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

INTERVIEW #188

Interviewed by: Adam Zarakov Interview date: July 20, 2011 Copyright 2011 USIP & ADST

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Participant’s Understanding of the PRT Mission

Interviewee was USAID Field Program Officer (FPO) with PRT Zabul, Afghanistan, from late 2008 to July 2011. His responsibilities included interagency teamwork with the PRT commander and the diplomatic lead, serving as representative of USAID interests in Zabul, promoting stability programs, and working on development projects in Zabul. The PRT mission was to serve as a military-supported development and governance organization in support of the broader U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

Relationship with Local Nationals

Observations: Interviewee’s interactions were primarily with government officials, local national staff, and implementing partner organizations. Most government officials and implementing partners were not indigenous to Zabul. Zabul is economically poorer and less developed than most provinces.

Insights: Provincial officials did not always fully understand or were not fully aware of higher- level commitments made by their government. The security environment constrained program and project monitoring capacity, and influenced interactions between locals and government officials.

Lessons: Improved security environment would improve quality of interactions.

Did the PRT Achieve its Mission? (Impact)

Observations: PRT was largely successful, and had an atypically high number of military returnees and long-term civilian team members. Impact improved over time. USAID pursued Afghanistan-specific stability programs focused on immediate needs, as contrasted with USAID’s more traditional emphasis on long-term development programs in more stable countries.

Insights: PRT structure and impact were influenced both by ‘surge’ resources, and by U.S. (as

1 opposed to allied) leadership in the region. The PRT structure is sufficiently flexible to address diverse security, political, geographic, and other needs of specific regions. Current transition efforts exist in an environment akin to the pre-surge environment, particularly in terms of resource constraints, and appear driven more by U.S. domestic politics than by estimations of Afghan readiness. The coming surge drawdown has given increased focus and clarity to U.S. and PRT mission.

Lessons: Prior familiarity with Zabul meant that military PRT leaders who returned for a second tour were more effective than were new arrivals, but also meant that they sometimes struggled to adjust to changes that had taken place since their departure. Surge-era high funding levels are unsustainable. Transition should emphasize programs and projects that Afghans can sustain.

Overall Strategy for Accomplishing the PRT Mission (Planning)

Observations: PRT commanders were well trained, but limited military understanding of civilian agencies’ (including USAID’s) roles, structures, and operations, sometimes contributed to poor use of resources, redundancy in communications with Afghan officials, and development of ad hoc, ill-conceived military development projects that conflicted with civilian-led projects.

Insights: Frequent staff turnover, especially among military, resulted in repeated learning of the same lessons by each new team member. A significant portion of team members’ tours is spent either acclimating to the environment or preparing for one’s replacement. Governance efforts focused on building up institutional capacity rather than focusing on specific individual leaders because of the frequency of assassinations.

Lessons: Civilian team members who serve for longer tours provide PRT with institutional memory, continuity, consistency, and information to new team members that is not otherwise available. Additional training for military regarding function and activities of civilian agencies, particularly USAID, is advisable.

What Worked Well and What Did Not? (Operations)

Observations: Operations were heavily impacted by frequent changes in the security environment, including assassinations.

Insights: Resource and time constraints, including the 2014 withdrawal deadline, present significant challenges to achieving the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The PRTs’ available resources, including staff levels, will likely decrease even as the demands on them increase, and interviewee anticipates a shift towards a regional focus among field teams.

Lessons: PRTs should be restructured to adjust to increased demands and responsibilities in the context of fewer available resources. Best practices were largely a function of specific personality or circumstance, and therefore may not be applicable to future situations in which the context is markedly different.

2 THE INTERVIEW

Q. To start off, could you state the date range, location and position you held on the PRT?

A. My involvement with PRTs in Afghanistan as distinct from Iraq was from September of 2008 until July of 2011. And that date encompasses the initial PRT training, which was being conducted at the time at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and the particular PRT that I served with was in only one province in Afghanistan, that being Zabul province. So I was with several tours or iterations of the Zabul PRTs in southern Afghanistan up until July of 2011.

