United States Institute of Peace Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Iraq/Afghanistan Provincial Reconstruction Teams: Lessons Learned

Home , Ghor Province

Interview #1

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Participant’s Understanding of the PRT Mission

Originally the mission was undefined. At first the mission involved just reporting on local developments but over time the mission definition evolved to exercising an influence in the area of operations, helping to implement U.S. foreign policy on the ground, and making the government of Afghanistan more functional at the district and provincial level. While no formal strategy for the PRTs was ever issued, the ISAF International Security Assistance Force Handbook was useful.

Relationship with Local Nationals

Observations: Excellent in Helmand and Ghor province. Americans have a very good reputation in Afghanistan, dating back decades to the 1940s with the work of American development/aid officers.

Insights: Social interaction in the traditional manner, regular office visits, long luncheons and dinners, were important. Length of time on the ground was crucial to developing this interaction, and it was important that PRT officers returned hospitality.

Lessons: Adequate representational allowance was important, and somewhat lacking; upwards of $10,000 annually per officer would be optimal. Local staff can be vital; lack of funds to hire them is a limitation. Longer tours are important for developing effective interaction with local nationals.

Did the PRT Achieve its Mission? (Impact)

Observations: Little was achieved up to 2009. The biggest achievement was maintaining and then expanding the areas of security in Helmand province. There has also been progress in bringing and coordinating Afghan resources to expand the security zones around the population centers in Helmand province.

Insights: Civilian leadership and adequate resources were the key to success in this British run area.

Lessons: Civilian leadership is key: “The military-led PRTs are destined for the history bin.”

Overall Strategy for Accomplishing the PRT Mission (Planning)

Observations: There was no overall strategy for a long-time, but one is evolving. The Afghan National Development Strategy and the ISAF Handbook are useful.

Insights: Officers on the ground, in the PRTs, would use the Development Strategy and the Handbook as general guidelines, as no formal overall strategy existed. Generally the approach was to seek the possible as time was critical so “you can’t shoot for the gold plated standard, you’ve got to shoot for what can get us to the next level.”

Lessons: Only some of the local officials had the capability to understand and pursue their own government’s national strategy. Interaction and coordination among the foreign community (various military and official civilians, NGOs) was often lacking. Even if national strategy were more robust, it is important to create local coordination and planning boards. Furthermore, some discretionary funds are necessary.

What Worked Well and What Did Not? (Operations)

Observations:

What worked well - Military implementation/operations worked well when under civilian control. Civilian subject matter experts were very successful. Traditional diplomatic representation conducted along local lines. Local development projects to meet local needs (roads, airport, government office facilities, etc). Local planning boards. Relations with the Embassy (the PRT oversight) were excellent and collegial.

What did not work well - American civilians in PRTs were inadequately resourced for office facilities, local staff, and representation. Relations with ISAF were unproductive.

Other Comments:

The State Department has been remiss in exerting control over policy and strategy and in providing adequate funding. In the absence of civilian control and management (i.e. State), “the DOD will step in and do what it thinks it knows it’s doing, but it’s usually not right and then you have not good things happening out there. There are certain things in this field that have got to be controlled by the civilian efforts, otherwise there’s serious trouble ahead.”

2 The U.S. model is still the model from 2003 and is out of date. The British brought in contractors who had worked in the Balkans and Iraq and based them in the PRT while the U.S. PRTs were limited to USG personnel with relatively short tours and constant rotation.

Dedicated transport and security details are crucial; civilians in the PRTs cannot depend upon adequate military support for either.

State Department support for local staff and facilities is inadequate.

Notes: Interviewee was about to return to his third one-year tour in an Afghanistan PRT; his comments clearly reflected his long time on the ground – especially as compared to others. His experience was in British-run PRTs with their civilian-led organization.

THE INTERVIEW

Q: Let’s start with the basics. What is your understanding of the PRT mission in Afghanistan?

A: I’d say it’s changed in the couple years I’ve been there. Initially, when I arrived in May of 2007, they said, “Here’s your helmet and flak jacket, here’s where you’re going. Go out there and tell us what’s going on!” The mission was that vague.

Fortunately, before that I had gotten a copy of what was called the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) Handbook, which actually explained ISAF’s mission over there - to help stand up a functional government of Afghanistan in control of its own territory. So you’re able to train yourself about what the larger mission was.

But I would say as time has evolved, the understanding of the PRT mission has become more about not just reporting what’s happening but actually having an influence in your area of operations to fulfill that ISAF mission. I would come up to the office on several occasions in Kabul and say, “You just don’t want us to report on stuff up there, you want us to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty and make things move forward here ” and they would say, “Well, if you think you can, go ahead.” They don’t tell us no.

I would say now the mission of the PRT has evolved. You’re a functional officer. You’re helping implement U.S. foreign policy on the ground, to get the government of Afghanistan, at the district and provincial level, more functional, across the board.

Q: At the beginning, it was a less defined operation but more of a reporting function?

