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

INTERVIEW #24

Interviewed by: Adam Zarakov Initial interview date: November 12, 2009 Copyright 2009 USIP & ADST

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Participant’s Understanding of the PRT Mission

Interviewee was posted as the State Department representative to Ghazni PRT in 2008-09. PRT was unique in that Polish rather than U.S. forces provided security. Mission focused on supporting counterinsurgency through assistance with governance, development, and strengthening ties between the Afghan people and government.

Relationship with Local Nationals

Observations: Interviewee dealt mostly with Ghazni governor, provincial officials, and local nationals on PRT support staff. Relationship in all cases was described as “very good,” with easy and frequent access to the governor and his advisors.

Insights: Other than an isolated attempt to “shake down” a contractor, governor was an effective leader and “very cooperative” in obtaining information, setting up meetings, and mitigating negative response to civilian deaths from military strikes. Goals coincided more on security and development than on governance.

Lessons: Security environment limits access to local nationals not on base. Localized, autonomous governance with minimal U.S. interference may be advisable. A public perception that authority rests with Afghan leaders rather than PRT is important.

Did the PRT Achieve its Mission? (Impact)

Observations: Progress was strongest in development and positive but uneven in governance and political stability. Development projects were handed over entirely to Afghan control. Security worsened and dissemination of information was inadequate.

Insights: Small-scale, local development projects act as “force multipliers” for PRT reputation. Local leaders often resent U.S. interference in issues relating to justice. Governance institutions are weak and rely heavily on U.S. involvement.

1 Lessons: Security is the most important factor for handover to local nationals. Training Afghan army and police is important and arming and training local civilians to maintain security in Ghazni should be considered. Development assistance should not overlook stable regions and should emphasize working discreetly with local nationals over a large on-site U.S. presence. Information should be communicated in all local languages.

Overall Strategy for Accomplishing the PRT Mission (Planning)

Observations: Interviewee was at most key meetings with the PRT commander. Planning was coordinated among all departments as well as with coalition allies.

Insights: Projects are heavily influenced by goals and planning from previous PRTs. Interagency collaboration is largely “personality driven.” NGOs will share information but for security reasons usually avoid high profile contact with PRTs. Representatives from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) and Provincial Support Plan are “very good,” but day-to-day events often overtook long-term planning.

Lessons: Combat Lifesaver and weapons training were more useful than defensive driving course. Better radio training may be advisable. Pre-deployment country background training should have a regional rather than a national focus. Planning meetings should be frequent and include participants from across the base. State Department representatives should have a budget line for development projects.

What Worked Well and What Did Not? (Operations)

Observations:

What worked well: Initial handover, internal consultations, and interactions with administrative section of PRT office in Kabul were positive. PRT skills were appropriate to the mission. Afghans were comfortable dealing with U.S. women in uniform.

What did not work well: Cultural differences and restrictions from Warsaw caused frequent tension between Polish security forces and local nationals. Team members responsible for program and financial management lacked pre-deployment training in military CERP funds, resulting in delays. Policy section of PRT office in Kabul was unresponsive and sat on PRT reporting. Local nationals rejected the presence of female contractors and interpreters of Afghan descent.

Other Comments:

Interviewee’s perspective was influenced in part by a prior educational background in Afghan history, and the interview contains several recommended readings. He believes that the goal of a strong central government is “unprecedented” except though significant use of force and therefore “probably not workable” under current strategy. He was particularly proud of his support of a development project for a local Hazari school.

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THE INTERVIEW

Q: What was your position, and where were you were stationed?

A: I was the State Department representative in PRT Ghazni, down in Ghazni province in southeastern Afghanistan, from September 2008 to September 2009. I’m a State Department Foreign Service officer with 17 years’ experience.

Q: What was your understanding of the PRT mission?

A: The PRT mission basically is to provide governance and development assistance to the government of Afghanistan at the provincial and district level. It doesn’t necessarily have a kinetic role. That’s usually the role of what are called maneuver battalions or battle space owners in a given province.

So even though the PRT consists mainly of military personnel, its primary focus is on the projection of “soft power,” by helping the provincial government and officials at the provincial and district level in a given province to provide basic services to the Afghan people. The purpose of that is to tie the people to their government, which is a critical part of effective counterinsurgency.

Q: How did your role fit into this mission?

A: As the State Department representative on the PRT, I was part of the small command group that ran the overall PRT, which had over 80 people. I was virtually in every meeting that the PRT commander had - he was a navy commander - with his staff and with visitors, Afghan visitors and officials. My main function on the PRT was as liaison between the PRT and the provincial governor and other provincial government officials.

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

A: I would put that in two categories: local nationals on the PRT and ones off the PRT. So we had local nationals working on the PRT who were mainly interpreters and cultural advisors, but also they were support staff working around the base, did cleaning, etc. My relationship with those people was very good and frankly in the end I think they were very dedicated people, because they faced death threats by working with us.

Off the base, my relationship with the populace and the officials that we dealt with was also very good. I had a very close personal relationship with the governor and his key advisors. He would come to the base frequently to see me and sometimes would pop in unannounced to my room where I actually did my work.

3 So that was the relationship we had. We’d be on the cell phone numerous times during the day. He would call me to ask my advice on things. I would also call him sometimes to offer my advice on issues or ask questions. So I had very good access to the governor and his key advisors.

With the rest of the population, that all depended on one’s ability to get off the base and honestly speaking I didn’t do a lot of travel outside of Ghazni city, which is the provincial capital. I did make it out in the field in one or two other areas during my year there and I think my interaction with Afghans in those areas was fine.

Q: How large is the city?

A: 150,000 people. The population of Ghazni province is 1.5 million people. But it’s not a very permissive environment. As soon as you roll out of the base, you have to roll out in a convoy of armored vehicles. Even just making the journey from the base to Ghazni city, you’re putting yourself in potential danger of attack.

Q: You noted that you interacted regularly with the governor. Was that also true with his advisors?

A: Yes, especially with one of the more trusted district sub-governors, who also had interactions with us on other matters.

Q: In your exchanges with the governor, were there specific issues that either you or he were looking for advice on?

