In the Muqaddimah, completed in 1377, Ibn Khaldun laid out simply and brilliantly the primal political divide of peoples such as the Afghans. Long before modern democracy, communism, or socialism, Ibn Khaldun proposed that these peoples fell into just two categories—tribal and urban. He then put forward the notion that most civil unrest in the country was the result of these two diametrically opposed cultures. Dogma did not divide men on any level in nearly the manner that their chosen way of life did.
Ibn Khaldun described the tribal world as a “desert civilization,” one founded on what environmentalists today would romantically call “sustainable living.” Tribes, whether settled farmers or nomadic herders, are autonomous. They live off the land, growing the crops they need to eat and raising the livestock necessary to sustain the group. Because a majority of Afghanistan’s tribes are rooted in rugged terrain or isolated valleys where individuals alone would perish, kinship is vital. This isolation also prevents the tribes from being easily conquered.
As tribal economies are based on subsistence, not surplus, there is little value in growing more food or slaughtering more livestock than the group can live on. Material personal possessions, beyond the necessity of weapons to defend the tribe and protect its natural resources, are few. One man’s home is just like another’s. A chief eats roughly the same food in the same quantities as any other peer. With resources scarce in the marginal areas that Afghanistan’s tribes call home, wealth is equated not with money but with land and livestock.
What little wealth there is in a tribe is invested in relationships. After the community has been fed, whatever surplus remains is traded in town or village bazaars. The extra food or goods brought back from the marketplace are then used for hospitality and communal feasts, not personal consumption. Gift givers are highly esteemed, and power is reflected in a man’s ability to live simply, not in his ability to hoard.
Tribal life is based on honor. An honorable man brings tribute to his tribe, a venal man humiliation. Similarly, an assault on one peer is an assault on the entire tribe. Justice is meted out not by a policing arm of a centralized governing body but by the entire community. If a man is murdered by a member of another tribe, blood revenge or reparations must be enforced. If a tribal warrior is called to battle, he fights bravely and will not retreat unless the tribal elders determine it is best to fight another day. Retreating to save oneself, though, is the most shameful act imaginable.
The tribe is led by elders, those peers with the most experience. But in essence a tribe is egalitarian, run by consensus. A chief does not have dictatorial power. He does not live in a palace. He cannot give orders and expect blind compliance. Instead, he must earn and constantly re-earn trust. If his leadership is lacking, there is no shortage of other ambitious peers capable of taking his position. While a chief with the respect and support of a majority of tribe members can strongly influence the direction of a tribe, he is expected to listen to and refute the arguments of detractors in order to get his decisions approved. The wisdom of the crowd counterbalances charismatic dominance.
In stark contrast to this tribal world or “desert civilization,” Ibn Khaldun wrote, is the world of the urban or “sedentary civilization.” Cities in Afghanistan have greater population density, more wealth, greater social inequality, and a political order that is more hierarchical. In the urban centers, divisions of wealth and class are far stronger, social bonds weaker. Individuals take care of their nuclear family first, putting it before the larger kinship group. Governments exert more authority over the population through bureaucracies and taxation.
When it came to warfare, the contrast between the sedentary civilizations and the tribes was most striking, Ibn Khaldun observed. For city peoples, a man’s honor was defined differently than in a tribe. His position in the social hierarchy was determined by his net material worth. War was outsourced to specialists and was not a skill valued in a society driven by its surplus economy. But the self-sustaining tribes living in mountainous lands were adept at deadly conflict. By necessity, they defended their homes from neighboring threats and were well versed in the strategies and tactics of war. Their warrior’s ethos was built on death before dishonor. Tribes viewed the city people as weak and venal. Urban dwellers looked down upon the tribes as primitive and uncivilized. When the two cultures collided on a battlefield, however, one prevailed over and over again. Historically, Ibn Khaldun found that when the central urban powers became vulnerable in places such as Afghanistan, with flagging economies raising the ire of unpaid mercenaries and a widening segment of the rural population, desert civilizations rode herd. Camel-riding Bedouins and Turkish nomadic horsemen attracted by the wealth of the cities attacked and conquered. The autocrats were cast out and glory and wealth came to desert empires. Then a process by which the desert people were seduced by the luxuries available in the sedentary world began. The allure of better food, better clothes, and power transformed and corrupted tribesmen into the urban life. Within a few generations, the process would begin anew. Thus in Afghanistan social status at times overlaid and trumped ethnic affiliation—a Pashtun living in Kabul had far more in common with his Tajik neighbor in the city than he did with a Pashtun living in a qalat in the Konar River valley.
