‘The perfect counterinsurgent’: reconsidering the case of Major Jim Gant

ABSTRACT

In 2009, Major Jim Gant published a treatise online entitled One Tribe at a Time, outlining a strategy for victory in Afghanistan based on the still untested counterinsurgency doctrine developed by General David Petraeus. Gant was given the opportunity to put theory to the test by returning to the village of Mangwal in eastern Kunar Province. Evaluation of Gant’s mission has been overshadowed by the scandal that led to his resignation from the US Special Forces. This essay provides a re-examination of Gant’s time in Mangwal based on interviews with residents of Mangwal and an appraisal of the lessons that can be learned from Gant’s attempt to put counterinsurgency principles into practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Counterinsurgency
• Afghanistan
• Kunar
• tribe
• honor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gant, One Tribe at a Time, 14 (47). The first page number refers to the online version of the treatise that appears on Steven Pressfield’s website. The second page number refers to the printed version of the text (see bibliography).

2. Costen, Comment on One Tribe at a Time.

3. Judah Grunstein, “The Horror, The Horror.”

4. Noah Coburn, Personal communication.

5. The ‘Perfect counterinsurgent’ quote is taken from the front cover of the published edition of One Tribe at a Time.

6. Tyson, American Spartan, includes a number of photographs, including examples of Gant meeting with American dignitaries in Mangwal.

7. Tyson, American Spartan, 58.

8. It is worth noting that just a month before the charges against Gant were filed, Afghanistan had erupted in riots when accounts surfaced that soldiers at the Bagram military base had burned copies of the Qur’an. On the same day the complaint against Gant was filed, Sergeant Major Robert Bales was detained in Qandahar for the massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians. I am not aware of anyone connecting these three incidents, but it is not unreasonable to suspect that, under the circumstances, the military had reason to get Gant out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, since Gant’s actions would have brought further attention to a military already under fire.

9. In his formal letter of reprimand, the commanding officer wrote the following:

You were entrusted to maintain the highest standards of discipline, operational deportment, and leadership in an environment of austere conditions and high risk; the very conditions in which Special Forces is intended to thrive. Instead, you indulged yourself in a self-created fantasy world, consciously stepping away from even the most basic standards of leadership and behavior accepted as norm for an officer in the U.S. Army. In the course of such self-indulgence, you exposed your command and the reputation of the Regiment to unnecessary and unacceptable risk. In short, your actions disgrace you as an officer and seriously compromised your character as a gentleman.” Tyson, American Spartan, 346.

10. It should be noted that, while Tyson’s book represents a defense of her husband’s actions in Kunar, it is also the work of a serious reporter, who maintains standards of journalistic objectivity and provides a great deal of factual material in her book, including details that are not exculpatory to her husband.

11. Gant, One Tribe at a Time, 4 (5).

12. Following our two years working together and while still a refugee in Pakistan, Miakhel went on to work for a Belgian relief organization, the Voice of America, and the United Nations. After being given political asylum in the United States, he worked for a computer company and the VoA, as well as driving a a taxi in northern Virginia, while putting his children through school (all have gone on to gain college degrees). In 2003, he was asked to return to Afghanistan to serve as the Deputy Minister of Interior. Later, he became Country Director of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Kabul, and is currently the Governor of Ningrahar Province.

13. In addition to providing much of the information in this essay on Mangwal and its social organization, as well as background on Nur Afzal, Shahmahmood also contacted other residents of Mangwal on my behalf to answer the various questions I posed to him that he was unable to answer based on his own experience. Those he contacted included Dr. Akbar, whose photograph appears in One Tribe at a Time and whom Gant identifies in his treatise as the first person he met in Mangwal and who was an important interlocutor for him throughout his time in the village. Over the three decades I have been studying Afghanistan, I have interviewed a number of men myself from Mangwal and Kunar more generally. My first trip to Kunar was in 1976 when I trekked with a group of Afghan and expatriate friends to the top of the Kamdesh Valley in northern Kunar. In 1986, I led a survey team for the United Nations investigating the conditions in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, and had the opportunity to visit camps in Bajaur and the Mohmand Agency which border Kunar. In 1995, I accompanied Shahmahmood on a trip to the Pech Valley in northern Kunar (where Gant briefly served many years later, prior to his deployment to Mangwal). During that trip, I joined Shahmahmood on a visit to his family home in Mangwal. On the Pech Valley, see Edwards, Heroes of the Age (Chapter 2); and Before Taliban (Part 2).

14. Tyson, American Spartan, 108.

15. Ibid, 66. It is not unusual for anthropologists to assert that in the course of their fieldwork they established such close relationships with their research subjects that they were essentially adopted into their families, a status symbolized by their being referred to thereafter by a kinship term such as brother, sister, uncle, aunt. Being awarded such a title is thought to indicate the closeness of the relationship between anthropologist and his or her informants. However, what is less often noted is that, whatever affection the people might have felt for the anthropologist (or the military officer), they are also exercising a form of social control, the expectation being that the individual in question might thereby act in accordance with the established norms and restraints associated with the kin position they have been awarded.