A: When I was providing him advice, it would usually be on matters of process, like, “Governor, maybe it would be a good time to hold another Provincial Development Committee meeting,” to try to institutionalize this sort of focus on development, because institutions in the provinces are very weak. If you’re trying to develop governance in the province, there have to be institutions and institutionalized processes.

If we weren’t there to press that on them, it probably would fade away and they would do things the way they want to do it, which is not necessarily bad, but it’s not what our job was.

As for the governor, he might ask for the PRT’s assistance on a particular project, or he might ask me to come speak to a group of people that he was also meeting with. So that’s how we interacted.

Q: About how often were these meetings or interactions?

A: Three or four times a week. Because of the governor’s close connections with President Karzai – at least that’s what he stated, and I think it’s true – I also frequently tried to get a sense of what was going on nationally. He was getting inputs from Karzai and Karzai’s inner circle, and I usually fed that information back to the embassy as well, because it might be information

4 that they weren’t getting, or it might be information they could use to corroborate information from their sources, on things like elections.

Q: Were there any agreements or outcomes that resulted from your interactions, and were those commitments met?

A: Yes, like when we advised him on Provincial Development Committee meetings, when to hold them, how to hold them, subjects to discuss, he would usually follow through on them.

We assessed him as very cooperative. He’s not an angel or a saint and he probably would throw any one of us under a bus if he had to for his own sake, but as a general rule he was very cooperative with us.

He was also very helpful. If I needed information, if somebody from Kabul was saying, “Find out this,” I could call him up and ask, “Governor, what’s the situation with this issue?” He would either tell me right then and there or if he didn’t know the answer, he would go get it and come back to me.

He was helpful in setting up meetings when we had visitors come out, like the ambassador in Kabul or the U.S. Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was very responsive to those kinds of things and came to the base and met with us.

The governor was also very helpful, sometimes proactively, in mitigating the consequences of coalition actions in Ghazi. If you have a military unit that’s not operating in Ghazni but comes in and conducts some strike somewhere and innocent people are hurt, the governor was usually on the ball, addressing that issue, trying to resolve it, calm everybody down, even before we were apprised of the event.

Then once we got the information we’d call him and give him talking points. Basically the governor was very good about making sure that we as outsiders, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), were not subjected to anger and animosity from the public. So he stuck his neck out for us.

Q: Did his ability to help resolve some of these issues stem from his own personal clout and reputation, or was he able to offer things to the population that assisted him?

A: A little bit of both. He’s not originally from Ghazni. He’s from Kandahar province to the south. He’s an Alokozai Pashtun and there are no Alokozai Pashtuns in Ghazni, so he has no tribal support base there to speak of, other than that he’s a Pashtun and half the population is Pashtun.

But he’s a very effective leader in the very traditional sense, holding these large jirgas, these gatherings of some 80 men at a time. He knows how to lead the audience, push their hot buttons, get them to be sympathetic. I personally witnessed this on numerous occasions. He’d cause people to cry.

5 He’s an educated man and so he pretty much had an edge over most of the population, which is not really educated and he was able to keep his stories straight.

He did have a small stipend from Kabul to help him do the kinds of things that a traditional Pashtun leader would do, like when you have a meeting giving out turbans or Korans or other little gifts to the people that you’re meeting with to buy their favor. He had a small stipend but he was always complaining that Kabul wasn’t giving him enough, and that’s probably true.

Q: You said that these interactions were fairly productive. Was there anything that could have made them more so or that could have improved on the relationship?

A: What I and the rest of the PRT leadership had hoped we could accomplish early on when I got out there was to get the governor out among the population. If necessary, take him with us, if not, if he moved separately, we could also arrive at a given location out in the countryside separately and be there just to provide security. That way he could meet with the local population and task us, say, “I have asked the PRT people over here to build you this school,” or whatever, to show that he was in the leadership and all we were doing was supporting him. That’s a classic thing that you’d want.

He was actually rather reluctant to do that. Instead, he’d like to hold meetings within the confines of his residence and bring people to him. I think that’s partly to show who’s in charge. It’s probably also an understanding of the security environment in Ghazni, that every time he moves out he’s taking his own life in his hands.

We weren’t as effective as I would have liked to have been in that respect, but he did hold court almost on a daily basis in his residence. Based on the times when I was able to watch that happen, I think he was probably very effective and probably didn’t need a lot of my advice on how to govern.

Q: In what ways did United States government objectives coincide with those of the local leadership, or in this case the governor?

A: On security we had the same objectives. I should point out that the coalition security providers changed shortly after I arrived in Ghazi in September of 2008. The maneuver battalion there was an American battalion and they were departing as I was arriving.

The governor had a very good relationship with them. They worked closely with him. They consulted on targets of operations and other things, and the governor believed strongly that Americans were probably the best forces to have in the province to counter the threat from the insurgency.

They were replaced by Polish forces, and the governor did not get along with the Polish forces. I think he viewed them as being like the Russians and they are sort of similar in that way.

I think he also came to understand, as we all did, that there were real limitations on the Polish forces’ ability to get out and actually do things. That’s not because of lack of any fighting skill

6 on their part, because they probably are good fighters and they certainly had the equipment to fight well. But they were limited by their capital. Warsaw made it very clear to them that “You can only do this,” and “You should avoid this at all costs.” So on security, I think we, the Americans, worked very closely in line with the governor, but the Poles probably not.

I also don’t know that the governor had a particular vision for development. I think this is probably the case throughout Afghanistan. He’s more concerned about basic services.

So he wasn’t going to oppose us on any of the things that we did, because we were focused on things like schools, road, clinics. These are the kinds of things that he would welcome and usually the governor was very good about doing ground breaking ceremonies and ribbon cutting ceremonies for projects that we funded and oversaw. We would stay out of the picture, so he got the benefit of all that. So I think we were on relatively the same page, development-wise.

Governance-wise, probably the governor felt, “Well, thank you for your advice, but we Afghans know best how to govern ourselves.” I would say that’s probably where you would see maybe the greatest kind of divergence on issues.