A: It wasn’t defined whatsoever. It was simply “Go out and tell us what’s going on, both good and bad.” My first assignment, two months in Ghor province, mostly was good. Ghor was just poor and needed development assistance. In July of ’07, when I moved to

3 Helmand, things still weren’t that bad, but you knew additional resources were needed to fulfill the ISAF mission, to help the government get functional. The operation had to change to actually make progress on the ground.

Q: When you left the last time, or near the end, you say the mission had changed? How formally had it changed? Did you have written instructions? Were there guidelines coming out? And were they coming from where?

A: That’s been the problem. It’s still not formal enough. It’s largely still personality driven. My title is still PRT officer. That’s a very vague title. I still am rated as a State Department political officer, with a very embassy-centric job description. Very little of that equates with my actual job at the provincial reconstruction team. That’s bad.

The good point is it’s vague enough that it allows the go-getters, the self starters to get down to the PRT and informally take hold of many different aspects. In Helmand I took over the whole rule of law and police mentor training coordination cell simply because there was no one else to do it. I took it upon myself. I had a very good USAID officer, so he took over most of the development and then on the political stuff, which was my day to day job, I did that, but I assumed more and more responsibility, simply because there weren’t other officers to do it and we weren’t told to do it. But you understood on the ground you needed to do this to get the government functional.

Q: You’re saying you were doing this down on the ground? What about PRT leadership? Were they telling you to do it, inferring you should do it, ordering you to do it?

A: In Ghor province, which was led by the Lithuanian PRT, the leadership was Lithuanian and had Croatian and Danish members. First of all, none of them had seen the ISAF Handbook, and when I pulled it out and said, “Well, here’s the mission statement which we can all work towards, we don’t have to overcomplicate this,” there really wasn’t the kind of long term expertise to have a cohesive, coordinated effort to help get development started across Ghor province. After I kind of assumed control, we found out we actually had quite a few funds in Ghor province to do small scale development.

In Helmand, which is a British-led PRT and has been since May 2006, there is British leadership there and it’s a civilian-run PRT, but they’ve been refining their status. Originally they had seven to eight officers. Now I think they’re up to close to eighty or ninety officers, that is, civilian officers with military embeds. It is the largest PRT in the country and they are still experimenting with the formula. And what I’ve been able to do as the only U.S. State Department officer there, is fill in at a pretty senior position to try to coordinate all U.S. activity across Helmand province.

Q: Are you able to comment on whether your experience there was similar to what other people have had in other PRTs, or do you think yours is different or you can’t tell?

4 A: It’s highly different because the U.S. model is still the model from 2003. And it’s one of the things, as I would go to Kabul and meet with my colleagues based at the U.S. PRT. The British found out very quickly and so did some other countries like Canada that you really need to bring in subject matter experts to get things moving on education, health and governance.

The British brought in contractors who had worked in the Balkans and Iraq and based them in the PRT. I would work with these officers to try to move these areas forward. The U.S. PRTs had none of that expertise. They relied on the 2003 model, which had a U.S. State Department officer, AID officer and USDA officer. And then they would use civil affairs officers from the rotating military unit to try to fulfill those areas of expertise.

Nothing wrong with that in the initial phase. However, most of the PRTs only do nine months on the ground, so you had this constant rotation. In Helmand province I’ve worked with the same educational lady for almost two years and her whole career is making educational systems work better. She’s actually Swedish, employed by the Danish government, working at a British PRT, but part of a cohesive team.

Q: I just focus on this question of understanding what the mission is, now it’s evolving. How much interaction, as this was occurring, did you have with ISAF headquarters and with the embassy?

A: We had very good, almost daily or every other day interaction with the embassy. We had a very confident, secure boss and office director, who replied to suggestions from the field with, “Do what you think’s best.” I deployed myself and actually kicked off the stabilization efforts up in this newly liberated city in December 2007, early 2008. That was a good example of my supervisor allowing us a lot of leeway.

ISAF headquarters, on the other hand, is in the problem category and has been for much of the time I’ve been in Afghanistan. Part of the problem was I don’t think they understood their own mission and second of all was that, and I’ve made this clear to every U.S. or international visitor that’s ever come through the PRT, time on the ground in Afghanistan is currency of the most valuable type and ISAF headquarters is staffed by a bunch of officers who do four months, six months, maybe a nine-month tour. The old hands up there do a year. And they simply don’t have the institutional knowledge to be a resource for officers in the field.

So where the embassy was responsive and knowledgeable to the officers in the field, ISAF headquarters time and time again was often much more of a liability, simply because it was structured wrong and it didn’t have the kind of long term, in-country experience it needed.

Q: How would you characterize your relationship with local nationals?

A: Excellent in Helmand and Ghor province. Americans have a very good reputation in Afghanistan no matter what you hear in the media. I’ve been on the ground 26 months.

5 I’ve never been hit, had a rock thrown at me, never been made fun of or called a bad name. In Helmand province you had U.S. development officers at work there from the forties to the seventies. Many Afghans still have a fond memory of the days of the king, that’s when most of them say the last good government was, and during those days Americans were all over the country, especially in the south.

Q: Who did you interact with? What was your normal setup? Who did you see, how often did you see them, what were the reasons?

