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.

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.

[This week has been a rough one for our troops in Afghanistan--and a contentions one among policymakers here in the States.  I'm going to interrupt our ongoing interview with tribal chief Ajmal Khan Zazai to post this open letter.  The same note was sent by e-mail two days ago to the parties below.]

TO: Gen. James Jones, Adm. Michael Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal

FROM: Steven Pressfield

SUBJ: An opportunity in Afghanistan

Dear Gen. Jones,

I’m the author of Gates of Fire. I read in a newspaper interview a few years ago that Gates is your favorite book–and you and I have corresponded briefly by e-mail in the past. I cite this connection in the hope that it will give me enough credibility in your eyes that you’ll keep reading this note.

I want to draw your attention to a situation in a valley in Afghanistan that may afford an opportunity for real progress in the Afghan campaign. Please bear with me for a little background.

A pro-American Tribal Chief

For some months I’ve been writing a blog called “It’s the Tribes, Stupid.” Its address is http://blog.stevenpressfield.com. The thesis of the blog is aligned very much with Gen. Petraeus’ and Gen. McChrystal’s COIN strategy of “protect the people.” Recently I’ve been running a series on the blog–a multi-part interview with an Afghan tribal chief, Ajmal Khan Zazai of Paktia province. Chief Zazai holds the paramountcy of eleven tribes in the Zazi valley. He’s an extraordinary man. He and his father fought the Soviets in the 80s and the Taliban after that. Chief Zazai’s father was assassinated under orders from Mullah Omar; the chief himself has survived two attempts on his life.

Chief Zazai, right, with his father and bodyguard, both murdered in 2000.

Chief Zazai was educated in Canada; he’s an excellent English speaker and holds Canadian citizenship. He has been a champion for his people for decades; in fact right now he is in London meeting with Sir David Richards to try to further his country’s cause.

A grass roots anti-insurgent force

This past summer Chief Zazai formed a Tribal Police Force of 85 men. This is purely a grass roots effort, intended to protect the people of the valley and founded by the chief under his own initiative. He has been in contact with the 10th Mountain Division, whose Area of Operation is the Zazi valley; in fact elements of the division helped provide security this past July for the tribal council at which the TPF was organized. The chief’s earnest hope is to ally with U.S. forces, to share intelligence and to work together to “protect the people”–i.e., his eleven tribes–in the valley.

Zazi Valley, Afghanistan. The meeting place of 11 tribes this summer to organize a Tribal Police Force

Three weeks ago, the Tribal Police Force was attacked with an IED. The enemy (no one knows who) struck at a mosque where the unit was dining at the end of Ramadan. Just a couple of days ago, a second attack occurred on a road in the valley. So far, luck has held. No one has been seriously hurt.

If “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” then Chief Zazai and his tribal police are America’s friend. But they are in danger.

Thank God somehow the main bomb in the mosque did not go off [Chief Zazai wrote to me], if that had gone off, it could have killed as many as 30 to 40 people easily. The reason the insurgents planted this bomb is that they are aware we are siding with the US, just imagine if this bomb had gone off and killed this many people, do you really think I could have been in the position to form another such group? No, never.

A chance for COIN to work

Here’s what I’d like to put before you, Gen. Jones:

If you or Admiral Mullen or Gen. Petraeus or Gen. McChrystal could assign one aggressive young officer to look into this situation (and grant that officer access to you), I believe a real breakthrough could be made that might serve as a model for U.S.-Afghan cooperation.

A beginning this summer

We need some on-site person to bridge the gap between 10th Mountain Division commanders and Chief Zazai’s tribal police. As it stands right now, chain-of-command bureaucracy is deadly. If no action is taken, this opportunity will fizzle. This is a classic situation of How To Lose A War, if “business as usual” is allowed to prevail. We need a man on the spot. Somebody who can assess the situation and move for action up the food chain. Here’s a note from Chief Zazai yesterday:

I spoke to Wayne (Borders, the 10th Mountain Division commander in Ali Khell in the Zazi valley). There is not much he can do to help really, what I need is more resources, more support … Wayne is a great guy, he already expresses his total support and is 100% dedicated to help in any way he can, what he can do really is put some good words for the Programme to his superiors and I believe he has done so already.

The relationship is there, it’s building, what really is missing is lack of logistical support for my Tribal Police Force programme. With proper funding I will be able to have proper Intel teams and my night Working team who will look after these [bad] guys who have taken safe refuge in my Valley!