Q. And your position on the PRT was?

A. I was USAID field program officer (FPO), and I’ll probably refer to that position in this interview as the FPO. So that’s one of the interagency personnel that is part of the PRT structure in Afghanistan. And again, my earlier comment, in contrast to Iraq. Just for the record, I also had a PRT experience in Iraq, which is probably not in the scope of this interview, but with my previous professional experience, I was with a PRT in Iraq from November or December of 2005 to May of 2008. So that will influence my comments vis-à-vis my experience with the PRTs in Afghanistan—just the contrast with the approaches between the two missions.

Q. Can you briefly explain what your responsibilities at the PRT were?

A. Under the FPO position with USAID—again, one of the three interagency positions on the Afghanistan PRTs, that being the Department of State, the Department of Agriculture, and USAID—the field program officer’s position broadly encompasses three areas, if I can recall them. It is to be part of the interagency team, which includes the PRT commander and the State Department or embassy lead, that—in different provinces, different rotations, it was called an integrated command team, and nominally, we have a voice in the civil/military relations at the PRT level. Secondly, as an employee of USAID, an important part of my job responsibilities was to represent the interests of USAID in Zabul province. Again, that’s a sort of PRT structure, because the USAID mission in Afghanistan certainly doesn’t follow provincial boundaries, but just the way PRTs are structured, the FPO position is embedded in that structure. It covered a province-level effort. There were a number of USAID/Afghanistan programs operating in Zabul, so I just played several roles regarding those national programs. And then the third one I might characterize as to be a development voice in a particular area—in this case Zabul province. So that is in terms of dealing beyond the PRT structure. Examples being dealing with other military units and the NGO community. In this case, in Zabul province, they were general development issues, to the extent that I would be considered a development professional or expert, I guess. That’s another third area. So those are the general parameters of the FPO position that I filled.

Speaking about the PRT more broadly, it’s a military-supported development and governance mission, as opposed to a security mission. Again, in Afghanistan, what that meant was that the civilian interagency staff are integrated or embedded in an ad hoc military organization. I won’t call it a unit, because in the US military, there is not such a thing as a PRT organization in Afghanistan. Again, this is on US-led PRTs as opposed to other NATO countries in other

3 provinces in Afghanistan. They’re either led by U.S. Navy or U.S. Air Force, for the record. Zabul province is a U.S. Air Force-led PRT. So there’s a lieutenant-colonel, a career officer that’s the PRT commander, and he leads a sort of ad hoc, you might say, military personnel, and then the U.S. government civilian personnel are integrated or embedded in that ad hoc U.S. military structure and again, focusing on governance issues and development-type issues. So it’s definitely a civil sort of mission, as opposed to security or maneuvering units, or traditional military missions. Although – and we’ll get into this, I’m sure – in the case of Zabul, it is a grey area because it’s a kinetic environment, I guess you could say. Broadly speaking though, it’s a development and governance mission, under the larger US mission in Afghanistan.

Q. You were leading to this when you were explaining your responsibilities, but is there anything that you would like to emphasize in terms of how your position fit into the larger PRT mission?

A. Well, that’s a broad question. I could answer that from several different angles. I’d say again, going back to my job description. If you were to just look at a typical day—I guess there isn’t really a typical day, but just on an average day—you would mostly be dealing with USAID/Afghanistan programs in any number of ways. In the PRT mission, that often spills over or crosses over into the other development and governance aspects of the PRT mission.

Where those two intersect is mainly with the broader PRT mission and the more specific program-related duty of USAID. Where those two intersect is usually where I would find myself on a given day. We can get into that specific detail, but broadly speaking, it’s that intersection that I would characterize as being my job description: representing USAID’s interests where that intersects or makes contact with a generic or average PRT mission. Which is to say that there is an inherent overlap, but it’s varied from day to day, I guess.

Q. To expand on that, are there any particular examples or instances you would like to state?

A. Well I could almost run down the menu of programs, but just as a very, very basic example, there is this – and again I’m speaking for Zabul province, which is in the South part of the country; you have a general understanding that that’s a little bit more of a security environment, which is a little more challenging, say, than provinces in the North or the West of Afghanistan – but there are overall ISAF security missions, there are U.S. maneuver unit forces in this particular province, there is a security mission. And in certain districts of this particular province, Zabul province, there are, of course, security-related military operations going on, and there are several USAID/Afghanistan programs which are specifically designed to, in a way, follow on those security-related missions so they are not active in kinetic areas, but they’re sort of a post- kinetic or transitional phase where a handful of different USAID programs are designed to follow on.

