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

INTERVIEW # 179

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Participant’s Understanding of the PRT Mission

The interviewee served in Afghanistan from January 2010 to January 2011 as the senior Department of Agriculture (USDA) advisor on the U.S. civilian team at the Regional Command North headquarters at Camp Marmal, the major German military facility located near Mazar-e Sharif. He understood his small U.S. team’s mission to be one of supporting counter-insurgency objectives in the northern part of the country. His role was to help improve the productivity of Afghan agriculture and to strengthen Afghanistan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL). He also supported agricultural and livestock initiatives of USDA’s five Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) officers assigned to the five PRTs in northern Afghanistan.

Relationship with Local Nationals

Observations: He enjoyed good relations with Afghan counterparts, both officials and leaders of non-governmental organizations. However, he was frustrated that he could not do more from them due to his minimal resources and virtually no support from the embassy and USDA Washington. In addition, due to a jurisdictional dispute between the State Department and USDA, he was not provided with an interpreter and often relied on an AID colleague to interpret for him.

Insights: Working in Afghanistan proved more difficult than he had anticipated, leading him to make initial commitments on which he could not deliver. His problems stemmed from poor internal communications, inadequate leadership and the lack of a supervisory structure that would clearly identify the command structure above him and clarify his responsibilities over FAS personnel at the PRTs. His team leader initially gave him an impossible assignment to conduct a study of U.S. agricultural programs in northern Afghanistan over the past ten years.

Lessons: To work effectively with counterparts in northern Afghanistan, it is essential for assigned personnel to have clear objectives and strong institutional backing.

Did the PRT Achieve its Mission? (Impact)

Observations: The interviewee felt he had made a significant contribution to building working relationships with Afghans. However, lack of resources and a coordinated plan for achieving

1 agricultural objectives made the impact of his efforts much weaker than they could have been. A particularly dire need in his region was for help in rebuilding irrigation canals, but no support in that area was forthcoming. Moreover, no planning was being done to devise strategies for strengthening the MAIL.

Insights: His efforts to secure CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program) funding consumed considerable time and effort, but produced only small amounts for three of the 15 projects he applied for – and none was available for MAIL management training. His most successful project was supporting the Balkh Livestock Development Union. Military-supported agribusiness development teams (ADTs) are conducting valuable agricultural support activities in the eastern part of Afghanistan, but regrettably do not operate in his region.

Lessons: Impact from agricultural efforts in northern Afghanistan will only come from integrated strategies and careful planning in such areas as improving irrigation and capacity building at the over-staffed and under-funded MAIL.

Overall Strategy for Accomplishing the PRT Mission (Planning)

Observations: The interviewee's priorities and activities were essentially self-generated or developed through collaboration with Afghan officials or NGO leaders.

Insights: An agricultural policy working group at the embassy could have produced useful results, but it tended to get bogged down in operational issues relating to handling the stream of visitors. Pre-assignment McKeller Corporation scenario playing was excellent.

Lessons: Personnel assigned to the field in Afghanistan particularly need training in how best to navigate the complex and cumbersome process of securing CERP funding.

What Worked Well and What Did Not? (Operations)

Observations: He was never assigned a formal supervisor and no performance evaluation was written on him. Logistical support was hampered by the lack of a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and the Germans (or other governments) covering modalities for Americans assigned to non-U.S. facilities in northern Afghanistan. Emblematic of this problem was that he had four different housing assignments at his place of duty. Computer and telephone problems were serious at first, but were eventually resolved.

Insights: Because the region enjoyed reasonably good security, he was able to self-drive to meetings. Though he felt comfortable driving in his home province he was sometimes nervous when venturing into other areas, but had some reassurance from the high-tech GPS system attached to his vehicle. He never faced a serious security problem.

Lessons: The assignment would have been much more successful if he had not felt that USDA’s leadership, after developing the promising idea of assigning personnel to field operations in northern Afghanistan, had not thereupon dropped the ball and left them “pretty much abandoned to fend for ourselves.”

2 THE INTERVIEW

Q. Could you begin by telling me the title that you had in Afghanistan, where you were and what time frame you were there?

A. I was a Senior Agricultural Advisor in Camp Marmal about five miles east of Mazar-e Sharif.

Q. What is your understanding of the mission of the PRT that you were in, and what was your specific role within that mission?

