A Tribal Strategy for Winning in Afghanistan

With a problem as complex as Afghanistan, I have felt some justifiable trepidation to enter an overcrowded field of underqualified experts and opine on what should be done there. The real experts are the Afghans themselves, though many of the Afghans with the best access to foreign audiences have their own agendas. The few Americans who speak with credibility are those with experience living and fighting there — men like Major Jim Gant, who embedded a team of half a dozen men with a Pushtun tribe in Konar Province.

[This tribal map of Afghanistan is actually a detailed slide presentation, showing tribal affiliations down to the province and district level.]

Still, it is difficult to suppress what we know. In my case, that has meant a sense of unease that the discussion of adding troops to Afghanistan missed the main point of how those troops would be used, or what objective they would pursue. Although my own understanding of Afghanistan is admittedly based on second-hand experience, I am reasonably certain of this much: Afghanistan will remain a fundamentally decentralized and tribal place, a loose federation at best, for the foreseeable future. If our definition of victory in Afghanistan is to extend Kabul’s writ to every tribe and village, we will lose. If we try to pacify Afghanistan by filling it with foreigners, we will lose. If our objective is to impose any alien ideology, or eradicate opium production anytime soon, or impose Western models of gender equality, we are doomed. And we are doomed if we lose Afghanistan to the Taliban, because that will mean that our enemies everywhere will know that they can attack the United States from their safe havens with impunity.

Instead, our objective must be to help Afghanistan pacify itself by preventing the Taliban from imposing its own alien ideology, from increasing opium cultivation, from destroying girls’ schools, and from turning soccer stadiums into killing fields again. To the extent that we bring social change to Afghanistan, it will only be by creating the security conditions for Afghanistan to evolve at its own pace. The Kabul government isn’t going to be the vehicle for creating those security conditions anytime soon. As I observed here,

One thing that Afghanistan has never been, and which it should not aspire to be soon, is a unitary state. Its tribal, ethic, linguistic, and sectarian differences wouldn’t tolerate it, nor would the tribal leaders who control the countryside, and who stand to lose too much from radical social change.

In the last war, tribes provided the combat power that defeated the Soviet Army. Their alliances with various Saudi-, Pakistani-, and U.S.-political groups were alliances of convenience as transitory as their occasional alliances with the Taliban today, or with the various central governments that come and go. These arrangements really amounted to the exchange of weapons, food, and protection for nominal support, recruits, infrastructure, and intelligence. It was the tribes, however, that did the real fighting. They provided the recruits, stored the weapons, and provided the invaluable intelligence that allowed mobile mujaheddin groups to avoid Soviet ambushes. Given most surveys that show that most Afghans despise but fear the Taliban, couldn’t the tribes potentially squeeze the Taliban out of Afghanistan, too? I had wondered if we were taking sufficient advantage of the tribes, the one resilient political structure that exists in Afghanistan.

It seems that we are not, judging from Gant’s must-read proposal, which he entitles “One Tribe at a Time.” Gant calls for embedding similarly small, skilled, highly trained teams with tribal leaders, especially within a belt of strategic tribes along the Af-Pak border, forming close personal alliances with those leaders, and giving them veto power over air strikes and major operations in their areas. Gant’s work is worth reading in its entirety, and his ideas seem so inherently sound to me that they overcome my inherent suspicion of the Washington Post’s admiration. Here is his central thesis.

Everyone talks about “winning” in Afghanistan. But what does that mean? The most current definition from President Obama is to, “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” the terrorist network, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. More importantly, the President also added, “and to prevent the return of al-Qaeda in either country in the future.

Although a topic for another paper, US forces in Afghanistan have accomplished that mission and could continue to do so until our national or political will to stay there runs out–and everyone knows this time is quickly approaching. We cannot make progress in Afghanistan through a war of attrition or a war of exhaustion. As I have said and will continue to say, time is on their side. In an insurgency, all the insurgents have to do is not lose.

