I recently read a number of manuscripts by the constructivist scholar Alexander Wendt.

The takeaway from Wendt’s work?

The only reality that exists is the one we socially construct for ourselves and others of like mind.

There exists no one reality that can be accessed through empirical research. And, we can’t be sure that the reality we observe exists independently of our observation of it. All human associations, social identities and the interests of purposive actors, are continually shaped, and guided primarily by shared ideas and biases. Furthermore, all relations are socially constructed and given form by social practices and interactions.

Why this matters?

Often, ideas are discounted because they don’t mesh with someone else’s concept of reality. I was on the receiving end myself recently, related to my latest recommendations for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. And, well, I’ve shot down the ideas of others in the past, too.

End of day, we have to consider the different realities—because the one thing I think we can all agree on is that, in Afghanistan in particular, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, because the realities on the ground vary so greatly.

“Agora” is a place to consider all of the realities.

COIN doctrine, counter-insurgency theory, says “protect the people” comes before “kill the enemy.” In meeting after meeting we heard all the right things from officers and civilian leaders who were earnest, brave, well-intentioned, smart, sincere, hard-working and absolutely decent and ethical.  We heard about construction projects and rules of engagement and mitigating civilian casualties, about liaising with tribal elders and managing escalation of force and irrigation and extracting resources and using local people, defeating the corruption of the Karzai regime, delivering good governance, etc.  But I didn’t see any Afghans in the rooms.  I didn’t see any in the PRT sessions (the meetings with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.)

Maj. Cal Worth, foreground, with Gen. Mattis and MP Tobias Elwood in Marjah

Maybe that observation is unfair. Maybe it was in the nature of this trip—that its task was to investigate other areas. In Marjah and Lashkar Gah, we heard about the construction contracts that would start soon and the “government in a box” that would be set up immediately. Certainly the new Afghan flag fluttering over the police station looks hopeful. But Marjah has been a Taliban stronghold for the past five years and those boys aren’t going away. Will development efforts stick?  Will the tribal people accept police and administration from the government in the capital? In meetings in Kabul, we heard experienced, honest U.S. generals declare with full confidence that today’s Afghans possess a sense of national identity.  “Ask a man who he is and he won’t name his tribe; he’ll tell you he’s an Afghan.”

Will he? I wish I believed it. Searching the eyes of the men and boys in Marjah, the best I could see was wariness and skepticism, the worst enmity and hostility. Who can blame them? I’d be half-Taliban and hedging my bets too. Yeah, the Americans are strong and brave and they’ve got jets and armor. Some of them even speak a bit of Pashto. But how long are they going to stick around?

Can the Machine make the stretch?  In Kabul we drove past rows of Arabian Nights mansions behind fifteen-foot walls topped with razor wire and security cameras. Drugs lords and corrupt officials who have raked millions from construction contracts and international aid. To truly reach the people (and that is, after all, the be-all and end-all of COIN strategy), the Machine has to get around that—and around a culture of family, clan and tribal loyalty and patronage that goes back five thousand years, not to mention bonds and rivalries, blood feuds and grievances of honor among warlords who are now cabinet ministers and sub-commanders and ex-mujahideen who are fighting on three sides at the same time and whose codes and secret ways are as impenetrable to our Machine as the squiggles in Farsi and Dari (or is it Arabic?) on the walls of the mechanics’ shops and the ad billboards for cell phones.

11. We meet with ISAF commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in a conference area adjacent to his “war room.” Without exception, the American and Coalition commanders we spend time with are A+++ leaders, and Gen. McChrystal impresses me as the best of the best.  Clearly he understands (far better than any of us reporting on it) the maddening complexity of the conflict, and he and his team are working as hard and as smartly as they can to do their job and accomplish their mission. Gen. McChrystal is the only U.S. commander with no budget. What he needs, he gets. He can cherry-pick any individual from any unit and get him sent wherever he wants. At least that’s the theory. But even the Machine can grind slowly sometimes.  I ask him if he feels he is getting enough support from up the chain of command. He answers sincerely, I believe, that he feels backed up fully by the White House, the SecDef and all hands in the Capitol and the Pentagon.

I know he means it, and I know that generals don’t get four stars because they don’t relish handling an adult portion. But this chore is a real bastard. I wish I felt that the Prez and the American people were in it with both feet.

Market scene in Marjah

12. Maybe Vietnam is the culprit–the U.S.’s last unhappy experience with a conscripted army. Maybe blame can be localized to whatever forces or events turned the U.S. electorate off to the idea that every citizen owes service to his country–and decreed that 100% of the burden for defending our nation be borne by 5% of its citizenry.  The all-volunteer military is probably the most highly functioning sector in American society and the only one in which the public still places full faith. But our troops are out here alone in space. They can hack it. In their own way they relish it.  But that’s a lot of weight on their shoulders–and lot on Gen. McChrystal’s. “Today in America,” says Navy Capt. Kevin Sweeney, Gen. Mattis’ executive assistant, “if you don’t have a son or husband or a neighbor who’s in the military, you don’t even know there’s a war on. You see film on the news but the fight seems a million miles away, and you don’t want to hear about it anyway. It’s someone else’s problem. I don’t blame people. Who wants to ruin their dinner, hearing about civilian casualties and suicide bombers? But it’s happening. We’re here and this is a real fight and somebody ought to know about it.”

What’s my final takeaway from all this?

13. I went into this trip with an axe to grind (the name of this blog is, after all, “It’s The Tribes, Stupid”) and I came home carrying that same axe.

To me, the tribes are the X factor. They and the boots-on-the-ground troopers who work with them are the link between the Machine and the People. We were meeting with Gen. Scaparotti, commander of Combined Joint Task Force – 82, whose area of responsibility is the 14 provinces of Regional Command East, where the Pashtun tribes dominate and where enemy supplies and fighting men roll in and out across the Pakistani border. Gen. Scap told us of the Shinwari tribe, 400,000-strong, who had on their own concluded an internal treaty to resist the Taliban and work with Coalition forces. Tribal elders signed and planted their thumb prints, agreeing to fine any member who supported the insurgency and to burn down that person’s house. I asked the general how he placed this development in context of the overall fight. Was it an aberration or a potential game-changer? “The tribes signing up was huge,” he said. In the cities it’s different because tribal influences are less, but in the country (and 95% of Afghanistan is country) this is exactly the kind of turnaround we need and we must support it any way we can.

Gen. Scap worried though that such self-generated, bottom-up movements can be messy and difficult to control.  I told him about my own friend, Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai (you know him if you’ve followed this blog), and the Tribal Police Force he has raised in his district in Paktia province. Though the chief speaks better English than I do and is passionately pro-Western, he has had to move heaven and earth to get the U.S. units in his district to work with him–and as recently as a month ago, American elements were trying to arrest his chief of police. I heard this same skepticism voiced at a recent think tank meeting in Washington, D.C.  “Won’t empowering the tribes,” one of the Senior Fellows asked, “inevitably conflict with supporting the central government, which is, after all, our mission in Afghanistan?”

We missed the tribes on this trip. The agenda was to meet with American and Afghan commanders. But in the meetings and the walkarounds and on the plane flights, I couldn’t help thinking about Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant (you know him too from these pages) and the Marine infantry battalions and Special Forces teams and the officers and men of army and allied units who have been, and are today, out there with the real Afghan people. I still don’t know how many of these men (and women too) there are—or where this fits into the enterprise of the overall Machine. I hope we’ve got somebody with the Shinwari. I hope more are coming, to that tribe and to others <em>as tribes</em>. And I hope those officers who are doing this work, in whatever form it takes, are getting support and not just lip service.

14. What makes us Americans different from the Russians or the Brits who came to Afghanistan before us? For one thing, we’re not there to conquer the place. We’re not out to destroy the tribal system, as the Russians tried to do, and we’re not here unilaterally. Our mandate derives from the U.N. and our support comes from troops of more than forty countries. We’re the good guys, and the more up close and personal our soldiers and Marines and PRT teams can get with the village and tribal Afghans, the clearer that truth will become to them and the more impact it will have. The Machine is doing fine in its sphere. The Afghan people are the same as they’ve always been. Where the twain meet, if indeed they do, is and will be face-to-face, person-to-person, man-to-man.

Can we do that? Does the Machine have that gear? I don’t know.

The Senior Fellow at the think tank raised another excellent question. He was expressing skepticism about the feasibility of a policy that reaches out to the tribes and banks on the people-skills of American and Coalition team members to produce bonds and build trust across cultures so disparate and so far apart. “How can the United States bet on a policy,” the Fellow asked, “that relies on geniuses?”

The ANA commander in Marjah. Pressfield is back left, in civvies.