A: It’s fairly common to go over to the governor’s house for dinner about every other week. You’d have lunch or dinner with the chief of police. Every Sunday, this is a good example, we have a sit down chat with the provincial council, which is a group of about 12 or 14 Helmand residents who are elected by the province to represent them, and it includes four women. I’ve known them now for two years. I consider many good friends. We meet every Sunday and update them personally on the activities in Helmand province.

The British at this PRT maintain a civilian security element which has about 12 or 14 armored Land Cruisers and USAID maintains a small personal protection detail, so we’re able to get out and interact on a regular basis around the city of Lashkar Gah and in most of the districts across the province.

Q: Your interactions, mainly calling it “seeing them.” Did you have any facilities for being able to return hospitality?

A: Yes, absolutely. We sponsored lunch. In Ghor province you could actually go to a restaurant in the city of Chaghcharan, but in Helmand you have to do it on the PRT facility itself, or you would sponsor lunch, usually at the governor’s hall or the provincial council hall. You would pay for the lunch and basically host some type of event or luncheon.

Q: What way, in terms of your resources, facilities or anything would have made it more productive or easier to interact?

A: What’s essential for every officer in Afghanistan is to have a personal protection detail. Various formulas work, but most officers now should be traveling in armored civilian Land Cruisers. Various contract security firms can provide these. They have the logistic capacity to do this. That’s one requirement.

Q: Did that change much over the two years?

A: No, it’s terrible. In June of 2008 all of the PRT State Department offices got together in Kabul to compare notes and many of them were leaving after their year and it’s probably the biggest complaint from all the officers. Most of them had served a year and were getting ready to rotate out. Many simply couldn’t get off their PRT’s facilities.

6 Q: Why couldn’t they get out?

A: They didn’t have independent means, because with many of the PRTs, you don’t have what’s called “self drive.” You can’t jump in a car and drive off, because of security problems. That’s fair. But in certain areas like in Ghor or Herat you could drive off without the security detail. But in the areas where you required military protection you had O-2, O-1 State Department officers who still had to go to an army lieutenant or captain and try to get on a convoy going into the city. The classic example was my colleague in Jalalabad. All the U.S. PRTs are commanded by a lieutenant colonel. If you had a good working relationship and were personality driven, you got out a lot. If you had a bad one, they didn’t feel the need for the State officer to go along to meetings. So the U.S. government was paying to have this very expensive asset, a U.S. State Department officer, at a PRT that couldn’t get out and about.

Q: You didn’t have this problem in your British PRT?

A: No, because the USAID officer oversaw what’s called the alternative livelihood programs, he had his protection detail. And the British quite rightly said, “We’re not going to tie down our military assets to move our civilian contractors or State Department or DFID (UK’s Department for International Development) around. We’re going to spend money and bring in these civilian contractors to do it for us.”

Q: And you found that a good system?

A: Yes, the best you’re going to find. The perfect example is in Kandahar. We had a senior State Department officer based over there. He had no means to get off Kandahar airfield.

Q: Do you have any other suggestions that could have facilitated your interaction?

A: Representational funds would have helped. The first year I had no funds and I think the next year I got $300. For Afghans, as in many cultures, lunch is not simply an excuse to eat, it’s a formal interaction, it’s a social setting. We need moderate amounts of money.

Q: Give me a figure.

A: Probably $10,000 a year would have been more than enough for each officer, because you want to do lunches at Ramadan, Eid, at various holidays. You want to be able to keep these interactions at a certain professional level. We also need local staff. Some officers over there still don’t have locally engaged staff. I have one, my USAID colleague has two. I’m looking to hire some more.

Q: What were the obstacles to having -

7 A: Funding. Most of the time it was funding.

Q: You would need State Department funding, or you could get it from the PRT or -

A: No, from the State Department because these are State Department employees, just like local nationals.

Q: Anything else?

A: We need longer tours. I would put it in this order: local staff, security and representational funds, and then the other thing that’s critical is longer tours for the civilian officers.

In Afghan culture, like many other cultures, it takes time to build relationships. You can see it’s physically insulting to the Afghan nationals when an officer, whether American, British, or Danish, leaves the country after six, nine or twelve months. You go to these going away celebrations and the Afghans will turn to you and say, “Wow, didn’t they like it here?”

It’s beyond the point now where a year tour is practically, I won’t use the term worthless, but it’s getting non-relevant, almost, because by the time an officer leaves, first of all they won’t stay a calendar year, they’ll stay about eleven months, because they’ll leave in the month that they came and then each officer is allocated 65 vacation days., which they should use, they’re entitled to do that.

So now that brings them down to about maybe nine months on the ground, now you’re taking some trips up to the embassy; this officer may physically have on the ground eight months, eight and a half months, so your time to build a relationship and get to effect, to deliver U.S. policy on the ground is minimal. And this is what all the officers agreed to in June of ’08: our minimum tours on the ground should be 18 months, or probably a two- to three-month train-up window.

Q: Has there been any reaction to that suggestion?

A: We heard the Director General shot it down, because it would throw too many officers off the summer cycle. But all the officers in the field said 18 months should have been the minimum you spend at a PRT.

