One morning just two weeks after he spoke with Adm. Olson, Jim opened his email at his house in Fayetteville to find a terse and defensive message from Col. Mark Schwartz, operations director for the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command–Afghanistan (CFSOCC-A) in Kabul. The command was in charge of all Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan. Schwartz brusquely rebuffed the one-tribe-at-a-time idea and implied that his command was already conducting tribal engagement. In fact, a fledgling 2009 experiment in recruiting local police in the eastern province of Wardak had largely failed because it did not follow many of Jim’s principles. Plans for a broader community defense initiative were under way but had only been attempted on a small scale, and had limited high-level U.S. and Afghan support. The initiative aimed to use volunteers like a neighborhood watch and did not involve arming or paying tribesmen—key elements of Jim’s strategy.
“There is no intent to put you on a ‘special team’ conducting tribal engagement,” Schwartz wrote. Instead, he said, Jim would be assigned as a “staff officer to the J35 Future Operations Directorate,” putting Jim in the last place on earth he ever wished to be: behind a desk. Like many military officers, Jim shunned desk jobs as dead-end assignments.
“I understand that you were potentially putting together a select group of NCOs to accompany you to the headquarters. Now that you have a better understanding of the scope of your duties working within the J35, you realize you do not require a team of individuals to accompany you,” Schwartz wrote.
Jim almost choked on his coffee. Who was this guy Schwartz? How could he override an order from Adm. Olson?
One reason Special Operations commanders in Afghanistan were so determined to confine Jim to a cubicle in Kabul was that the very public, four-star embrace of his strategy contained a damning subtext: an obvious Special Forces mission had been neglected at a time when U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were responsible for fighting the war. Jim’s paper raised a number of other troubling questions. Why did Jim need a handpicked team? Were not all Special Forces trained to be “special” in their ability to work with indigenous fighters? But after eight years on the ground in Afghanistan, why did so few of them speak Pashto? The answer, Jim believed and wasn’t afraid to voice, was that in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Special Forces teams had largely been tasked to conduct raids and other direct-action missions. He readily admitted that he, too, had been blinded by the “kill and capture” mentality during his early deployments as a captain. The Special Forces had lost sight of their core skill: integrating with local people and teaching them how to fight for themselves.
The Schwartz email also smacked of a turf war. Olson had plucked Jim out for the mission and—together with Petraeus and McChrystal—issued a “by name” request to change his orders from Iraq to Afghanistan. But as Jim soon learned, Olson’s command, and those of Mulholland and Repass under it, were by law headquarters dedicated to providing forces and thus had limited or no authority over overseas combat operations. They were designed to train and equip forces to supply them to the overseas combatant commanders running the wars. Those commanders—mainly conventional military officers who were often risk-averse and wary of Special Operators—had the final say in employing the forces. So while Olson could create a team and try to influence how it was used, he often faced resistance from downrange.
Caught in the bureaucratic crossfire, Jim could only watch as the colonels and generals who had been behind him ran for cover.
“Your employment will be decided by the in-theater chain of command,” Maxwell stated dryly. Privately, he advised Jim to be careful, warning that his conspicuousness could cause him to be “crushed under the weight of the senior leaders who are chasing the shiny thing.”
Jim decided to take the matter directly to Olson. The admiral was no stranger to brawling, but he knew when to throw his punches and when to dance to the side. Olson realized that too much prominence could prove deadly for a military officer’s career. Jim needed to assume a low profile until the opposition he faced from the military command in Afghanistan blew over. Olson assigned Jim to a new program in Washington, DC, designed to groom military personnel for long-term service in Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as the Afghanistan-Pakistan (AFPAK) Hands program. The downside was, instead of assembling his handpicked team and heading to Afghanistan, Jim would be cooling his heels studying Pashto for another six months.
At 8:00 p.m. on December 1, 2009, the same day Jim learned he was going to the AFPAK Hands program, President Obama stepped onto the stage at the packed Eisenhower Hall Theatre at West Point to address the nation on Afghanistan. At Fort Bragg, Jim watched on television as the president strode past a royal blue curtain and took the podium.
“Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backward,” he said, explaining how the Taliban reemerged while requests by U.S. commanders for more troops went unmet. “The security situation is more serious than . . . anticipated. In short: the status quo is not sustainable,” he said.
“As your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined, and worthy of your service,” Obama said, addressing the crowd of uniformed cadets in the audience. After a policy review, he said, he had determined that “it is in our vital national interest to send an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan.”
Jim nodded, feeling encouraged by the president’s commitment to the war. But he didn’t expect what came next. It was the precondition for the troop surge that had concerned the top U.S. military advisors handed the Afghanistan problem in the Oval Office just two days before—one they might have preferred to keep quiet.
“After eighteen months, our troops will begin to come home,” Obama pledged.
Fuck me! Jim thought. Our commander in chief just told the Taliban how long they have to wait us out!
In his view, Obama’s public announcement of a deadline to begin the troop withdrawal sent exactly the wrong message—to U.S. troops, to the American and Afghan people, and, most important, to the enemy.
Obama had just set the clock on the war ticking, but Jim would have to wait another half year before he got on the ground.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN I MET JIM, one of the first things I noticed was his startle reflex.
Soon after I stepped into his Crystal City, Virginia, apartment in January 2010, the sharp clack of a door down the hall sent him momentarily into a crouch, his arms poised at his sides. I ignored the combat-zone impulse, which didn’t surprise me.
Anyone who’s had repetitive exposure to incoming fire is hypervigilant. When I returned from covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I imagined that I saw charred bodies lying on the side of the road in my manicured Bethesda neighborhood. When the annual Fourth of July fireworks exploded at the country club across the street, I curled up in a ball and pressed my hands against my ears.
“Would you like a drink?” Jim asked as he reached for a glass, filled it with ice, and poured in Johnnie Walker Black and a splash of Coke.
“Why not?” I said.
I glanced across the living room and noticed a few empty scotch bottles standing on a corner table. He’d only lived in the apartment a few days. Self-medication. Some used alcohol, others pills, but they all did it. Many in the military—especially in Special Forces—saw any admission of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or psychological problems as career ending. No wonder the Army’s suicide rate was soaring.
Funny thing is, I had brought Jim one more bottle—fuel for the flames. It was Early Times, the rotgut Kentucky whiskey his dad mailed to him in Afghanistan because it was sold in plastic containers. As a reporter, I picked up on that kind of detail—personal preferences, habits, likes and dislikes. I did my homework before interviews. It was something I had learned years earlier, when I met former New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in his Paris apartment. “Remember every bit of information. It will be useful one day,” he advised me, after showing me a wal
l full of signed black-and-white photographs of famous people he’d interviewed. So when I called Jim’s dad in Denton, Texas, to ask him about his son for the commentary I was writing about Jim’s one-tribe-at-a-time strategy, he mentioned Early Times. What he didn’t tell me, though, was that Early Times made Jim crazy.
Jim smiled when I handed him the bottle, his glance at me making me feel ever so slightly uncomfortable. I took a sip of my drink. He tried to nurse his, but it was soon gone. He poured another.
A few weeks before we met I’d finished my article, an opinion piece for the Outlook section of the Washington Post. Jim’s sophisticated insights on the Pashtun tribes, coupled with his rough demeanor, had intrigued me. “I am not a very nice guy,” Jim told me when I interviewed him by phone. “I lead men in combat. I am not a Harvard guy. You don’t want me on your think tank.” I needed photographs to accompany the piece, so I met Jim at his apartment that chilly evening to go over images of his Special Forces team in Konar Province in 2003. He took out a stack of photos and offered to tell me about them.
“Afghanistan was still the Wild Wild West. There weren’t a lot of U.S. forces in the area,” he began, showing me a picture of the Konar River valley. “This region was of strategic importance because of where it sits along the border with Pakistan.”