The divide between these two worlds, tribal and settled, remains strong in Afghanistan today. Most important, the geographic isolation of the tribes in the mountains and large expanses of desert hinders the central government from asserting control over the tribal people.
Jim fell hard for the desert civilization code and its ethos of Pashtunwali in 2003, while living with the Mohmand tribe and fighting the Taliban alongside them in Konar Province. He related to their warrior creed as parallel to the life he’d embraced himself as a Green Beret and one he preached to lead his small band of men into battle. It resonated with the ancient laws abided by the obedient three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. Honor, strength, and loyalty were not empty platitudes to Afghanistan’s tribes; they were as important to tribal members as were water and wheat. As important as they were to Jim. As important as Jim assumed they were to the U.S. military establishment.
In 2010, as Jim prepared to return to Afghanistan, he increasingly realized that the only way to stabilize the country was to empower the desert civilizations, the Pashtuns still living in the rugged lands bordering and inside Pakistan. It was the pursuit of this honor, through physical courage and battling a common enemy, that Jim believed would allow him to become close to the Pashtuns. To ally with these proud fighters, to befriend them and help them recover their economies while also giving them the power to defend themselves, would not only take the fight to the Taliban but also draw disgruntled Taliban foot soldiers back to their villages, back to their tribes, secure and confident in their ability to come home and make a life for themselves. They could retreat with honor.
Jim was convinced that the reintegration of the Taliban fighters was a key component of any plan for long-term stability and could happen through the tribal network. Taliban foot soldiers continued to fight after years of hardship and immense disadvantage on the battlefield. Why? One reason was that battling the Americans was a way to earn their stripes as warriors. If they could fight against the Taliban and alongside fellow tribesmen, would they? The answer, Jim knew, was yes.
Jim viewed the Taliban’s top leaders—Islamic extremists such as the one-eyed Mullah Omar—as championing a dogmatic, tyrannical movement that by its very nature threatened to dismantle the millennia-old rule by tribal elders. If the U.S. military were to convincingly help village elders take back their clans, defend their honor and traditions, and return their tribes to the authority of these egalitarian peer councils, the Taliban would be hollowed out and ultimately destroyed. The men who left the villages to join the Taliban in the turmoil of the civil wars would come back and take their rightful places inside their tribes. With no foot soldiers, the Taliban would lose power. The best way to empower the rough-hewn tribes, Jim
believed, was with small teams of Special Forces such as his ODA 316, living among them one warrior to another. Once one tribe was secure, the team would leave and knock on the qalats of the tribe next door and start all over. It required little manpower or money, but could help Afghanistan begin to change from a war-torn terrorist haven to a more stable U.S. ally.
This was heady stuff. As Jim spent hours in Washington, DC, memorizing Pashto vocabulary, practicing the ornate Arabic-style script, and reading about Afghan culture, the speaking invitations continued to pour in. After Jim’s “One Tribe at a Time” hit in-boxes at the Pentagon, in Congress, and at the White House, everyone from four-star generals to policy wonks wanted to hear from him directly. Jim’s ideas were fresh and adaptable to both counterinsurgency and counterterrorism proponents. After Obama announced his Afghanistan surge, policy makers were continuing to wrangle over specific initiatives that could help turn the tide of the war. Recruiting Afghanistan’s tribesmen and villagers to defend their own communities, as Jim had argued, was one of those initiatives. In Washington, policy reports were constantly circulated by think tanks as a form of not-so-subtle political warfare, and Jim’s paper was no different. So Jim soon found himself in a suit and tie—completely out of his element—debating strategy as he gave a series of talks on his tribal engagement plan. Jim’s friend Steven Pressfield, the author who had edited and published “One Tribe at a Time,” was on the speaking tour with him.
