so long as its inhabitants had primary loyalty to themselves and a secondary loyalty to us.
And from this I wonder if we can gain, from some serious "living among them" effort, a sense of loyalty derived from the Pashtunwali code. If that code could be exploited through IO, engagement, development, etc., in order to allow support for our efforts, and that support was in harmony with faith in Allah, we'd probably be headed along the right track (let's term it the "Gant Path").

The beautiful thing about Gant's proposal is that we don't have to do it in all 40,000 villages in the country. That's why we orient on key terrain at times...all 40K villages are not key, but the need to determine the ones that are is paramount.

I wonder how we'd fair if we could all just grow beards as a first best practice.