Q: We’ve identified a number of things that work or don’t work in terms of ability to interact. What kind of outcomes did you get from your interactions in the time you were there? What was produced in the way of agreements or specific outcomes that you could point to?

A: There were two key examples: infrastructure in many places was just non-existent, so after working so closely with the security establishment and being there a long enough time, there was funding by the U.S. Army, through the Department of Defense, CSTC-A

8 (Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan). I actually had 25 million dollars, I didn’t have it, these CSTC-A guys had it, they had probably thirty projects, security-related projects that needed to be built in Helmand province - police stations at the provincial and district level and for different kinds of police, border police, et cetera.

The Army Corps of Engineers came over to us and said, “We don’t know how to get this done. We just can’t get these things started. Can you help us?”

I went and talked to the chief of police, and we talked to the governor and then we talked to the provincial council. Some of the sites had been arranged earlier through the ministry of interior but had never really been cleared. I had to get all these parties, and they knew me by then, not always very friendly, to agree to get what was called the right of entry, basically a building permit. Then we could go forward on these very badly needed security projects and, one by one, we got the provincial police headquarters cleared and started, then we got the Afghan National Civil Order Police facility started.

Without my or another State Department officer’s intervention, experience on the ground and running roadblocks we wouldn’t have gotten those projects started and finished. As of this January we had, it turned out to be a huge political event, the governor invited everybody for the grand opening of this $12 million Helmand provincial police headquarters.

So when you see in the news that Helmand’s going crazy and everything, no, large scale development is possible in Helmand because there were officers on the ground who could coordinate to get things implemented, whether it was myself or another State Department officer.

The other thing that played a key role is education implementation. With this very good education advisor, I was able to use my experience with the provincial council, the elected political leadership, the governor and the director of education to support the advisor, getting agreements to keep the schools open, help protect more schools and then getting rather large construction programs going to rebuild the schools that had been destroyed over the last five years. This year they broke ground on nine new schools right around the Lashkar Gat area. That’s something we’ve been able to do simply because we’ve been on the ground a long time working with these various officials.

Q: How did you see the relationship between USG objectives, ISAF objectives and local officials’ objectives?

A: That’s where it comes off the tracks altogether. To a local official on the ground, al Qaeda might as well be a man on the moon. Or a terrorist threat. Even a Taliban member to them isn’t that bad of a guy. You literally get to Helmand in 2007, you looked around and say, “Wow, what have we done?” You looked at all the money we said we had spent and many problems all over the country, the Afghans look around and say, “You say you spent millions, but what has been done?”

9 The U.S. government might be saying, “We understand that, too. We’ve done this to the bad guys.” But the local government officials, the good, solid ones, say, “I don’t have anything to attract the guys who sit on the fence over to our side.”

We built a ring road through Helmand and we built a road from Lashkar Gat connected to the ring road. Those are the two tangible large projects we completed by 2007. People loved them. It cut down the travel time to Kandahar. Local officials said, “One of the U.S. government goals should be to do more stuff like this. It helps us, it keeps guys from going over to the bad side and you guys can go home.”

Until recently I think ISAF was still trying to clarify its mission, because for the longest time we were only fighting bad guys - not the local bad guys, only international terrorists. Then they didn’t want to have anything to do with the drug trade and we spent two years trying to get them to actually support counternarcotics efforts and now they do that. So I think their plate is pretty full, now, as far as a mission. I still don’t think it syncs up with what local government officials want.

Q: Who want what?

A: They want an absence of violence across their area. I’ve traveled from one end of Helmand to the other and to be honest they want productive infrastructure, meaning something that actually does things that they actually want. They don’t care about the guys in the Korengal Valley, they don’t care about the guys in Khost or anything like that. Many Afghans will ask you, “Why are you guys fighting in those God-forsaken mountains? Didn’t you read our history books?” (I have.) General McChrystal said that, too: “Maybe sometimes we shouldn’t be fighting in certain areas.”

The Afghans understood completely and said, “Honestly, we’re going to have bad guys here for a while, but if you help us, if you focus on a few key areas, key infrastructure, a lot of mentoring for our security forces, we are not afraid to fight, we can beat those bad guys and keep them out of this area.”

So they want a full-scale effort to reduce the violence there, one way or the other. They want more money put into visible, productive infrastructure. A good example of productive, visible infrastructure is outside Lashkar Gat USAID completed an airfield reconstruction. It’s just astounding. Afghans from 200 miles away showed up that day to celebrate.

This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. Since that day on June 3rd Ariana (Afghan national airline) has reestablished civilian air flights to Lashkar Gat, for the first time in thirty years. Now, why didn’t we do that in 2002? Many have asked that: “Why didn’t you do this in 2002?”

Q: How would you characterize the difference, you say there’s a bit of a mismatch between USG objectives, strategy and local interests. How would you characterize that?

A: I think it was far too much focused on warfighting, which is understandable, but also it was far too much focused on non-visible infrastructure. It’s hard to be a good district governor when I don’t have a district office. It’s hard to be a good agricultural extension worker when I don’t have an ag extension office.