Being embedded in this PRT structure, you’re synchronized with that larger security effort, and your job as the FPO is to look for opportunities to bring these particular stability program resources to these particular locations. And I use the term “stability program” very specifically, because that’s the term that the USAID/Afghanistan mission has created for this specific environment. For example, you won’t find that in a typical USAID mission elsewhere in the world. Again, this term “stability program,” as opposed to “development programs,” which are

4 longer-term—some use the term sustainable, but the stability programs are specifically designed for certain types of effects in a security-challenged environment. So I could name those programs and go into specific details for those programs, but that would be a little bit more of a specific example to your question.

Q. In terms of host nation interactions, how would you characterize your relations with local nationals in Afghanistan -- both local officials and the local population in general?

A. I’ll have to disaggregate those two broad categories, because of course the overall mission of USAID is to improve the general socioeconomic circumstances of the country and of the local population in general. But (A) being a U.S. government official, and (B) being embedded in sort of an organizational structure, the types of individuals that you would deal with on a day-to-day basis vary. So I just want to be clear about disaggregating government officials from the population in general, as a sort of target audiences.

And that has different implications in Afghanistan, depending on which province you’re in. I can explain this briefly to say that if you were in, say, a province like Wardak or Logar or Parwan provinces, those are sort of adjacent to Kabul, the overall level of socioeconomic development in those places in relatively higher than other provinces, and just to indicate that there is a range or a spectrum even in a country like Afghanistan, as would be the case in a country like the United States or any other country.

But the point to make for the record is that Zabul province—again, I’m only speaking for my experience in Zabul province in the South of the country—is that Zabul, in the range of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, by any reasonable standard, even by the government of Afghanistan themselves, would be considered in the lower range of socioeconomic development. Which is to say, it’s one of the poorer provinces in Afghanistan.

And the implication or consequence of that is that if you were to take government officials, many of them are not from Zabul province. They are, by definition, relatively more educated than the general population of Zabul province, being less developed. So a lot of them are not from a province where the populations that they are even sent there to benefit are from. And that is a particular characteristic of the province that I was in—Zabul province.

So that’s why I brought that up in the beginning. Because that dynamic has any number of implications for in respect to, like, service delivery where a lot of these government officials are supposed to be helping the people of Zabul. And the way they even interact with each other is a kind of rural, less-educated, less developed population interacting with government officials of their own government that aren’t from their local area—in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases.

And the sort of cultural dynamics that that sets into motion, in terms of tribe, language, general affinity, and again, that is a much different direction in terms of me being a U.S. government official with the government of Afghan officials that I came into contact with in Zabul province versus the program beneficiaries of USAID programs, that are supposed to be benefiting the population of Zabul. The term used for local residents of Zabul province is Zabulese, and I’ll use

5 that term, probably. So dealing with Zabulese is different than dealing with, say, the director of a ministry that happens to be from, for example, the Kabul area. It’s just a different type of interaction. So that, again, just speaking from my personal experience, would be different than if I was working with a different province. So that’s a statement I wanted to make.

Q. Could you explain a little more about some of the characteristics of those differences, what distinguished your interactions with Zabulese from government officials?

A. Well, I don’t like to generalize when I talk about the people that I dealt with over a three-year period. I mean that’s a little challenging. But to be frank about it, Zabul, if you’re not otherwise familiar with the province, is very agrarian and very rural and relatively less developed than other province within Afghanistan. That is, Afghanistan as a country is on the lower tier of developed countries if you take a look at socioeconomic indicators, literacy, health indicators, economic-development indicators. Basically, Zabul would be characterized as a subsistence agriculture-based society. It’s semi-arid in terms of its climate, so the human terrain patterns of settlement are quite sparsely populated, based on sort of family or village-level settlements. Which is to say it’s not very urbanized, and all of the development indicators are supposed to deal with urbanization, which is minimized in a place like Zabul. So it’s very much an agriculture-based, subsistence-based, semi-arid sort of high-plateau area.