A. Well, to start I was in the Region Command, somewhat different. The mission of the Regional Command was to support the PRTs in the area. And to support the counter insurgency effort. I was an Agricultural Advisor. The U.S. government had defined the Agricultural Assistance Strategy for Afghanistan. There were two elements to it: one was focused on improving the productivity of Afghan agriculture, the contribution of Afghan agriculture to the economy, and the second element was focused on strengthening the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, or MAIL.

Q. How would you characterize your relationship with the local nationals, the Afghans, with whom did you interact?

A. I interacted with mostly MAIL personnel, the provincial director of MAIL. In Balkh province – and other provinces as well, because I had a nine-province area of responsibility. I’d interact with the MAIL personnel and I interacted some with Afghan NGO personnel, particularly in the Balkh, Mazar region – the Balkh Livestock Development Union and its director.

Q. You were working with both crops and livestock?

A. Yes. My mission was never really clear, it was uncertain in many ways. Whether I was to serve as a supervisor to the other agricultural advisors in the northern region or if I was supposed to be doing my own agricultural projects. So I did some of both.

Q. How did you interact with the other people while running or giving advice on projects? I assume for the other agricultural advisors in the area you were advising them or guiding them?

A. I was trying to. It was a very difficult year. And much of what made it difficult was the lack of direction, particularly from the embassy and the Foreign Agricultural Service about what I and the other agricultural advisors were supposed to be doing. There was poor communication between the embassy, the FAS and with me and with them and the other AG advisors. In theory I was supposed to be supervising; although, that was not made 100 percent clear. There was poor communication with the State Department, and immediately I ran into conflict with the senior civilian representative in Camp Marmal. The individual that was responsible for all the American personnel in the northern region. And I ran into conflict particularly around what our mission was supposed to be. I get there and I meet with him on the first or second day and immediately

3 he says, “Our mission (or my mission) is to support the Germans battle rhythm, that we are guests in the Germans battle space – Camp Marmal is a German base – our mission is to support their battle rhythm.” It was never entirely clear what he meant by “their battle rhythm.” But, it was very clear that that was not what USDA was saying to me. Clearly they had never had that discussion with him.

Right off the bat he gave a simply impossible assignment – I was to research the U.S. governmental agricultural activities in northern Afghanistan in the last 10 years. To determine what had been done, what had been spent, what had worked, what had not worked, and lessons learned from that. This would have been a major project for a contractor. For me it was simply impossible and, again, it was not congruent with what I understood my role was there.

Q. Speaking about your interaction with Afghan nationals, what agreements or outcomes were you looking for? And what was achieved?

A. I was focused on the two elements of our agricultural assistance strategy. One was to improve their productivity, so I was working with them on whatever projects I could manage that would help their productivity. The other was to strengthen MAIL. I was working with MAIL to figure out the constraints on ministry effectiveness. We did eventually figure that out, that the ministry was in essence overstaffed and underfunded. They had about 350 personnel in just the one province where I was. Most of these personnel were paid so little that they did the job poorly and they just came for a few hours a day. They weren’t doing jobs that were clear. What was clear to me and the other agricultural advisors was that constraints to improving the ministry’s effectiveness were way beyond what we could deal with. It wasn’t just a matter of teaching them how to use soil testing kits or how to check an animal for mastoids or whatever. There was no way that we were going to be able to deal with the constraints that they faced. I heard repeatedly from personnel that they did not have sufficient resources, sufficient funds – vehicles, gasoline, anything to do their job. I would ask, “Are you making the requests to Kabul.” “Yes we are.” “Do you get the resources? What kind of response do you get?” “No, we don’t get the resources and we don’t get a response.” It was really difficult to see a path for strengthening MAIL. What I did towards the end of my year was organize a training session on the budgeting process within MAIL and we had a trainer come from Kabul, a trainer from the U.S. Department of Treasury, who was embedded in the Ministry of Finance. She came for a two day training session and beyond that I don’t really see what we could have done to strengthen the ministry.

