Excellent little paper on the nuances of calling for and attending a Jirga or Shura. I put this up on the blog because contractors attend these meetings all the time, as well as the military. That means we can hurt the war effort or help the war effort, all based on how we conduct ourselves at these kinds of meetings. Do you want to be the guy or the company that completely pisses off a region or village because you did not know how these meetings worked?
My intention here is to get individual contractors thinking about this stuff, and try to apply some of these lessons learned to their own processes out there. That is Kaizen and that is what is required of any company or individual that claims to have a learning organization or claims to be a student of warfare. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Also, if you go to this link at Small Wars Journal, you can follow along in the conversation and talk with the authors about the subject. Enjoy. –Matt
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Tribal Engagement: The Jirga and the Shuraby Major Jim Gant and William “Mac” McCallister
According to NATO’s military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now maintain shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces. While we like to see the world in black and white, the complexities of relationships and alliances in the village and valley make it anything but a straightforward contest between two parties. The U.S. strategy of stripping away Taliban loyalists is not easy in a very complex socio-political landscape. This landscape includes different types of traditional authority, local rivalries and the various configurations of social power in each village and valley.
The rubber of U.S. strategy meets the road in the village assembly. It is in the local assemblies where Coalition Forces speak directly with the local inhabitants and indirectly with the shadow governors of the Taliban. Identifying ahead of time the familial, sectarian, security, economic and political alliances represented in a given village or valley assembly will assist in identifying how these alliances might influence group decisions. We must also contemplate, identify and differentiate between two very different village assemblies: the jirga and shura.
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Major Jim Gant is currently assigned to the Afghanistan Pakistan Hands (AFPAK Hands) Program as a Tribal Engagement Advisor. AFPAK Hands is designed to develop cadres of officers (and civilians) from each of the military’s services who agree to three to five year tours to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. He will be returning to Afghanistan in the near future.
William “Mac” McCallister is a retired military officer. He has worked extensively in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has applied his study of tribal culture in assessing reconstruction efforts, as well as insurgency and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror.
Download the paper here.
Link to Small Wars Journal post and discussion here.