The U.S. government has spent a lot of money in Afghanistan. Most Afghans understand that, but yet they look out the door and they just don’t see visible signs of it. Another perfect example is the governor’s office in Helmand province. We didn’t start renovating it until about September, October of last year. So seven years into this, our governor was sitting there with a shell of a building. Not a bad building, but it would have been one of the first things as a public official to say “To make me a better public official I need a functional office.” To me it should be an implied task of our U.S. mission there, to help build a functional state. That requires real functionality.

That’s where there’s this disconnect. When a U.S. government official comes down and says, “Oh, we’re going to kill the bad guys, secure the area and do this.” I’m like, “How come I can’t get a district headquarters built for my good district governor who wants to help?” And they still haven’t connected those two areas.

Q: To what degree do you think the PRT achieved the mission which you evolved, because you say you evolved the mission of the PRT?

A: For the PRT in Helmand, tragedy probably is too strong a word, but there was a lost opportunity from ’06 to ’09. In the south you had minimal forces for those three very important years. The largest contingent was British in the largest province, Helmand, 7,000 guys and that included everybody, the cooks, the cleaners. Then you had the Dutch in Uruzgan, the Canadians in Kandahar, and a very small U.S. PRT over in Zabol. They were far too resource-starved to accomplish any real mission down there.

Q: I’m talking about the PRTs, though.

A: I don’t think they did accomplish that mission, because the insurgency kicked off in full force during the summer of 2006 and if the PRT’s mission is to build and stabilize the government of Afghanistan, it simply didn’t have the resources to do that.

Q: What did you achieve short term, if anything, what did you achieve long term, if anything?

A: The British PRT, in some respects the Canadian PRT, had a much larger emphasis on the civilian aspects of a PRT. The PRT could no longer be a military outpost that threw money out through CERPs (Commander’s Emergency Response Program). It had to do more than that. It actually had to bring the various strands of the government of Afghanistan together and through whatever mechanism start to get them to function, district to provincial, provincial to Kabul. I think probably the British did it best, simply because they put resources into it early.

Q: The civilian contractors you talked about?

A: The British PRT is led by a British professional diplomat from the FCO (British Foreign & Commonwealth Office). He has a diplomatic team there. So it’s really a diplomatic outpost that has a bunch of contractors trying to implement this stabilization effort. And I think as our interaction with the Dutch and the Canadians grew, they saw this model as being not perfect but more effective than the traditional PRT.

Q: And what did it achieve?

A: I’d say its biggest achievement was that it maintained and then expanded the areas of security in Helmand province. You probably wouldn’t believe that by watching TV, but you can literally drive around Lashkar Gat, a city of 160,000 and, knock on wood, there hasn’t been a serious mass casualty terrorist event there. The city of Geresk, which is about 80,000 people, sits on the commercial road and has episodes of violence, but is literally clear.

And I would say the biggest thing it’s done is it’s helped bring and coordinate Afghan resources to expand the security zones around the population centers in Helmand province, arguably the most violent province in the country.

Q: That was achieved by the civilian aspects of the PRT?

A: Civilians directing the military tool. But the British civilian actually outranks the British military officer, so all the planning there is basically driven by the stabilization effort. The tactical and the implementation are up to the military officers, but the civilians direct the implementation by the military forces.

Q: What is the most crucial component in this dynamic that you’ve described?

A: The most crucial component is that PRT’s be civilian led. The military-led PRTs are destined for the history bin. They’re just not a functional element anymore.

I was in the army for twelve years, I served in multiple posts. It’s very hard to be an O-5 (lieutenant colonel), but you’re taking line officers from the air force, navy and army, asking them to do something after three months of training that is totally alien and some just aren’t up to it. Neither are their staffs.

I can say this first hand, because last fall I evaluated the twelve new U.S. PRTs coming out who were going through training at Ft. Bragg and we recommended three of the commanders be fired, relieved, and we said three need additional training. So right there you had about fifty per cent. Not one officer had put his PRT on the ground in Afghanistan yet. You’re only batting .500.

12 The diplomatic corps, while not the perfect tool, is probably the better tool and the long- term tool to get in there, understand first of all what the civilian mission is, what the national strategic mission is, and then try their best to implement it with what resources they’re given.

And the military should be a resource of the civilians, not the other way around. Far too often at a U.S. military PRT, the civilian is simply a staff member, he doesn’t direct the PRT and that’s the biggest failure of our PRT effort.

I think they’ve done a lot to adjust that. There’s a senior civilian now that’s been placed in Kandahar airfield to at least match or direct the one-star American military officer who is running the civilian-military coordination cell. I hope that generates a lot of improvement.

Q: What advice would you give to your replacement? In your case, you’re going back, but if someone were coming in to replace you, what would you advise them?

A: On a professional basis, all officers need to have some reporting experience. They don’t need to be the best political officer, but they need to understand some reporting. They need to know what to report, how to report it, when to report it. Some officers simply don’t have that. Consular officers don’t have that training, nor do management officers. I ran into officers who said, “I haven’t written a cable in years. I don’t know what to write at my PRT.” There are certain things you realize after doing a reporting tour that have to go to the Front Office.