More than just one valley

I would not put this before you, Gen. Jones, if I didn’t think this particular situation bore enormous potential for expansion beyond just this one valley. When the eleven Zazi tribes met this summer,

… the Tribes were excited to take part in the gathering and this was seen widely throughout Afghanistan by many other tribes on Shamshad TV which broadcasted the event for 3 days and a momentum is now circulating around Afghanistan for a tribal united front which could find a way forward. My team in Kabul and Zazi have been contacted by many Tribal chiefs throughout Afghanistan who wish to join our efforts for uniting all the Afghan Tribes.

Chief Zazai’s father, before he was murdered, worked for years to unite the Afghan tribes–not only the Pashtuns, but the Hazaras, Uzbeks, Tajiks and others. Now Chief Zazai himself is championing this cause.

Yes, this is only one man and only one valley. But the opportunity is real and so is the peril. If the next IED attack succeeds, this bottom-up effort could be snuffed out before it even gets going.

At a time when the U.S. Afghan mission is under tremendous pressure politically at home and under attack in the world press, here in Ali Khell in the Zazi Valley is a chance to “protect the people”; to ally with a passionate, articulate, pro-American Afghan patriot; and to link with a true grass roots movement that is on our side and only wants to help and work with us.

I can put you, or any officer you designate, in touch with Chief Zazai. Just respond in the Comments box below or write me at steve [at] stevenpressfield [dot] com.

Chief Zazai and I have been invited to speak in January at Marine Corps University; we will be at other venues and media outlets in Washington D.C. as well. But that is a long way away.

I salute you, Gen. Jones, and Adm. Mullen and Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal on giving your all to an incredibly daunting and complex task–one that has frustrated no less illustrious a personage than Alexander the Great (not to mention Cyrus the Great, Genghis Khan, Akbar the Great and the Brits and Russians) in the past.

Please consider what I have put before you here. Just one bright, assertive young officer could make an enormous difference if he were given latitude to act and direct access to you. Thanks and all my best …

Semper Fi,

Steven Pressfield

Site of the tribal gathering in Zazi, Paktia province

They say that every enterprise, from D-Day to a kitchen remodel, takes three times as long as you think and costs three times as much. I must apologize: our two new series have run afoul of this same syndrome. Here’s the latest:

We will launch, for sure, next Friday, with a reconfigured site.

Series #1: A multi-part, in-depth interview with an Afghan tribal chief

Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai was recently elected to the paramountcy of eleven tribes in his home district, the Zazi Valley in Paktia province. His first act was the creation of an 80-man tribal police force to protect the valley from insurgents. Chief Zazai must be doing something right because last week, his enemies tried to blow the force up.

I was having dinner with my family when I received a phone call from my commander, Amir Mohammed, telling me that an IED had been placed in the mosque where [the tribal police] were having a dinner. A small device went off … thank God the main bomb did not … it would have killed 30 to 40 people easily.

Chief Zazai’s father, who fought the Soviets and the Taliban, was assassinated several years ago; the chief himself has survived two attempts on his life. His cause is to unify the Afghan tribes and use them as a basis, not only for security for the Afghan people and state, but for a new (actually very old and traditional) form of governance for the entire country.

Inside the tent: elders from eleven tribes

Series #2: Special Forces Major Jim Gant’s “One Tribe At A Time”

Major Gant, who has served in Helmand and Konar provinces, approaches this same problem from the US side. While Chief Zazai is attempting to work with the 10th Mountain Division, whose area of responsibility is the chief’s home district, Major Gant lays out a program for US Tribal Engagement Teams to reach out to the tribes all over Afghanistan, one at a time. This is from his Foreword:

Afghanistan. I feel like I was born there. The greatest days of my life were spent in the Pesch Valley and Musa Qalay with the great “Sitting Bull” (a tribal leader in the Konar Valley who you will meet later in these pages). I love the people and the rich history of Afghanistan. They are a people who will give you their last bite of food in the morning and then try and kill you in the evening. A people who will fight and die for the mere sake of honor. A great friend and a worthy enemy.

Major Gant with "Sitting Bull," Konar province

Both Chief Zazai and Major Gant express the same belief:

The US [says Chief Zazai] has only one card to play in Afghanistan and that is the tribes.

Major Gant agrees.

… the answer lies in understanding and then helping the tribal system to flourish.

We’ll get these series rolling next Friday, I promise. And we’ll have free downloadable .pdfs of both, with photos and video, as soon after that as possible. Thanks, friends, for your patience.