That question shut me up. I didn’t have an answer in the moment. But I think now that such a policy doesn’t need geniuses. It doesn’t need anything that our Marines and soldiers don’t already have and aren’t already doing. It needs smart and brave young captains and lieutenants and sergeants and lance corporals who can connect across the cultural divide. It needs civilians like Greg Mortenson of <em>Three Cups of Tea</em> and <em>Stones Into Schools.</em> It needs money to back these individuals, political will to protect them and patience to keep them in place until they have time to do their job. I hope Marjah works. I hope it’s the start of something.

Afghanistan is ancient; it’s not coming into the modern world any time soon.  Afghanistan is tribal. We’re not going to turn it into New Jersey in the next eighteen months. The Machine can’t overcome those realities by itself, and it can’t connect across the gulf between East and West, ancient and modern, unless it can bring to bear a dedicated element whose task is to do just that. I’m not a believer yet. I want to be. When I see that dedicated component–and see it in the field, being supported by our unbeatable Machine–maybe I will be.

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

It’s more than a little weird, participating in one of these PR walkarounds. Self-congratulation is the inevitable theme. The bubble can get pretty thick. For me, at least, it’s almost impossible to grok the street reality. Are things going great or are we all lining up to drink our own Kool-Aid?  For all I can tell, the sullen, hood-eyed bandits eyeballing our procession have been cutting loose AK rounds at Marines twenty-four hours earlier—and may be doing it again three days from now. Not that that means anything. Earlier in the trip, Gen. Mattis, speaking of Iraq and the Anbar Awakening, had credited British general Graeme Lamb with the philosophical breakthrough that made that turnaround embraceable by the field commanders, the battlespace owners.  “Gen. Lamb’s mental model divided the Iraqi population into two groups—those who were reconcilable and those who weren’t.  The trick was to reintegrate the first group into the life of the nation–and to kill or chase the second bunch out of Dodge.”

Gen. Mattis with an Afghan commando in Marjah, 28 Feb 2010

That would be the next phase here in Marjah and in the succeeding towns and cities on the Marines’ clear-hold-build list.  Will it work?  Can the ANA pull it off?  Can the police from the new “government in a box?” Two days earlier we’d been in a meeting in Kabul with LtGen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO Training Mission, and his staff, who had been tasked with bringing the ANA and ANP up to speed.  I didn’t envy these officers; they had definitely drawn the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

Here’s how good intentions go wrong: the Pentagon has decreed that the job of training the Afghan National Police be outsourced. Contractors will do it. So the bids go out; one company wins. But wait, a spurned bidder files a protest. “Now we’re set back,” says Gen. Caldwell, “for however long it takes to settle the dispute. Meanwhile the individual contractors—retired American law enforcement officers, police chiefs and so forth—can’t stick around waiting half a year. They’ve taken other jobs.”  Gen. Caldwell’s original wish list calls for over 2000 trainers; now he’s down to 400+, and it’s no sure thing that he’ll get even those.  “And this,” notes on staffer, meaning the train-up of the ANP, “is the centerpiece of the whole counterinsurgency operation!”

The Machine giveth and the Machine taketh away.

9. Lashkar Gah is our next stop. The name means “camp of the warriors.”  Alexander the Great’s warriors. His columns came through here in 330 B.C., skirting the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, before setting up the tent city that would become Kandahar and trekking north across the Hindu Kush into the Bactrian plain. I peer down from our vertical-take-off Osprey. You can’t tell me much has changed in 2300 years. Below are mud-walled compounds, irrigated fields divided into squares, dark-eyed men in shalwar kameezes. The tribes even have the same names. Alexander and his generals sat around planning tables just like our ISAF commanders, trying to dope this theater out. The great conqueror employed the same tactics we’re using—he hired his enemies for pay, treated them with respect and sought to make them friends. He invested fortunes, built towns and cities, cut off cross-border sanctuaries (or tried to) and ran operations constituted of assault forces and blocking elements, aiming to trap the foe in between. I’m talking to a Marine colonel. “Alexander’s mother Olympias wrote him a letter once,” the officer tells me, “getting on his case for taking so long to knock off these primitive, poverty-stricken Afghans.  So Alexander captured three tribal chiefs and sent them back to Macedonia, each one carrying an offering of soil from his own tribal homeland; they were supposed to deliver these tokens to Olympias as a gift from her son. But waiting outside the queen’s palace door, the three chiefs got into a fight and killed one another. Alexander’s Mom wrote back: ‘Now I understand, my son.’”  I’m not sure what that story means in the current context, but I’m pondering it as we fly back to Kabul at dark.

Alexander would recognize some of the residents of Marjah

A Marine KC-130 is a cavernous, workhorse cargo plane powered by four turbo-props. You board via a rear ramp. The interior can be configured to ferry troops, in canvas seats facing inboard along the airframe wall with others facing outboard down the centerline, or for cargo on roller pallets. For this flight it’s fifty-fifty. Our nine-man troupe is joined by a platoon of Afghan commandoes, fresh out of the fight at Marjah. What a fine-looking bunch they are. The commandoes, Maj. Raymond of Gen. Mattis’ staff explains to me, are the cream of the ANA, way beyond the regular line troops.  These guys are all young, no one above 22 is my guess. They look like fighters. Obviously this is their first plane ride. They’re trying to be cool, but as the huge, clamorous KC-130 starts rattling and banging into takeoff, all palms are turned heavenward in a quick prayer. Maj. Raymond shakes hands with a half a dozen of these young men; they light up with big, Chiclet smiles. The Taliban, a number of Marines have told me, haven’t stood up to our guys yet.  Is the momentum shifting to the Coalition side? The enemy will mount a spring offensive,  says Gen. Scaparotti of the 82^nd Airborne.  “He has to, because our side is getting so much traction.  If the enemy lets us keep doing what we’re doing now, we’ll hit a tipping point and it’ll be over for him.”

10. Could this be true? Here, for what it’s worth, is how I see it after my trip inside the bubble:

The campaign has two extremities. At the top-end is the NATO/ISAF/American Machine. This Machine is made up of men and money, of massive bases and O’Hare-sized airfields, of vehicle parks and tarmac aprons chockablock with MRAPs and Black Hawks and C-130s and Navy fighters. Its elements include drones and laser-guided missiles, satellite imaging and biometrics. It is thousands of tons of supplies and construction materials; rooms full of captains and majors manning laptops; it is PowerPoints, flow charts and projections, focus groups, think tank treatises. The Machine is also constituted of a can-do attitude, a fierce and dedicated work ethic, a commitment to integrity and transparency and an attitude of good intentions that no one who has seen it can ever doubt. All of it is powered by a will and a level of professionalism that is without peer for putting a man on the moon or a thousand-pound bomb down a chimney. That’s the input end of the dynamic. That’s the Machine.

At the bottom, at the receiving end, is the villager, the tribesman and the Afghan man in the street. From where he stands, the Machine is a marvel. It is rich beyond imagining. It can call down death from the sky or beyond the horizon; it can see in the dark and strike without warning out of nowhere. Its intentions are good. Its heart is in the right place. But what can it do for him? He has seen clever men manipulate the machine and wicked men take vengeance on those who have been reckless enough to befriend it.  He may be illiterate, this man of the village or the street, but he is not stupid. He has seen great powers come and go. In his own or his father’s lifetime he has lived through domination by the Soviets, the Afghan communists, the warlords and the Taliban. Now the NATO Machine has come. If our man can tap this apparatus for a job or a contract, he will. Every little bit helps. Most Afghans, we are told, view the Coalition presence favorably. I would too. The Yanks and their allies bring in cash and development projects, and they’re a far more benign presence that Genghis Khan or the Brits or the Russians, who were there for reasons of conquest or self-aggrandizement. The Americans just want to help. The Machine wants to bring security, development, education. It wants to get Afghanistan up on its feet. Can it?

An Osprey comes in over Marjah. Note the .50-caliber machine gun aft. In foreground, beneath camo netting, are the tents where the Marines have temporarily set up camp.

In the middle lies the space between the Machine and the man of the village, the man of the tribes. Here is the payoff point. This ground is occupied by the Marines and Army troopers and allies who man the frontier posts in the mountains, who hold down the outposts in the south and east. This space is held by the Marines in Helmand who fight and camp with their Afghan counterparts, who wash in the canals and eat the same lentils and flatbread, who haven’t had a shower in the past twenty-one days and won’t have one for the next three months. These are the guys who put a human face on the Coalition effort. They’re the young warriors who make friends and learn the lingo and constitute the person-to-person payload that the Machine above (which is as remote to them as it is to the Afghans they operate beside) has come halfway around the world to deliver.

