They can, but tenure/promotion committees won’t “count” it for consideration of tenure/promotion purposes because textbooks aren’t considered a contribution of original research/new interpretations to the field/subfield.
If all a tenure-track Prof has on his/her CV are textbooks meant to provide an overview of the field like Greg Mankiw’s intro econ texts when tenure/promotion decisions come around, the committee will perceive that Prof as dimly/more dimly than a Prof who had no research/publications on his/her record(including monographs or textbooks which contribute original research/new interpretations to the field/subfield) and act accordingly.
One reason why Greg Mankiw and Jonathan Spence(Search for Modern China’s a popular intro text for intro courses on Modern Chinese History) became the prominent bigname Profs in their respective fields is that in addition to writing those textbooks, they published many more original research/new interpretations for their respective fields in the form of journal articles and more advanced textbooks/monographs which do the same.