A guest blog by Michael Brandon McClellan

[Mike McClellan is a graduate of Yale and Georgetown Law and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. His articles on politics and foreign policy have appeared in the WSJ, the Weekly Standard and on TCS Daily.  It's our pleasure to welcome him as a contributor.]

A few months ago I sat in awe in a Santa Monica hotel ballroom. George Will had been speaking for an hour and still held the audience spellbound. In a relaxed conversational tone, he addressed a dozen subjects, deploying dates, anecdotes, and quotations with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Never once in the seventy-five minutes did he consult a note. It was classic George Will, and it was impressive.

Last week, however, Will reminded me that brilliant men can err, and even err substantially, when he wrote a column titled “In Afghanistan, Knowing When to Stop.” Implying that the lives of some of America’s finest young men would be squandered if the US does not withdraw, Will declared Afghanistan to be essentially not winnable, and perhaps more importantly, not worth winning. Citing the present failure of America’s nation-building and democratizing mission after eight years of effort, Will offered the following policy prescription:

Forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

On its face this must sound tempting to a wide audience. Such a policy would save the lives of Marines and soldiers on the ground, save tax-payers the expense of deploying 68,000 troops, and use air-power to play to American technological strengths. The problem with this thinking is not only that it has failed before, but that it has failed before in Afghanistan. Less than twenty years ago, the United States abandoned its mujahideen allies after a decade of arming them against the Soviet Union. We know who filled that vacuum.

George Will argues that Afghanistan is underdeveloped, has a tiny GDP, and is not worth American blood and treasure. To emphasize the point, he asks whether the US should also nation-build in “Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereignty vacuums.” Proponents of withdrawal made the same arguments twenty years ago. They declared that the US had helped the Afghans enough and it was time to leave them to “sort it out.”

Of course a fractured nation such as Afghanistan does not easily “sort it out” when shrewd geopolitical players like Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia are waiting to step in and tip the scales in favor of their preferred partisans. In the aftermath of the Red Army withdrawal, many of the heroes of the war against the Soviets were left facing ruthless warlords armed with foreign money and weapons. The vacuum created by American withdrawal left Afghanistan open to outside manipulation that was in direct opposition to American interests and security. Today, to that list of outside players may be added China and Russia, larger and more powerful than any of the previous three and possessed of substantial ambitions in Central Asia.

The Taliban takeover was not inevitable in the 1990s. Most of the Afghan freedom fighters were not Islamists or jihadists but proud tribesmen defending their land as had their ancestors for generations. Neither did most Afghans desire a continuance of the corrupt, chaotic, and violent rule of the warlords. Backed by foreign money and arms, the Taliban emerged with promises of stability. The stability they brought was that of Wahhabi repression of indigenous Afghan Islam–and of alliance with and sponsorship of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

America reaped the fruit when unmolested jihadist training camps, hosted by the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, produced hardened fighters who brought down the World Trade Center and blew a hole in the Pentagon. I was two blocks from the White House that day and watched the black smoke billow across the Potomac, before the Secret Service, with weapons drawn, made us get off the roof, and we joined the throngs leaving downtown via Connecticut Avenue. As is true for many Americans that witnessed these events either in person or on television, such things are seared on my mind.

That said, if the lesson of 9/11 is not that bad things happen when Afghanistan is left as a vacuum for regional players to fill with anti-American radicals, then what is?

While violence is escalating, and the war in Afghanistan is at a tipping point, the war is not lost. There are tribal leaders who understand the value of American and NATO assistance, and they want peace, freedom, and prosperity for their people. They desire neither Taliban nor warlord domination and they are furious with the corruption and ineptitude of the Karzai government. They are also outraged when their people are killed by missiles seeking Taliban targets.

Equally important, there are American officers who understand the need to win the confidence of the tribes and to enlist them, as tribes, in the cause of the greater nation. They recognize that the Afghan warrior will not be won over by a foreign superpower that declines to put its own young men into the field or that refuses to meet him with respect.

An “offshore” war as Will prescribes has the potential to create the opposite result of engagement with the tribes. Mistakes inevitably happen with missiles, hardening opposition among the tribes in whose midst the Taliban must hide to survive and carry out their war. Moreover, as one Afghan chief has told me, for the cost of a single missile, a whole group of local tribal fighters could be recruited to clear their own valleys and villages of Taliban and warlord forces alike. But such a strategy at its most fundamental level requires engagement, not disengagement.

