One Tribe at a Time: The Paper that Changed the War in Afghanistan

ONE TRIBE AT A TIME

JIM GANT

US ARMY, RET.

The paper that changed the war in Afghanistan

JIM GANT

US ARMY, RET.

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For Ghulam Nabi, known as Himmit to
his friends and family. A great and kind
man with a wonderful mind, his death in
November 2011 a tragedy.

Among the earliest readers of
One Tribe at a Time
was Gen. David Petraeus. One of the most recent was Osama bin Laden.

Petraeus read
One Tribe
and told his staff, “Operationalize this.”

Bin Laden read it and circled the author’s name on the title page. In the margin he wrote, “Kill this man.”

I first met Special Forces Major Jim Gant in the summer of 2009. At the time I had a small website called “It’s the Tribes, Stupid.” The primary content on the site was five short videos that I had made with the intention of influencing policy in the Pentagon and the White House. I was hoping to get the decision-makers’ attention on the subject of how the US was employing its forces in Afghanistan.

The message was, well … “It’s the tribes, Stupid.”

Of course no one listened. No one even knew the site existed.

Then I met Jim.

The tribal concepts that I was talking about in theory, Jim had enacted in fact. He and I spent three days together at his home near Fort Bragg. Jim told me about leading Special Forces team ODA 316 in the Konar Valley in Afghanistan in 2003. He and his men had lived with the Mohmand tribe, had been taken in as brothers by the tribe’s leaders; Jim himself had virtually been adopted as a son by the tribal chief, Noor Afzhal.

Was the US military’s current strategy in Afghanistan doomed to failure? Would a tribally-based strategy have a better chance? Did Jim have an idea what an effective T.E.
(Tribal Engagement) design would look like?

Yes, we concluded. And yes, and yes.

“Jim,” I said, “you have to write it.”

Jim of course had already worked it out in his head. The document would be a white paper, about fifty pages long.

“If you write it,” I promised him, “I’ll bring it out on the website.”

You always hope that something will go viral. Your aim is for a paper to get picked up and passed around.

That’s what happened with
One Tribe at a Time
. Gen. James Mattis responded first, giving the paper a boost within the Marine Corps.
Small Wars Journal
picked it up next and added to the momentum. Even its detractors helped. A few high-snark attacks added to the paper’s visibility.

Then Gen. Petraeus gave it his blessing.

One Tribe at a Time
changed policy.

It also destroyed Jim Gant’s career.

Jim’s story became the basis for the bestseller
American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant
by former
Washington Post
reporter Ann Scott Tyson.

Alas,
One Tribe
did not change policy enough. It was too radical. Too disruptive to the battlespace owners. Too impractical within the sphere of Afghan-US politics. Tribal engagement was an idea whose time had not come, at least when implemented by conventional Army forces. But this short paper became a significant footnote in what will probably be the United States’ last intervention of choice in the heartland of any Islamic nation or predominantly tribal culture.

Two final notes and I’ll let you get on to the meat of the book.

1. The reason I came to believe, in the first place, that an understanding of tribes and the tribal mindset was essential to formulating a military and political strategy in Afghanistan was Alexander the Great. I studied Alexander’s history in the Afghan kingdoms in the 330s BCE. He and his army ran into the same buzz-saw that we Yanks blundered into. This was not hard to predict. A Western-style invasion force (whether Macedonian, Roman, Russian, or American) could expect fierce, unconventional resistance on the home turf of a primitive, tribe-based society.

But here’s the interesting part: Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic. What that said to me was that religion could be taken out of the equation
in attempting to understand the fight on the ground in Afghanistan. We couldn’t chalk up our troubles to Islamic extremism or Islamo-fascism or Islamo-anything, because Islam didn’t exist in Alexander’s day. It wouldn’t appear for another 900 years.

Tribalism.

Tribalism was the common dynamic between the East-West clash then and the East-West struggle now.