I came in with a background on Afghanistan, having studied it under a prominent Afghan historian at university. I came in with an appreciation that leadership basically occurs at the local level in Afghanistan and also with a sensitivity to the complexities of the local environment and different tribal units and all their baggage.

So I wasn’t really going to advise the governor on how to run his show. Maybe the embassy or our government could fault me for not being more out in front pushing central governance in Ghazni, but I came to the conclusion that in this case it was best to let the locals run their own show, as long as what they were doing wasn’t crossing any fundamental red lines.

There was one incident where the governor tried to shake down one of our contractors on a project. I forcefully pushed back on that, and it was a very uncomfortable situation but I think we were able to resolve it. If there were moments where we had disagreements with the governor, I didn’t hesitate to make that known.

Also, when the governor would get in one of his moods and start complaining about the Poles, I defended the Poles. The governor didn’t necessarily like that, because he thought I was his friend and he didn’t want to hear me defending them, but I was, because I felt that that was the right thing to do.

Q: At what point did this transition to Polish security take place?

A: October-November of 2008.

Q: In terms of troop numbers, was it a one to one replacement?

A: I don’t think so. I think probably that the Poles were a lot more numerous. The previous unit was a lot leaner.

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Q: In terms of the references you made to development projects such as schools and clinics, was control handed over entirely to the Afghans?

A: Yes. Any kind of school, clinic or road that we were building ultimately would go over to the Afghans. In an ideal situation, what you would have is the governor sitting on a development council and the council setting the priorities and the PRT supporting. That council was in its infant stages in Ghazni. Again, institutions are very weak in the provinces, especially in the southeast, where the central government never really has had much in the way of institutional capacity.

Oftentimes, elders and others would approach the governor and say, “Governor, we need a school built here,” or “a road built here.” Then he would refer them to us and we would say, “Okay, we heard you. Now go back to the governor and get his stamp of approval.”

That was the mechanism that we inherited and what we tried to do as we got our handle on the situation was basically tell people, “You need to take your proposal to the Provincial Development Council. You need to get a stamp of approval from them and bring it back to us and we can start working on it.”

Q: Following up on the governance issue, at what point did this shakedown take place?

A: Yes, that was actually interesting. I was there for three different PRTs. I went through Fort Bragg training with the PRT that I joined in Ghazni. After Fort Bragg training ended in February 2008, I had to return to my assignment where I was in Israel. The PRT went out to Ghazni. So I came in on them just as they were finishing up their assignment, the last few months. The shakedown thing occurred right at the end of that period of that PRT and before the next rotation PRT came. It was probably in about October 2008.

Q: In terms of planning, what was the overall strategy for accomplishing the PRT mission?

A: We did develop plans, but with a PRT like ours, we have to integrate our plan with all the other coalition elements on the base. So in this forward operating base, or FOB, you had us, you had this large Polish military task force, you had a Texas National Guard agribusiness development team (ADT), you had Special Forces and other units. So if we’re going to do development and governance work, we want to make sure it’s synched with the kinetic activities or security activities of the Polish task force.

We started to develop our strategy for what the PRT was going to do for nine months, because they’re there for nine months. Then we thought, “Well, we had better lash it up to what the task force is doing.”

That required some work trying to get their plans. They developed by the end of November what they called a winter campaign plan, which said, “We’re going to focus our security activities in this particular area of Ghazni.”

8 So we fixed our plan to theirs, so that we would go to governments, support them, and do governance and delopment work in those affected areas. That’s how we did our planning.

Here’s the thing, though: there were some interesting timelines going on. When the PRT comes in, it’s not starting over from scratch. It’s inheriting a whole bunch of projects from the previous PRT. So what the PRT is doing is actually executing projects that were identified by the previous PRT and then identifying projects for the next PRT to follow up on.

That essentially consumed the bulk of the time that I was there with this one particular PRT that was there in the middle. That was doing what we could to support the task force’s plans and then doing what we could to identify ways that we could help the government connect with the people when it wasn’t in conflict with these plans.

One of our strategic thoughts was that, while the task force was focusing in the Pashtun part of Ghazni province, where there was the greatest insecurity – and we would certainly make that a first priority to support them on that – we didn’t want to ignore the Hazari part of Ghazni, which was relatively secure and peaceful. Because we didn’t want to see develop a view that “Hey, to get development assistance, you need to cause problems.”

The Hazaris, as far as we were concerned, were good people, keeping the place safe. So we didn’t want to see them left out. We wanted to encourage that kind of behavior.

Q: You noted that you had some previous knowledge of Afghanistan. How did you gain additional political and situational awareness for Afghanistan as well as the specific region that you were in?

A: First of all, I studied in college, like I said. I did a lot of reading on my own, once I was assigned to the PRT, which would have been December of 2007, that’s when I knew I was going to go out there. I starting buying up books and reading. That refreshed my knowledge.

I also took a seven week language course, FAST course, as they call it, here at FSI, for Pashto.

That was good. It’s very hard. Pashto is not an easy language. So not only are you studying the language, but you’re also getting cultural knowledge from the instructors here.

Q: Were there any books that you found particularly helpful?

A: Oh definitely. Anything written by Hassan Kakar, who was my professor at UC San Diego when I was there back in 1990, is especially worthwhile. He is still alive, he lives in Concord, California, outside of San Francisco.

But he was the department chair of history at the University of Kabul when the Soviets invaded and then he was put in prison and eventually made his way into the United States. But he is considered one of the foremost historians of the country, so if you can get anything by Hassan Kakar or M. Hassan Kakar, his first name is Mohammed, that’s good.

9 One particular book that I would recommend for people going especially to the southeast of Afghanistan is his A Political and Diplomatic History of Afghanistan, 1863-1901. It describes one period in Afghanistan’s history, during The Reign of Amir Sher ‘Ali and ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan, where the central government actually was able to extend itself into the provinces and it did it by brutal force, crushing tribal leaders.

It’s instructive, I think, for anybody working on Afghanistan, because you realize that this notion that we’re trying to push in Afghanistan now of a central government that has control over the rest of the country, is actually historically unprecedented, except through violence, which nobody is going to sanction.