George Will quoted a Dutch officer saying that walking through a southern province of Afghanistan is “like walking through the Old Testament.” Perhaps in such a statement there is an unintentional lesson. The Afghans have indeed been a proud, fierce, and honorbound people since the time Esther was influencing Xerxes to better treat the Israelites. As the Afghans are still such a people, we can look to history for instruction. In that blank page of the Bible that separates the Old Testament from the New, and the Persian Empire from the Roman, Alexander the Great figured out that if you win the tribes, you can win Afghanistan; lose the tribes and you face intractable insurgency. Two millennia later, Disraeli’s Britons and Gorbachev’s Soviets would surely concur. Given the strange consistencies of Afghanistan over time, and the disastrous ramifications of withdrawal two decades ago, we should recognize that knowing when to stop is not nearly as important as learning how to win.

Discussion of the problems created by tribalism in Afghanistan often provokes from our own compatriots such outraged responses as, “Hey, who are we Americans to talk? We have our share of tribes too!” There’s no arguing with that. Here at home we’ve got the Bible-thumping cracker tribe, the latte-sipping liberal tribe and dozens more, all of which have to be catered to by the political process. To me though, the most useful American parallel to Afghan tribalism goes back to 1491—before the first European sail appeared off these virgin shores.

Tribal America

Pre-Columbian America was tribal from sea to shining sea. From the Mohicans to the Seminole to the Crow and the Apache, the land was a patchwork of warring, competing kin groups. Some, like the Iroquois and the Sioux, could be legitimately called nations; they were families and clans and sub-tribes united by ethnic/racial lineage and confederated, at least loosely, into a political whole. Like Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Hazaras and Tajiks, you could tell one from the other just by looking at them.

They were strong, they were free, they proud and virile and autonomous. But there was one thing they weren’t.

They weren’t a nation.

Could they ever have been? Can the Afghans be today? At least our Native American tribes were safe behind the Atlantic and the Pacific. Unlike the Afghans, their land was not the gateway to India or to Central Asia. They didn’t have to worry about superpowers vying in great games to turn their territory to the power’s own advantage.

Sympathy for the devil

Which brings us to this week’s Afghan elections. There was a very interesting article by Elizabeth Rubin in the August 9 New York Times Sunday magazine, titled “Karzai in His Labyrinth.” What the piece highlighted, at least to my reading, was the monumental barrier to true Afghan nationhood (the same one we would have seen in pre-European America): the political void between the tribes and a central unifying government.

Many have tried to fill this gap. Afghanistan has struggled under external invaders and conquerors, homegrown royal families; it had Communism for a while; then warlordism; then Talibanism. Now it’s got Hamid Karzai and us. I must say my heart went out to the Afghan president, reading Ms. Rubin’s article. I believe he’s a good man in an impossible situation. Consider Karzai’s plight. He has no real power in terms of guns or constituency. He has no militia loyal to him (unlike Dostum, Fahim or Hekmatyar), no great personal fortune, no vast landholdings. He has no religious or moral mandate as, say, his hero Gandhi did. What he had, once, was the favor of the Western powers, but now even that is deserting him. He’s trying to hold the country together with baling wire and bubble gum. He could probably do it too, the Afghan way, if the West would back off and let him. I salute him. He’s doing the best he can. From Elizabeth Rubin’s article:

“His father was head of the tribe, and in tribal culture you depend on loyalty of individuals rather than institutions,” says Ali Jalai, his former interior minister and a friend from refugee days in Pakistan. “You always try to be a patron to people close and loyal to you.” [Karzai] cherishes the values of democracy but has no faith in its institutions. “How he reconciles these competing demands creates his style of leadership,” Jalai said. In reality, said another friend, “he sees human rights, freedom of the press, the law, the constitution as chains around his hands and legs.”

Under pressure from the West, Karzai ousted from Kandahar Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, “probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker.” What happened? The Taliban took over. Karzai has brought onto his ticket (the “warlord ticket”) Muhammad Fahim to bring in the Tajiks, the Uzbek warlord Adbul Rashid Dostum for his homies, and the Hazara politician Muhammad Mahaqiq to deliver those ethnic and tribal votes.

The West calls this corruption. Is it? What Karzai is up against is the Great Void between the tribes and the Kabul government. He’s filling it the most efficient way he can—with supertribal commanders, who can deliver the tribesmen and tribal contingents under them. What else can he do? He has had to accommodate everything, he says.

