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All Politics Is TribalObama's Afghanistan strategy should team our soldiers with their militias.

By Fred KaplanPosted Monday, Nov. 23, 2009, at 6:14 PM ET

Though it doesn't claim as much, Dexter Filkins' article in Sunday's New York Times, headlined "Afghan Militias Battle Taliban with Aid of U.S.," may offer a clue to where President Barack Obama's strategic review of the war is going.

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Or let's put it this way: If, in the coming days, Obama does decide to deepen America's involvement in Afghanistan, and if his strategy bears no resemblance to the approach Filkins describes, it is almost certain to fail.

Filkins, one of the most intrepid war correspondents, reports that special-operations forces have begun to help anti-Taliban militias in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are concentrated. These militias have risen up spontaneously in certain tribal groups, but U.S. commanders hope that they can use the example of these revolts "to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland."

The interest, even excitement, in this development stems from two sources. First, it is reminiscent of the Anbar Awakening in 2006-07, when Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq formed alliances with U.S. forces—whom the Sunnis had been shooting just months earlier—to beat back the bigger threat of al-Qaida.

Second, it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country.

One measure of the interest in the paper is that Maj. Gant, who was about to be redeployed to Iraq, has been sent back to Afghanistan instead to help set up more of these teams.

The premise of his paper is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will." Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes—and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well.

The United States' approach of the last seven years—focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan's national army and police force—is wrongheaded and doomed. The tribal approach also has many risks. But the case for it, Gant argues, is this: "Nothing else will work."

There are signs that Obama has been mulling over something like Gant's strategy. At one of the seven meetings Obama has held with his national security advisers (the ninth, and perhaps final, session takes place tonight), he asked for a breakdown of which Afghan provinces could provide their own defense, which need our help, and to what degree. He also told ABC-TV's Jake Tapper, in an interview earlier this month, that he and his advisers were focusing on "not just a national government in Kabul but provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now."

A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.

Second, these teams of U.S. soldiers are small. As Gant puts it, the approach requires a lot of time—many months to gain a foothold, years to make the bonds stick—but not a lot of manpower.

If Obama is looking for a way to counter the Taliban and build Afghan security without sending all 40,000 troops that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested, this is one such way.

Third, the strategy makes military success less dependent on the political fortunes of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Counterinsurgency campaigns work through local authorities; if the authorities are seen as corrupt, the campaign can't succeed. Karzai has promised reforms, which may boost his legitimacy among the Afghan people. But it he doesn't follow through, or if his efforts have scant effect, it won't matter so much with Gant's strategy, because the key authorities are the tribal leaders, not the central government in Kabul.

Gant has no illusions about the difficulty of working with tribes. He spells out the risks of getting enmeshed in internecine feuds. Several times during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, our guerrilla allies called in U.S. air and artillery strikes on what they said were "Taliban targets" but in fact turned out to be gatherings of rival tribes.

An explicit and essential part of Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services. He's less clear on the mechanics of how this "bottom-up" approach to national unity takes hold, but he recognizes that without it the Taliban can gain advantage by playing the tribes off against one another.

Nor does he contend that the Taliban can be countered by a tribal strategy alone. The officers who have been circulating Gant's paper, and discussing it in closed-door meetings, don't think it can be anyway.

Two weeks ago, asked about the continuing internal discussions on the subject, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters that President Obama was asking how to "combine some of the best features of several of the options" that his advisers had put on the table.

Obama is likely to announce his decision—on a strategy and on how many, if any, more troops it will require—soon after Thanksgiving. A key question to ask, in examining this mix, is how prominently it features the tribes

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

COMMENTS

I read Major Grant's "One Tribe at a Time" with more than passing interest, having a familiarity with the Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP) in I Corps Vietnam.

Though that program itself, and the Marine and Navy Corpsman volunteers that participated deserve praise, and merit, the program wasn't entirely an unqualified success. But what it did show, and as Major Grant pointed out with his previous experience in Afghanistan, is what a few motivated and dedicated personnel can do with indigenous personnel to stand-up to, and drive an enemy away.

Without going into the pitfalls, and particulars of such a program, or the type of unique individual we need to find that it takes to live, and set an example of risk sharing with the local Afghan in a small village, I would remind everyone it also takes time to recruit, train, and build confidence in a local militia (let alone spread to other tribes), and time is something America and our NATO allies don't have a lot of.

A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi – A precipice in front, wolves behind!

-- Tyrtaios-rising
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The approach makes sense because it understands that the fundamental US interest in Afghanistan is a negative one. As long as the country is not a base for jihadists who want to attack the US and other Western countries, we really shouldn't care how it is governed or how Afghans live. Allying ourselves with the traditional local authorities means buying their cooperation with the money and arms that they need to maintain their power against local rivals. The US will wind up as the honest broker in tribal disputes, but to make itself acceptable in that role, it must abandon any effort to change local culture through education or through economic development that upsets local power relationships.

The policy is not dissimilar to the British reaction to the Indian Mutiny in 1857, which was to stop annexing Indian states, make no further interference with Hindu practice (beyond the existing abolition of thuggee and suttee), and sharply limit the activities of Christian missionaries in India. Our secularist missionaries, especially the ones who would like to improve the status of Afghan women, are going to be deeply disappointed with our new accommodation.

The acid test is going to be how we come to terms with the cultivation of opium, which is the principal source of income, and hence of power, for local elites. I suspect we're going to wind up buying a good deal of the crop, either directly or by payments not to plant.

-- jack_cerf
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