The other thing I would advise my replacement, is that it’s the most interesting and fun job you’re going to have and you’ve got to be a hundred per cent flexible. There are multiple tools you have to get you there. We’re interested in getting a state somewhat functional, so it can control its own territory. Anything more than that is not part of our original mission and that needs to be left for follow-on elements.

Q: You talked about strategy. Basically you said there was no overall strategy.

A: Not for a long time.

Q: Now you’re in an unusual situation, compared to most, because you’ve been in Afghanistan for two years and going back for a third. How did you acquire situation and political awareness? You got it all on the job, or did you have any particular background that you found applicable?

A: My previous experience in college helped. And after the army I was a legislative assistant for a local chamber of commerce. Then I worked for an economic development corporation and then I worked for the Wisconsin state legislature, so I had a lot of local government experience, and once you hit the ground in Afghanistan you realize everything you’re dealing with there has a strategic influence, but it’s all local government.

They asked me the other day at Main State about this problem, that problem, they asked, “Who would you recommend we go talk to?”

I said, “Go talk to Washington, D.C. Mayor Fenty. Mayor Fenty can probably tell you which one of his blocks work and which ones don’t and how he got some to where they work. It could be better staffing, better training, he could have bought new communications equipment. But ask him. He’s a local government expert.”

And the thing you realize on the ground in Afghanistan, Kabul might as well be on Mars. They want to know how things are going to get better here on the ground. So you find yourself immersed immediately in local politics, local and state politics. In America, it’d be your townships, counties, village, or city.

Luckily I had that experience. We did a lot of arguing over very tight resources to achieve resources for very local communities.

Q: If Kabul was on the moon to the local officials, how far was ISAF headquarters and the embassy from them?

A: Most of them never heard of ISAF, to be brutally honest. Our first governor in Helmand I worked with, he did not have good qualifications for getting the job. To a local government official, ISAF had no relevance.

Q: How did you, or did you, coordinate what you were doing, your planning, with national planning being done in ISAF and the embassy?

A: We have the Afghan National Development Strategy. This is what we keep at our desk, because when we had the Special Inspector General come down and ask, “What really drives your overall planning?” I said, “Well, here’s the ISAF Handbook, we follow it and then here’s the Afghan National Development Strategy.”

That’s what the USAID officer keeps on his desk too, and if there’s a question, you go back and refer to it. I think that’s the only development plan that all of the coalition countries have signed up to support. The thing we can’t do, because time is critical, you can’t shoot for the gold plated standard, you’ve got to shoot for what can get us to the next level.

Q: Did your local counterparts operate under that Afghan National plan as well?

A: Some of the directors do. We have two very good directors. These are very professional men.

I would say the rest of them, no. That capacity isn’t there yet. But our governor does. We have one of the better governors in the country.

14 Q: Among your civilians and the military and then the NGOs and others, how did you all interact?

A: In Ghor, for example, I was amazed, because of this weird dynamic of the Lithuanians working with the Croatians and the Danes and then you had American military up there to train the police, and there wasn’t interaction. I literally got up there and said, “Well, you guys must hold a weekly development coordination meeting.”

“No, we don’t have that.”

And then I said, “According to the ISAF Handbook, you should have NGO coordination meetings.”

“Well, no, we don’t have that as well. Maybe we should try having those.” And they actually had two Icelandic development officers assigned there, too, just to make it a little more weird mix.

So I basically went to the commander and said, “Sir, maybe we should try these weekly coordination meetings.”

Q: Did you do that at your level, as well?

A: Yes. Up in Ghor it was still a military-run PRT, but after a while they said, “You’re going to take over the governance and development stuff.”

Q: How did you manage coordination with NGOs and civilian counterparts?

A: You got them together. Because it was such a small PRT, it was very easy to do. In Helmand, when I came down, it was British and they would make statements like, “Well, we really don’t see ourselves as part of the ISAF chain. We do our own thing down here.”

I said, “Have you guys seen this?”

“What’s that?”

“The ISAF Handbook.” None of them had read it and so it was just a point of getting them back on track, too. “You’re not here to build Helmandshire. You’re here to fulfill this mandate.”

A lot of it was just, as a political officer, reminding them of that. I was a pretty junior officer, but I had direct access to the PRT commander, who was a former British ambassador and said, “Sir, this is our mandate. This is our mission statement here.”

15 He would agree and they had already had a series of meetings. The previous American hadn’t been that hands on or that involved. He basically gave me free rein to get involved and be the political guidance of the PRT.

Q: Did you have anyone designated as planner? Who was doing the planning, coordination and leadership?

A: The leadership was done by, in Helmand you’ve got the civilian lead giving direction, but then you’ve got the military doing their military planning. We realized very quickly that there wasn’t a joint coordination or joint planning board. So the new head of the British PRT brought military planning officers over, with a senior civilian planner, and created a joint planning board. It’s a Danish one-star.

Q: So you had a formal planning office?

A: Here’s the example: the best one was a district called Nawah-ye, it had fallen under Taliban control, and the district governor had been forced out. Both of the two commanders, military and civilian, turned to their planning board and said, “We want a plan, civilian effect, achieved by military tools. Go!”