At the think tanks, there was a mixture of support and skepticism. Critics argued that tribal engagement could sap power from the Afghan government and its security forces, and risked creating local militias. Others said a strategy focused on tribes was too narrow, and Jim agreed that in some areas it would be necessary to work with other types of local leaders, as years of war had weakened the tribal structure in some parts of the country, such as the south. But there was broad agreement that leveraging the tribes was important and had been overlooked. Perhaps the most serious criticism was that the U.S. military lacked the pool of talent needed to carry out the strategy on a wide scale. “I just don’t see how the United States can back a strategy that is predicated upon it being implemented by geniuses,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and advisor at the Center for a New American Security, a prominent Washington defense think tank.
Jim and Pressfield were also asked to speak at the Washington-area military schools and bases. There, they found the audiences of young officers hugely enthusiastic—like Jim, they all seemed hungry for a worthy mission. At Quantico and Annapolis, hundreds of Marines and Naval midshipmen turned out. Jim’s last stop was at Mahan Hall at the Naval Academy.
It was nine at night when Jim spoke. A crowd of midshipmen filled the audience, taking time away from their required studies. Jim was tired. But his real self came out. He looked into the young men’s eyes, and he made them members of his team.
I don’t want you for eight months. I don’t want you for eighteen months. I want you committed for as long as it takes. You will not be just good. Good doesn’t count for shit. You will be great. I will make you great.
When I send you out with the tribes, you will wear what they wear, eat what they eat, sleep where they sleep and live and die not as an American but as an Afghan. If you get home once in eighteen months, you’ll be lucky—and I’ll give you only enough time to kiss your wife before you turn around and come back. How long will we stay? Till we win. Till that tribe is standing on its own two feet and doesn’t need us anymore.
You are there for them, not for yourself and not for the United States. Your agenda is their agenda. You can’t lie; they’ll see through it. You can’t bullshit; they’ll know it before you speak. You must be truer than you’ve ever thought you could be and braver than you’ve ever dreamed. Whatever you imagine your limits are, I will push you past them, and when I’m gone you’ll push yourself beyond even those. I won’t give you a medal, I won’t give you a warm bunk, I won’t give you a hot meal unless it helps the tribe you’re working with. You’ll eat rice and beans, wear Afghan clothes, and carry an AK-47. You won’t see an American uniform, helmet, or body armor. And if you die there, I’ll die alongside you.
When Jim finished, the middies swarmed the stage. “Where do I sign up, sir?” they asked him. “How soon can we leave?”
Yet despite the surge of professional recognition, the high-level accolades for his plan, and his new mission in Afghanistan, Jim felt drained by the bright lights, the uncomfortable suits and ties, the speeches and political games. The war of words so intrinsic to Washington was not the kind of combat Jim thrived on. At the same time, his mind and soul had never recovered from Iraq. But now he had to steel himself to kill and die once again. He felt himself slipping into a precarious, downhill slide mentally and emotionally. He just wanted to get back in the mountains with a couple hundred guns, some men like him, a bundle of dry kindling for a fire, and a couple of sacks of beans and rice. He wanted to get away from the empty sparring of Washington and into the heart of the Taliban insurgency.
CHAPTER 9
A COOL MIST WAFTED over the long rows of white marble gravestones at Arlington Memorial Cemetery and disappeared into a line of trees, their tall trunks and bare branches like silent sentries silhouetted against a wintry sky.