All they have to do is wear down the will of the counterinsurgent and in this case, the will of the American people and the American politicians. Either approach (attrition or exhaustion) will not work. We have killed thousands and thousands of the “enemy” in Afghanistan and it clearly has not brought us closer to our objectives there. Just as important is the fact that we could kill thousands more and still not be any closer five years from now.

My definition of “success” (that is, “win”) includes the one currently in use. I would add: “. . . to facilitate security and prosperity for the Afghan people. In other words, the tribes. We will be totally unable to protect the “civilians” in the rural areas of Afghanistan until we partner with the tribes for the long haul. Their tribal systems have been there for centuries and will be there for many more. Why should we fight against not only what they have been accustomed to for centuries, but what works for them? They will not change their tribal ways. And why should they?

Bottom line: “Winning” in Afghanistan will be an elusive prospect until we base our operations within the cultural framework of the tribal systems already in place.

Fundamentally, Gant’s approach will depend on building trust between American team leaders and the leaders of the tribes on whom their lives will depend. It will be risky. But without having known Afghan people, it is difficult to understand the importance of bonds of honor in their culture:

Here again, we circle around to the main point of the whole premise of the power in a TES [tribal engagement strategy]. 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.

What Gant proposes would be the antithesis of the failed Soviet strategy, which tried to terrorize and drive out the rural population and bombed everything that moved. In fact, Gant’s strategy would likely result in reduced dependence on air power, better intelligence, and far fewer civilian casualties. On a strategic level, General McChrystal seems to “get” this. On a tactical level, I’m not as sure, though Gant says McChrystal is listening. The greater danger is here at home. Domestic political opportunism here sometimes plays into a mixture of weariness and ignorance of the situation in Afghanistan. Too many politicians in America are happy to send soldiers to fight and die, only to undercut their mission when it becomes politically popular to do so. This is different than criticism of how a mission is conceived and executed. My fear is that we may not have time to win, even if our strategy is sound.

Yet Gant’s strategy certainly seems sound to me. Despite differences in mechanics, its fundamental principle is the same that was used with success in Iraq — to help the people to defend themselves against an unwelcome foreign ideology, form strong bonds with local leaders, and promise to depart as friends when the country is at peace. The irrelevance of body counts and the paramount importance of providing security to the population flows directly from the ideas articulated decades ago by Sir Robert Thompson, the architect of the successful British counterinsurgency strategy in Malaya. Thompson’s ideas, adopted by General Creighton Abrams, , though too late to prevent a collapse of American political will and support for South Vietnam’s government. Even the vicious Shining Path were ultimately defeated by villagers organized into “rondas” and armed with surplus 12-guage shotguns. The point is this — it is the native population that has the necessary intelligence, will, and staying power to secure itself, if it has confidence that it will have our backing if attacked by a larger enemy force. A corollary to that rule is that a foreign force must tread carefully to avoid the perception that it is an occupier, rather than an enabler, of the native population.

Extended to the broader range of foreign policy challenges we face globally, these victories of self-liberation can become the model for a new foreign policy doctrine that enables local populations from the bottom up to provide what governments — both those allied to us and those opposed to us — cannot or will not provide to their own people.

In the longer term, Afghanistan can evolve into a less tribal, more modern society, not primarily through a crash rebuilding program, but in the way that most other societies have. When the infrastructure functions, when there is electricity, gasoline, and a cell phone network, and when the roads are safe to travel, industries will take root in the urban areas and draw young men out of the tribal areas. This will mean that the tribes will have less excess labor, more remittances flowing back from factory workers in the cities, and less marginal land under cultivation, all of which will gradually reduce opium cultivation. More commerce will mean more revenue for the central government. The new urban generation will be exposed to new ideas and cultural influences, and a wise central government would ensure that schools and universities are waiting for the most ambitious of them to provide Afghanistan its next generation of doctors, mechanics, judges, and businessmen. As generations pass, the sons and daughters of tribal emigrants will intermarry and stitch Afghanistan together as a more unitary state. But that will have to happen over the next century, long after our troops have gone.