In 1915, French officers sought to subdue the powerful Beni Mestara tribe of the Jbala region of northern Morocco by cutting off the tribe’s access to grain imported from the Gharb plain. These officers read the Jbala in terms of its lack of grain, thereby overlooking the diverse and storable production of the hill country. The French blockade of the grain markets of the eastern Gharb in 1915 and 1916 was based on the faulty premise that the Beni Mestara needed grain from the Gharb to survive. French confidence that occupying the town of Wazzan and thereby denying the Beni Mestara access to its large market would be decisive was also misplaced. Mountain fractions of the Beni Mestara, led by the Beni Ymmel, fought until 1927, holding out even after the Rifian rebellion collapsed with 'Abd al-Krim's surrender in 1926. This long resistance speaks to the moral perception of the mountaineers; they were sustained by their confidence that resistance was just and pious. They were also sustained by their diverse and storable production, particularly their olives, figs, legumes, and herds. This factor constituted the sine qua non of the moral stand that the mountaineers made. The French officers had defensible reasons for identifying grain as the critical vulnerability of the mountaineers. Morocco, especially viewed from the flats, was a land of grain, and indeed there typically was a robust exchange between the Jbala and the Gharb, with olive oil and figs flowing down and grain moving up. Yet the contrary reports of those Frenchmen who knew the Jbala best, Auguste Mouliéras and Édouard Michaux-Bellaire, who attested to either the richness or the self-sufficiency of the Jbala, suggest that the officers of the Gharb were swayed by a discourse that took hold during the first decades of the protectorate: that of Morocco as the granary of Rome. Scholars have described how this discourse drove the agriculture policies of the protectorate during this period, and how it encouraged the forcible settlement of tribes on truncated bits of their former territory. Here we see a different effect of this discourse: its impact on military strategy.