So what we’re actually supposedly trying to do is probably not workable. That’s what I would argue, based on my understanding of Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean that we can’t adjust fire or accept the realities that are emerging on the ground and that would be my advice for us.

That book’s particularly useful. Also another book, by William Maley, an Australian expert on Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, called Afghanistan Wars, I highly recommend that book.

Q: What was the relation between your planning and the higher level planning process in Kabul?

A: We had a group of people come out in December of 2008 from S/CRS (Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization) at the State Department. This was the first time frankly I’d ever heard of these people, so I didn’t know what S/CRS was, but they’re planners and they come out and they sit down with you for like three days, huddled in the command center with all the key people on the staff. They ask all sorts of very good, provocative questions, basically trying to figure out what’s realistic within a year and what’s realistic within three years in the various lanes like security, development, governance, and information.

These are really good. I was involved in all those discussions and they do make you think a lot about what you need to do to get to your desired end state in a year and in three years.

They then generate a Provincial Support Plan which comes back, a very thick document with all this background information and time lines on it. It’s a very good undertaking. The problem is that there is an actual day-to-day life in the province. So even though you have this as a guide, probably what you’re going to do is put it in a drawer, because you’re dealing with little fires that you have to put out every day.

So I was involved in that kind of planning. Those people are plugged into Kabul and even back here in the State Department, very actively involved in that. Again, though, great plans but as they say, plans are the first casualty when you come in contact with the enemy.

Otherwise, for the day-to-day planning of the PRT, I was at virtually every meeting that we had with the commander. Usually I sat in the command center and that’s what I would recommend for people like me going out: sit in the command center, have your computers there. That way, whenever the PRT commander comes in and convenes his different groups to discuss issues,

10 you’re there and you can pipe up and say, “Oh, I know something on that,” or “Here’s what I recommend on that.”

Q: Were there any other ways that military and civilian planning were coordinated internally?

A: We had something that I tried to reestablish that had fallen off between my predecessor and myself, called the Joint Steering Committee (JSC).

The idea of the JSC was to bring working level people from all the different elements on the base, which I described to you earlier, together on a weekly or biweekly basis to say, “Here’s what we did since we last met, here’s what our current plans are.”

That way we could synch up our activities. So if we knew that the Texas ADT was going to be going out next week to visit a particular district, someone like me could say, “Hey, I’d like to go along. Can I get a seat in your convoy?” Or vice versa. If we could see how we could help each other out, we would do that.

That worked pretty well. People who attended the JSC, which I chaired, thought it was a very useful thing. But the problem is that it got overtaken by battle rhythm events. And then I would go on leave or something like that and come back and then it was just very hard to get it started up again.

I recommend that kind of thing, though, especially in a complex base like ours, where you have so many different elements, including a Polish maneuver battalion. Because they and we are not on the same computer systems, so they’re not going to have access to all our documents and they’re not going to have access to our thinking, necessarily. So you need to pull in people like that into such a meeting, so that they understand what you’re doing and you understand what they’re doing.

Q:When you were on leave, was there somebody who would sit in on your behalf?

A: The USAID person, usually.

Q: In addition to allies, was there any coordination of planning or involvement of either international organizations or NGOs?

A: No, actually, not in those meetings. If there were NGOs in Ghazni – and there were some like Swedish Committee, who’d been there for 18 plus years – they were very few and they generally tried to avoid us and we really went out of our way to avoid them. We didn’t want to cause them problems.

We had heard all through our training at Fort Bragg how the NGOs didn’t want us stumbling on them, didn’t want to be seen with us, because they felt that put them at great risk, so we honored that.

11 We were open to meeting with people from NGOs, but generally they weren’t coming to the base to see us. The only interaction I had with NGOs that I can recall were in two cases.

One when a Bangladeshi NGO called BRAC had one of its people kidnapped in Ghazni, and we were able to talk with them. I reported that information and the governor’s efforts to try to rescue that person back to the embassy. He was successfully rescued, so that was good.

I think one or two NGOs actually attended one of these Provincial Development Committee meetings at the governor’s residence that happened on a monthly basis. But generally speaking when the governor invited those people they wouldn’t come. So I’m not sure that we were synched up, let’s say, with NGOs.

One very important point that I want to make here: at his own personal effort, the USAID rep, who did have experience working with NGOs in the past, because he was a contract hire of USAID and so previous to that he had worked in an NGO in Afghanistan - because he had that kind of background - he could speak more freely with NGOs. He was able to pull together a database of projects that were being carried out in Ghazni from about 2005 to the present, which included input from the NGOs.

So we had some idea of where some of these NGO projects were. That way we wouldn’t duplicate their efforts or stumble on to them. He also shared that database, which included our projects, with the NGOs, taking out sensitive information like locations. The USAID person in Ghazni while I was there deserves great credit for having that kind of connectivity with NGOs.

Q: Did you have a previous relationship with that USAID representative?

A: He didn’t go to the Fort Bragg training, so the first time I met him was out there in Afghanistan but he’s a very congenial fellow, and we got along with each other rather well.

Q: Were you or the USAID representative specifically designated as planners or were there others?

A: The three of us civilians, because there was also a USDA person, I think we were all welcomed to be involved in planning, so really it was a matter of your own personality and initiative as to whether you got involved or not.

The USAID person and myself were chomping at the bit; we wanted to be involved in everything. We both had a really good relationship with the PRT commanders that we worked with. When you ate with them, socialized with them - a lot of it was personality driven - I had no hesitation knocking on his door, offering my thoughts on this or that.

The USDA person, on the other hand - I don’t know the reason why but again, probably personality based - tended to be remote and on their own, and so oftentimes was left out of planning. But it wasn’t like people were trying to sideline that person; they just opted out.

12 Personality, unfortunately, plays a huge part in a lot of this stuff. You’d like to have it more institutionalized, but the PRT and the whole ISAF coalition presence is like a living creature that’s morphing all the time. I think State should be looking for people that have that team spirit approach to things.

Q: In terms of planning, how did you take resources into account, either financial, human, or otherwise?

