Rand’s “Invaluable” Aiel
Without the Aiel, Rand would not have come nearly as far as he has. Fortunately he has the Aiel, his most crucial and valuable tool for winning all those victories as the Dragon Reborn, yes?

No. Let’s look at Rand’s accomplishments as the Dragon Reborn.

Driving off the Seanchan and defeating Ba’alzamon This was his first big Dragon Reborn moment, and not an Aiel to be seen. Of course, it was at the opposite end of the continent and he hadn’t won them over yet, but there COULD have been Aiel with them. Urien, for instance, rather than helping the wetlanders hunt and kill the Trollocs they are looking for, decides to go looking for portents instead. And then there was the trio of Maidens who almost violated the peace of a stedding to attack Rand and company on sight. Remember, they were sent to look for He Who Comes With the Dawn, presumably an Aielman, among the wetlanders. Instead (and this is why you don’t make women into soldiers) they go on a shopping detour at Stedding Tsofu! Upon seeing a man who looks EXTREMELY like an Aielman (to the point that they are more disgusted over his sword than all the other swordsmen present), they decide to do absolutely nothing about it. Any Aiel who spotted Rand should have AT LEAST asked him some questions or something! But Rand wasn’t wearing his “Hi! My name is: He Who Comes With the Dawn” nametag, so the Maidens keep on looking.
You could also say that the Aiel were hesitant about hanging around with the Shienarans who predominated both those scenes, due to their long enmity, but whose fault is that? The Three-Fold Land borders on three (four until recently) wetlander countries. And which one do the Aiel raid? Cairhien who offered them mortal offense in the last generation? No. Ostentatiously wealthy Tear? No. Shienar and Malkier, who were probably the two poorer of the four lands bordering the Dragonwall, and thus have the least loot, and who are mostly occupied with trying to fight the Shadow? Yeah, let’s pick on THEM! The Shienarans do not raid the Three-Fold Land, as they seem to believe it isn’t worth having, and see the aforementioned struggle for their very survival against the Shadow as their paramount concern, leaving them no spare resources to fritter away attacking the Aiel. There is no motivation for the Aiel to raid them that does not apply to lands they leave alone, but they exclusively raid Shienar. They have peaceful trading relations with Shara despite getting cheated at every opportunity, they give gifts and rights of passage to a nation that couldn’t give a damn and they harass and harry the nation that is desperately trying to hold back the forces of the Dark One. Way to go, Aiel.

Taking the Stone of Tear and Drawing Callandor Ostensibly this is an Aiel win, but how necessary was it? The Tairens stopped fighting as soon as they saw Rand with Callandor, and seemed to think that they were only tolerating the Aiel because they followed Rand. Fear of the Aiel might have slowed some assassination attempts, but if that was really a danger and there were no Aiel, Moiraine would be sleeping in his anteroom with Lan guarding his door if she thought there really was a plot.

And how much good were the Aiel guards really? Horny women got all the access to Rand they wanted. They let a woman with significant martial arts training approach Rand’s bed in complete secrecy without bothering to wake him! Slayer himself could have cut Rand into little tiny pieces by wandering up to his door, claiming he wanted to sodomize (or be sodomized by) Rand or that he wanted to check Rand’s wounds or that he needed to see him and was willing to manhandle Maidens to do it.

Basically, all the Aiel did in Tear was kill a crapload of Rand’s future soldiers.

Becoming the Car’a’carn Okay, this was a purely Aiel thing, right? Yeah, he had Aiel help with this, except it was totally self-interested. The Aiel need him if they are to survive. Rand doesn’t necessarily need them, that we know of for certain. And who was the opposition to this quest? That’s right – other Aiel. He had Aiel doubters and rival claimants from among the Aiel, whose laughably and demonstrably false claim only held up because of sheer superstition and racism on the part of the general Aiel public! What kind of people see two men make a claim to an experience that only 11 living men are known to have shared, and when those men unanimously verify one guy’s story which contradicts the other one, STILL choose to follow the other one? The Shaido can be forgiven for sticking with their clan, but the stated preference is sept over clan, and clan over outsiders. By Aiel customs and laws, the Mera'din were immorally joining with an enemy to wage war against their own people, and that sophistry about just visiting their society brothers was a farce, probably only accepted because of the reluctance of the chiefs to admit to treason and condemn their people in favor of a wetlander. So this triumph of Rand's was only an issue, because the Aiel were jerks.