16. Gant, One Tribe at a Time, 17 (60).

17. One commentator accused Gant of ‘genocide’ in response to his actions supporting one side over another in a land dispute unrelated to the Taliban insurgency. To the best of my knowledge, that accusation is unfounded, and the dispute has not been revived to date.

18. See Edwards, “Origins of the Anti-Soviet Jihad.”

19. Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy and Society, 220–1.

20. Gant, One Tribe at a Time, 8 (22).

21. Ibid., 10 (28).

22. Ibid., 13 (41–44).

23. On tribes and states in the Middle East generally, see Khoury and Kostiner, ed, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East; on tribes and states in Afghanistan, see Richard Tapper, ed., The Conflict of Tribe.

24. Nur Afzal’s own story demonstrates the ways in which tribal identity is interwoven with other connections and commitments. Both of Nur Afzal’s brothers, who served as maliks before him, were employed by the government – Sher Afzal as a tax collector and Muhammad Afzal as an army nurse – and Nur Afzal’s own heroics, if indeed there were any, would have come not while fighting the government but while serving as an army conscript.

25. In 1984, Shahmahmood and I conducted a survey of the social organizational units that had constituted themselves in the Kacha Garhi camp. Our goal in particular was to discover to what extent the social units established by refugees in the camp reflected their tribal kinship ties. Of the fifty-nine groups we surveyed in Kacha Garhi (each of which had built and supported its own mosque), the vast majority contained families from an assortment of tribes. Some had previously lived and worked together in Afghanistan; some had established marriage connections prior to becoming refugees; some were thrown together by circumstance. Only a small handful of units consisted exclusively or even primarily of families connected to one another by ties to a common patrilineal ancestor, which is assumed to be the sine qua non of tribal organization in Afghanistan. See Edwards, “Marginality and Migration.”

26. Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy and Society.

27. For purposes of identification within the local section system, the residents of Mangwal proper are divided into five groups, each of which is understood to include the descendants of five ‘fathers’: Maluk Baba, Wahdat Baba, Sadat Baba, Amir Baba, and Jangi Baba. Even though they come from different backgrounds and lines of descent, the members of the various occupational groups in Mangwal are clustered in two groups that are also named after a supposedly ‘common’ ancestor: Dendar Baba and Musa Baba.

28. The Mohmand tribe has four major subtribes (Bayzi, Khoyzi, Halemzi, and Tarakzi). The Atamarkhel is a sub-branch of the Bayzi.

29. Not all of the representatives of these families still practice these occupations, but these lines of descent are remembered and often preserved in the names by which these families are known, and they are considered of lower social status because of the perception of inferior ancestry.

30. The association with Sufism disappeared after his grandfather’s death, but Shahmahmood’s father, who served in government ministries in different parts of the country, was often called back to the village to help resolve disputes and for consultation regarding important community affairs, a role Shahmahmood is called on to perform as well, especially since his father’s death.

31. I base this description both on personal conversations with Shahmahmood Miakhel and a paper he has written which includes a description of the social organization of Mangwal. See Miakhel, The Importance of Tribal.

32. Tyson, American Spartan,134–5. According to Tyson, Gant read that the Spartans had affixed the Greek lambda to their shields, so he tattooed it on his own forearm and had it made it into a patch for his men’s uniforms and affixed it as well to the sides of their vehicles in the field (Ibid., 100).

33. Tyson, American Spartan, 139.

34. Ibid., 72.

35. Ibid., 72.

36. Ibid., 82.

37. Tyson, American Spartan, 152–3. Two examples from Tyson’s book stand out as exemplary of how Gant viewed himself as more Afghan than the Afghans themselves, the first of which involved a local man who Gant believed had disrespected one of his men. In response to this act of disrespect, Gant put on old clothes, rummaged around in the compound’s trash heap to ensure that he smelled bad before meeting the man, then refused to shake his hand, declaring to him that he was ‘more Pashtun than you are.’ (195) The second involved an incident in which a vehicle that he and Tyson were riding in was struck by an IED, ‘Jim’s rage was all the more intense because he could not help but see the incident through the lens of Pashtunwali, as an unforgivable blow to his honor, to his namoos. They had attacked his family, his wife.’ (249).

38. For a more complete description and analysis of the Pakhtun culture of honor, see Anderson, “Khan and Khel”; “Sentimental Ambivalence”; and Edwards, Heroes of the Age, especially Chapter 2.

39. Gant, One Tribe at a Time, 7–8 (4).

40. Ibid., 4 (9).

41. Ibid., 4 (8).

42. Ibid., 13 (41).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David B. Edwards

David B. Edwards is an anthropologist and a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Michigan. The author of three books and numerous articles on Afghanistan, Edwards has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.