William S. McCallister is a retired military officer. While on active duty, Mr. McCallister served in various infantry and special operations assignments specializing in civil-military, psychological and information operations. He has worked extensively in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
ONE TRIBE AT A TIME
The Full Document at last!
By Steven Pressfield | Published: October 29, 2009
Download Major Jim Gant’s “One Tribe At A Time” to your computer, or view it right now.
[Because of the extraordinary response to Maj. Jim Gant's paper, One Tribe At A Time, I've decided to leave it up all week in the "Number One Slot." My ongoing interview with Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai will pick again next Friday; the Chief has been in Kabul all week, meeting with U.S. and British commanders, and we haven't had time to speak. So all's well that ends well!]
The downloadable and open-able .pdf of One Tribe is here, on the right. On a personal note, let me say again that I consider it a privilege to offer this document in full, not only because of my great respect for Maj. Jim Gant, who has lived and breathed this Tribal Engagement idea for years, but for the piece itself and for the influence it is already having within the U.S. military and policymaking community.
One Tribe At A Time is by no means a super-pro Beltway think tank piece. What it is, in my opinion, is an idea whose time has come, put forward by an officer who has lived it in the field with his Special Forces team members–and proved it can be done. And an officer, by the way, who is ready this instant to climb aboard a helicopter to go back to Afghanistan and do it again.
Questions and comments
At the moment, Maj. Gant is at Fort Polk, Louisiana, getting ready to deploy to Iraq, where he will lead an Iraqi commando battalion. He’ll be available in the meantime, however (depending of course upon time demands), to answer questions or take criticisms. Just respond in the comments section below. And I myself have further thoughts I’d like to offer on this subject in the coming weeks.
Here’s a quick one:
The most common response I anticipate to the Tribal Engagement concept (and it’s a valid criticism, shared by Maj. Gant) will go something like this: “Yeah, this is a great idea–but where are we going to find the men to implement it?”
Men for the job
Tribal Engagement Team members, should this concept be adopted, would be called upon to commit for multiple tours under the loneliest, harshest and most hazardous conditions imaginable. To succeed with the tribe they are assigned to, they would have to demonstrate impeccable combat credentials and, even rarer, possess the “people skills” to establish and maintain rapport across a cultural chasm—Western to Tribal Afghan—that has defeated every outside entity from Alexander the Great to the British and the Soviets. The task would be extraordinarily difficult, dirty and dangerous, and in the end would almost certainly be rewarded neither by career advancement (because the enterprise would be unprecedented and outside the normal channels of military promotion) nor by recognition from the public at large, who in all probability will rarely hear of it and wouldn’t understand or appreciate it if they did.
How can we identify and attract such men?
Do you remember this tiny, three-line ad from the London Times, December 29, 1913?
Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.
5000 volunteers queued up in response to this advertisement, posted by Ernest Shackleton seeking crewmen for his Antarctic expedition.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think our young American warriors would respond with any less enthusiasm than their British cousins did a century ago to a similar call. Do you?
Again, many thanks to Maj. Jim Gant for writing One Tribe At A Time, to Printer Bowler for designing and editing the .pdf and to Callie Oettinger for managing the outreach. I’m proud to put this document in circulation with as much reach as this modest blog can offer. We all hope it proves of interest and of use.
I have a boy in the Marines, adopted from Romania in 2001. I am wondering if those born abroad, particularly in peasant areas such as he came from (he was a boy shepherd, and we have joked he will have to milk goats again in Afghanistan), fare better or fare worse in the type of operation you describe?
Funny, I thought the same thing about my own boy, adopted from Moldova in 2000, but he’s only 11 now. Still, a special personality, incredibly smart, brave and tough, I think he’d have the ‘touch’.
great idea! Getting back to Warburton with a modern grasp of the issues.
Steven and MAJ Gant, I intend to read the book, thank you very much for posting it. Re: recruitment. I think you are right about the availability of volunteers, so the next question is training and selection.
From colonial times through the end of the Indian campaigns in the Western US there was a need for men very much like those described above. The often came from the ranks of those captured and escaped from the Indians themselves, others came from settlers who grew up on the frontier either or both living and fighting with the tribes. Others came from people who lived far away from North America but whose life mimicked that of the frontier (Scots Highlanders and Scots-Irish for the most part). Others like Sir William Johnson, acquired the skills from serious study over a long time.
During WWII the OSS recruited heavily from refugee camps to find agents with the language and cultural skills necessary to go back to their home territory and lead partisans.
The British experience in India and elsewhere shows a similar eclectic and flexible approach. The raw material is out there.
I think todays Special Forces already have a selection and training program that is pretty close to what is needed. So the question is , do we expand SF to provide the necessary pool of operatives or do we form some semi-permanent task force where suitable recruits are cycled through on repetitive tours? There are arguments for both approaches but that is for another time.
Before reading the book, I’m certain it’s got a huge core of correctness — a good future Afghanistan will be based on Tribes. My own gov’t predjudice would be for Tribal Cantons, like Switzerland more than post Civil War USA.
Tribes and Tribal leaders will win in Afghanistan — the USA can help choose which tribes and which leaders in those tribes. It might even help create methods of peaceful cooperation and wealth creation (based on peaceful agreement, also called capitalism).
I fear, tho, that no strategy can win if heroin remains illegal — so that opium selling tribal leaders will remain “criminal”.
To create a prosperous Afghanistan, rather than one ruled by drug/warlords, some legalized poppy buying must be done in a big way.