My question is: are there enough of them? Have they penetrated deeply enough? Will they stick around? Does the Coalition possess the patience and political will to give their efforts time to bear fruit?

[Read Part Four]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

6. Kabul is a Third World city, squalid as mud and dirty as hell. Every building that’s above the level of the people is built like a fortress; compounds with high walls topped with razor wire, AK-toting guards out front and security cameras atop Y-shaped posts. At the airport, guard towers are set in onion fields with police asleep or tending little vegetable gardens or heating tea over propane stoves. They’re keeping watch, supposedly, over cyclone fences topped with concertina wire and protected at ground level by rolls of the same, so no one can crawl under. Hesco barriers are squarish barrel-like containers made of super heavy duty cardboard and wire; fill them with rock or gravel or dirt and they make impenetrable blast walls.  Stack them three or four high around a perimeter: instant Fort Apache. On bases, the quonset-shaped living tents are surrounded by sandbags piled four and five feet high. Checkpoint guards are TCNs–Third Country Nationals–from Fiji, Mongolia, Bangladesh. We circle Massoud Square again and drive past the famous Serena Hotel. “Why is it famous?” I ask SSgt Barr, our security team leader. “Because,” he says, “the Taliban keep trying to blow it up.”

The Marine Osprey aircraft can fly like a helicopter or a fixed-wing. That's BG Nicholson, back to us, in the foreground.

On the street: boys and men manning wheelbarrows, contracting themselves out; guys selling phone cards; flat wooden handcarts balance on two car tires, selling oranges and onions; goat meat hanging in sidewalk stalls.  Every street is muddy, with shallow brown lakes and piles of dirt, rubble and stone ten feet high every fifty feet.  Local police in beat-up Ford Rangers with machine guns guard every roundabout; they help the convoys go through. A typical run of traffic will be yellow cabs (Toyota Corollas), Toyota mini-buses carrying ten people sardine-style, hitchhikers getting picked up by kind-hearted Samaritans, motorcyles, convoys from the UN or ISAF (the International Security and Assistance Force), Tata trucks and Mercedeses and Russian Kamazes, lots of bicycles, a few horse carts, many people walking. Shops are corrugated tin sheds or mini truck containers with roll-down metal doors. Plastic jugs and jerry cans in a stack serve as a signboard for an auto repair shop or a parts fabricator. Energy comes from propane tanks, big ones, five feet tall, which you see singly on the street or in stacks of four or five, rusty and dirty.  The vendors and mechanics use torches to work metal or primus-style burners to cook up lunch. We pass coffee and tea shops, carpet stores, women’s apparel shops, more than one bodybuilding gym with drawings of muscle men our front, video stores, phone emporia; signs are all hand-lettered, in Arabic (or is it Dari?) and English. Billboards advertise education: learn computing, accounting, vehicle repair. Streets are laid out like this: a main vehicle boulevard with traffic running both ways, separated by a median of mini-concrete barriers and sometimes a lane of forlorn-looking mulberry trees; then, to each side, an unpaved, muddy frontage road, on the outboard margin of which is a sunken runoff ditch. You cross by footbridge to the shops on the far side. I’m speaking theoretically of course, for us Yanks; we’re in the Bubble and nobody’s letting us out. Eating establishments look nasty but tasty: Brothers Restaurant and Hamra are two whose names I jot down. We pass good-looking women packing knockoff iPhones and Blackberries, Gucci-esque bags studded with geegaws.  You see wives in burkas but not many.

My own feeling on Day One is one of apprehensiveness and Third World bummerdom. But after a few jaunts around town, even in body armor, you start getting the hang of it. You begin to see the city, grim and muddy and conflict-ravaged as it is, as a vibrant metropolis–poor as dirt, yes, but with a lot of action going on.  Maj. Nelson and I share the back seat of Chase Two. “In the sixties and seventies,” he says, “Kabul used to be part of the Hippie Trail that ran across Central Asia to Katmandu.” Young Brits and Americans and Euro-freaks would backpack and bunk in villages, carrying only a few dollars; locals were friendly in those pre-Soviet days.  Kabul looked good.  “I bought some postcards when I was deployed here a few years ago that showed these boulevards back in the day. There were cafes and shops, the trees hadn’t been all blown up.”

7. What happens in Gen. Mattis’ meetings? Reports are given quickly, efficiently. There’s a lot of laughter. These officers know each other; they’ve dodged bullets together and gotten drunk together and lost good men together. When they greet each other today, though they’re all wearing stars, they go back instantly to when they were lieutenants and captains in the field–in Desert Storm and Ramadi, in Baghdad and Camp Rhino and Kandahar. Then they get down to business.  It’s like the most efficient American or British corporation imaginable. “How can I help you?” Gen. Mattis asks. “What do you need that you don’t have?”

The background is always COIN theory–counterinsurgency–and the alteration in priorities from “kill the enemy” to “protect the people.” CIVCAS is the military acronym for civilian casualties. All hands are hyper-conscious of avoiding this. But there’s still plenty of killing to be done and a long fight ahead. Gen. Scaparotti commands the 82nd Airborne Division; his AO, Area of Operations, is Regional Command East, the run of provinces between Kabul and the Pakistani border. He tells Mattis of successes and setbacks.  Gen. Scap’s State Dept. counterpart is Dawn Liberi; she’s the civilian equivalent of a three-star general and they work together as a team. Both are tremendous. Tactical victories, COIN strategy says, must be followed up at once by actions that support the people and increase good governance. They’re talking about marble deposits in one province, rail transport in another, and a particularly robust harvest of grapes in a third.  “General,” I ask, “when you were a young trooper jumping out of airplanes, did you think that one day you’d be getting excited about the size of grapes?”

Marjah and surrounding countryside, seen from a Marine Osprey aircraft

8. Marjah.  Day Three, we fly by KC-130 to Kandahar, then by Osprey to Camp Bastion, the huge British base and airfield adjacent to Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand province. The area is thick with history–Alexander, the Silk Road, Persian adventures–and populous. The Marine Osprey takes us down to Marjah, where the big U.S.-Afghan push has been going on for two weeks or more.  The tilt-rotor aircraft touches down vertically in a field of winter grass, after jinking and juking on the approach to make it tougher on any RPG gunner to line the plane up in his sights from below.  We leap off like infantry and sprint/stumble over an irrigation ditch with a footbridge to the compound where the victorious Marines, Afghan National Army and U.S. Army Special Forces have set up shop. BrigGen. Larry Nicholson commands the overall operation. Morale is sky-high. The compound is Hesco’ed up, with a half dozen or so MRAPs (IED-proof armored vehicles the size of two Humvees that cost about a million bucks each) and a machine gun nest on the roof.  The gate entry has been sandbagged so you have to zig-zag to get in and out.  The outer gate is sealed by an MRAP parked sidelong and a Marine sergeant operating concertina wire like a collapsible gate.

Eight Marines have been killed taking Marjah. It’s too painful for anybody to think about so the emotion is choked down to be dealt with later. In a bare dirt room, a young major gives Gen. Mattis a quick map briefing. Marines and ANA and Afghan commandoes are still involved in “kinetic” action, meaning shooting and getting shot at, a few miles ahead. But here it’s pretty much over; the stability operation has begun.  Reporters are on the ground—the excellent Tony Perry of the L.A. Times, whom I know by e-mail but have never met in person, and a pair from Germany or England, a pretty girl in a head scarf and a cameraman. Marines and Afghan army commanders are gravely solicitous about each other’s casualties. This is no joke. An Afghan soldier was killed several days ago. Gen. Nicholson ordered his body to be flown by Marine KC-130, all by itself, to Kabul to the soldier’s family. Among Muslims immediate burial is of the highest spiritual importance. A tough-looking young major tells Gen. Nicholson how word of his gesture has made the rounds of the Afghan platoons, making a deep impression. Gen. Nicholson is delighted. “This is their boy’s victory,” he says, meaning the Afghans’, “as much as it is ours. Maybe more.”

We walk several miles up the dirt road that serves as Main Street in the part of town we’re in. Flat fields stretch to the horizon. Mud walls surround compounds constructed like forts. The street itself is deeply rutted and potholed. Your boots sink ankle-deep in dust the consistency of talcum powder.  It’s a market town road, the country version of the boulevards in Kabul—traffic down the middle, irrigation ditches on one side, shops and stalls on the far side of the ditch and the dry side too.  Tobias Elwood, our young British MP, is an expert in post-conflict stabilization operations. He’s already trying to rally the troops to re-do this road. “Hire local people, do it all by hand; pay as many people as we can. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfect job by Western standards; what counts is to get the people involved and let them see real change happening right now. Every hour we dither increases skepticism about our intentions and our capabilities.”