A: When I arrived there, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that State Department PRTers would get some small budget to do outreach work. I was told that I had something like $5000, which I thought, “Wow, this is great!” Because I didn’t really expect to have any money.

Generally those of us going to the PRTs were thinking, “What is our value added that we’re bringing to this game?” Because USAID brings huge money, the military brings CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program) funds. And we, what do we bring? Knowledge.

So we had a budget and I actually used some of it. What I did is, I found a Hazari school that I visited. The PRT supported me, took me out there in a convoy, and I visited with the schoolmaster, saw the school, fell in love with this place and said, “We’ve got to support this school,” mainly because by doing so, the word would get out really quickly to the Hazaris in Ghazni that we care about them and it did. So it was like a force multiplier, injecting resources into the school, and the word got out.

So that was a really good thing. And that was small money. We’re talking $2,200, I think, that I ended up expending to help that school out.

Later we were told that State reps would get a budget of something like $10,000. If that materialized, it was probably after I left. If it’s true, then it’s a good thing.

So I would wholeheartedly recommend that State Department PRT people get some sort of budget that they can use. And of course you have to be accountable, you have to report back how you’re using it to the embassy and show receipts. But I highly recommend that, because I think we can actually do a lot.

Otherwise, I’m not going to tell other people how they should spend their money, but I was involved in decisions about whether we should support X or Y project, which necessarily entails advice on use of funds. So I was involved in resource allocation by having a voice in those decisions.

It would have been helpful for me in Ghazni to have a local national assistant, like my colleagues in Paktika and Khost had. Even though I requested one, I didn’t get one assigned to me.

I also had a local national attorney advisor who helped out on justice sector issues, but he was cherry picked away from us by the JSSP (Justice Sector Support Program) back in Kabul. They offered him a better salary and frankly moving him to Kabul was safer than keeping him in

13 Ghazni. So we lost that asset and we weren’t able to hire one by the time I left. Nobody wants to work in Ghazni. It’s that dangerous.

Q: How well do you feel that your training prepared you for your experience?

A: I think my personal background and what I learned back in university and my own reading was probably the most beneficial training that I had, in terms of understanding the environment I was going into and moving around effectively in it.

The Fort Bragg training, which was very practical stuff, such as Combat Lifesaver training (CLS), that was very good. I highly recommend it. If you ever end up in a situation where someone’s injured, you as a civilian, a State Department person, can help. You don’t have to stand there on the sidelines and look dumb.

And I did help. We helped with a case where about 20 Afghans were brought to the base, their legs were all shredded up from RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and I and everybody else helped out to save their lives. So CLS training is very good.

We had weapons familiarization training, which I would recommend. Again, State Department personnel are not supposed to be walking around with weapons and shouldn’t. But if you were in a firefight and things were getting really bad, I think you’d want to know how to defend yourself, so I recommend that and did that at Fort Bragg.

The FACTS training, the “crash and bang” course, where you learn how to escape…

Q: Defensive driving?

A: Yes. That’s probably not useful in the PRTs where you’re driving around in a convoy, because you’re never going to drive. In a self-drive environment, like in Kunduz or Panjshir, where the State Department officer drives himself around, that would be useful. What I would recommend there is not requiring training for people going out where they don’t drive. That’s a waste of time.

So what I would recommend instead is maybe seeing if there’s some way to familiarize a person, either here or in country, on how to start up and drive a humvee if you had to do that. I did that on my own out in the PRT and I think it’s a good idea.

Maybe more serious radio training might be useful too. These are all contingency things. But the training that we got at Fort Bragg on how to use radios was rushed and it didn’t stick in my head at all. I was just thinking, “Okay, I know how to drive a humvee out of here if I have to, but I don’t necessarily know how to use a radio.” I would recommend that.

We had a weeklong training in February 2008 here at FSI on Afghanistan. The instructor was very good, I thought, but it was more an overall understanding of Afghanistan. Especially if you’re going to the Southeast, there needs to be more in-depth drilling down into the tribes, the

14 role of tribes, because you really, really have to understand that stuff to be effective in the Southeast.

Q: Do you think that a more localized or region-specific training would be appropriate across the board or was it particular to your experience?

A: Definitely region-specific across the board. Because Afghanistan, is actually a series of regions and tribes. It’s a country but it’s not in a way. It’s very diverse.

If you’re going to Kunduz, you probably have to have a better appreciation of Uzbeks, Tajiks, the whole northern Afghanistan experience. If you’re going to the Southeast, you really need to study your different Pashtun tribes, the Ghilzai Pashtuns in particular and their relationship with their government over the course of the country’s modern history.

I know that some of this stuff’s out there already in books. Like Olaf Caroe’s book on the Pashtuns. [Note: See The Pathans: 550 B.C. – A.D. 1957 by Olaf Caroe.] It is a very detailed study of the different Pashtuns. Probably U.S. government agencies have a lot of this stuff, it’s just not necessarily in a one-stop shopping format. But that would be really helpful, if you had access to that.

There’s also an organization called the Tribal Liaison Office in Kabul. It’s an NGO, and they do excellent provincial surveys. They did one for Ghazni, and I really benefited from that. They came and briefed us on their study.

They sent people out into Ghazni for several weeks and to other places. They came back and put together results of their study, and it gave you a really good political, ethnographic lay of the land. It was very helpful, so I recommend that particular organization.

Q: In terms of impact, to what extent do you feel that the PRT achieved its mission and could you divide that into short-term and long-term achievements?

A: Good question. I think we were achieving our objectives in the development area. We didn’t have too many setbacks there. So that was good.

In the governance area, we achieved a critical sort of development, in terms of stability, by helping to ensure that the governor stayed there for longer than a year. Since 2002, up to the time we were there, Ghazni had had something like six governors, so it was a rotating carousel of governors. That’s what I would call political instability and that allowed the province to slide into the hands of the enemy.

The current governor proved to be very effective. We supported him, and that helped him to last longer than other governors. His predecessor was there, for instance, less than two months. So I’d say we achieved a certain amount of political stability there.

