As I understand it the various formations organized by the British in India which could be considered Frontier ‘Scouts’ were recruited locally and officered by regular Indian or British Army officers who had long experience in the Northwest Frontier. These men were very conversant in the languages, dialects, culture, traditions and geography of the area. They could do this because India was in a sense for many of them not merely a posting but their home, particularly for British types serving in the Indian Army. One of the reasons that Indian Army service was welcomed was that officers of modest means could live sumptuously in India on very little money and were accustomed to the easy deference paid to them during the Imperial period. While I would never say we could not do the same it seems probably not likely. Firstly, and most importantly American officers are not intimately involved in the area on a long term basis thus allowing them in many respects to go local. Few if any American officers would consider a semi-permanent posting to Afghanistan as anything but a career disaster. Additionally, a factor we often forget to day in our era of instant communications is that those British officers carried much greater authority to act and make decisions locally than an American officer second guessed and hounded about the smallest detail by hyper-active headquarters of today. One of the great shortcomings of modern militaries is that officer’s roles have changed to often being little more than robots with little allowance for initiative. And God help you if you make the smallest mistake that could be a career ender. The modern micro management of the smallest operations by higher command levels that should have better things to do would cripple the effectiveness of such a force particularly in the American military which worships the god of command and control as no other.

Would we give American troops the T.E. Lawrence treatment? If you notice, in most pictures, Lawrence wears his British Army uniform with the Arab headdress (as opposed to our popular image, where he wore all Arab robes).

On the topic of uniforms, it's sad that I know the troops in that picture are in the 25th Infantry Division based on their orange reflector belts...

What Ricks is ignoring is the larger issue of how the British governed South Asia. The enforced social distance was both a source of weakness and strength for the British. Recall Ricks said that the young men sent to the frontier were well educated, the best and the brightest. The problem is the US Army is far larger and more cumbersome and filled with lots of Americans, some of whom are the best and the brightest, some of whom are flotsom and jetsom recruited outside a Walmart. The Brits made a policy of not allowing "regular" Englishmen come to India. So with the exception of a few soldiers, there weren't 't a bunch of working class types sauntering around Lahore.

In some regards we resemble the Russians more in our approach to overseas operations. And, just as Curzon noted regarding the Russians, this is a strength for us. There is less of a social distance and more familiarity. We are seen as less snotty than the British, and from what I heard Pashtuns don't like English people (makes you wonder what genius assigned them to the area around Marwand) But, as the Russians found out, familiarity breeds contempt. I would also add that world that Ricks speaks of is over. Those places are still way out of touch with the modern world, but still. Paul Theroux noted back in the 1970s that the very worst thing that could happen for Western image in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1970s was the arrival of the hippies. It was a case of familiarity bred contempt. I wonder to what extent knowledge or myths about Western decadence play out in Afghanistan? To what extent has Brittney Spears undermined the effort? In a society based on honor, you can't really respect a man who comes from a place where girls put out on the first date. That's why Russians are viewed with such contempt in many countries. I've not been to Afghanistan, but I've traveled in the Middle East and spoken with plenty of Afghan expats, and I kind of independently came to the same conclusion as Theroux. I'm not saying its right. I'm just saying that the kind of snobbish pruddery (indeed bigoted) required for what Ricks writes about is not to be found in the US these days. That's a good thing for society in general, but, yeah.....

You were quite right to point out the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. But I was referring to Tsarist Era Russia. I realize now I didn't make that distinction. If you are interested, Curzon's book "Russia in Central Asia" is on Google books. It's a worthwhile read for this topic. For what it's worth, Curzon is a little too generous to the Russians. But he was in a good position to judge both the Brits and the Russians.
For all their faults and failures in the 20th century as Soviets, and the ongoing human tragedy that is the Caucasus (people forget the Georgians practically begged the Russians to protect them from the Ottomans and the Persians) we forget the largely successful experience of the Tsarist Army in the 19th Century, particularly in the area of the 'stans. And, ultimately, the Russians left the 'stans of their own accord, they weren't chased out.

I understand that the Tsarist era Russians weren't dealing with Pashtuns, but many of the ethnic groups they ruled over can be found in the North and West of Afghanistan, and they were dealing with a fairly sensitive area, in terms of Muslim sensibilities. Bukhara had been an Islamic religious center for over 1,000 years. And, realizing this, the Tsarist powers didn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. They let the emir and the mullahs have the run of the place, content to practice a loose suzreignity over the Bukharan emirate. They did, however, destroy the khanate of Khiva in the West, and did a number on the Turkmen. But that was payback for centuries of steppe slave raids on the Slavs (pun intended, slave comes from the word Slav), it was also pretty mortifying for a would-be member of the Western club to have so many of its subjects as slaves in Khiva.
But, back to the Tsarist experience. They also conquered the Eastern part of what is now Uzbekistan, the khanate of Koqand, which they ruled directly. And they ruled it so well they experienced migration from areas ruled directly by the Emir of Bukhara and from Iran. Goes to show that Muslims would tolerate the control of non-Muslim powers if they were governed moderately well- not overly taxed, and left to the everyday issues on their own.
You mentioned Jim Gant earlier; the Russians had a similar experience to one he mentions, namely property disputes. And back then, just as with Major Gant, the party siddling up to the colonial force had "documents" proving their claims to the land. In fact, some of these documents were such sophisticated forgeries that they were revealed to be forgeries until the 1950s by scholars. Unlike Gant, however, the Tsarist era officials didn't touch those issues with a ten-foot pole. They said take it up with a qadi (Islamic judge) and avoided getting dragged into local feuds.
Now the Soviets, on the other hand, were a much different creature. They had an ideology. I should also add the Soviets did reform gender relations in Central Asia. They destroyed the burka, but used methods I don't think we would resort to. Enough written on this, it's an extremely complicated topic, and I haven't done it the justice it deserves.

This endless romantic fascination with what the Brits did is very odd. Colonialism and European imperialism was an unmitigated disaster in human history. Anybody who thinks modern state building models are messed up only needs to look at any of the major European colonial empires to find something a million times worse. The main lesson from the British attempt to dominate the Pashtun tribal belt was the destructiveness and ultimate futility of their methods. They explored the full range of realistic options available at the time and got nowhere. Thus, they swung endlessly between hands-on engagement (road building, hospitals, free medicine, bribery) and containment/butcher and bolt tactics (raids, strafing, forts, barbed wire and aerial bombardment with petroleum shells)-the modern COIN vs Counter-Terrorism debate (drones vs. boots on the ground) debate in microcosm in fact. The overarching lesson was that stability never came close to being achieved, whilst imperialism as a broader phenomenon, via its corruption and rampant inequality, led directly to the broader great power competition that spawned the catastrophe of the First World War. Why would anyone rationally choose that era as a useful and productive starting point?