As our party of generals, colonels, majors and reporters trudges along, protected by ANP (Afghan National Police) and Marine infantry providing 360-degree security, local boys and men eye them from market stalls, rooftops and margins of fields.  We have heard that in another part of Marjah, the Taliban had set up such an efficient government of their own that streets were paved, homes were electrified and there were full-time courts of law.  Maybe the locals aren’t too pleased to see the Marines and the ANA. “We’ve got work to do in that part of town,” says the young major running the show.

Coming home: a family returns to Marjah

One thing that doesn’t come across back home in TV coverage of the army and Marines is what great-looking, superbly-professional guys they are. There’s no way, I’m thinking, that the Marjah locals can look at these young men and not be impressed.  Tremendous fighters as these Marines clearly are, it’s also obvious that they aren’t here to conquer the place or rape the resources; they’ve come to help and they intend to.  Still the locals are giving us the stink-eye, skeptical about how long this new boss is gonna stick around or if they even want him to. A big farm tractor is rumbling down the road toward us like Tom Joad’s jalopy, overloaded with people, at least twenty–a big extended family, we are told. Where are they going?  “Coming back,” says the interpreter.  Returning to their homes now that the Taliban are gone.  The family itself is a wonderful-looking bunch—boys and girls with lively, intelligent eyes; young men looking smart and strong and ready to laugh; elders who look like … like Afghan elders.  The grown women are bundled up, but their eyes are quick and savvy too. Stalls in the bazaar that have been vacant or shuttered are open again and more are opening every few minutes, as in Nawa nearby where, we heard, Marines and ANA troops have done the same thing. We squint down the talcum-powder road. Here comes another tractor, also overflowing with returnees.

[Read Part Three]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

Gen. Mattis in Marjah, Helmand province, 28 Feb 2010

1. Jim Mattis is a four-star Marine general. He doesn’t go out of his way to be quotable; he just can’t help himself.  Here, from Iraq 2004, are his instructions to the Marines under his command on how to conduct themselves with the natives they will encounter.

Be polite.  Be professional.  But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

In the first battle of Fallouja, Gen. Mattis commanded the Marines assigned to take the city. There came a point during the fighting when Mattis had to negotiate with the Sunni sheikhs and Baathist ex-army officers who claimed they wanted to quit, but whose acquaintance with the truth had been a little dubious.

I come in peace.  I didn’t bring artillery.  But I’m begging you, with tears in my eyes, if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.

Who would be an historical counterpart to Gen. Mattis? My pick would be Epaminondas, the great Theban general (like Mattis, a bachelor) who beat the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 B.C.  When he retired, Epaminondas took nothing home but his clothes and his books.  Gen. Mattis will be packing it in in November. He’ll go home to Washington State and hike the high country. Will he write his memoirs? “No way.” Such a document might break trust with the military and political leaders who expect private, candid counsel from their senior military colleagues and depend upon those colleagues keeping the content of such discussions in confidence. We’re in the library of Gen. Mattis’ spacious, columned quarters, the Virginia House, on the naval base at Norfolk, and I’m trying to talk him into reconsidering. I’m a student of history; I want to hear those stories. The current era is important, and Mattis was there at the center of it. But he won’t budge.

It’s February 24^th and Gen. Mattis has invited me to accompany his party on a four-day burst to Afghanistan. I’ve never been there. I want to go. So I’ve flown to Norfolk from Los Angeles, where I live. We take off in the morning.

2.  A couple of disclaimers before we plunge into this narrative. I’m not a journalist, and the piece that follows doesn’t purport to be journalism. It’s not a war story.  Nobody got shot at or blown up. We didn’t live with the tribes or sleep in the field alongside the Marines and the Afghan National Army. We traveled in a bubble and most of what I saw was glimpsed through a bubble-distorted lens. So take what follows with a grain of salt. Here’s what I saw and how it struck me.

3. What’s the first thing you think about when you realize you’re going to Afghanistan? Warm clothes. Good boots. Immunizations. For me the big deal was medical insurance. It took some doing (“I’m sorry,” says the rep at my company, “we do not cover injuries sustained in a war zone”), but my quest ends happily at an outfit called Global Underwriters, via Lloyds of London, that insures reporters and filmmakers who travel to places where bombs sometimes go off.  Bottom line: fifteen hundred bucks for what (I hope) will cover my butt if the shit hits the fan.

4. The day comes. We’re “wheels up” over the Atlantic. How does a four-star general travel? By Gulfstream 5, it turns out. It’s like Mick Jagger but without the girls. The party is fourteen, including pilots, security team, aides and communicators. The other guest besides me, is the Hon. Tobias Elwood, an up-and-coming member of Parliament and a former Royal Green Jacket infantry officer. We’ll pick him up in London. Over the Atlantic it’s Gen. Mattis and me, in seats facing each other, up front in a compartment with a banquette berth and a fold-down table. Gen. Mattis currently heads JFCOM, Joint Forces Command; it’s his job to integrate the all-forces team—Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—and prepare it for joint operations.  He travels to the front regularly, to check with the commanders face to face and see how they’re doing and how he can help.

Bring briefed in Marjah by BG Larry Nicholson. Member of Parliament Tobias Elwood is next to Gen. Mattis. That's me, obscured in "deep background."

I had imagined we’d fly all the way in one long, spine-crunching haul. But the trip is broken up into two days because the crew stays with the plane; safety regs require that they rest. We stop in London at Stansted Airfield. A four-star general is a serious piece of gear, as the Marines would say. He is a key component in America’s defense apparatus and has to be on call 24 hours a day. Security teams escort the party everywhere. When we land, cars are waiting with the advance team. Zip, we’re in the hotel. Special Agent Jim Rivera is the security chief. He’s NCIS. “Like the TV show,” he says. “Only real.” Our bags appear; our passports are taken care of. The only snag for me is I’m having trouble sleeping. It’s the time zone change. And I’m keyed up. By Day Two, after we’ve picked up Tobias and are flying over the Black Sea, with

TEHRAN

and

BAGHDAD

on the cabin trip monitor, this jaunt is starting to feel serious. Darkness falls.  There’s Kabul below. It looks like a regular city but without the street lights. What was I expecting? Stalingrad? Pluto? The banquette in the forward cabin is now heaped with flak jackets and helmets. Everyone is suiting up. Magazines are being slotted into 9mm Berettas and M-4 carbines. Tobias and I are the only ones not packing heat. The plane doesn’t come down in a death spiral to avoid rocket fire. It’s a regular landing, just like at O’Hare. KAIA is huge and we taxi for a long time, up to the WELCOME TO KABUL sign and down the stairs to a four-vehicle convoy of armored Suburbans and Expeditions. I’m with Maj. Tom Nelson, Gen. Mattis’ special assistant, in “Chase 2.” Again, I’m not sure what I expected–stopping for flat bread or lamb kebob on the streets? Apparently not. We zig and zag along muddy back tracks for what seems like half an hour, then past a skein of security points and out into actual Kabul. We’re heading for Camp Eggers, which is in the city, not far. I’ve never worn a flak jacket before. It’s heavy. By the time you’ve donned helmet and gloves and wedged yourself into the back seat of a Chevy Suburban, you feel like Spam in a can or a turtle inside its shell. How secure can Kabul be if we have to schlep around like this? Answer: it ain’t. As our vehicles circle the roundabout at Massoud Square with Afghan taxis and Hi-Luxes jostling on all sides, it’s clear that the “security environment” is a free, open city. Risk is accepted by everyone, included the women waiting in the crosswalk and the kids kicking a soccer ball across a field.

We enter Camp Eggers through a maze of chicanes and checkpoints. Signs says NO JAMMERS and TURN OFF ECM–Electronic Counter Measures, i.e. signals to jam cell phone transmissions that might be used to trigger IEDs. The camp itself is smack in the middle of the city, carved out of  … what? Existing shops and apartments? Our quarters are a nest of rooms at the end of a souk-like passage past security doors and concertina-wire-topped walls. It’s warm and raining.  Kabul sits in a bowl at 6000 feet with the Hindu Kush mountains invisible behind dense smoke and fog in the distance. The team sets up its office at one big table in their desert-tan t-shirts.  Everyone is here to serve Gen. Mattis, to keep him on schedule and in touch with whomever he has to be in touch with. “Why have you chosen Mr. Pressfield and me to accompany you?” Tobias asks.  “Because I like you both,” the general answers. “And I want your fresh eyes. I can get all the predictable responses I want already. You gentlemen will give it to me straight.”

5. Breakfast. Before dawn in the chow hall (which is two cramped rooms run by KBR contractors), we hear a bang in the distance. “Did you hear that?” The blast will turn out to be part of a coordinated Taliban attack, including suicide bombers and a VBIED, a vehicle-borne IED, that will leave sixteen dead and dozens wounded. We don’t know that yet, though, as we head out to the day’s round of meetings.