We saw security deteriorate. That’s not necessarily our fault. The Poles are basically responsible for the coalition contribution to the province’s security, and frankly I don’t think they had a very

15 good relationship with the Afghan army and police forces there. Of course, they had their own political limitations on their activities; they were essentially constrained to controlling the main highway.

We had a Special Forces unit attached to the PRT. They did some effective work but they’re a small unit and they can only do so much.

Two other areas: information and justice, which I would break out as important things. Information-wise, I think we’re losing in Ghazni, losing all over Afghanistan that way.

We maintained or helped the Afghan government to maintain a couple radio stations in Ghazni, which were mildly effective, in terms of just putting out nice stuff for Afghans to listen to and getting the occasional government message out, but their programming was basically in Dari and so the whole Pashtun population of Afghanistan felt left out. They either didn’t understand what was coming over the radio or they certainly didn’t see Pashtun-oriented programming that they could enjoy.

I was trying to work with a prominent Pashtun to set up a private radio station that would allow him to do some sort of moderate broadcasting to a Pashtun audience in Pashto, but as I left that was still in the very early stages and I don’t know if that worked.

In the justice sector, I would say that we jumped on that a little late, but frankly there’s not a whole lot you can do in the justice sector. You, as the PRT, you can help with the formal sector, courtrooms, judges, getting them training, helping building up a courtroom, and making sure they have the infrastructure to run a functioning, formal justice sector.

But most of the people in Ghazni relied on the informal, traditional justice sector, a jirga of men sitting around in a circle in a village, meting out justice. That’s what most people relied on, and I contend that we should not get involved in that. We need to be very careful about messing with that, because you can engender backlash from people who are very protective of that sphere of their life.

Q: You mentioned that there was a fairly rapid turnover in previous governors. Under what conditions? Were they forced out of office?

A: Usually they left either on their own or they were forced out. The one who preceded the governor we worked with was a taxi driver from New York. He was an Afghan that had emigrated to New York, nice guy, very congenial. We got along with him well, he spoke perfect English, but he had no connection with the local population, so it was not clear why he was ever even assigned there. But he didn’t last long.

The guy before him was a mujahideen commander. If I’m not mistaken, we may have had some role in him getting booted out at one time or the other. But I can’t tell you the specifics of the other previous governors and why they came and went.

16 I would make this observation: I think Ghazni is neglected by the government in Kabul and certainly by us. I think that’s a mistake.

Q: What advice, if any, did you give to your replacement?

A: A couple things: first of all, to their credit, the PRT office in the embassy, which was, by the time I was leaving, called IPA, really made it clear that they wanted overlap.

So we worked it out. I worked with my replacement over a period of a couple of weeks to work out his schedule, so that he arrived and we had three weeks of overlap, so that was really good.

By the way, he also arrived right on the eve of the elections on August 20, so we worked together on the elections. He met all the people I knew. Basically before I left, he just picked my brain.

I also left a continuity book that my predecessor had left me. I updated the continuity book and had issues and personalities and other information and left that with him as well.

We maintain contact to this day, and so I think we had very good continuity and handoff of the issues.

Q: What would you say is the most critical component involved in enabling a positive transition to the host nation?

A: That’s a good question. I would say there’s a point where we need to resist our American tendency to want to do things on our own, the way we think they should be done. And we’re a very impatient people.

So that’s the first thing you need to put on hold. I think you need to go out there with an understanding that your time there, in a year, is probably not going to make a huge difference.

It’s a 5,000-year-old country. They’re very patient. They’ve had armies come and go through them. So my showing up there for one year isn’t going to make a huge dent in the whole scheme of things.

Concerning transitioning authority or responsibility to the Afghans, the biggest hang up on that is going to be us being willing to relinquish control. Part of that has to do with our sort of hubris as a nation and desire to micromanage everything, to think we know better. That’s part of it.

And part of it is we have invested a lot, in terms of lives, money, and time. We don’t want to see it frittered away and I understand that, so there’s a reluctance to hand over things.

The big issue on all of this, the big determining factor, is security. The only way we’re really going to feel comfortable as a nation pulling out is when we’ve convinced ourselves that the security situation is such that when we leave the place isn’t going be overrun by the Taliban and

17 then al-Qaeda’s going to be let back in. If we ever come to that point, then I think people will be rushing to get out of Afghanistan and will gladly turn over the keys and say, “Thank you.”

But I suspect before then the Afghans will be coming to us and saying, “Thank you for your help and now it’s time to go,” and we should listen when they do that. We need to seriously think that over, because others, like the Russians and the British before us, did not heed that message and they got into a lot of trouble.

Q: You mentioned earlier that during the time you were there, you felt that the security situation had deteriorated.

A: Yes, definitely, overall in the country and certainly in Ghazni.

Q: I wanted to revisit one thing. You mentioned that to a certain extent your experiences were shaped by what you inherited from previous PRTs. Can you give a general sense of the extent to which your planning was shaped by what you inherited and what latitude that left you in terms of developing new avenues?

A: Sure. Actually, it’s huge, because what happens is, if you think of all the lists of projects that the PRT is working on - development projects, again, are the main focus of the PRT - it’s a reconstruction team. The only reason why you have military people there is because they can defend themselves. Otherwise you can civilianize the whole thing and have civilian contractors come in and do all this work.

You inherit something like over 150 projects at various stages of development and part of the PRT’s work is to go out and quality check the projects and make sure that they’re going along at a set time line and people aren’t stealing the money.

So a lot of that work gets passed on to you and a PRT has to go out and do that. A good chunk of your time’s going to be focused on that.

You also then want to try to identify your own projects. I’m not saying that you necessarily go looking for them, because people often bring them to you. However, you might think, for instance, that the Hazaris out in the west aren’t necessarily going to be coming to us. If we want to try to keep them on board and make sure that they don’t start acting up, we might want to go out and do a drive through their territory and see how we might be able to help them. So that was something our PRT did. It takes a lot of planning to do that.

There’s not so much that I as the State rep inherited from my predecessor, because, again, State reps aren’t involved in specific projects per se that they run and manage from beginning to end.