Everything, everything, everything! I had to balance the U.S. and Iran in Afghanistan. I had to balance other countries in here. I had to balance Europe. I had to balance the Muslim world. I had to make Afghanistan a country where all work together for it. And that I have managed. Fortunately. But, you know, at great personal stress and cost.

The other candidate seeking to fill this political void is of course the Taliban. They’ve done it before. We saw what that produced. The Taliban want again to be the super-tribe, the uber-tribe that can deliver a true national unity.

What is the missing link?

Afghanistan beyond the cities, it seems, is constituted of three political levels: the tribes in the villages, the central government in Kabul and the Great Void in between. What mechanism, what process might with legitimacy bridge this gap? Tribal confederacies have been tried before. They’ve worked before—just not for long. Loya jirgas have been convened, as one was when Karzai originally took office, with representatives from the vast patchwork of tribes that is Afghanistan. Could that work?

My guess is that, if any form of linkage ever does fill this void, it will be idiosyncratic and uniquely Afghan. It will be some hybrid form of governance—partly tribal, partly democratic, with no small measure of feudalism and cronyism thrown in. It will almost certainly require an international presence, for a long time, to serve as an honest broker, preventing some single tribal or ethnic element from dominating all others. This eventual government will probably be something that we in the West will find messy, corrupt and incomprehensible. But maybe it’ll work. Maybe it will stabilize Afghanistan long enough for peace and security to reach the people.

Oh, for wise Chief Seattle

It may help us Americans to try to imagine our native tribes struggling to put together the same thing. If we shrunk down our pre-Columbian borders to the size of Texas and crammed them full of competing tribes and nations, could these groups have gotten it together? Would the Lakota have cared what the Onondaga thought? Could the Kiowa have aligned their interests with the Crow? Now add superpowers on all sides, each with their own competing agenda. Could this crazy-quilt conglomeration find a way to come together as a nation?

That’s what Hamid Karzai is trying to pull off. Can we blame him if he’s coming a little unpeeled?

The challenge for General McChrystal is creating a comprehensive and integrated strategy for Afghanistan out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of peoples, identities, and conflicts in the country.

This next quote from Sitaraman’s op-ed reminds me of the work of then-Captain Jim Gant and Captain Michael Harrison, which I wrote about in the post “Gifts of Honor: A Tale of Two Captains.” It takes getting to know people on a one-on-one basis. As Tom Daly wrote in his guest post “Lessons from Ramadi”—which Neptunus Lex also pointed out to his readers (Thanks, Lex!)—“step one is showing up.”

Paradoxically, the right strategy for the Afghan war is one that recognizes there can be no single strategy. To be sure, broad principles and strategic direction are absolutely necessary, but the strategy must be flexible and adaptive. It must recognize that what works in one province or district might not work in the next, and that some of the most important strategic decisions cannot be made by generals in Kabul or Washington, but only by the soldiers and civilians who are out in the villages.

About two weeks ago, Seth G. Jones made some of the same points in his Wall Street Journal op-ed “Going Local: The Key to Afghanistan—The U.S.’s strategy of building a centralized state is doomed to fail in a land of tribes:”

One of the biggest problems, however, is that since late 2001, the United States has crafted its Afghanistan strategy on a fatally flawed assumption: The recipe for stability is building a strong central government capable of establishing law and order in rural areas. This notion reflects a failure to grasp the local nature of Afghan politics.

When I started writing this blog, I came under fire for what some perceived as a lumping together of everyone in Afghanistan. Not the case or intention. My point has always been that the tribes should be worked with—understanding that each tribe and region is different. Jones adds:

Tribal, religious and other local leaders in Afghanistan best understand their community needs, but they are often under-resourced or intimidated by Taliban and other insurgents. This is where the Afghan and U.S. governments can help. A key starting point is security and justice. In some areas, local tribes and villages have already tried to resist the Taliban, but have been heavily outmatched. The solution should be obvious: They should be strongly supported.

This past Thursday, the elections in Afghanistan took place, and the following two quotes from the article “Of Afghan Warlords and Polling Places” (from Stratfor’s Geopolitical Diary) caught my eye:

What we have here is a clear indication that the underlying geopolitical nature of Afghanistan has not been altered by attempts to steer the country toward democratic politics. Political parties have not supplanted ethnic- and tribal-based warlordism. On the contrary, warlordism determines electoral outcomes. . . . 

