Jim Gant, the Green Beret who could win the war in Afghanistan
It was the spring of 2003, and Capt. Jim Gant and his Special Forces team had just fought their way out of an insurgent ambush in Afghanistan’s Konar province when they heard there was trouble in the nearby village of Mangwel.
There, Gant had a conversation with a tribal chief — a chance encounter that would redefine his mission in Afghanistan and that, more than six years later, could help salvage the faltering U.S. war effort.
Malik Noorafzhal, an 80-year-old tribal leader, told Gant that he had never spoken to an American before and asked why U.S. troops were in his country.
Gant, whose only orders upon arriving in Afghanistan days earlier had been to “kill and capture anti-coalition members,” responded by pulling out his laptop and showing Noorafzhal a video of the World Trade Center towers crumbling.
That sparked hours of conversation between the intense 35-year-old Green Beret and the elder in a tribe of 10,000. “I spent a lot of time just listening,” Gant said.
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