We had a small budget. Those funds were used for quick impact kinds of things. The duration would be for a very short period of time, so that’s not something that would be handed off from one State person to the next.

18 The one lasting contribution that I did leave to my successor was that Hazari school. I helped to establish a relationship between the PRT and that school and I assume and hope that my successor is still keeping that relationship up and still trying to help that school out.

Q: In terms of operations, what worked well and what were the major impediments to accomplishing the mission in your day-to-day activities?

A: Again, our consultative process in the PRT worked well. I think a lot of that’s personality driven, but that was good.

The biggest problem area that I had to deal with was probably with our Polish colleagues. I love the Poles and I don’t want to come across as bashing on them, but they have a different culture, different priorities.

I happened to be well placed to deal with that, because I’d served in Poland for five years, so I spoke their language and had familiarity with their military and that helped. But in my day-to- day life, probably half of what I was doing was trying to run problems with the Poles, either problems we were having with them, or problems that the governor and the Afghans were having with them. So I was intervening a lot.

The thing to stress here is that that’s a unique situation. You’re not going to find a lot of other PRTs that have that kind of situation. We are the only PRT, as far as I know, where you had an American PRT that was latched to a foreign maneuver battalion.

Q: How would you characterize the handover at the beginning of your tour?

A: I didn’t have any overlap. I did have good communication with my predecessor by email well before I got out there and he was very kind to come out to Dulles Airport and meet me for about an hour-and-a-half over coffee and give me a mental download before I got on the plane to fly out to Afghanistan. We had a good friendship and contact and I could email him from time to time and ask him advice or follow up.

Q: Did the lack of actual time for your overlap contribute to your looking for more time in terms of your own handover?

A: I felt sufficiently briefed.

Q: As far as the rest of the team, you mentioned some personality issues, but do you feel like the team had the skill sets appropriate to carry out the mission?

A: Yes. One thing, though, is that the people on the PRT who are involved in program management and contracting and handling funds, those guys, they get out there and they’ve had no training before they get out there.

19 They’re learning about the CERP, the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, after they get out there. That’s not right. So that totally slows things up. They can’t hit the ground running that way.

Q: Were there processes and structures in place that helped you achieve your goals, in addition to the problems that you mentioned?

A: Here’s the thing: a State rep or civilians in general out in the PRTs are essentially on their own and that’s nice; you’re actually given free rein to run your own show out there. You have, for instance, free rein to meet with local press people without getting clearance about what you’re going to say to them or to government officials for that matter. It’s a fairly unique thing in our Foreign Service to have that latitude. You’re allowed to do your own thing.

The State rep is supported by the PRT office back in the embassy, which has two components: a substance component dealing with policy and an administrative component.

I thought the administrative support was really good. They pretty much gave us whatever we needed and oftentimes they were offering and pushing stuff onto us. “I don’t really need this, but I’ll take it, anyway.” So that was good.

I thought the policy office, the PRT office, what has since become IPA, that’s the area that I think we got the least support from. When we’re sending in reports - this is actually a really critical point and I can elaborate on this – but I know from talking to my colleagues who were there with me that year in Afghanistan that we were sending in regular reports updating the embassy on governance, security, development, and anything else we thought the embassy would think is important. I believe that those reports basically went into the IPA office and never went out. I only saw one or two of the many cables that I wrote actually ever go out front channel from the embassy and usually they were delayed by several weeks.

I think the IPA office originally thought that what they were going to do is take our reporting and condense it to what they thought was important for the ambassador and others to see and that it then would go up internally within the embassy as a memo, but not everything that we wrote would go out.

That’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that, except that I really have my doubts as to whether that stuff ever went up to our ambassador to read. And I know you’ll meet with some other people here that I’ve talked with who are my colleagues and they’ll say the same thing.

So it’s not just me. I think the feeling was that a lot of the reporting going from the countryside, from the PRTs, to Kabul was just going into a black hole.

Q: Are there any particular approaches that can help streamline that communication or to assist with that?

20 A: Unfortunately, now there’s even more bureaucracy, because there’s an extra layer of involvement now. It used to be that we could report directly from the PRT to the PRT office, now IPA, and from there who knows where it would go.

Now we have to report to a regional command. So there’s a person in Regional Command South from whom you have to get a chop before you can send something to IPA. I think it’s now probably even less effective than it used to be.

Streamlining: I get a little nervous; I know what you mean by that. In terms of speeding up things…

Q: Or assuring that they actually move up the chain.

A: Right. That to me is a commitment on the part of the leader, in this case the ambassador. If the ambassador doesn’t take an interest in what his officers, his eyes and ears, are seeing in the Afghan countryside, it doesn’t matter. You can send reports up all the time to him, but if he doesn’t care about reading it, then it’s not really going to matter.

So there has to be a commitment on the part of the leadership to read what we’re sending up.

I would say there should be guidance from the top down too. As you’re going out into the field, the ambassador should meet with you, or he should appoint someone to meet with you and say, “You’re my eyes and ears out in the field, here’s what I want to see from you: I want to see a monthly report that does this, this, and this, and it has to be three pages or less.”

Whatever works for the ambassador, but I think that’s really important. We were told going out by the head of the PRT office that probably our primary function was to be the eyes and ears of the embassy out in the field, so that’s what I put most of my work on. I reported back what I was seeing and provided analysis and commentary on it. That’s why I was frustrated to find out that a lot of my stuff, and I think not just mine but all my other colleagues’ stuff, was probably just being, I don’t know, filed away electronically or such.

I even had one very critical report that looked at what the Poles were doing and highlighting a big problem coming up. That report went to the embassy. IPA sent it to the pol-mil office. The pol-mil office panicked.

I went to the embassy and I saw a whiteboard and it said, “Pending,” or something like that, “Under review.” So I knew this report’s not going anywhere. It’s a pretty critical thing.

Interestingly enough, a two-star general came down to Ghazni shortly thereafter, to talk to us about the content of my report. But it wasn’t my report that caused that to happen. It was a discussion I had off line with a Polish military intelligence officer in a restaurant in Kabul. He, shortly after our meeting, called the ministry of defense in Warsaw at 1:00 a.m. to report what he heard and that caused this whole thing to happen.