And this is what’s really interesting, the civilian, because he had so much experience doing this, he would task them through the military. So the military understood. And then the governance team, “What’s your governance plan?” Health advisor, “What’s your health plan?” “Rule of law, counternarcotics, justice advisor?”

Q: When was that put into place?

A: December of last year and now we’ve got a functional district governor. It’s only about thirty miles from Lashkar Gat, but it’s probably the wealthiest district in the entire province.

Q: Did this planning board have oversight and planning for resource questions, money and so on?

A: Yes, it does, it has oversight and planning for the PRT because the Danes and Brits have combined resources. What we’ve done now is we’ve brought a U.S. marine officer in and we all contribute information to see what funding is available and so does USAID and DFID and Danish funding, to see what’s available to spend in Helmand. And then we have a joint coordination planning board every other week or something like that to review funding and implementation.

It’s clumsy but the good thing about Helmand is that we use it as a test case. The British only have responsibility for one province with the Danish and we’ve been able to experiment and a lot of people have brought experience from Bosnia and from Kosovo and Iraq. It can work if the leadership directs it to be implemented.

16 Q: Interesting. What are the major impediments to your achieving your effort? You talked about security, talked about civilian-military relationships. Were resource shortages, other than representation funds -

A: It’s funny, in Helmand we have tons of money, because we have some of the wealthiest countries in the world, Americans, British, Danish. The Estonians gave us a doctor who is our medical advisor.

A lot of times we didn’t have control over the funding. Like our USAID officer was implementing a hundred-million-dollar project. Yet we had no discretionary funds to do anything else you needed.

Q: What was the hundred million for?

A: It’s the Kajaki dam. That’s national policy. The Kajaki was decided in Washington. It was managed directly out of Kabul by the Office of Engineering and Electrical.

Q: What about contact with your local government and local officials?

A: We did that. We facilitated that, with the governor and the district governors. And also, he oversaw what’s called his alternative livelihood planning. So USAID actually had funds to implement, but we just didn’t have any kind of real discretionary funds. Even the PRT office in the embassy was just too small.

In Helmand, you would want to take your vacation, but when you would leave, they would say, “Well, you’re the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s leaving Helmand.” So you would try to get out and back as soon as possible so you could keep the momentum going.

It was an allocation of resources. I don’t have anything to complain about. The British have been very proactive. They’ve built good facilities. I work in a very good building. I have very good accommodations, but many officers over there don’t have an office, they don’t even have a pod to work from, or they share their hooch with army colleagues, which is fine, but if you really want State officers to do things out there, they need living accommodations, they need an office and most of them need a shura hall so they can actually engage with the Afghans.

Q: Who should be providing those?

A: The State Department. This is a problem and one of my colleagues had a forceful argument with the PRT director about it, because in the British system, the FCO contracting officer will bring in engineers to supervise the provision of such facilities. We could do the same thing with our OBO (the State Department’s Overseas Buildings Operations office). But we rely on DOD to do ours. State just doesn’t exercise enough control.

17 The perfect example was when the marines rolled into Helmand, the General asked “What’s the first thing I need to have?”

I said, “You need to stop everything, build yourself a shura hall over by your headquarters, so you can properly receive Afghan officials, local officials, to interact on an appropriate level. We’ll go downtown and show you some examples.” It hadn’t even gone through their thought processes.

It was still June and they were still trying to get it built, a functional meeting hall for the Afghan representation and those types of things.

Unfortunately, the problem in the embassy is that though they’re great people who work very hard, they have a big mission. Most of them have never worked in a PRT. I would say “I need two pods out there,” and they would say “Why do you need that? Do you know how much they cost?” I’d reply, “Yes, I know how much they cost but we need a pod out there for an office.” Otherwise, your bedroom is your office and the officer is unhappy and doesn’t want to go out to the PRT and you waste a year. So for minimal input, proper infrastructure, you get a better product.

Q: You’ve identified two questions. One is the military-civilian relationship, who’s in charge. The second is the civilian support for the civilian component is in many ways is inadequate.

A: Oh, it’s been terrible. It’s been completely lacking.

Q: See any changes in this?

A: I think it has gotten better. A perfect example: apparently the body armor that was originally ordered back in ’05, ’06, and ’07 was not good stuff. People would go out to the PRTs, the military would laugh and they would just sign for a military piece of body armor. It was the wrong body armor.

Fortunately, when I got out there, I replaced a guy, and somehow they had gotten real body armor into the mix and I just signed for his. But that’s just one example where State just didn’t have the experience, because it was ordered through the PRT management office.

Q: What’s the PRT management office?

A: Originally it was just a desk.

Q: In the embassy?

A: In the corner of the political section. When I first got there, you sent a cable up, it went to the political section. And then you had one PRT director and for a long time an

18 OMS and then finally you got a PRT deputy and then they actually got their own work space up there.

But they still have a lot of people in the field. The biggest challenge for the first year- and-a-half was that there just weren’t enough people to properly manage their people in the field.

Q: How is it staffed and managed now? What is the support now?

A: It’s better now. They’ve pushed it out to the regions. They put the senior civilians out in the regions.

Q: But the senior officer who has been moved out to the field is responsible for overseeing several PRTs? And that’s new? Is that an improvement in management?