 

 

Given the objectives of the Taliban, any political settlement would not come in the form of a democratic framework, and especially not Western-style democracy. Ironically, it is the politics of warlordism that could provide a framework for calming down the insurgency. A wedge will not be driven between pragmatic Taliban elements and the more hard-line ideological types because the pragmatists play by the rules of a Western-style political system; rather it would materialize as deals are cut with various Taliban commanders who would be willing to lay down arms in exchange for recognition of their domains of power.

Then there’s the report “Afghan Voters Defy the Taliban” from CBS’s “Washington Unplugged.”

The segment features John Nagl (Center for a New American Security) and T.X. Hammes (National Defense University). Afghanistan election talk aside, T.X. asked:

Are we destabilizing Pakistan? We’re driving the drug dealers out of Afghanistan. Where are they going? Are we destabilizing Pakistan? What is the impact on India? We’ve almost got this reversed. We’re all focused on Afghanistan, but the important players—India and Pakistan, and all the effort is focused on Afghanistan. . . . Is Afghanistan the right place? Would we be better spending a third as much money in Pakistan and working for Pakistani stability? And what’s the impact on India? Those are the bigger questions you have to answer.

This would be the never-ending-mashup if I tried to include everything from the past week, so I’ll leave you with just one more thing.

Among other things, this week marked the 40^th anniversary of Woodstock. The interviews and articles related to the anniversary vary, but overall, people seem to agree that we support our troops these days—Yellow ribbons, #militarymonday on Twitter, etc.

But I wonder if saying we support our troops really means we support our troops. How have we changed in the past 40 years? Some of us said we didn’t support the troops then, but we say we support our troops now? Is the change in just the wording? After Vietnam, veterans went untreated. Same story today. And within the services, there’s still a division over support of Reservists and National Guard members. Some have said they receive even less support.

Here’s a story of support in action that I really get. Michael Yon wrote it this week.

A gunshot ripped through the darkness and a young British soldier fell dying on FOB Jackson. I was just nearby talking on the satellite phone and saw the commotion. The soldier was taken to the medical tent and a helicopter lifted him to the excellent trauma center at Camp Bastion. That he made it to Camp Bastion alive dramatically improved his chances. But his life teetered and was in danger of slipping away. Making matters worse, the British medical system back in the United Kingdom did not possess the specialized gear needed to save his life. Americans had the right gear in Germany, and so the British soldier was put into the America system. 

 

British officers in his unit, 2 Rifles, wanted to track their man every step of the way, and to ensure that his family was informed and supported in this time of high stress. Yet having their soldier suddenly in the American system caused a temporary glitch in communications with folks in Germany. The British leadership in Sangin could have worked through the glitch within some hours, but that would have been hours wasted, and they wanted to know the status of their soldier now. So a British officer in Sangin – thinking creatively –asked if I knew any shortcuts to open communications. The right people were only an email away: Soldiers Angels. And so within about two minutes, these fingers typed an e-mail with this subject heading: CALLING ALL ANGELS. 

 

Soldiers’ Angels Shelle Michaels and MaryAnn Phillips moved into action. Day by day British officers mentioned how Soldiers Angels were proving to be incredibly helpful. The soldiers expressed deep and sincere appreciation. Yet again, the Angels arrived during a time of need.

There’s much more to this post, including information on Soldiers Angels, provided by Shelle Michaels. Please read it in full.

Now that’s support!

I was very interested last week to see what would happen, in terms of leadership succession among the Pakistani Taliban, after the reputed death of Baitullah Mahsud. According to scores of press reports as well as Pakistani and Taliban spokesmen, the immediate aftermath was a shootout involving two rival successors, Hakimullah Mahsud and Wali ur-Rehman, that resulted in the death of Hakimullah Mahsud. Within two days however, Hakimullah was phoning in, according to the Economic Times, declaring not only that he was still alive but that so was Baitullah–and that the world would be hearing from both very shortly.

This is pretty Wild West stuff. What struck me on a deeper level, however, was that both incidents–Baitullah’s death and the subsequent succession gunfight–illustrate timeless truths about tribes and the tribal mind-set.

Tribes band together to repel an invader

This is a reality that has been well-established since Alexander’s era, 2300 years ago, when the tribes of Afghanistan/Pakistan/Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan were called Pactyans (modern Pathans), Aparytae (Afridis), Satrayddae, Dadicae, not to mention the Scythian tribes north of the Amu Darya–the Dahae, Sacae and Massagetae. These tribes regularly warred against each other during normal times but came together to attempt to repel Alexander’s invading forces.