Over two days, Gen. Mattis will be conferring with BrigGen. Jeff Smith, BrigGen. Gus Gilmore, LtGen. David Rodriquez, ViceAdm. Robert Harward, LtGen. William Caldwell, MajGen. Curtis Scaparrotti, and four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal.  These guys are the real deal. Here’s one instructive civvie comparison: Col. Joe Felton whom we meet on the second day (Commander of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team) has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford and an MPA from the Kennedy School at Harvard–and he’s out there fighting the Taliban. We’re supposed to meet Ambassador Eikenberry but that falls through, as does one get-together I had circled on my calendar–with British LtGen. Sir Graeme Lamb. It was Gen. Lamb’s concept of “reconcilables” versus “irreconcilables” that set the mental model for the Anbar Awakening that turned the tide in the Iraq War.

After these meetings we’ll fly down to Marjah in Helmand province, where the Marines are fighting right now. That will be the highlight, for me anyway. But for now, we’re suiting up and heading back out into the capital …

[Read Part Two]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

Mangwel and the Konar River Valley

[Friends, with apologies, a stomach virus has laid the blog low.  Here's a re-run of a post that has been a reader favorite. We'll be back on Wednesday!]

June 22nd, the Washington Post ran an excellent article by Greg Jaffe, titled “A Personal Touch in Taliban Fight.” The piece is about a young Army captain, Michael Harrison, and his up-close-and-personal work as a company commander in the remote tribal villages of the Konar River valley in Afghanistan.

Flashback to 2003, same valley, same U.S. Army—different captain. This is the story of then-captain Jim Gant of Las Cruces, NM, and how he and Capt. Harrison are linked by a gift of honor, a 12-gauge shotgun.

A tribal chief

Mangwel is a village in Konar province, close to the border with Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Terrain is mountainous, no paved roads; Taliban fighters use the valley regularly as an infiltration route to and from Pakistan. The chief in Mangwel is Malik Noorafzhal. He’s 86 now; he fought the Soviets in the 80s; he’s been defending his tribe’s turf all his life.

In 2003, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 316–twelve men, led by Capt. Gant–had Mangwel as part of its area of responsibility. The ODA helped the chief in some tribal warfare, fighting alongside him. The chief said he would return the favor to augment the ODA’s mission; he mentioned that he could deliver 8 men with guns, then upped it to 80. On 23 April 2003, Capt. Gant had a meeting with him and other tribal leaders. The following is from the captain’s OPSUM [Operation Summary], written immediately afterward:

The head local we have named “Sitting Bull.” He is an old, old warrior. He didn’t speak much. I didn’t speak much either. I mainly listened. I looked him in the eye often. After the meeting was adjourned, he asked to speak with me privately. So my terp [interpreter] and I went out back with him. He took my hand in his. “I want you to know, Commander Jim, that you have my loyalty. If you need men with guns you come see me.” He promised 800. From 8 to 80 to 800!

Bonding tribe-to-tribe

Capt. Gant made it a point to bond with Sitting Bull. This nickname that the ODA gave the chief captures the spirit of their affection and admiration. These tough Special Forces soldiers regarded the malik as a living figure of legend, a warrior who had fought and defeated many enemies, a leader to whom the highest respect was due. They loved to question him about his battles with the Russians and he loved to tell them his stories. The warriors, American and Afghan, would stay up deep into the night, drawing maps of ambushes and infiltrations. Capt. Gant had his own father, James Karl Gant, send Malik Noorafzhal a knife with “Sitting Bull” engraved on it—and a letter, man-to-man, father-to-father. Here is part of it:

My son says you are a great warrior. He respects you and considers you to be his friend. He tells me that your enemies are his enemies. He says he would give his life to protect you. Be my son’s father while he is in your country. Take this gift from us as a token of our friendship.

Through his interpreter, Captain Gant read the letter to the chief.

When I read [the letter] to Sitting Bull, he was outwardly moved by it and said, “Tell your father not a hair on your head will be harmed as long as you are with me, you are now my son.”

Sitting Bull, the shotgun and Capt. Gant, 2003

A gift of honor

Capt. Gant and the ODA wanted to give the chief their own gift of honor. They searched and found a beautiful 12-gauge shotgun. The photo on the right shows the moment they presented it. That’s Capt. Gant beside the chief. Up front is SFC Mark Read.

Flash forward to 2009, a few weeks ago. Marine Col. Bing West, author of The Strongest Tribe, about Marines in Iraq, is now in Afghanistan researching a book. He visits Mangwel and meets with Malik Noorafzhal. The first thing the chief does is to bring out, proudly, the gift shotgun and ask Col. West if he can get him some shells, as he is all out. The photo below tells everything. Bing West e-mailed it to now-Major Gant, who forwarded it to me. The young officer next to Sitting Bull is Capt. Michael Harrison—the company commander profiled by the Washington Post–who is now on his second tour in Konar. Here is part of an e-mail Capt. Harrison sent from there to Major Gant, 18 June 2009, a few days ago.

Over the past five months, he [Malik Noorafzhal] has helped us out tremendously. His son and son-in-law both work at our COP [Combat Outpost] as ASG [Afghan Security Guards.]

Sitting Bull, the shotgun and Capt. Harrison, 2009

Tribesmen relate man-to-man

Men of the tribes never forget an insult or a kindness. Six years later, Capt. Gant and ODA 316’s heartfelt gift of honor is paying dividends for follow-on generations of American soldiers. And Capt. Harrison (though he and Maj. Gant have never met) is employing the same tribal language of man-to-man, person-to-person bonding. From Greg Jaffe’s article in the Washington Post:

Between his two tours, Harrison, whose boyish face and blond hair make him look like an especially earnest grad student, had kept in touch with his interpreter and several of the Afghan leaders from his old sector via e-mail. He sent them packages of T-shirts, jeans and toiletries. Soon after he arrived in Konar for the second tour, Harrison bought mosque speakers for the religious leaders in his area. Although his current sector is a three-hour drive from his old base, Afghans whom Harrison hasn’t seen since 2007 sometimes arrive at the gates of his new base. Many show the guards scraps of paper bearing Harrison’s signature, proof that they once knew him. “You cannot come to me, so I am here to visit with you, my good friend,” one man told Harrison.

All this is not to say that life is roses today in Konar province. Successes are unfortunately the exception, and tribal-savvy breakthroughs like those produced by Capt. Gant and Capt. Harrison are, so far at least, only the model for achievements to come.

Tribes and Alexander the Great

When Alexander fought in the Afghan kingdoms 2300 years ago, a gift of honor might be a horse or a Damascene sword. Alexander understood that such tokens, presented man-to-man, warrior-to-warrior, were the currency of tribal alliance. The celebrated tale of Alexander marrying the Afghan princess Roxane is usually told as a romance–the youthful king smitten by the ravishing damsel. There may be an element of truth to this, but Alexander was also a shrewd political animal whose army was then mired in a disastrous three-year counter-insurgency campaign with no end in sight. He married his way out of that quagmire, by taking to wife the daughter of his most powerful foe, the warlord Oxyartes, thus making his enemy into his father-in-law.

That marriage was an act of honor. In tribalspeak it said to Oxyartes and the other warlords, “I honor you as an equal, you have fought me to a draw and won my respect; let us make war no longer but join our two peoples in a peace whose issue will be prosperity and happiness for all.”

A shotgun and a bride, a gift and an act of honor. Perhaps the Obama era’s young officers and men, incoming now to Afghanistan, can take a page from Alexander and Oxyartes, from captains Gant and Harrison, and from a chief called Sitting Bull.

I was introduced to Mac a few weeks ago, when he forwarded to Maj. Jim Gant his paper “COIN and Irregular Warfare in a Tribal Society,” which he’d written in 2007, and which focuses on Iraq. Mac was in Iraq around the same time Maj. Gant was in Afghanistan. Both were working with tribes, attempting to figure out what works in the real world and what doesn’t. Since his return, Mac has continued publishing work focused upon military affairs and tribal warfare. He has guest-lectured at Johns Hopkins University and presented numerous papers at academic and government- sponsored conferences such as the Watson Institute, Brown University; Department of the Navy Science and Technology and DARPA; and the Central Intelligence Agency. He has appeared as a guest on National Public Radio (NPR) and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal. As a senior consultant for Applied Knowledge International (AKI), he continues to study current events in Iraq and Afghanistan in tribal terms, including the tribal art of war and peace, tribal mediation processes, development of tribal centers of power, and tribal influence in political developments. He has applied his study of tribal culture in assessing reconstruction efforts, as well as insurgency and counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of interviews with Mac McCallister. We also plan to excerpt his paper in the coming weeks, then make it available here as a free .pdf.