And then there are limited sectors of what we would know as formal governance. That could encompass a security presence by the national Afghan security forces, which would include the Afghan national police, ANT is the acronym I’ll use, and the Afghan National Army, or the ANA. In terms of government presence, there’s ASF and there’s the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which, as I’m sure you’ve recorded previously, is GIRoA. So these are terms that I will probably be using. Their actions with ASF and GIRoA, civilian officials versus a sort of farmer/village profile of the general population, which a lot of the USAID programs are targeted to. So again, that’s a broad range, but I did want to make that distinction explicit. Just a little color or substance.

Q. With whom were you interacting primarily on the governance end?

A. To be blunt, to be frank, on the governance side I would say I interacted more with the government officials, rather than the Zabulese or program beneficiaries, because simply, that’s more of a function of the way a typical USAID/Afghanistan mission is set up in a different country. Which is to say that I, as a USAID official, posted to a province-level or field location, I’m not doing the day-to-day work of USAID at the program implementation level.

This is typical of USAID as a U.S. government agency. We basically hire what are called implementing partner organizations to do the actual work. And my job in the field is more to support the implementing partners. So that really kind of gives you a relative base of who I would typically deal with on a daily basis. So less directly with Zabulese, because we have implementing organizations that handle that by intent. So the day-to-day issues or challenges I might say are just routine problematic issues would be my role would be more to interact with either GIRoA government officials, or the actual implementing partner organizations themselves.

6 And another note to make is that even the staff, the Afghan staff, because implementing partners are mostly staffed by, in this case Afghans, that’s a good role. Around the world with USAID programs, there’s a term “local national staff” or LN staff. Even those local staff implementing USAID/Afghanistan national programs in a given province, in this case Zabul, most of them aren’t even from Zabul. They’re hired sort of from a national labor pool. You might say they’re even hired mostly from other provinces; that’s largely just a function of the status in the labor market. Again, relatively less-educated labor pool to draw from in a place like Zabul. So in this case, in Zabul, most of the local staff are actually from the Kandahar area. Not that you have a map in front of you, but Zabul is the province directly adjacent to the northeast of Kandahar province, which is a big populace with a big city. So they’re from the general region, but not necessarily from Zabul. So again, that’s just a further disaggregation in terms of who I would be dealing with. All Afghans, of course, but those are the categories.

Q. In terms of the projects that you were working on with your implementing partners, were there any agreements or outcomes that resulted from your interactions with them? What this question is getting at is that, in terms of commitments that may have been made on the Afghan side—were there commitments made, and if so, were the commitments met?

A. Um, no. I think you have to define for me the term “commit.” I’m not that sure how that term is defined here.

Q. Well I think it’s in terms of how you would define commitments in that climate.

A. Yeah, just to sort of frame that question, it’s very important to understand, again, the sort of interview questions vis-à-vis my particular condition as a USAID field staff in this particular province.

Just a first comment on the way that USAID and the US government was structured around the world. It’s a bilateral U.S./foreign systems agency. Which means we generally work in countries where we have diplomatic relations, number one, which means embassy. Number two, the head of that embassy, the Chief of Mission or the Ambassador heading an embassy’s staff, works out bilateral agreements or programs with the host country—in this case, Afghanistan. So all of the higher levels, at least, to flesh out this answer following this statement, is that all US agencies involved in this situation in Afghanistan are, at the higher levels, worked out between the US embassy and the host country government. That may seem understood, or common sense, but it really answers your questions in terms of the commitments that I would be dealing with or involved with at a province level.

The qualification of that is that typically in USAID missions, most of the USAID staff are located in the capital city, which is to say that the presence of USAID staff in the field in this sort of atypical USAID mission in a quote/unquote “normal” country, but then of course Afghanistan is not a “normal” country in terms of the level of effort of the US in missions. So, putting field staff out at the province level had a certain implication in terms of the question of what commitments I would be dealing with.

7 So what programs I’m dealing with at the province level, the larger-level commitments within the government are already sort of in place. So the types of meetings or agreements or commitments that I would be involved with were much lower-level, and they would be framed by these preexisting programs which have higher-level commitments backing them up, if that makes sense. This may seem like a technical answer, but it really gets to the heart of the nature of my positions worked at the province level in Afghanistan.