I knew Jim didn’t trust reporters. In 2007 his commander in Baghdad had handed him a three-by-five card with my name on it and told him to call me in Washington for an interview about his Silver Star battle. Jim’s command apparently knew I had a solid reputation—I’d gained the confidence of a lot of wary military officers—and so picked me to become the only reporter he would speak with. Ten minutes into the conversation, Jim was telling me his beliefs about God and warfare. We talked for well over an hour. I was impressed by Jim’s deep understanding of the culture of the Shiite Iraqi police he fought with. He was appreciative that, a day later, I took the time to interview his close Iraqi comrade and interpreter, Mack.
As with Iraq, I knew the intensity of Jim’s approach to Afghanistan had caught the eye of senior commanders. A couple of days before I met Jim, Petraeus weighed in on Jim’s one-tribe-at-a-time strategy in an email. “Ann—on the record: Major Jim Gant’s paper is very impressive—so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely.”
Petraeus wants this out, I thought. He’s pushing this. I later learned that the politically savvy Petraeus considered Jim the “perfect counterinsurgent” to infiltrate the halls of power in Washington and Kabul and launch a local security program on the ground.
But as I sat listening to Jim talk about Konar, one thing was certain: Jim Gant was no David Petraeus.
“I was born in the Konar,” Jim went on, looking at another scene of the harsh yet beautiful landscape. “I became a man there.”
Afghanistan, he had discovered as a thirty-five-year-old Army captain, was a nation of ancient, warring tribes. The largest tribe was the Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan’s population and inhabit the east and south. The Pashtuns live by the tribal code of Pashtunwali, which requires a Pashtun man to protect his honor by fighting for what is his—his village, his valley, his tribe. Jim learned about Pashtunwali at the knee of a sixty-eight-year-old tribal chief, Malik Noor Afzhal, whom he respectfully nicknamed “Sitting Bull.”
Jim showed me a photograph of Noor Afzhal, imposing in a silver-gray turban, and recounted the day he had met the venerable tribal leader in his village of Mangwel in Konar. He had learned of a land dispute involving Noor Afzhal’s Mohmand tribe and made a gut decision to ally with the powerful elder.
“I looked him right in the eye—after knowing him for about four hours—and told him that we would do whatever he needed us to do,” Jim said. “I took a lot of heat for that.”
Noor Afzhal and his men bonded with Jim and his team because they were themselves a small tribe united by a similar set of beliefs, he said.
“All of our values and ethos are those of a warrior. The tribesmen knew that we would fight next to them, that we would die. They knew that we would kill for them,” he said.
“Tell me more about Sitting Bull,” I asked.
“Ah, Sitting Bull,” Jim said. “He was like my own father. We would sit together and speak Pashtunglish. . . .” His voice trailed off. “I am hoping that someday, when they write the story of the war, Sitting Bull will be included, because he was a great man.”
Jim took another drink of his scotch and turned to look at me.
“Now,” he said. “You tell me about Afghanistan.”
I thought for a minute.
“I think I’ll show you instead,” I replied.
I did a quick search of the Post website for articles and video I’d taken the previous summer while embedded with a company of U.S. Marines in Helmand Province, the most violent place in Afghanistan. I hit PLAY.
On the screen, a sweaty Marine platoon sergeant and his men were crouching in grass in a tree line, when suddenly we came under Taliban fire at close range.
“Fire on it!” the sergeant screamed to his men. “Where’s my fucking SAW gunner?”
Gunfire exploded in footage I’d taken of several close-up firefights with the Marines. It always made my pulse quicken to watch it.
Jim, kneeling beside me, stared at the screen. He was silent, and then he said: “Ann, you have seen more combat than a lot of men I know. You have credibility with me.” He paused again before asking, “Would you like to go to dinner?”
“Sure,” I said with a smile.
We walked to a nearby Spanish tapas restaurant, talking nonstop. The room was so dim that we could barely read the menu, and the food was terrible, but neither of us cared.