SP: Your paper COIN and Irregular Warfare in a Tribal Society is based on your experiences working with tribes in Iraq, during the Awakening period. When tribal engagement is brought up today in connection to Afghanistan, some readers assume that its principles are derived from the U.S. military’s experience in Iraq and therefore won’t work because Afghanistan is a different animal from Iraq. What do you say to that?

WM: I think it normal that our engagement strategies in Afghanistan are somewhat based on our experiences in Iraq. How could it be otherwise?

If journalism is, indeed, the first draft of history, it would make total sense for the media to simplify the tribal engagement narrative so that everyone can share in the experience. The simplified tribal engagement narrative lumps the Anbar Awakening and Sons of Iraq in Salah ad Din Governorate together as if they were the same. Although a closer scrutiny would identify major differences in motivation and execution on part of the patron and client, it is a logical analogy.

We shouldn’t be surprised that many of our politicians, celebrity media pundits and think tankers are now hyping the one size fits all “awakening” myth and its universal application-”I am not sure what this awakening thing is all about, but I want more. . . .”

We tend to dismiss the fact that our soldiers and Marines have been working in Afghanistan since 2001. The simple engagement narrative assumes that we have learned nothing in the last 8 years about the local cultural operating environment.

SP: What has been learned? What do we know about the tribes and the possibility of tribal engagement in Afghanistan ?

WM: In my opinion, the tribal engagement discussion entails four components. These are the definition, description, prescription, and prediction component. The definition component is the most important.

What exactly is a tribe? Do tribes even exist in Afghanistan-or are we dealing with some other form of social organization?

One definition of “tribe” declares “a social group of humans connected by a shared system of values and organized for mutual care, defense, and survival beyond which could be attained by a lone individual or family.” Another defines as “societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, descent groups, related by blood or marriage.” Still another classifies tribes as “units of socio-political organizations of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.” A fourth definition states that a tribe is “any aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor, community of customs and traditions, and adherence to the same leadership.”

Tribal identities exist in Afghanistan, but local communities and interest groups may not necessarily organize themselves based on these identities. Individuals tend to define themselves in terms of a group identity. A qawm, or solidarity group, is a collection of people that act as a single unit, which is organized on the basis of some shared identity, system of values, beliefs and or interests. It can describe a family group or reflect a geographical area. It can specify a group of people united by a common political or military goal under one jang salar or martial leader. Members of a village; the inhabitants of a valley; a warlord and his retainers; a strongman and his followers; a bandit and his forty thieves, or the local chapter of the Taliban are all aqwam (plural).

Do tribes exist in Afghanistan? Yes. Tribes exist in Afghanistan, but I personally like the term “qawm” or solidarity group much better when discussing social organizations in Afghanistan.

SP: David Ronfeldt, the distinguished writer and former senior RAND analyst, has gotten into this debate a little. He thinks we can drive ourselves crazy with fine, academic distinctions. In his view, if “tribal dynamics” are in play, then we need to “think tribally” if we hope to understand them.

WM: Bottom line, it doesn’t matter to me what we call things, whether tribes, solidarity groups, or circus clowns, as long as our labels support our efforts, rather than force us into analytical and operational dead-ends just to prove an academic point. We need to explain clearly what we mean and proceed from there.

Fighting in Afghanistan requires that we question our implicit assumptions on everything from social organizations to individual motivating factors since we are not in Kansas anymore. We must accept that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in Afghanistan and instead try to recognize significant patterns of behavior. Afghan social relationships are very complex. In my opinion, the key tenet of COIN is to: 

“effectively communicate intent, whether kinetically or non-kinetically, within the target audience’s cultural frame of reference.”

SP: You said there were four components to any discussion of tribal engagement. Can you briefly explain the final three-description, prescription and prediction component?

WM: Simply put, the description component identifies and describes the existing social system’s institutions, organizations, and actors such as key village or valley leadership, religious personalities, or solidarity groups and the types of influence of each in an area of operation. I apply the imperial-confederacy model to describe the social system’s behavior as follows: the operational environment is a mosaic of territories, each of which lies under the immediate authority of a local qawm or tribe. The fluctuations in the fortunes of each qawm or tribe inevitably impacts upon other local territories, whose patronage relationships or allegiances at any given time are largely dictated by events in the area.

For example: in Anbar province in Iraq, the Albu Risha, a third tier tribe in the Dulaym Confederation, exploited its patronage relationship with the USMC. Under the guise of fighting al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and with our help, markedly improved its standing and power in the confederation vis-à-vis the more reputable tribes. In the words of Napoleon, the Abu Risha stole a march on their rivals in the Dulaym Confederation.

The prescription component spells out the specific strategy to shape and influence the actions of an ally, patronage or alliance network in a given area of operation i.e. the ends, ways and means employed to achieve our end-state in a given village, valley or region.

This is most challenging, requiring considerable skill as well as nerve, in assessing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the relevant tribes at any given time. A great deal of political sagacity is required in determining what course of action and what political alignments will serve best. For example: the U.S. pushed the Sons of Iraq, a U.S. Army-sponsored security force, into the arms of a less than welcoming Maliki government.

While realpolitik considerations may have forced our hand to create a patronage relationship between the Maliki government and Sons of Iraq, it actually weakened the Maliki government in the short term and may have actually exasperated the already tense relationship between the Sunnis in Salah ad Din province and Shia dominated government in the long-term.

The prediction component is the result of war-gaming the second and third level effects of a given initiative and the likely responses of ally, neutral, accomplice, fence-sitter or opponent, whether in local or national government, village or valley. Definition, description, prescription, and prediction serve to create an appreciation of the social system’s rules of play and behavior in an area of operation, and an ability to explain the actors and factors in play as groups compete for access to limited resources and power.

SP: You wrote in COIN and Irregular Warfare that

“throughout history, rulers and administrators located in the capital had to resort to various methods to retain power and prevent attacks from the countryside or to check the process by which a new dynasty might arise to seize power. The countryside and its inhabitants embody a continuous danger that threatens urban administration.”

This scenario is definitely in action in Afghanistan today. What can we learn from U.S. experience in Iraq? How did you approach the differences between the tribes there? Was there one method or philosophy that worked with all of them?

WM: The approach that worked for me was to structure my analysis applying a number of cultural operating codes and coordinating messages in assessing the actions of the various actors competing against one another in Iraq. The four cultural operating codes are shame and honor, segmentation or the tendency of all groups to engage in alliance and coalition building, patronage, and territory. The two coordinating messages and something you hear in every conversation are “what have you done for me lately and what will you do for me tomorrow” and “no stability without us.”

I also noticed that although the bureaucratic trappings of the Iraqi state looked like those found in any Western nation-state, it didn’t act like it in the way power is accumulated and distributed among its component parts. The Iraqi state behaves more like an imperial-confederacy, where control is exercised by an organized political entity that attracts and incorporates local political entities without absorbing them. Control is not exercised directly, but indirectly. While an imperial confederacy might appear to control monopolies of coercive authority, it does not because the hegemon, whether monarch, military clique, or other elites, has been unsuccessful in developing the forms of popular legitimacy as recognized in the West necessary to support its rule. All political relationships are quid pro quo based with local political entities retaining considerable autonomy vis a vis the central government.

When the imperial structure collapses, local entities are ready to reemerge as autonomous political actors. In terms of power, local political entities remain a latent threat to the central authority, which is forced to continually guard against challenges from the periphery. We find a similar type of political system in Afghanistan. The accomplished strategist in both Iraq and Afghanistan seeks harmony, not sameness.

SP: When you say “local entities,” do you mean tribes?

WM: “Local entities” can be tribes, solidarity groups, military commanders, rural and urban elites, politicians and political parties, technocrats, kith and kin networks etc. The Western nation-state model doesn’t answer my questions as to why local actors behave the way they do in Iraq or Afghanistan. The imperial-confederacy model does. So, I adapted the model to the 21^st Century and changed my analytical paradigm. In my opinion, the imperial-confederacy is more inclusive of various actors in the social system and sheds greater light on the competitive relationship between autonomous centers of social power.

I have gained a deeper appreciation and understanding of the social forces in play in both in Iraq or Afghanistan. An appreciation for how an imperial-confederacy behaves over time better explains how things work in a given territory and helps describe the relationship between power and insurrection. I believe it can assist us in articulating appropriate political-military strategies and initiatives that if executed well will effectively communicate intent within the target audience’s cultural frame of reference.