So what I would be working with, just for an example, a challenge or a hurdle that a USAID program was encountering: in this case, it was a Zabul province mine. Support of that program often took the form of helping to arrange or following up on previous meetings with government of Afghanistan officials to resolve a more routine technical issue or a hurdle that the implementing partner was encountering with implementing their programs. Again, I’m not involved on a day-to-day basis with the implementing partners’ implementation of a program because frankly, that’s what we’re paying them to do—to do the work. I’m not really in a position to do all the work of those implementing partners’ organizations for them. That’s not the intent of my position, which would be to leverage or intercede at particular points to break some sort of logjam or misunderstanding or mistake of an implementing partner organization—honest mistake or otherwise. So that would be the best use of my time and position, in terms of this whole subject of commitment.

The interesting thing is that the province-level government officials’ understanding of those higher-level commitments likely was not 100 percent. So my intercession on the issue of commitments, dealing with province-level government officials took the form of trying to explain, in terms that this person could readily grasp, the mixture of higher-level commitments that his government entered into with the government of the United States. So that could have particular manifestations in the health program or the education program or what have you.

If that seems a bit roundabout way to answering a question, it really is important to understand this structure of U.S. non-military foreign assistance in a given country, in this case Afghanistan, the sort of larger strategic objectives of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and how USAID is one of the U.S. government agencies supporting that mission, what we sort of take from that national mission, the national programs that have been designed to meet those larger strategic objectives, and then how those national programs that they solicit, and the war, and our implementing organizations at the province level and even the local village level are sort of where the rubber hits the road, and why the results are or are not changed. And the reason why you would put people like me out at province levels is just to sort of facilitate or support at the local level that sort of larger objectives of the mission. So that really frames the area of the question in terms of commitment. But as I said, I’m not negotiating a whole lot of agreements per se at the province level, because that’s already set in place at a higher level.

Q. That does clarify the question somewhat. In terms of the misunderstandings or lack of understanding amongst some of the provincial-level officials that you were referring to earlier, when you were interceding to explain the nature of the high-level commitments that had already been made—Was that lack of understanding resolved satisfactorily? In other words, did you come away from those meetings with a sense that the provincial level officials did have a better understanding of what the commitments were at that point?

8

A. Just as a general statement, if I were to summarize it or reduce it to a general reply: generally, yes. Although, like in any real-world scenario, that is a sort of range. From white to black, a lot of grays in the middle there. Again, part of that is perception. My perception of any Afghan official’s deeper understanding of higher-level things is my anecdotal opinion. It would be a different questionnaire if you were to interview said Afghan government official in terms of his perception of interactions with a person like me. So in that, we see an esoteric distinction. But again, it’s based on my perception of that interaction.

So the bottom line for evaluating that would be: Is the result achieved? Decide whether there’s a deeper understanding of policy aspects of it. My bottom line assessment of it would be: Was the problem that arose resolved? And if it was, that’s a functional level of that question, I guess. Let’s just say that the bottom line mostly held to achievable results.

This is a larger debate in the development world, the development profession: whether the measures used for evaluating performance are sort of output-oriented or results-oriented. Just take a hypothetical example of health training: This particular USAID program was responsible for deliver or ministries report that ‘X’ number of people went through training, and that was the result that was measured in output, but the distinction of whether the performance of the health officials was quantifiably better—so that’s the challenging area you often find yourself in, in terms of the question at hand.

Q. And what could make your interactions with locals more productive, if anything?

A. Again, this is a broad statement. Improved security would have made—this may be sort of an oblique response – but again, I’m speaking from sort of my personal experience in Zabul province, where the overall security environment is probably the largest framework factor in influencing the success or relative challenge of again, USAID programs’ implementation in terms of (A) where they’d be able to operate, because districts were really just able to operate vis a vis where they intended to operate or where they can operate, the ability of Afghan officials to participate or monitor those activities, the ability of our own implanting partners to, in a transparent way, monitor or report on said activities.

That even cuts across to my personal availability or my Afghan staff’s ability. Like a USAID deputy at my location at the PRT in Zabul, Afghan staff, Foreign Service National staff, just the term that is used—FSN staff—and I supervised this Afghan staff, employees of USAID as distinct from an implementing partner employee. So our collective ability to monitor or evaluate the performance of working limitations of USAID programs.