The complaint I have is with the folks at the embassy and back here at Washington. They should have been thinking more specifically about how do advisors in the field tackle this problem of strengthening the ministry. My sense is that they put us out there with these grand objectives, but no operational plan. By and large we failed – but I just didn’t see a path forward to being successful. The other element in the agricultural assistance strategy was in improving productivity. We were trying to do small projects with the Afghans wherever we could and we ran into problems there right off the bat because we had no funding source. The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars on development assistance on Afghanistan. When we wanted basically nickels and dimes for small projects we couldn’t get it. The MAIL personnel in Balkh and Baghlan province came to me and said, “I want to do management training for MAIL staff.” That seemed to me a very reasonable request, which was exactly what they needed. It was what

4 was reflected in our agricultural assistance strategy. We needed only a few thousand dollars to do that. I went to the embassy and asked for that money and could not get it. I asked repeatedly and could not get a few thousand dollars to do management training with MAIL staff.

Q. Did you have any way of tapping into or trying to tap into the CERP (Commander's Emergency Response Program) money?

A. Yes, that was probably our best avenue for getting funds, but that was not easy either. CERP is a very bureaucratic process. The guidelines and regulations for CERP – I have my manual on my computer; [it] is some 200 pages of rules and regulations for how to do it. I ultimately proposed something on the order of 15 different CERP projects; I was only able to get funding for three. The extraordinary bureaucracy involved in CERP was really the reason why. Any project over $5,000 required competitive bidding and it just slowed down the process enormously. Rebuilding agricultural irrigation cannels was desperately needed, everywhere in the north. The north has plenty of potential for agriculture, but most of it is irrigated agriculture. The irrigation canals are a critical component of that. We could have spent millions of dollars on irrigation canals, we spent zero because we couldn’t get into the CERP process. I did ultimately get one significant CERP project approved and funded. That was with the Balkh Livestock Development Union that I mentioned before. That was a project that was about $75,000 that provided them equipment for their dairy facility. It was very frustrating. I must say that while I was there I worked with three different CERP teams and of those only the last was really well trained – understood their own process. There is a key difference between the CERP availability in the northern region, where I was, and CERP availability in the eastern region. In the eastern region the U.S. military had Agribusiness Development Teams (ADTs) and they are mostly National Guard Teams of about 60 folks each and it was their task, their responsibility, to move these projects through CERP. They could do that. We had zero ADTs in the northern part of the country. There were a total of maybe 12 to 15 CERP personnel for all nine provinces combined. If you look at the amount of CERP funding by province throughout Afghanistan, 90 percent of it was in the east where the ADTs were. In the nine provinces in my area of responsibility we had almost zero. Of the projects that were approved in principle by the commander, probably 10 percent actually got implemented and funded. It was the bureaucracy involved in the process that stopped that.

Q. Did your relations with Afghan counterparts go comfortably and productively?

A. Comfortably, certainly. The Afghans were just a delight to work with, they were happy I was there. They were very appreciative. I never had a problem working with the Afghans. The real issue was that I over promised and I under delivered, because I thought I could get projects approved through the CERP process and as it turned out I could not. I had Afghans calling me up saying, “We are going to try and do this and the other thing. What is going on?” I had to tell them, “It is ultimately not going to happen. I am sorry.”

Q. What would you identify as your short term and long term achievements?

A. I think probably the greatest impact was just developing working relationships with the Afghans with whom I could work, showing them that there are U.S. people that care. In terms of

5 program impact, we didn’t have much. Not nearly enough to justify the cost of us being there.

Q. Were you replaced? What advice did you get to your replacement?

A. Yes, I was replaced. I have been in fairly regular contact with my replacement. I did not overlap with my replacement, there was about a two-month gap. By the way, we had a total of five agricultural advisors in the north including myself, only one stayed on at the end of his first year. I was willing to, but USDA was not willing to extend my term. Another one was also willing to, but had difficulty with the Senior Civilian Representative, who insisted that this AG advisor in Kunduz province be transferred to another location, and he was. He was transferred to a different location against my recommendation and against the recommendation of the lead civilian in Kunduz province. Despite a very favorable article in the New York Times about his service there in Kunduz. It was very unfortunately that he was transferred. But, it was directly attributable to a difficult working relationship with the senior civilian representative.

A large part of the difficulty we had with agricultural advisors working with Afghans, and the senior civilian representative, revolved around translators. We were not provided translators. We all complained repeatedly that we didn’t have translators. Part of the difficulty that the Kunduz AG advisor ran into with his regional command senior civilian was around translators. With the advisor complaining to the embassy we don’t have translators, which I think embarrassed the senior civilian representative. But, it was true. We didn’t.