There is also the problem of his having to sway the Aiel when his message was so unpalatable, but whose fault was that? For 3,000 years the chiefs and Wise Ones have lied to their people, and yet no one has brought them to task over it to date.

There is one other point of opposition to his becoming Car’a’carn I feel I should mention, in fairness to the Aiel. That was, of course, Moiraine, who had her own reasons for not being happy about seeing him gain control of an army of hundreds of thousands of anti-Cairhienin warriors who were not under the authority of the Tower. Where could you find Moiraine during all of this? Why, she was the honored guest, confidant and sauna-buddy of the leading clique of Aiel Wise Ones!

Conquering Cairhien A draw, Aiel-wise, since he would not have needed to conquer it, if not for the Aiel being jerks.

Conquering Andor and defeating Rahvin While he did take the Aiel with him, they didn’t seem to contribute a whole lot. He killed Rahvin, and came back to find them still contained and fighting for their lives against a Trolloc horde. He promptly broke the Trollocs with balefire, and that was that. Immediately after, Bashere showed up with his 9,000 Saldeans and pledged his services to Rand, who would have thus had all the troops he needed to hold Caemlyn even if he left all the Aiel in Cairhien.

Dumai’s Wells To the extent that anyone other than Rand contributed significantly, it was the Asha’man. Sure the Aiel came, but for the most part, their contribution was negligible. Very few of them managed to penetrate the Shaido to the camp, and it was the efforts of the Asha’man that broke and smashed the Shaido. Whereupon the Aiel decided to be suspicious of them.

All in all, Dumai’s Wells reflects really badly on the Aiel, because in the first place, while the people who ostensibly lived under the authority of the Tower and had the most to fear from opposing the Tower, were able to scramble up a few hundred soldiers willing to fight Aes Sedai for Rand, most of the Aiel could not be trusted that far, aside from the Maidens who knew they had a good thing in the first chief in 3,000 years to let them be bodyguards and who was remarkably tolerant of their "foolshness", and were desperate not to lose him.

In the second place, once again, it was Aiel who were the bad guys! Only this time, the good Aiel and bad Aiel don’t cancel one another out, since the Asha’man had to right the wrongs of the Shaido. Thirdly, there was the issue of Rand’s crack bodyguards letting the Aes Sedai walk off with him and taking the Aes Sedai at face value, when they are known for duplicity (not that any Aiel could be bothered to have a conversation with any wetlander who might have been able to so inform them), and letting the Aes Sedai lull them into a false sense of security.

Illian The Aiel were simply a diversion on this campaign, and if Rand had no Aiel, a Tairen-Cairhienin-mercenary force would have been sufficient for the same diversion. It was not the quantity of troops Rand had massed near the border so much as the fact that he threw every soldier he could spare into the army. The plausibility of his diversion rested in the notion that he had ALL his troops in it, not that he had such a large number. And once again, the biggest obstacle to a rapid conquest proved to be more Aiel, who, having turned against Rand, proved a tempting target for Sammael to scoop up as a side project.

Also, during the build-up stages, Rand, who was always feeling pressed for time, had to waste it soothing the egos of the chiefs, who would be upset if he took longer to give the wetlanders their orders than to talk with the Aiel (hey, maybe if they had got to the command tent faster, or could bear to socialize with the wetlanders, he wouldn’t have had to be alone with Weiramon & co so long.

Defeating the Seanchan again. No Aiel went along on this trip. Not that that did not stop them from adding to his personal misery which led to his emotional nadir in tGS. The Maidens, perceiving that Rand had somehow broken a promise to them, decide to assault him to regain their pride. In fact, the wording of the only promise he ever made to the Maidens was that Far Dareis Mai would have as many as any other society. We see this being the principle used in his personal guards in LoC, when he refuses to allow whatever male society guarding him at the time to outnumber the Maidens. He kept this promise on the Altaran campaign against the Seanchan, taking zero Maidens and zero Aiel of any other sort. He even told Bashere that for the most part, aside from the commanders, he did not want men he trusted along, since the troops were just supposed to be cannon fodder, and he seemed to expect the brighter among them to figure out why they were picked or not picked for this trip. Oh, right. The BRIGHTER of his followers! Let no one accuse an Aiel of intruding herself into that category! They were incensed at a compliment from Rand! He wanted the people he TRUSTED elsewhere, and the ones he suspected of treachery under his eye. Not to mention, even taking them along to assuage their foreign values would undermine the whole point of his arrangements. He mixed up the troops so that they all accompanied their enemies, whom they could not trust to plot together with. Yet, when Aiel are around, wetlanders put aside their hatreds and cooperate! Had Rand brought even a token force of Aiel, their mutual distrust of the savages would have been a talking point for Cairhienin and Tairen, Tairen and Illianer, Illianer and Cairhienin to start plotting together. Bashere got all this at once, but explaining such concepts to the Aiel is like trying to fit ten gallons of crap in a quart-sized balloon – it’s never going to work, it isn’t worth the effort, and you don’t want to be around when it is stretched too far & explodes.