The key to such confederacies of expedience is of course a leader whose prestige transcends–like that of Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse–the natural rivalries and jealousies among individual tribes. Such a commander, from all we have read, was Baitullah Mahsud.

Mahsud was responsible, so reports say, for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (though he himself denied this.) His armed followers numbered 20,000. He was a master in the tactical use of suicide bombers as part of coordinated assaults and offensives. Suicide bombings, he used to say, “are our atomic weapons. Although the infidels have atomic weapons, our atomic weapons are the finest in the world.” He was about 35. A tough act to follow.

The Los Angeles Times on August 8 quotes Masood Sharif Khattak, a former Pakistani intelligence official:

The real challenge for [any potential successor] would be to hold together the tribal groups that Baitullah Mahsud assembled. It’s not monolithic. There are serious personal and economic rivalries.

Indeed. Even if the Hakimullah Mahsud vs Wali ur-Rehman gunfight at the O.K. Corral turns out not to be literally true, it’s certainly credible enough that it might be true. Which brings us to a second characteristic of tribes.

Tribes switch sides

Gary Berntsen’s book Jawbreaker and Gary Schroen’s First In both treat as axiomatic the capacity to “turn” tribesmen, usually for nothing more exalted than a suitcase full of greenbacks. Berntsen and Schroen were fighting the Taliban in the weeks immediately following 9/11, when that force still controlled Afghanistan and called their government an emirate. That lofty appellation didn’t stop individual Taliban from crossing the lines at night to have a yarn with their neighbors of the Northern Alliance, nor did it prevent entire tribal contingents from going over to the Western invaders when the tide of conflict turned.

The notorious saying, which originated with the British during their wars beneath the Hindu Kush, is that “you can’t buy an Afghan, but you can rent him.” The condescension in that phrasing is misleading. The fundamental tactical reality of tribes throughout history is that their numbers are rarely large enough to dominate the region in which they live. Necessity compels them to seek accommodations with rivals. The result is not far from our own Five Families in New York: alliances keep shifting; the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Is the Taliban a tribe? Not technically. But its fighters are tribesmen and tribal contingents, who share the tribal mind-set (hostility to all outsiders, extreme political and cultural conservatism, a code of honor as opposed to a system of laws, suppression of women) and who are harbored by and among tribal peoples. The Taliban, to my mind, are a super-tribe. Their methods and objectives are tribal (to drive out the invader by all means, fair or foul) but their aims are elevated to the next level (dominance of the entire region) by the adhesion of a passionate religious fundamentalism that is in essence the traditional tribal code squared and pumped up on steroids.

Is Baitullah’s death an opening for the West and the Pakistani government?

My guess is it won’t be easy to replace Baitullah Mahsud. I expect a serious power struggle. Tribes are not good at coming together. What’s working in the Taliban’s favor is the stepped-up pressure by the U.S. in Afghanistan and by the Pakistani military across the border. The first law–tribes band together to repel the invader–will still supersede the second. The time will not yet be ripe, I suspect, for the West to try to peel off contingents. But that day may come.

Can we imagine ourselves into that reputed succession council between Hakimullah Mahsud and Wali ur-Rehman? How much trash did one side have to talk before the other decided to let its AK-47’s finish the argument? Not even the Israelis and the Palestinians have that touchy a hair-trigger.

Baitullah Mahsud, I suspect, will be sorely missed.

Afghanistan

It can be tempting to downplay or ignore the influence of tribes in Afghan politics, and on the effects on our operations. We tried to ignore the great influence of the tribes during the war in Iraq, and not until 2006, fully three years into the war, did we effectively begin to work with tribes on an appreciable scale.

The work with the tribes during 2006–2007 in Anbar Province helped set conditions that greatly facilitated the successes of “The Surge,” which unfolded during 2007. A compelling argument could be mounted that had we not seen the 2006 tribal “Awakening” in Anbar, the Surge might have spiraled into yet more violence, and the war in Iraq could have been lost.

Drawing parallels between Afghanistan and Iraq is fraught with peril, yet there are some useable lessons in regard to tribal influences.

As I wrote in a recent Washington Times article:

Time has a different meaning here. Take the case of members of the Baibogha tribe who abandoned a patch of land nearby about 150 years ago. Hazaras moved in, now Baibogha have come back to tell Hazaras, “Wait . . . you stole our patch of nothing while we disappeared for 150 years.”   