Q. Meaning the senior civilian representative could have provided help to you, but it was not made available?

A. Correct. There was a lack of communication between State Department and Agriculture about whose responsibility it was to provide translators. They never worked it out. When I get there the SCR (Senior Civilian Representative) complains to me, “You come, you come without resources, without translators. How are you supposed to function?” Good question – how can we function? But, at the same time the Department of Agriculture is saying it’s the State Department’s responsibility to provide you with translators. I don’t know if they still haven’t worked that out.

Q. What was the time frame you were there?

A. A year. I arrived in country January 3, 2010 and I left January 21, 2011.

Q. How did you go about planning your day or your operations and setting your priorities? Through what process of consultation or communication – on site or in Kabul?

A. It was mostly self-initiated. I was there for probably a month before I got off the base or “outside the wire” as they would say. It came about because I eventually was able to contact one of the local managers for an AID project and he and I eventually became very good friends. He was very helpful to me and he served as a translator. He was not supposed to, that was not his job, he had another job. I eventually went to his supervisor to see if it was okay if he could work with me on a time available basis, helping me with projects. He said, “Yes, that is okay.” I shouldn’t

6 have had to do that. It really was not okay, because he had his own job to do. I got to meet this individual and it was from that contact that I was eventually able to make contact with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Balkh Livestock Development Union and with others. I was self- initiated because I was not receiving any guidance from either FAS or Washington or the embassy about what to do.

Q. Were you expected to give weekly or monthly reports to receive an okay for what you were doing? Or was there no communication in that regard either?

A. Our senior civilian representative expected weekly reports from each of the agricultural advisors, except me, because I was a supervisor and I was to collect their weekly reports. I was sending them on.

Q. From five or nine provinces?

A. There were four provincial and then one region. There were supposed to be five provincial, because there are five PRTs, but we ended up one short and that was because of a very difficult situation with the senior civilian representative. Eventually USDA just cut us back one position because of that. That position by the way remained vacant for the entire year that I was there. So we had one PRT that was not covered with an agricultural advisor and should have been. In Baghlan province they have a very key area for the counter insurgency effort. My replacement was eventually told she should go to Puli Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province, five times a month. This was an absolutely absurd instruction, because there was no way to do that. It took two days to just get there. To go there five times a month would have taken half her time just in travel.

Q. You mentioned the NGO run by the Afghans -

A. There are Afghan and ex-pat NGOs.

Q. Did you have any collaborative effort to carry out projects together?

A. Yes, we tried. I’ve mentions the Balkh Livestock Development Union. It is a union of farmer cooperatives focused on livestock and dairy. That is where I had the most success. I also worked with the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan. They had two small CERP projects. One of them focused on livestock vaccination and all we did was provide $5,000 to the Dutch Committee to do that, because it was below the threshold for competitive bidding. If it had been above the threshold we wouldn’t have been able to do it. I also had a lot of interaction with the Wildlife Conservation Society, another ex-pat NGOs working in Afghanistan. We funded a vaccination project for them in Badakhsan province, which was funded at $12,500 and it was done without competitive bidding, which is actually illegal. But the military let it go through anyway.

Q. Did you participate in staff meetings, planning sessions or other collaborative efforts there?

A. We had somewhat irregular – we tried to have weekly meetings between State Department, USAID, and USDA at the region command in Camp Marmal.

Q. Was this a way of trying to get a sense of what people were doing and their priorities and giving you some sense of what was going on?

A. Absolutely, we would share what we were doing. I would talk about the projects I was trying to push forward and the difficulties I was having with CERP, and AID would talk about their projects. A lot of it, too, was focused on the visitors – we got lots of visitors. A fair amount of our time and attention focused on visiting delegations.

Q. These were operational more than planning sessions?

A. Yes, absolutely. There was the Agricultural Policy Working Group at the embassy in Kabul that I was very disappointed with, because my sense was that they focused more on operations than planning and policy. Towards the end of the year I was there, there was a significant personnel change in agriculture in Kabul. There was indication there would be a new group formed, but it was indeed supposed to focus on policy and planning rather than operations.

