socialmedian: Going Tribal in Afghanistan

Hi there. I'm Jason, one of the founders of socialmedian.

socialmedian delivers the news, filtered by your network.

We'd love to have you join in.

You can use facebook connect to sign in.

Add News Flash

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clips

Going Tribal in Afghanistan

Source: SWJ Blog

Nov 06, 2009

Summary

Going Tribal in Afghanistan - James Dao, New York Times.

In Washington, the debate over Afghanistan seems to center around two broad ideas: counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism. Should the United States add troops for a more population-centric strategy, as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal advocates? Or should it use a less ground-heavy approach, disrupting Al Qaeda with Special Operation Forces and unmanned drones, as Vice President Joseph Biden argues? There is, of course, no shortage of other ideas, many of them afloat in the blogosphere. Among the more provocative ones has been posted on Steven Pressfield’s blog, It’s the Tribes, Stupid, and it comes from an Army Special Forces major who has spent much time in both Afghanistan and Iraq training indigenous fighters.

The 45-page paper, “One Tribe at a Time” by Maj. Jim Gant, argues that one way to undermine the insurgency is to return, in part, to the strategy that ousted the Taliban to begin with: Embed small, highly skilled and almost completely autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan. Much like the G ...Read the full article

Comments (0)

Add Your Comment