Category Archives: On Tribalism

Gifts of Honor: A Tale of Two Captains

By Steven Pressfield | Published: January 18, 2010

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-with-shotgun-and-mike-harrison

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.

Also posted in Afghanistan, Editorial, Related Article | Tagged Afghanistan, Captain Michael Harrison, Greg Jaffe, Maj. Jim Gant, Tribalism, tribes, Washington Post | 15 Comments

Mea Culpa: Coming Attractions coming a little late

By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 18, 2009

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.

Also posted in Afghanistan, Editorial | Tagged Afghanistan, Interview with a Tribal Chief, Maj. Jim Gant, Tribalism | 1 Comment

Knowing When to Stop, or Learning How to Win?

By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 11, 2009

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.

Also posted in Afghanistan, Editorial, Guest Blogger | Tagged Afghanistan, Michael McClellan, Tribalism | 8 Comments

Previews of Coming Attractions

By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 7, 2009

Three items will be coming up this week (and in the following weeks) in this space that I think will be extremely interesting and provocative. I can say that with confidence because none of them will be coming from me.

First, in the next day or two, we’ll post a response from Michael McClellan to George Will’s recent “This Week” comments and Washington Post column. Mike is an extremely thoughtful and articulate young lawyer and Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. I don’t know what he’ll say but I’m really looking forward to seeing it.

Second, I’m very excited to use this space as a platform for a white paper titled “One Tribe At A Time — A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan” by Special Forces Major Jim Gant. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve seen Maj. Gant’s name a number of times. He’s an ODA team leader, recipient of the Silver Star, with three combat tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan–on his way back for a fourth tour in Iraq in about a month.

Major Gant is not a pundit or a think-tanker; he’s a warrior whose points of view derive from time on the ground, in the villages and under fire, and whose ideas come from real experience that has really worked. In a nutshell his thesis is that, if the U.S. hopes to succeed in Afghanistan, it must work with the tribes. There’s no other way. The good news is that he believes this can be done–in a light-footprint way, without massive additional troop deployments and without egregious casualty counts (though it will take specially-trained, motivated and supported Tribal Engagement Teams). In his paper, Major Gant lays out the specifics for how he believes this can be done. What makes his recommendations carry weight, in my view, is that he is speaking from real-world experience. The course he proposes, he and his team have lived out. It has worked. Whether you agree or not, this is going to be fascinating reading.

Third, I’m hoping to provide a forum for an Afghan tribal chief, just elected to the paramountcy of eleven tribes in his home valley. This gentleman (who I won’t name for the moment, out of respect for him, and also because this announcement may be a bit premature) is knowledgeable in a way that no Westerner can be and is extremely articulate and passionate in championing the tribal cause in Afghanistan. He has survived two attempts on his life–and that’s the least of his personal story.

Like Major Gant, the chief believes that the tribes are the only avenue by which Afghanistan can truly achieve stability, autonomy and evolve to a state from which the forces of global jihad can be neutralized or eliminated. He has very specific ideas and propositions and he too has lived them out in the real world.

I’m hoping to run a number of stories on these issues, primarily in the words of these individuals. One thing they have in common is a belief that it would be a mistake for the U.S. to disengage from Afghanistan at this time. What is needed, they say, is not so much more American involvement as smarter involvement.

I don’t know specifically what any of these gentlemen are going to say, but I’m sure it’s going to make for some really interesting debate.

Also posted in Afghanistan, Editorial | Tagged Afghanistan, Chief Zazai, George Will, Maj. Jim Gant, Michael McClellan | 5 Comments

In Defense of Hamid Karzai

By Steven Pressfield | Published: August 24, 2009

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?