire, and allowing them to go unmolested is setting them up as a rallying point for the disaffected or criminals or rebels and a symbol of successful resistance. When the Aiel attempt to gather in a secure settlement, the Seanchan of course must break it up, as the birthplace of a nascent resurgence of their most dangerous enemies in their new lands. The subsequent sanctions against Aiel survivors and individuals is likewise reasonable, to keep their own people in mind of the cost of treachery, rebellion and resistance.

The reflexive protest by the reader against the injustice of punishing people for the actions of their ancestors is irrelevant. Some characters rule nations because of the successes of their ancestors, and others live in squalor because of their ancestors’ mistakes, and even the Aiel practice such intergenerational transference, with the rewarding of the Cairhienin for actions of their ancestors more than 2,000 years gone with Avendoraldera and rights of passage to Shara, and a generation after the end of the Aiel war, persist in holding the Cairhienin in contempt for the actions of an unpopular king. The reaction of a number of clan chiefs’ to Rand’s attempts to alleviate the famine in that country is “better to let the treekillers starve.” How can the Seanchan be blamed when they have the exact same reaction to a people who attacked them unprovoked and incited an entire continent to war against them? Even in the degree to which they carry out the threats they make to the Aiel, the Seanchan behave like their enemies. We see a couple of times in the series that Aiel do whatever they say they will, such as Amys’ refusal to teach Egwene even after her transgressions are forgiven and forgotten. Amys said if Egwene broke the rules she would not teach her anymore and she cannot. Just as the Seanchan threatened the Aiel with the total eradication of their society and unceasing vengeance if they did not surrender, they continue to act. Whether or not this is in keeping with Seanchan practices, after several generations of studying and analyzing the Aiel, they have probably come to the accurate conclusion that to be taken seriously by the Aiel, you must do as they do and carry out whatever threats you make.

All in all, it appears as if the very factors that make the Aiel so formidable, and which are thus prized and cultivated and reinforced whenever possible, will also be what leads them down a path toward their own destruction. Because of who and what they are, they cannot turn from a fight with the Seanchan, and because of who and what they are, they cannot adjust and change sufficiently to beat the Seanchan at their own game. Indeed, the singularity of vision that makes the Aiel so hard to dissuade or corrupt or intimidate, prevents them from seeing that there is any game other than the one they are accustomed to playing. They go to war for honor, but the Seanchan go to war to conquer. In order to beat that, you have to be able to outdo the Seanchan at conquest, but that Aiel perspective will not let them see as much, or make the necessary changes. Instead, their blindness leads to them to open up new avenues of conquest for the Seanchan and allow their enemies to strengthen their position even more. The sources of the fall of the Aiel and systemic and inherent. What works in the limited environment of the Waste is too limited for the more complex world outside it, and leads to them becoming overwhelmed. What makes them so good in the Waste, renders them unfit to cope with a world beyond it, and it seems highly likely that even if they COULD defeat the Seanchan in battle, cast down the Imperial Family, wipe out the Ever Victorious Army and loose all the damane, they could live happily ever after, or rule the world successfully. At best, we’d have a world that resembled Malden in some ways, with things like Aiel randomly abusing conquered subjects for ancestors’ slights, and even punishing attempts to adapt wetlander society and Aiel culture, as Rhuarc wishes regarding the Cairhienin societies, because Aiel see their code as “all or nothing.” One way or another, the Aiel are going to be destroyed by their own inherent, systemic weaknesses.