Tom Grey, you have hit the nail on the head!! We can run a COIN campiagn OR we can run a moral minority campaign. If we try to inflict our won mores and customs on host nations and make them like us, then we will fail. As a part of a successful COIN campiagn we must accept that at time we will have to accomodate some things and people that we don’t agree with or condone at home…if we are that worried about the drug trade out of Afghanistan, there are other ways of interdicting it…
Well for what it’s worth, I submitted a link you the Major’s paper to the Whitehouse.gov site. Who knows?
Mollie,
Thank you!
STRENGTH AND HONOR
Jim
Major Gant,
First off, I’d like to thank you, ODA 316, and all the other American forces fighting in the GWOT to keep fat, middle-aged, computer programmers, like myself safe.
I found your personal narrative of engagement with the Pashtun tribes around Mangwel to be fascinating, and a possible example of how Obama may be able to shift strategies to both achieve his heretofore seemingly impossible goal of reducing our military footprint in Afghanistan and still achieve success (not victory, I agree with you that there is no victory for the US in Afghanistan. There may be victory for the Afghans, there is only success for the US).
This may be an opportunity for the Obama administration to adopt an unconventional strategy in Afghanistan, much like, “the Surge”, in Iraq, to lead us to a successful conclusion of our extensive military involvement in the Afghan conflict. Your strategy holds great promise for the Obama administration because it does not call for significantly more troops, it just calls for the best and brightest and most dedicated troops (and officers and NCOs). IMO, this should be a strategy Obama can embrace, he can pander to his liberal base by not sending additional numbers of troops to Afghanistan and he can still attempt to engage successfully in the conflict, the one he considered, during the campaign, the central war on Islamic terror. It’s a win-win situation, unless there are influential elements in his administration more invested in losing in Afghanistan than in succeeding.
Sorry for the long post, but one question I had was about the dynamic between the tribes and the warlords. I recently read Doug Stanton’s, “The Horse Soldiers”, which is very warlord oriented. It seems that your experience was quite a bit different. For example, Stanton suggests that soldier and unit allegiance is very fungible (“Today my enemy, tomorrow my comrade”), but you state that allegiance to the tribe is fundamental. I realize that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, nor even in opposition. I’d just appreciate hearing your take on this (maybe) apparent juxtaposition of ideas. Do the tribes pledge allegiance to the dominant warlord or is it more like individual mercenaries (or some combination of these)?
Kind regards,
An Average American
Major Gant,
I took the liberty of emailing your paper to my Senators (Dodd and Lieberman), the White House, and to Senator John Kerry (Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee).
An Average American,
Thank you for taking the time to read the blog and post. I appreciate you passing this work on as I believe it to be relevant and necessary…the more people that read it, the better.
Thanks again.
STRENGTH AND HONOR
Jim Gant
I will address your other post in a short while!
The British Empire’s military, political and social culture differed vastly from ours. Her young men of education and status, e.g. Winston Churchill, were deeply engaged in military, political and commercial activity throughout the empire,and achieved their positions as a result of same. American military strengths rest primarily in our popular armies rather than in our political elites, which makes it difficult to implement a plan like this. Our young Soldiers are redeploying from Iraq and Afghanistan with extensive combat experience, and many go on to get good educations. However, while they are excellent at fighting the enemy, few have any desire to become more familiar with their cultures. In a way, this is good news, as deployments provide young Soldiers with strong antidotes to their relativistic, multicultural ‘educations.’ Their schools haven’t informed them of what is great about our civilization, but at least they know what isn’t great about the Middle East and Central Asia. On the other hand, our educated elites (with some outstanding exceptions), who could invest the time and effort to learn the languages and cultures, aren’t participating in the GWOT (oops, that is, the campaign against ‘man-made disasters.’). We’d need those elites to implement a plan like this. Sorry, but the limited number of highly talented, intelligent, fit adventurers who could do this job are already occupied in the Special Forces.
I appreciated your article. I’ve been commenting on Military.Com and sent an email to LTG Kearney about setting up “Mike Forces” in each tribal area. It seems some things don’t actually change over 40 or 50 years. Also asked him to please have his boss rethink the move into the cities because my feeling is that the center of gravity is with the tribes not the city folk. Shades of the Montagnards and the Vietnamese. From what I could gather from your discussion I think you believe the same. The only thing I think needs to be expanded upon is “inter- tribal fratricide”. You address a fairly vague, sort of a short paragraph to the problem. Might be a great subject for the next discussion. I used to joke (?) about two adjoining tribes, each counseled by a different A-team, who had an honor disagreement. Would there be a possiblity of two teams trading rounds in support of “their” tribe? Presumably not, with the two teams somehow overcoming 2000 years of vendetta/revenge motivations and getting each tribe to compensate the other in some way to satisfy Honor (good luck on who wronged whom, and how to get each to compensate the other when they both think the other is wrong).
Your approach seems far superior to my nemesis, a retired Armor LTC who thinks the British have actually ever won an insurgency other than by using concentration camps/peace villages. Finally, I hope the SF teams are successful in getting the “legs” to let them go native as required. I once had a leg Colonel radio me to ask if all my men had shaved that day. Fortunately my radio broke up badly during my reply. Good luck and welcome home. (I put this reply in another forum on a similar subject, thinking it was about this publication-my apologies)
Jim,
If you guys are really going to set up this Tribal Engagement Team, I think getting people involved will be as easy as putting it out there. There are many of us who did very similar things in Iraq between 2006-2008. I know it’s a different world in Afghanistan, but many of the principles are the same. Also, you might look at National Guard and Reserve folks. We do the whole “people skills” things on the civilian side and could take our skills to this kind of fight.
I’m interested in your team.
Chris