Q: Were there instances when the more formal reporting process worked well?

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A: Again, did my reporting have any effect? Hard to say. For most of my tour I’m not so sure, because I don’t know that people were reading it.

Where it was seen to have an effect was when the American military that was responsible for our region at a higher level changed out. The new command, which had been there in an earlier rotation, wanted everything they could get in typical military fashion. So I found a greater receptivity to my stuff among my military colleagues up at division headquarters, because I would send out my stuff to different people. They liked my stuff, and I would get feedback from that.

I think what happened is they thought, “Well, okay, we’re getting good information here from Ghazni and, my God, it’s not looking like such a great place there. It seems like it’s really gone badly since we were last here.”

So all of a sudden we had one-star and two-star generals coming down to Ghazni on a regular basis. I’d like to think that I somehow contributed to that renewed attention on the part of the U.S. military.

Q: Were there any gender or cultural issues, either internally or in terms of the PRT’s interaction with local nationals that are worth highlighting?

A: Yes. First of all, American military women in uniform are viewed as a third gender by the Afghans. They don’t seem to have an issue with them. Even Pashtuns, who are the ones who are the most traditional and conservative on this, don’t seem to have a problem talking with women in uniform.

In contrast, we had an American woman of Afghan descent - she was actually born in the U.S., but in an Afghan family - who was sent to us by a private company that hires interpreters. She grew up in a Pashtun family. She didn’t speak Dari and she could only speak Pashto, she couldn’t read Pashto.

We discovered very early on in her assignment to us that she was essentially useless, because the Pashtuns we were dealing with, if we would bring her to meetings, they resented her being there. They didn’t want to hear her speaking and talking to us, because even though she was an American, they saw her as an Afghan and they didn’t like that. So they told us, “Don’t ever bring her to meetings again. We don’t want her there.”

We tried to figure out ways to constructively use her, except that she couldn’t do translations, because she couldn’t read Pashto, and she didn’t speak Dari. So we eventually recommended that she be moved to somewhere else. I don’t know what happened after that.

That contractor also sent us another woman as an interpreter. Again, similar kind of situation and she lasted with us for a few months until we could find another place for her.

22 So I would say that whoever’s running that program needs to seriously look at that. That’s a lot of U.S. taxpayer dollars being wasted.

Q: Were there any other security or logistical issues that you want to highlight in terms of day- to-day operations?

A: Just that realistically, Ghazni’s a dangerous place. It’s getting worse. You have to go out in convoys, in big MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) and humvees, in these big armored vehicles, with body armor.

You roll into a village that way and it just freaks people out, especially in the area where the Taliban are operating. Usually the Taliban, when they see that coming down the road, they get out of there. They’re not interested in taking you on, because they’ll probably lose. You’re talking about small groups of men, 10 or 20 people. So they usually leave.

But they’re normally living there among the villagers, so you roll into the area and everybody runs away. Maybe a few scared elders come out and they’re shaking and they meet with you and they tell you, “Please go away.” That’s in the Pashtun areas.

In the Hazari areas it’s different, there’s much more security there, so you roll into Hazari areas, and they love you, because, they’re like, “This is an American commitment to our security and safety.”

So in that kind of an environment, our effectiveness is rather limited. It really brings us back to where we started this conversation, which is essentially that we must do everything possible to go through local officials to make things happen. It’s really critical to get them out into the field and for us to be over the horizon. That’s part of Afghanization and turning responsibility over to the Afghans.

Q: Is there a way that you think there could be some coordination with locals to minimize that impact of coming in there?

A: One effective best practice that we used was to set up a contracting office attached to the governor’s residence. I highly recommend this to other PRTs if they aren’t doing it.

What you can do as a PRT is do all your bidding and contracting and the things you do that support development work in that office, but you do it discreetly. You go in there, Afghan contractors come in, and you sit down and talk with them within the governor’s residence. It reinforces the governor as the one in charge and allows these people to meet with you in some degree of privacy, so that the Taliban watching don’t see the contractors meeting with you. That’s a good thing.

Q: Before we close, are there any other comments that you would like to share about your experience with PRTs? How they work, how they can be improved, or any other closing thoughts that we haven’t covered?

23 A: I have a closing thought, which is that we’re scrambling now to try to figure out how to stop the Taliban momentum in Afghanistan. I think when we talk about turning over responsibility to the Afghans we also really need to seriously think about this in the security sector.

Yes, we need to train up more Afghan National Army, we need to better train and equip the Afghan National Police and give them a professional ethos and turn that very corrupt organization around to actually serve the people of Afghanistan.

That’s going to take a lot of time. It’s going to mean that we have to have people linked with them, going out with them on joint patrols in the field, mentoring them, American soldiers next to ANA soldiers, until such time that they can stand on their own two feet and say, “Hey, GI Joe, I don’t need you anymore.”

That’s one approach. I think we need to really seriously think about organizing the people to defend themselves too, especially in the Southeast, because the people of the Southeast, the peoples like the Pashtuns who live there, do not want anything to do with the government, their own government. They want to have minimal contact with that, including the army.

Remember the Afghan National Army are mostly Hazaris and Tajiks, so they already have a tribal rivalry with these people, anyway, an ethnically-based rivalry. These are people that are very libertarian. They want to be left alone. In the past, from 1920 to 1978, they were tribally organized and kept the peace along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. There was a power sharing arrangement between the central government and these tribes, who were armed and defended their country.

I think we need to seriously think about turning over arms, organizing these people and saying, “We’ve given you the ability to defend yourselves and you’re on your own now.” And then we can pull back to the main cities and population centers.

That’s a risk, because these people could use weapons against us. But I think there are creative ways, such as using biometrics, that we can get around that.

That would require buy in from the Afghan government, obviously, because it means ceding a certain amount of power and control. But I think that’s the only way you’re going to effectively return security to the Southeast of Afghanistan, allowing the people to organize and defend themselves with our assistance.

I know there’s a lot of reluctance and concern about that right now, but I think that’s what we have to do.

Q: Thank you very much for your insights.

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