Ghor Province, Afghanistan

If we desire to help bring Afghanistan to a status that a reasonable observer might call a “developing nation,” then the commitment here has just begun. This expensive project will require many decades of effort at best, and more likely a full century of commitment.

If most Afghans cooperate, and we work hard together, Afghanistan might develop into a self-sustaining country—a real country—after a few decades. In the dispatch “Sangow Bar Village” I wrote that the village was in the dark.

It had no electricity until 2006 when Lithuanians invested about $40,000 to build a micro-hydro generator with the idea of watching the village to see if true improvement was made. Today, Sangow Bar has plenty of electricity and the people have lights and satellite television . . . The Lithuanians have determined that the project was a success, and the project appeared to be a success to the Japanese and to me.

 

With this success in mind, the Lithuanians together with Iceland decided to build thirty more hydro-generation stations. Now, if we look at this in context of the broader picture, thirty, three hundred, or even three thousand might seem like an irrelevant number. But it’s not.

However, Afghanistan’s narco-remittance-puppet-state is hindering each attempted step forward. An embryo of a real country is growing, but will die instantly without help. For now, and at a minimum many decades to come, with a lack of stable government, tribal influences will be at least as important as those emanating from Kabul.

Michael Yon

Sangin, Helmand Province

Remember the Bizarro World, from Seinfeld and Superman comics? Everything is its opposite in the Bizarro World. Up is down, black is white, in is out.

Students of Counterinsurgency (COIN) and Tribal Engagement tell us it’s the same in their field. Who would have thought, for example, that killing bad guys would be a no-no? Or that a good old-fashioned grease-the-palm payoff would prove as effective as “winning hearts and minds?”

Here then, in no particular order, are a few other cherished maxims of conventional warfare that might profit, in the Bizarro World of tribal COIN, from being turned on their heads:

No beards

In Afghan tribal society, a beard is the sign of a man. Boys are clean-shaven. Capt. Michael Harrison reports from Konar today that he was able to bond with tribal elders in one village because they remembered fondly “the bearded Americans”—Special Forces ODA 316–who had been with them six years earlier.

Can discipline be maintained in a U.S. line outfit when troopers are shaggy and unkempt? Probably not. But on tribal engagement teams whose mission is to bond with native elders toward the end of living with and fighting alongside them, maybe the “high-and-tight” is not the best way to break the ice.

Always wear body armor

Clearly when a unit is in the field and expects to take fire, it must keep all defenses up. But once “inside the tribal gate,” in a shura meeting or over tea, such a posture offends the honor of the host. The Pashtunwali obligation of hospitality, melmastia, mandates that the tribesman protect the guest, even at the cost of his own life. Are we, the Kevlar-plated stranger, unwittingly offending the very benefactors we’re seeking to befriend?

Hang onto the purse strings

What we in the West call a bribe can be, in Afghan tribal society, simply good manners. Of course we don’t want American officers running around with open-ended slush funds. But friends help friends. And “gold is honorable.”

Such transactions must be conducted with extreme delicacy and respect, however. No condescension. No strings. And no after-the-fact monitoring.

"The bearded Americans" had success in Konar province

If you leave five grand in an envelope for Tony Soprano (the mob is a tribe too), it’s in poor taste to come back and ask him what he did with it.

Never give them guns

Weapons carry big juju in any tribal society. The gift of arms is an act of honor and a profound statement of trust. Conventional wisdom says hell no, give ‘em guns and we’ll wind up promoting warlordism–or get our guys shot with weapons we ourselves put into the shooters’ hands. But a tribesman never forgets a favor or an insult and is honorbound to requite such exchanges in kind.

It worked in al-Anbar.

What makes Bizarro bizarre

The through-the-looking-glass aspect of certain COIN precepts in a tribal setting derives from the contradictions between the Western way of seeing the world and the tribal way. What seems irrational to our eyes often makes perfect sense through the tribesman’s.

Their minds [wrote T.E. Lawrence of the Bedu tribesmen he came to know so well] work just as ours do, but on different premises. There is nothing unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inscrutable in the Arab. Experience of them, and knowledge of their prejudices will enable you to foresee their attitude and possible course of action in nearly every case.

If our mission hopes to succeed in the tribal areas of Afghanistan, we must learn to speak the cultural language–the street lingo of tribalism.

Lastly, the poppy

In the Bizarro World of tribal logic, let me venture the following proposition:

In dealing with issues around opium, whatever course we think makes the most rational sense … do the opposite.