Q. To what extent did the training you received prepare you for what you were getting into?

A. Kind of medium. Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t. We had weapons training that was useless. I never held a weapon while I was there and I certainly wasn’t expecting to. Even if I had the training I would have been inadequate. We had driver training that was done in Fort Victoria, I think – the cars with big engines, with low centers of gravity and very wide tract. What we had to drive were armored Toyota Land Cruisers. All the stuff we had done at Fort Vic would have been useless in Land Cruisers. What we could have used a lot of more training in and didn’t get was the CERP process. I went over there completely naïve about CERP. We heard about it during the training and I went over there expecting funding from these guys. I had no idea that it was going to be as challenging as it was going to be.

Q. Was there any specific FAS training you got?

A. No, there was not. The other training we received was from McKellar Corporation, the scenario playing – that was out in Indiana – was excellent. It was a week of didactic presentations, but a lot of role playing and scenarios. Then afterwards talking about the role playing that was excellent, very realistic. A lot of it was not focused on agriculture and as good as it was it could have been better for those of us working in agriculture to have that focused on agriculture.

Q. You had similar overseas assignments to what you were..?

A. This was my longest overseas assignment. I have been to Afghanistan two times before. Once in 2004 and the second time in 2005. I have done a fair amount of international training in Africa and South America in the Caribbean region.

Q. In your day-to-day activities, what worked well and what were your major impediments? You talked about not having a translator. Were there other major problems or logistical issues?

A. Logistics was difficult. I would not complain too loudly about that, it was a difficult environment. There was no way it was not going to be difficult. The housing was poor, but there were a lot of challenges in providing for us and I recognize that. I would complain about – in the north with nine provinces, all of it [was] run my foreign militaries. They sent five agricultural advisors to stay at five foreign military bases. When they sent us up there, there was no MOU (memorandum of understanding) in place. There is no clear agreement if the foreign military is going to provide housing, if it’s going to provide health care, if it’s going to provide food, laundry – that sort of thing. When I got there I basically had to steal a laundry bag to get my laundry done. We got those types of problems worked out, but it would have been much better if they had these issues worked out before we got there and had MOUs in place. This was a problem for all of us, not just myself. I was constantly getting questions from the AG advisors about their relationship with the foreign military where they were staying and what the responsibilities were.

Q. You were dealing with the Germans?

A. I was staying with the Germans, I had one AG advisor at a Swedish military base, I had another at a Norwegian military base. In Baghlan, where we didn’t have an AG advisor, but were supposed to – that was a Hungarian base. Then we had two other German military bases, one in Kunduz and the other in Balkh.

Q. Pretty much the same – as far as you understood – in terms of lack of an MOU and difficulties of sorting out who was responsible for what?

A. Yes, absolutely. My sense was there was just this huge rush to get us all over there as quickly as possible by the beginning of 2010. In many ways they were just not ready for us; they sent us out without having done a lot of the field work first. Once I got to Camp Marmal – living at four different places within the camp, having to move my living place three times. They started me out in a tent way out in the right edge of the base.

Q. So you were the first (AG adviser]?

A. Yes. The other thing I should mention is the issue of supervision, formal supervision. In the government, we all have a supervisor. Before I left the U.S., I asked, “Who is going to be my supervisor?” I was given the name of somebody down in the headquarters of FAS. In fact I never spoke with them once. It never did get clear about who was my supervisor. The senior civilian representative certainly thought he was. But, I had leadership in Kabul who was giving me direction at 180 degrees in opposition to what he was telling me. I was told I would receive a performance appraisal from its evaluation – never did. Ultimately I was told that this appraisal would be done by my supervisor from my home agency in Riverdale, Maryland. I was told I was supervising the four agricultural advisors at PRTs, when in fact I didn’t do their performance appraisals. I did not approve their leave slips. I did not approve their travel. Any of the normal functions of a supervisor I did not have. But, I was told I was their supervisor. It was never really clear; it was never really worked out what the chain of command was.