I would say if there were one thing that would help improve that across the board, it would be a more permissive security environment. That would be a different response than if I were to have worked in a different province in Afghanistan that was relatively more permissive. So if you would like to have a follow-up question about that, feel free, but again, a general response to that question would be that colored or influenced every aspect of interactions or, on the technical side, monitoring and evaluation of projects. So that would be one variable, probably the main variable, that would have affected the implementation of the conventional way that USAID

9 typically implements its programs. And that has cascading effects with the way they interact with the general population, and then on the governance side, the nature of the interactions with government officials.

Q. Your answer sort of weaves into the next question we’re getting into, which is the question of impact. And so in terms of impact, to what extent did the PRT achieve its mission in your opinion?

A. You’re asking me to comment on the ability of a PRT organization to achieve its mission? And you’re asking the USAID person in that larger team his opinion on the larger organization and its ability to achieve its mission? Am I correctly understanding the question?

Q. Yes.

A. I would say again, the generic PRT mission, the generic PRT structure that is applied more or less the same across the different provinces of Afghanistan—there’s a half-dozen U.S. Navy-led PRTs, there’s approximately half a dozen U.S. Air Force, that’s about a dozen, give or take—I think, overall in Afghanistan there might be two dozen PRTs. So about half of them are NATO- led and half are U.S.-led. And even of the U.S.-led, there are different services. It goes without saying that each of those come from their own culture, in terms of their respective services.

Just now I won’t speak about the NATO ones because that’s too broad of a spectrum, but just talking about the U.S. PRTs, most of them are in the east and south of the country in 2011, that’s true, so—again, the question I’m responding to is: As a civilian, a U.S. interagency staff embedded on a U.S. PRT in the south of the country in the 2008-2011 time frame. I would say that generally that organization is relatively successful, has been relatively successful, and it’s a sign that we’ve seen, again, over the course of several years, over the course of a changing security environment, from when I first arrived in 2008 until recent developments in 2011.

For the record, my tenure in Zabul on this U.S. State-led PRT in the south of the country stands six different rotations on the military-led side. If it’s not otherwise noted for the record, the US Air Force and Navy PRTs do 12-month deployments, three of which are the initial training, so there’s an in-theater duration of about nine months. So if you do the math, I caught the tail end of the initial group and then I did four complete rotations of teams in Zabul, then just prior to leaving I caught the sixth and last.

So okay, the question—I personally dealt with six different groups, four of them complete tours, as you can imagine, six different PRT commanders, six different command styles, you might say, for leading this sort of ad-hoc organization which includes active Air Force personnel, reserve Army personnel, active Army personnel, National Guard Army personnel, so it’s an ad-hoc organization in that respect. So if you take all of those factors in aggregate, i.e. service orientation, changing personnel, filling the same positions longitudinally over a period of years, you add on their response to different leadership styles, so changes in security environment, again this is spanning four calendar years, approximately three years in the service in theater. That’s, if you can imagine, quite a handful. A lot of different variables.

10 So that’s a challenging question to answer in the terms that it was stated, which is: Was the PRT successful? Again, I’d be answering that differently if I’d only spent one year in Afghanistan, for example, instead of my three years. So again, that frames my question. So as a broad statement and as a follow-up question to a broad statement: Yes, the PRT as an enduring institution, which is staffed by a lot of different people, year to year, in and out, are they able to sustain the impact of the general PRT mission—I would say generally, yes.

But there are any number of anecdotes or instances where that kind of situational basis was relative success. So in terms of overall success, it’s achieving its intended mission. But again, you’re asking someone that had three years’ experience at one location, in one single province, as opposed to moving around to different provinces. Between, for example, maybe you’re a U.S. Air Force PRT for example, so I have a fairly consistent longitudinal experience, which is how I’m responding to that question. Six different commanders—you can imagine. Different personalities, different staffs—it was like a hundred-person organization, so—I’m not saying I’ve seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot of different situations over those past three years. The big question is to bite off at this point.

Q. Maybe to narrow it down, were there any particular time periods during your tour where you felt that the PRT was more effective or less effective at achieving its mission?

A. Yeah. That rhythm or that sort of cycle is, as I indicated, very much—this is again, a general statement about the PRT organization as I experienced it in Afghanistan over a three-year period—this goes without saying, but my span of time encompassed the so-called, or I call it the “pre-surge period,” through the buildup of the surge, which did affect—again, in Zabul, being in the South, it was affected by that surge of resources, both military personnel resources and, frankly, USAID/Afghanistan program resources.