As we picked at the dishes, Jim began telling me in detail about his inner battles—the violent nightmares, the visions, the demons that mauled him whenever he tried to sleep. I listened attentively. I thought of all the times, in dusty outposts and lonely barracks, soldiers traumatized by combat had broken down while talking with me. Sometimes I put down my notebook and simply hugged them or held their hands. I was no longer a reporter; I was just another human being. Still, I had always kept my own trauma to myself. Not that night.
Something about Jim made me want to tell him—the first person ever—about the aching depression I had suffered after returning from the war zone.
“One morning on a walk, I had an epiphany,” I told him. “I realized that I had just been born. I was an infant. I had to give myself time to learn and explore. I started crawling out of the depression,” I said. “Before long, I was back in combat.”
Jim reached across the table and took my hand.
“Ann, I am certain that in past lives, you too have fought many battles as a warrior—one far fiercer than I.”
For the first time all evening, he seemed calm.
CHAPTER 8
SOON AFTER HE ARRIVED in Washington on a bitterly cold day in January 2010, Jim began a five-month Pashto course. The curriculum was part of the AFPAK Hands program. Military officers enrolled in the program could study several different languages, including the Pakistani dialect Urdu and the standard Afghan tongue Dari, which is derived from Persian and used for official government business and media reports.
But Jim chose to concentrate on Pashto, the language of the Pashtun tribes, spoken by about fourteen million ethnic Pashtuns in Afghanistan and another twenty-four million across the border in Pakistan. The Pashtuns are the largest tribal society in the world. They derive their power by dominating a large swath of territory in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan that they call Pashtunistan. Jim understood that no Afghan ruler or foreign invader had ever held power in Afghanistan without backing from the Pashtun tribes, and that is one reason the country has not had strong central governments. As hundreds of years of history have proven, as the Pashtuns go, so goes Afghanistan.
Jim was advised by military superiors to stay under the radar in Washington, but the buzz over his tribal engagement strat
egy made that hard. After arriving in DC, Jim got a flurry of invitations to talk about the tribes in Afghanistan and explain how he believed they could be leveraged to help secure the country. Still, Jim initially held off. A self-taught man, he wanted first to read everything he could get his hands on to better understand the Pashtuns. Jim reached out to some of the leading tribal experts in the world, including David Ronfeldt and William “Mac” McCallister. He devoured books on Afghanistan and tribalism—from The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe, a British administrator who governed a Pashtun territory in the 1940s, to the Muqaddimah by the fourteenth-century Tunisian Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun. Often he found himself reading four or five books at a time. What he learned fascinated him and reinforced what he had intuitively sensed during his 2003 and 2004 deployments in Afghanistan.
Historically, Jim found, the Pashtun identity has been so strong that in large parts of Afghanistan “Pashtun” was synonymous with “Afghan.” Belonging to a tribe, being a peer, not only protects the individual but provides a man with a deep sense of identity. Abdul Wali Khan, a learned urban Pashtun politician and leader of Pakistan’s opposition party in the 1970s, was once questioned about his loyalty to his country. His response: “I have been a Pakistani for thirty years, a Muslim for fourteen hundred years, and a Pashtun for five thousand years.” Pashtuns have little doubt about their identity as Muslims, believing their earliest ancestor, Qais Abdur Rashid, was directly mentored by the prophet Muhammed. Given such a deep shared lineage and connection to particular patches of land, no matter how barren or remote, tribal life fulfills every one of the five strata of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The tribe provides food, security, love and belonging, self-esteem, and an understanding of one’s place in the world. Simply put, Jim believed that the eastern Afghan tribes offered Pashtuns everything that a person could want.
Especially revealing to Jim were the writings of Ibn Khaldun, one of the earliest thinkers to analyze the Islamic peoples living independently of central authority in the region’s mountains, steppes, and deserts independent of central authority. Ibn Khaldun focused mainly on marginal groups such as the Bedouin nomads of North Africa and the tribes of Arabia. But modern scholars—in particular Boston University anthropology professor Thomas Barfield—found Ibn Khaldun’s model of social organization equally relevant for the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan. Most compelling to Jim was Barfield’s application of Ibn Khaldon’s theory in his 2010 book Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History.
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