Evading the attack of the renegade Asha’man Just more names to Rand’s list, in addition to the point that they were not bothering to stop visitors, which is why Rand had Morr present. This meant that had they wanted, the renegades could have attacked Rand in person, and the Maidens would not have stopped them, because they were in a snit.

The Cleansing Heh. The only Aiel with a shot at helping had a ter’angreal-inspired premonition that if she went, she’d screw things up.

Trolloc attack on Algarin’s manor Total Aiel score – one wounded Myrdraal which Rand had to finish off.

Semirhage To be fair, this is one that a Maiden should have come on. Rand was told to bring a single non-channeling woman, a role tailor-made for a Maiden. What else is a superfluous elite and exotic bodyguard for, if not to accompany their principal to a high-level meeting with a foreign representative? Maybe if they hadn’t been such jerks in Cairhien, he might have been a little more open to the idea. But adhering to their own provincial notions of what they were owed, they drove Rand away from them and left themselves open to having their place usurped by a woman constitutionally unable to tell him “no.”

If Rand is to be chastised elsewhere for the imprudence of not appeasing the Aiel, no matter how little they deserve it, the Maidens should similarly be criticized for not doing all they could to be in a position to fulfill the requirements for their own honor. Moiraine swore to obey Rand in order to stay close to him and carry out what she saw as her mission – are the Maidens too good to do the same? How many Forsaken have they killed to place themselves above Moiraine’s example of dedication?

Arad Domon Rand relied heavily on the Aiel for this one, and what does he get? His most significant failure of his career!. To be fair, he also had inept political help. Regardless of what ability Dobraine has demonstrated in the past, he has lived in Cairhien, which for the last 20 years has been a combination of a consumer economy and welfare state. Hardly the experience best suited for dragging a country back to its feet. The other we know he sent was Darlin, who was so dense that it took multiple incidents of the besiegers of the Stone stealing his charitable donations to make him decide to stop sending food OUT of a besieged fortress.

While there are more than enough culprits to go around for the failure of the mission to Arad Domon, including adverse circumstances, it is telling to note that Rand gets the Aiel back and his unbeaten streak ends.

And then there is the fact that the Aiel are forever holding themselves as a special case, exempt from normal rules (“No Rand, spying is bad! We will not spy! Pardon me, I have to go beat Aviendha for revealing our spying.” ) Contrast their attitudes towards two different troublemakers who broke the rules and status quo and terrorized several wetland nations:

Sevanna: This Car’a’carn is a false Car’a’carn. I not only refuse to follow him, but I am sheltering hundreds, if not thousands of traitors to your cause. I am currently counting your greatly weakened numbers from inside your own camps.
Wise Ones: Come in! Sit down, take your shawl off! Have some tea! Want to punish our apprentices? What’s that, Egwene, Aes Sedai & friend of the Car’a’carn? Of course we cannot harm her or detain her! Now obey her humbly!
Maseema: Rand al’Thor is the most important person in the world! He is great and awesome and EVERYONE should follow him. No matter what! I hate Aes Sedai who are trying to manipulate him, just as you Wise Ones do. I was one of the very first to follow him, even overcoming my (well-earned) prejudices (see above re: Aiel-Shienar relations) against people who look like him. I took wounds in his service fighting Trollocs long before any Aiel ever met him.
Wise Ones: This man must die.

All in all, you have to wonder just who needs whom, in this equation, and maybe Cadsuane ought to do some speaking to her new buddy Sorilea rather than publicly telling Rand to kowtow to their semantic petulance.