And very much tied to or pegged to the rhythm of the nine-month deployments of the PRTs. Which pretty much all of the PRTs I have been with, they come in and out at the same time, they’re not like staggered, province to province.

So particular periods come to mind—the summer of 2009 through March of 2010, and the gap from spring of 2010 to fall of 2010, into the winter and spring of 2011. There was a very specific situation where the PRT commander from summer of 2009 through the fall of 2009 happened to have a strong team, which I can move into if you want, and the individual U.S. Air Force officer committed to a return rotation as the Zabul PRT commander in winter of 2010 and spring and spring/summer of 2011.

I say that because I think this is the only time you will find in the experience of PRTs in Afghanistan where a U.S. military officer did two non-consecutive tours as a PRT commander, and to add on top of that was a PRT commander in the same province. I think that only happened in Zabul province from 2009 to 2011. So you can imagine if there’s a returning PRT commander to a particular province. He, in this case, brings back that previous experience and during that interim training period, pre-deployment training, brings that experience to the training of the team, so then when they hit the ground they have that sort of experience under their belt, and that

11 sort of has implications for the idea of best practices or what didn’t work so well, what tended to work well.

Again, that’s a very specific answer for Zabul PRT in the 2009 to 2011 period, which just so happened to coincide with the whole surge because later that’s just another layer you have to add on to that in terms of available resources and then this sort of reservoir of experience. That was true on the Zabul PRT side, and it just so happened that the civilian component of that Zabul PRT also happened to benefit from the above-average years on the ground in Zabul province. And I’m speaking for myself, which I would say would be an atypical tenure of USAID staff. If you look at PRTs in general, it’s not often that an FPO stays in a province for that long of a time. You would typically rotate out after a year and do, for example, another year of positions in the mission structure or go to a different province and be an FPO on a different province. That also, for the record, applies to my U.S. Department of Agriculture colleague, who also happens to have been in Zabul for multiple years, in this case he went into his fourth year.

So again his tenure, that sort of institutional memory or best practices, what worked for Zabul, just keyed into the larger structure within Zabul province. So again, this was, I can say for the record, a unique confluence of—I won’t be as immodest as to say expertise, but—experience in Zabul taught me, with all of its particular challenges and circumstances.

Again, the original question was about the PRT structure and its ability to achieve its mission and success. So without mentioning names or individuals, you’ll find that the PRT commander— his commitment to, in this case, Zabul province from March of 2009, going back to his pre- deployment training, all the way to his transfer, which just occurred on July 10th of this year [2011]. So that’s now more than two years of commitment to Zabul. And I don’t think you’ll find that anywhere in the annals of PRTs in Afghanistan. The interagency staff, the core staff, which includes USAID in my case, and then the U.S. Department of Agriculture—it was sort of a unique confluence of personalities, individuals within this larger PRT structure.

Q. And when this commander returned, were there other people that he had worked with prior on the PRT, who returned with him?

A. That’s a very interesting question, that’s a very good question. In fact, five individuals from the SECFOR platoon (Security Forces), which is drawn from the national guard unit of a particular state, during this PRT commander’s first tour, I believe it was Nevada National Guard, and then five of them actually volunteered to come back with the same commander on a non- consecutive tour, and they got just that nine months of boots-on-the-ground experience in terms of how you organize convoys to how you manage dismount patrols, to just that sixth sense that you can develop, being in a particular location over time—you just can’t replicate that. You can train an incoming group, but this is just like NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) in the security forces. So that’s one example. There’s a—just for the record, if you’re interviewing others— there’s a platoon of about 40—that’s about four plus squads of National Guard infantry that forms its security forces. Which, basically—they drive PRT personnel around safely and form sort of the security element of the PRT structure. Also, to mention that the executive officer of the Zabul PRT—he will be an army major lieutenant-colonel, he actually was a member of the

12 PRT, believe it or not, just—the PRT commander that I mentioned who had done two non- consecutive tours starting in July of 2009.