I’ve stopped beating my head against the wall trying to understand Iraq or Afghanistan applying the Western nation-state template. The imperial-confederacy model works for me.

SP: How do tribes fit into this?

WM: I have often asked myself what is the role of the tribe (or qawm) in the building of major political systems and institutions and how do we integrate these folks? The answer to that question will require more strategists and fewer technical planners. On a side note: I personally am very supportive of Major Jim Gant’s “one tribe (qawm) at a time” approach. It expresses a natural pattern of behavior within the imperial-confederacy paradigm and resonates with the locals. Somewhere out there some tribe, qawm or pretender to greatness is fighting against an established order, fighting against an emerging order or fighting to establish a new order.

[Again, we're pleased to have this fresh post from independent correspondent Andrew Lubin, who has just returned from six weeks in Afghanistan, where he was embedded with Army and Marine troops and spent time with their Afghan National Army counterparts. Here's Part Two of Prof. Lubin's report.]

Training the Afghans how to shoot and move is the easy part. A typical Afghan soldier can probably beat an American tri-athlete up a steep hill; add in the flak, Kevlar and other equipment our troops carry, and the Afghans look back at us in amusement.

An ANA soldier mans his post after a firefight near Camp Joyce; the Marines and ANA fought off an attack the prior night

What’s not so amusing is the drug use, absurdly low pay, desertion, casual corruption, and problems caused in Kabul, much of which affects the ANA’s ability to fight.

The pay issue was finally addressed last week when Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, who now oversees the training of all Afghans, increased the pay for both the Army and the Police. The salary for a basic soldier is now $165/month, for a sergeant $210. While this is still far below the $250 or so that the Taliban pays its fighters, Afghan patriotism is such that enlistments boomed within the next days. One can imagine the results if we simply paid these volunteers close to the same.

The issue facing Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Caldwell is not just one of increasing the size of the Afghan Army, but rather having an efficient Afghan Army. If the war is to be “Afghanized,” then the ANA needs to be an effective army and not just a job-training program where the troop strength numbers look good on paper but don’t add up in the field. The question is not only how to properly train the young Afghans who enlist so enthusiastically, but how to better utilize the Afghan army as it is.

There are simple solutions here, except both are studiously being ignored in ISAF Headquarters, which is actively trying to over-complicate the ANA in their zeal to turn them into mini-American soldiers:

1 – Instead of forming more kandaks (Afghan Army battalions), increase the size of the existing ones. The ANA is short of good officers and senior enlisted; forming more kandaks will dilute these numbers even further. Inexperienced or incompetent officers and senior enlisted are bad for discipline, bad for morale, and they sap the Afghans’ ability to fight.

Increasing the kandaks from the current 670 to, say, 900 will enable the good officers and senior enlisted to retain control of their troops while incorporating the new and inexperienced troops into their kandaks.

2 – Push the ANA into the fight without further delay. It’s going to take years to get them spun up to Tier One units; so get their headquarters units co-located with their American mentors. Get the Afghans involved in the planning, in the logistics, and in their own training. Push them into the fighting ASAP; their “good enough” is in fact good enough. Plus they’re respected by the Afghan people; the more you can get them in front of the locals, the more you’ve Afghanized the war.

There is already a program in place, instituted by the 3^rd Marine Division, whose officers and men have been working with the ANA’s 201st Corps for the past four years. It’s called “Muscular Mentoring” and it’s extremely effective. Each Marine is paired with his 201^st Corps counterpart, with the Marine colonel mentoring the 201^st Corps CG. From going into the field together to planning missions to sharing chai and conferring about leadership, the Marines and Afghans serve as one.

The program works; in Kapisa Province’s Tagab River Valley, the ANA built their own FOB; their troopers maintain security in the southern part of the valley. Giving the Afghans their own battlespace builds both their expertise and effectiveness, as well as promoting their reputation amongst the locals.

This is a vivid contrast to the situation some 20 miles away in Mether Lam, where an American National Guard unit has no interaction with an 80-man ANA troop with whom they share a base. With an increase in IED attacks on the main road, it is disturbing that the Guardsmen have not approached the ANA for joint missions, but instead continue to patrol from the back of their MRAPS with minimal ANA input on intel, tactics, or strategy.

Last year I interviewed a group of young Afghan enlisted men. “Why’d you join up?” I asked. “My mother and father fought the Russians,” one soldier told me, “and my great-great grandfather fought the British, as did his grandfather. I hate the Pakistanis, and want to kill them all.” These young men don’t need to sit through an Army PowerPoint; if we could harness this sort of fighting spirit to some reasonable leadership, we won’t have to worry about withdrawing in July 2011; we can withdraw tomorrow.

[We'll be hearing again from Maj. Jim Gant in three weeks, but for this Monday and the next, I'm very pleased and honored to feature a "report from the trenches" from independent foreign correspondent Andrew Lubin, who has just returned from six weeks in Afghanistan where he was embedded with Army and Marine troops. Mr. Lubin's son Phil is a Marine artilleryman; Andy loves the troops; nothing gives him greater pleasure than to get out there in the tall cane with young Marines and soldiers and come back with the straight, unfiltered scoop. This recent trip is his 10th to Iraq, Afghanistan and Beirut. Andy's work appears regularly in Jane's Intelligence Review, Leatherneck and Proceedings. He is the author of the award-winning book, Charlie Battery: A Marine Artillery Battery in Iraq.]

Success Starts in the Villages

By Andrew Lubin

It’s more than just numbers of troops, it’s getting them off the Forward Operating Bases

Shopkeepers in Nawa greet Marines

The recent debate over troop strength is finally over; President Obama is sending 30,000 Marines and soldiers to bolster the 21,000 he added in March. As before, the Marine Corps will be leading the charge; 1^st Bn, 6^th Marines (infantry) will heading out in the next weeks, and the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force will join them in the following months. The Army is sending three brigades, along with 7,000 headquarters troops.

Are the 34,000 enough? Too little? Too many? That question is best answered by defining the troops’ mission and how it is expected to be accomplished. Judging by the results of the Marine efforts in Helmand and Nimroz Provinces, the real issue is not one of troop strength, but rather one of how those troops are utilized once they’re on the ground.

“It’s really very simple,” Col. Dale Alford said at the recent Marine Corps University Counterinsurgency Symposium in Washington, D.C, “we want to make them pick our side.” Alford is correct; for all the different theories on counterinsurgency (COIN) from “oilspots” to “trickle down” to “governance,” American and NATO success in Afghanistan depends on the farmers and laborers in the countryside believing that “our way” is more beneficial to them and their families than what the Taliban offers.

ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal knows that the Coalition needs the cooperation of the locals, regardless of how many troops are in-country. “The key to success,” he wrote to Sectretary of Defense Robert Gates, “will be strong personal relationships forged between security forces and local populations.” These relationships are not hard to initiate; Afghanistan’s Pashtunwali code of hospitality and honor lends itself to the tribesmen wanting good relationships with the Marines and soldiers–but the troops need to get off those FOB’s and meet the people.

Capt. Brian Huysman, Charlie Co., 1st Bn., 5th Marines, sharing a chai with local villagers

Down in Helmand Province, Marines of the 2^nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade are meeting the people. On the morning of 2 July, Afghan citizens and Taliban along the Helmand River Valley found 4,000 Marines had flown through the night and were on the ground, patrolling through their villages, engaging the bad guys and establishing multiple new bases. “We go out to where the people are,” 2MEB commanding officer Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson said. “We don’t drive to work; we walk to work.”

This was the first time many of the villagers had seen Coalition forces, and they are responding positively to the Marine efforts. In Nawa, C Company, 1^st Bn, 5^th Marines was attacked by the Taliban within hours of its arrival–and responded by driving the enemy back where they came from. “The bad guys weren’t used to Marines,” explained 1^st Sgt David Wilson. “We pursued them, we didn’t break contact, we hunted them down and we shot them–and in 10 days the area was secure.”

The first sign of successful “COIN” is when the local citizenry realizes that cooperating with Coalition troops improves their lives, and Charlie Company’s killing or driving the Taliban out of Nawa was an important first step. The next step was to build relationships with the locals, and to do that, the Marines went out on patrol two and three times daily. Showing up again and again in Nawa and the outlying villages, the Marines talked with shop owners, the money lender, farmers, children, the local Mullah, and everyone who would talk with them. In addition to becoming a familiar part of the landscape, their continued presence enabled them to ask questions as they bought small amounts of sodas, fruits, and vegetables from the shop owners: “What is the biggest problem facing your village? How would you solve it? Do your children go to school? Do you work?” Gathering this sort of intelligence, plus identifying key leaders and people of influence, enables the Marines along with Civil Affairs and USAID teams to sit with the village elders and address the issues of jobs and governance that will make Nawa a successful district again.