9 Q. How about communications, did you have any issues with cell phones or computers?

A. It started out very poor and pretty rapidly improved. When I got to the embassy they issued two computers: a SIPRNet and a non-SIPRNet one. The non-SIPRNet had no software loaded on it and with the SIPRNet I didn’t have access. So neither one was useful. I had brought my own computer, anticipating there might be issues, and most of the time I used my own computer. They had a satellite dish scrounged from somewhere; I don’t think it was an official satellite dish, but they found it somewhere. So we had some internet access, but I couldn’t get my computer hooked up to it. Eventually we managed that. A couple months later we got an official embassy satellite dish. After that communications dramatically improved. We had good internet access; we had telephone connection back to the U.S., which was very good. We had two problems. One was cell phones; we were given a cell phone. Cell phones in Afghanistan or Iraq are erratic. I am not certain why they are erratic I have heard a certain number of explanations: the Taliban take them down, the Afghan cell phone companies take them down because they are ordered to by the Taliban, or the U.S. military blocks it. I heard all of that. After 6 pm most of the cell phones did not work and many times they did not work during the day. Eventually, about six months in, the embassy provided a new cell phone with two SIM cards, so if some didn’t work we could try the other. That was something of an improvement. We were also given a satellite phone and the purpose of the satellite phone was for emergency communication – and a total waste. The satellite phone came with a preloaded account of $5 and the first thing you are told to do is make a registration call to just make sure it works. I used up the $5 right there. So I had all these useless phones – a prepaid account with nothing in it, totally useless. About three quarters through the assignment they changed that and sent us all new satellite phones. It was not a prepaid account at that point, it would be billed after. You could use it as much as you wanted.

Q. Even for non-emergency purposes?

A. Well, you were not supposed to. But, in theory you could.

Q. How about your movements? When you went out to meet with Afghans to get around did you have an escort?

A. I drove myself. It was a self-drive area.

Q. Security, was that an issue?

A. That was an issue, it was a self-drive area and I drove myself all the time. Almost never went with an escort. Whether I should have been or not is another question. When you get there you are supposed to register and call into the embassy and let them know you are going out. We had a blue force tract, which was basically a GPS device that would say where you were and had what amount, with a 911 button on it. But, if you ran into a minor problem, even a flat tire, who is going to come rescue you? In the Mazar area I wasn’t too worried. We had PRT and the Regional command – it was all German bases and I knew a lot of the Germans there. So, I wasn’t too worried about that. But, in other areas I was very worried about that. In particular I went to Baghlan, Puli Khumri, about five to six times. I was self-drive there, and I was out by [the okay of] the RSO (Regional Security Officer). But, the question was, if I have a problem who is going

10 to come rescue me? This is now a Hungarian base – it was not in essence my home territory. I actually stayed at an Afghan National Training Base and there was a small American military contingent there. I asked, “If I get into trouble will you guys come rescue me?” The answer was, “Well, we can if we are here. We are not AAA, we are not always here.” So, it was very unsatisfying. I would go out nonetheless, but I always wondered what would happen if I got into trouble, what was I going to do. I thought the blue force tracker would alert Kabul that I had a problem, but I am a few hundred miles away from Kabul. I didn’t want to have to wait beside the road for two days before they figure out where I am and get a helicopter out to bail me out. That was an issue. Was security adequate? I never had a problem myself. We had one of our office guards that was hit by an RPG, three people in the car – it came in the driver’s side and went through the passenger window – it did not explode and no one was hurt. That was one in a million that no one would be hurt. I had one advisor in Faryab province who was ambushed by the Taliban. Fortunately, he was not hurt, but certainly could have been. A variety of other instances like that, there were some really bad happen involving AID contractors. But of the five AG advisors that were there in the north fortunately none of us got hurt while we were there, but there were some close instances.

Q. Any other comments you would like to share? How could these PRT or PRT-like operations can be made more effective – in addition to the comments you have already made?

A. I particularly fault the USDA for not paying attention to what was going on. It was my feeling and I think a lot of the others shared it that they just sent us out into the field and once we were out of sight we were out of mind and pretty much abandoned to fend for ourselves. The consequence was that the impact was nowhere what it should have been. It was a good idea they started with. I look at AID programs and projects and I think USDA started with a really good idea to focus on strengthening the ministry – to focus on strengthening the government. That was something AID was not doing, so they started with a good idea and they just dropped the ball completely. The leadership in Washington and Kabul just wasn’t there for us. For our strategic guidance, for day-to-day guidance, for dealing with problems, they were just absent.

Q. Thank you.