A: I think so, if they can get the resources. One of the problems was State. To be a player, you have to bring funds to build your own infrastructure. Like there are going to be regional embassy offices in Heart and Mazar. That’s probably the best thing they can do. In KAF (Kandahar Air Field), if you’d go over there, you’d be shocked. Kandahar Air Field has been there for a long time, but the senior USAID person and senior State person worked in these little plywood-made shacks. It’s just terrible working conditions. When I left, nothing had been done. They talked about building facilities to bring in a senior civilian with four to five people on his staff. If you don’t bring enough people in, you’ll simply be an arm of the military. You will simply be subsumed into a much larger organization. State needs to come in with enough gusto in the south to really exercise control over this military component.

And not only that - the other problem is that you want to have local staff in these regional offices, Kandahar Air Field too, because you want those guys to have expertise on all things Afghan. It’s good to move down to the regional level, but they just weren’t serious about bringing the resources down there to make it as effective as it should be.

Q: In terms of planning and management, does the ISAF/embassy distinction cause you any problems?

A: I was always disappointed that we had an ISAF commander who probably knew next to nothing about Afghanistan. It was just amazing how many poor decisions they made about Afghanistan. Sometimes it was just their social interactions with the Afghans. We got our new governor, a good guy. But he’s also an old communist and now he’s come south. He needs to make a good first impression.

So here comes the General, demanding to come to see him and I cried like everything to get the embassy to turn this off. I said, “This poor governor’s only been here a week, has no funding.” It was going be a disaster. “Stop it!” I said, because you could just see it.

19 The embassy said, “We don’t tell four star generals what to do.” Well, maybe that’s something we should start doing, because he came rolling down there in this large military helicopter and they land in the center of the city. Then we got a manifest at eleven o’clock the night before and it only had 34 people on it. The next day, we didn’t even get the manifest, but the 36th guy to come out of the helicopter was the former governor, largest drug lord, mass murderer, who I’m sure the General didn’t know two hoots about and the locals were just like, “How dare they bring back this animal! Are you that stupid?”

First of all, I knew who he is and second of all, I didn’t approve of his presence on the helicopter. This is the lack of civilian control of the military that’s frightening sometimes, because for a four-star to do that and basically undermine a newly installed governor, it boggles the mind. That is your biggest challenge over there.

Q: But this bifurcation of command structure, does it pose problems or advantages for you in managing strategy?

A: I could tell it did, because they’ve done a lot to try to fix it over the last year. Like when they brought in a new general, they tried to sync up both teams. They’ve put liaison officers in there. They actually brought in a deputy ISAF commander to oversee operations, so the General could do more strategy and planning. They’ve started at the embassy something called ICMAG (Integrated Civilian-Military Action Group). They’re bringing the senior civilians at the embassy together with the senior military planners. That was one of the things that they knew they had to fix.

They also created United States Forces Afghanistan, because you have ISAF, but then the General’s now double hatted as the ISAF commander and U.S. forces commander. Everybody knew this was a problem, so they have made changes up there to better coordinate these two structures. I’m not sure it’s matured to the point where it works or not.

Q: Anything else you’d like to say? Comments, overall what do you think’s important? This whole purpose is to get your views.

A: The Powell Doctrine might be applied here. It’s better to go in too big and too strong than too little, too weak, because if you’re going to set PRTs up…

Q: You mean, on the civilian side?

A: Yes, rule number one, civilians have got to reestablish control over the military, because it’s clearly apparent in Afghanistan that control didn’t exist for a long time. But I think the new leadership over there seems more comfortable exercising control over the military. Now whether or not they’re on the same side…

We threw far too little resources and didn’t expect them to do too well with almost nothing and, as a U.S. government official out in a PRT, I don’t have any security, don’t

20 have any funding, don’t have any transportation. You shouldn’t put officers in that position. You really had to be careful to build careful relationships so you could leverage what support you could get from the embassy, if you were really interested in moving the mission forward and those types of things.

I’ve been in the State Department seven years and the one thing I’ve seen in the State Department is everybody always said “What did it do during the Cold War?” Well, the State Department reported on what the Soviets did. And I think what you see is the State Department still getting comfortable with its new role over the last 17 years.

I don’t know if they ever expected PRTs to last this long, but it’s probably sure they’ll exist for three, four, five more years. It’s not a flash in the pan. It’s probably something we’ll have to keep doing over and over again.

There are ways that this can be done better the next time, or even this time, to get it fixed now, so you can actually have real implementation on the ground of U.S. government policy, so it’s faster, more cost effective, safer for your officers, better for the Afghans, or better for the Iraqis, or in whatever country.

Making it up as we go shouldn’t be our catch phrase at the State Department. It’s just the attitude that the State Department will not assert itself as the dominant foreign policy planner, developer, and implementer. It’s not safe and not acceptable. It’s really got to take hold of these missions with a passion and a vengeance and drive them home to conclusion.

Otherwise, the DOD will step in and do what it thinks it knows it’s doing, but it’s usually not right and then you have not good things happening out there. There are certain things in this field that have got to be controlled by the civilian efforts, otherwise there’s serious trouble ahead.