Listening to the villagers helps the Marines understand what sort of jobs are required to make the area viable. As opposed to the big dollar projects ISAF touts, the Marines now have 260+ locals earning $5.00/day cleaning the irrigation canals–and with these canals now flowing freely, the locals are growing grapes, wheat and corn instead of opium.

But none of this would be happening if the Marines weren’t out patrolling, which is why recent comments from the Pentagon are worrisome. Concerns were raised that more big FOB’s need to be built before more soldiers are dispatched, that the soldiers need more chow halls, MRW shops, and hardened bunks with wireless internet. This is wrong; the troops need to live and work with their Afghan partners, abandon their MRAPs [heavily armored vehicles] and walk through the villages meeting those local citizens who are looking to be their friends. If you don’t get out and work with the locals and instead simply patrol from inside an MRAP, it makes no difference how many troops Mr. Obama dispatches.

Next week: It’s “Clear-Hold-Build-Transition” – Training the ANA

If a Tribal Engagement Strategy (TES) were to be tried in Afghanistan, how exactly would it work?

Last week, in the first part of this “Size Matters” post, we spoke with Maj. Jim Gant about the optimal size for a single U.S. Tribal Engagement Team (TET)—that is, the tactical unit that would be attached to a single Afghan tribe. Maj. Gant strongly advocated the position that smaller is better. Six to twelve men, no more.

"The Security Plan would be very well rehearsed and executed many times with the tribesmen taking the lead."

There is [Maj. Gant says] what I call an “acceptable level of integration.” It is something that can be hard to determine unless you are on the ground with the tribe daily. At the tactical level too many soldiers in a tribal area can cause major disruption of the daily life of the villagers. It can also bring a fight to the tribe that otherwise would not have been there. With a full platoon of soldiers, who more than likely will set up some type of mini-fire base, walking around in body-armor and helmets, the tribesmen and their families will quickly become alienated by the American presence. At the strategic level, too many troops and we become “occupiers.”  What we are after at the tactical level is cooperation without dependence.

SP: Someone reading this Q&A might say, “Yeah, those small numbers sound great in some little village that is peaceful, but what if you guys get into really serious trouble? What if the enemy comes after you in force?”

JG: I have put more thought into this than any other tactical question. As in any military mission, security is the first and most important task. Now, in this case, the task is daunting as hell, since the consequences of being unable to accomplish security would be catastrophic. In some cases small units are able to overcome lapses in security with overwhelming firepower. A TET will not be able to do this. I will not get into the specifics here, but believe me when I say the planning prior to the mission being conducted, coupled with the extreme steps that would be initially executed on the ground; no enemy force would be able to walk into your area in the middle of the night and cut your throat while you were asleep. That just would not happen. Period.

Now, in the case you describe above, let me emphasize a few things. First, the TET’s immediate and most critical task would be to establish security. Everything the TET did for the first 90 days (an estimate) would be in relation to security–security for the TET and security for the tribe. This security would be layered and have depth as well as reach. It would consist of early-warning systems and intelligence fusion that would allow the TET to use the U.S. intelligence assets it would have at its disposal, and fuse these with the incredible human intelligence systems that are already established on the ground by the tribe. The situation that occurred recently up in Nuristan was extreme and tragic with U.S. soldiers fighting for their lives. I was not there and do not know the specifics of the situation, but I do think that they were in Combat Outposts (COPs).  A TET’s circumstances would be completely different. Think about it. The enemy would have to mass and then attack an Afghan village, and would have to kill many Afghan tribesmen in the attack.

It is not as if the TET would be the only personnel there with weapons. As I pointed out, I would infil with weapons and ammunition on Day One. This is for several reasons. One, as a “gift of honor” to the tribal chief. Two, as a show of commitment and trust. And three, so there will be tribesmen with guns and ammo to help protect themselves, their tribe and us.

Here again, we circle around to the main point of the whole premise of the power in a TES. It is about building relationships. The head tribesman and his fighters will not allow us (the TET) to be harmed. Your earlier posts “Gifts of Honor: A Tale of Two Captains“ and “A Tale of Two Captains, Part II,” tell the story of Sitting Bull [the tribal chief, Malik Noorafzhal, with whom Maj. Gant and his Special Forces team, ODA 316, worked in Konar province in 2004] receiving the letter from my father.

I had asked my father to send him a knife with “Sitting Bull” engraved on it—and a letter, man-to-man, father-to-father. Here is part of it:

My son says you are a great warrior. He respects you and considers you to be his friend. He tells me that your enemies are his enemies. He says he would give his life to protect you. Be my son’s father while he is in your country. Take this gift from us as a token of our friendship.

After I read the letter to Sitting Bull, he replied:

“Tell your father not a hair on your head will be harmed as long as you are with me, you are now my son.”

It’s all about relationships!

SP: Major Gant, if you could design an overall Tribal Engagement Plan, what sort of fires and forces would you deploy in reserve and what would their role be in relation to the TETs who were actually living with the tribes?  Would ‘big army’ run patrols or operations?  Would they serve as a Quick Reaction Force to back up the TETs?  How would you envision the optimum situation?

JG: That ties into the above question. The overall security would absolutely have Close Air Support (CAS) planning considerations. Worst-case scenario, the TET could get air coverage in six hours, four hours or whatever, which will then be plugged back into the TET’s overall security plan. The TET would know long in advance what size and type of Aerial Quick Reaction Force was available, with worst-case scenario times for them as well. This information would once again be plugged back into the overall security plan. In the end, what the TET would come up with is a security plan that says we know we have to hold them off for (fill in the blank) amount of time before we can get any CAS, and we must hold them off for (fill in the blank) amount of time before U.S. soldiers are hitting a pre-planned HLZ (Helicopter Landing Zone) off-loading troops. Yes, securing an HLZ would be part of the plan. This security plan would be very well rehearsed and executed many times with the tribesmen taking the lead in the fight for their villages and tribal area.

On a larger scale, my paper “One Tribe At A Time” discusses that what I am trying to accomplish with the TET, in relation to everyone else outside the tribe, is synergism. The “battle space owner”—meaning the main-force U.S. unit and its commanders in whose AO (Area of Operations) the TET is working—would have to be completely aware and support what the TET was trying to do. The TET would draw in all the other units in the area to help support the goals of the tribe, while also supporting the goals and objectives of the other Coalition Force units in the area, as well as looking for every opportunity for the district, regional, and central governments to aid the tribe, or for the tribe to aid the government.

Just a couple of days ago, I spoke with a trusted friend who is Special Forces. He pointed out the importance of building systems within the tribe that will be able to accept outside help if and when it comes—whether it is from the government or NGOs. It would also include close contact with the Ministry of Tribal and Border Affairs to help facilitate concerns and grievances. To the point of the question, ideally the tribal area would be turned into a Joint Special Operations Area (JSOA) or what I think they now are calling an “Operations Box,” where everyone and anyone who wanted to pass through the area, with either land or air forces, would have to get approval from the TET on the ground. This may seem extreme, but think about a main-force U.S. unit conducting a raid on a tribal elder based on bad intelligence (it DOES happen). Then what? We lose 15 months of relationship and capacity building overnight. Think about the ramifications of a 500-pound bomb being dropped on the tribal leader’s daughter’s home, killing her, her husband and their four kids. The TET could end up hanging from ropes in the village square. That tribal area would have to belong to the TET. “Special trust and approval” would have to be used when dealing with the TET and supporting them in determining what types of operations could and could not be conducted in their “OP Box”.

SP: It’s clear from the newspapers that President Obama is getting close to making his decision about whether or not to give Gen. McChrystal the additional troops the general has asked for—or possibly choosing to send some fraction, half, two-thirds, whatever. If a TES is implemented—even as a pilot program, an experiment in one or two provinces, or part of a single province—how do you think that would impact the need for further American troops?

JG: I know this: If General McChrystal thinks we need more troops, then we need more troops. To fight the war in Afghanistan under the same type of COIN model that has turned out to be successful in Iraq (although comparing Iraq and Afghanistan is very dangerous), there must be more troops.  But I also believe that a seriously-applied Tribal Engagement Strategy will free up some of the troops that the generals need in other places, doing other things. One of the reasons I believe it is so attractive is that it is an “economy of force” mission with Afghans taking the lead from Day One.

General McChrystal recently said, “. . . this fight is for the Afghan people, it’s not with the Afghan people. It’s to protect the Afghan people. And so I think, that has to be foremost in how we operate.”  I believe that this Tribal Engagement Strategy, with the use of small, well-trained U.S. teams, will not only meet the General’s intent, but will help provide the basis for long-term “success” in large portions of Afghanistan.