On the south side of the cemetery, Jim and I gathered with a small group of mourners at the columbarium, where cremated remains are interred. It was January 22, 2010, and within days a major snowfall and blizzard would hit Washington, DC, burying the cemetery in several feet of snow. But that afternoon, the only hint of the cold front was a chill wind that cut through my navy coatdress and Jim’s thin green jacket as we stood listening to the eulogy for his driver from Iraq, Sgt. 1st Class Jean-Paul LeBrocq.
I could tell that Jim, standing next to me, was deep in thought.
Jim’s mind rushed from Arlington to the Iraqi desert, where for six months in 2006 and 2007 he and LeBrocq had lived and fought together in the heat and dust. They had come to know each other in battle. They had walked the same path. He recalled LeBrocq, steady at the wheel of his Humvee, when an explosion rocked the vehicle and shrouded them in debris. He saw him kneeling in the middle of that road to Baghdad on December 11 with insurgent rounds cracking over his head. He remembered him speaking fondly of his wife, Teresa. Jim glanced over at the soldier’s teenage son, Bryan, his pale face somber and brave beyond his years. And he thought of Liam, just a toddler, conceived after LeBrocq returned from Iraq and before he was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. LeBrocq died just before Christmas.
Across the grassy field, an Army rifle party, wearing white gloves, dark navy uniforms, and caps, fired a volley in a final salute to LeBrocq. As the echo of the rounds dissipated into the haunting and strangely peaceful place that is Arlington, I looked over and saw a single tear running down Jim’s cheek. I took hold of his arm, and he pulled my hand to his chest and gripped it tightly. He did not let go.
Jim had been back from Iraq for two and a half years. But he had never really made it home. Now he was bracing himself for Afghanistan and the inevitable mental and emotional strain of another long combat tour. I understood. It was my job, and I felt it deeply, too.
I had seen my share of combat covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 for the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post. When I first ventured into a war zone in March 2003, I rode with the force that spearheaded the invasion of Iraq all the way to Baghdad. I put on an Army-issued chemical suit and climbed into a Humvee in Kuwait with the 3rd Infantry Division. Along the way, we braved sandstorms, chemical weapons alarms, and suicidal enemy attacks, and left a trail of death and destruction.
Two of the journalist colleagues I set out with were killed in a rocket strike. I was threatened with a rifle at point-blank range by a spooked U.S. soldier. With everyone else, I lost much of whatever innocence I had left. My sense of time and space grew severely distorted, and my faith was challenged. With every bloody mile, the soldier
s and I felt more betrayed by the Washington officials who had ordered the invasion, resentful that they couldn’t fathom what they’d asked of the troops, and that the weapons of mass destruction that were the justification for the war didn’t seem to exist. I flew out of Iraq in 2003 in a C-130 plane full of dead U.S. service members in gray body bags. I had to step carefully over the rows of body bags in the plane’s belly to make it to my seat in the cockpit. I landed in Kuwait after weeks in the desert, took my first sip of cold water, and felt the unfamiliar firmness of asphalt under my boots. In a surreal twist, after weeks of sleeping in and on military vehicles, a well-intentioned hotel attendant gave me a room in the presidential suite at the Kuwait Hilton Resort. All I could do was heat up an MRE packaged military meal, wash off a little of the dust that caked my face, hands, and body, and try to sleep. All night a yellow light glowed in the hallway, and I slipped in and out of a dream that I was in another sandstorm on the outskirts of Baghdad. I struggled to keep the rest of the world and all of its sensations at bay while I gradually reentered life a changed person.
I came home to suburban Bethesda, Maryland, in April and found myself in a grassy backyard surrounded by blooming daffodils and my four wonderful children. But I had only partly returned. Every day I lived and breathed the war as I covered the news. Senses honed by danger and hardship added a strange new dimension to ordinary life at home. Hikes along the Potomac felt at times like combat patrols, and I fell asleep in my clothes on the couch, just as in Iraq, where I slept anywhere I could find a place, only taking off my boots. I was living in a twilight zone between two separate worlds. But I had no one to talk with about it, particularly since my husband was opposed to my war coverage.
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