2. In the winter of 2010, Jim Gant and I, along with an Afghan tribal chief, Ajmal Khan Zazai, and our friend Michael McClellan, laid a brief siege to Washington DC, attempting to influence policy. We spoke at Marine Corps University and at Annapolis, gave a few interviews, and pleaded our case at several influential think tanks.

At CNAS, the Center for a New American Security, Jim pitched his concept of Tribal Engagement to the full team of scholars including the distinguished author and foreign affairs expert Robert Kaplan and CEO and former Afghan-vet Recon Marine captain Nate Fick. It was clear to all in attendance that Major Gant could, if given the chance, pull off the Lawrence-of-Arabia-type stunt of embedding with an Afghan tribe and making a tribal engagement scenario work. But who else could do it? Did the army have a secret reserve of officers who could pull off this kind of miracle? Did the Marine Corps?

Andrew Exum is a former Army Ranger captain with Afghan combat service (and author of
This Man’s Army,
as well as the much-followed counterinsurgency blog
Abu Muqawama
.) He is also a Fellow at CNAS.

“Jim,” Andrew said that afternoon, “after listening to you speak and looking in your eyes, I have no doubt that you could insert yourself into a tribal environment in Afghanistan and make this kind of program work. But I don’t see how the United States can be realistically expected to back a policy that can only be implemented by geniuses.”

Andrew was right. He had Jim pegged.

Gen. Petraeus was right too. So was Osama bin Laden.

Herewith:
One Tribe at a Time
.

See if you agree.

Steven Pressfield

March 2014

The publication of
One Tribe at a Time
in October 2009 changed the course of my life and the lives of many others forever. In June 2010, I deployed to Afghanistan for nearly two years, and, together with some great men, put into action the ideas in
One Tribe at a Time.

It worked.

I learned a great deal—including how much I still don’t know. But I would without hesitation get on that same helicopter for Konar this very night, and do it again.

Captain Jim Gant (US Army, Ret.)
March 2014

ONE TRIBE AT A TIME

A Note To The Reader

A Soldier’s Journey of Discovery

Problems, Challenges, Questions

Foreword

Introduction

Defining “Win”

We Are Losing The War In Afghanistan

Tribes Understand People, Protection, Power and Projection

My Personal Experience With A Tribe In Konar Province

Pashtunwali and Its Tactical Applications

Six Problems With Current Coin Strategy and Its Application In Afghanistan

Tribes and The “Enemy”

How To Engage The Tribes

Tribal Engagement Team Timeline

Closing Thoughts

Acknowledgments

References

The thoughts and ideas that I will put forward in this paper are mine alone. Although I credit the US Army Special Forces for the training I have received and the trust of its commanders, nothing in this paper reflects the ideas and thinking of any other person or organization.

I am not a professional writer. I am not implying by writing this paper that anyone has “got it wrong” or that I have all the right answers. I don’t.

I started writing this paper in January of ’09 prior to the “New Afghanistan Plan.” Much has changed since then. It is an extremely difficult and elusive situation in Afghanistan.

This paper is about tactical employment of small, well-trained units that, when combined with a larger effort, will have positive strategic implications.

The following is a short list of terms you will see in this paper. I will define others as they appear:

TET
stands for “Tribal Engagement Teams.” I will go into detail about them in
Chapter 8
, but they are referred to in many places prior to that.

TTE
refers to “Tactical Tribal Engagement.”

TES
refers to “Tribal Engagement Strategy.”

TSF
refers to “Tribal Security Force.” I will also employ the word Arbakai next to it, as this is the Afghan term most used to describe the type of tribal element our TETs would “advise, assist, train and lead.”

I am not here to imply that I think I could win the war in Afghanistan if put in charge. Or that I can meet these challenges alone, or that there aren’t soldiers out there who could do it better. I just know what I have done and what I could do again, if given the chance.

Anytime I receive instruction from anyone, listen to someone speak, or read an article written by someone, my first question always is: Who are you? Why is what you are saying relevant? What is your background? What are your experiences? What are you getting out of what you are doing or saying or selling?