Picture two PRTs before that—this is the first PRT that I caught the tail end of that I mentioned previously—there was an army major, civil affairs army major who was the executive officer or deputy PRT commander of that PRT. I met him briefly as he was sort of ending his tour. He came back one, two, three, four PRTs later. So he left in November of 2008 just as I was arriving, and believe it or not, he came back with this most recent PRT that just finished in July of 2010, and he brought back that experience to Zabul as well. So that’s a perfect example of individual responses, commitments to the mission, spanning over a number of years.

He brought that back. The PRT laydown or sort of array in Zabul province changed quite a bit between November of 2008 and 2011. Largely a function of the surge resources that I mentioned. Back in 2008 the center of efforts for the U.S. in Afghanistan, just for the record, was not in RC South, Regional Command South, which Zabul was a part of, it was in RC East, in the eastern part of the country, so at the time in 2008 it’ll show you how things changed: having a U.S. PRT in a Regional Command that was headed by NATO countries in the south. It might be known that the Canadians and the Dutch and the British were sort of leading the Regional Command South, so of course a lot of teams—since then, the US took over RC South in 2009, and a lot of resources followed that change in mission.

But at the time the Zabul commander came back for a second tour and these other individuals came back for a second tour, the mission was different, the resources available were different, and the physical laydown of the PRT personnel was different. Back in 2008, pretty much everyone was based out of a central location in the provincial capital of Qalat, which is the name of the town, the provincial capital of Zabul province. But by 2011, there was, for example, more armored vehicles available, more—the mission was different, where the battle spaces are, the maneuvering unit in Zabul, of which the PRT was a constituent unit, which is to say they’re sort of under the command of O6 Colonel, and the PRT being commanded by the lieutenant-colonel, we were sort of being supportive of the larger battlespace or brigade structure that came online in Zabul around 2009. So by the time that the civil affairs major who I had mentioned was volunteering to come back, he was later promoted to a lieutenant-colonel, but he was sent out to one of the more remote districts to lead a detached team of the Zabul PRT. So it just gives you a slice or a snapshot of how the PRT mission—although the organization is the same, the command structure is the same, the staffing is largely the same—how that is arrayed over a four calendar year period, a three-year period from 2008 to 2011 is quite different. And that has implications for my position there under USAID.

But since you asked if other military have returned, again I would say that’s fairly atypical, as far as I’m aware, of PRTs in Afghanistan. But the confluence, or just the combination of personalities, worked out so that there was an above-average, I would say, strong team in terms of continuity of U.S. civilian agency presence and, as has been stated, the PRT commander and some of his chief staff—again, NCOs, the security forces platoon, and this detached team that was basically, if you break up the structure of the PRT and you sort of disperse them at these outlying district locations, so some fairly specific and concrete examples of how that experience can be leveraged or taken advantage of. That’s very particular to Zabul.

13

You go to a different province, obviously the terrain is different, the security framework is different. I guess the salient point is that all of the PRTs are more or less staffed and organized the same, but they’re flexible enough that they can be responsive as much as is safely possible to the larger force structure—to the different regional commands, different brigades, different task force structures within the regional commands and how the province or the PRT plugs into that military framework. And then the civilian agencies are embedded or plugged into that.

Q. What would you identify as the most critical component involved in enabling positive transition to host nation authority, responsibility, and sovereignty?

A. Well, that’s a really necessarily broad question. What’s the most important factor in doing that?

Q. Right. It would probably apply to your experience in Zabul specifically, not necessarily to the country.

A. Well, this whole “transition” term is, as you’re aware, relatively recent. Again, my answer is based on that longer-than-average tenure. Again, I’d be answering differently if I’d been anywhere else for like a year, but you happen to be asking me. I happen to have about three years of experience, so that frames my answer.

Again, I made the comment earlier that my tenure in Zabul province preceded the surge, so the term that’s used is an “economy of force” environment. So back in 2008, as I mentioned, it was a NATO-led command, which was to say a U.S.-led PRT and a NATO-led regional command. You were sort of a backwater. Zabul was a backwater, even in 2008. And that was a NATO-led mission. And then, if you really want to get technical, Afghanistan as a whole was a backwater to the efforts in Iraq in 2008. So again, I’m going to answer your question, but the framework is that Zabul was a backwater back in 2008.

So then I was fortunate enough to be a part of the surge—well, a piece of the larger surge through 2009, through 2010. And now, I mentioned that this term “transition” is a term that has come up in the past six months to a year. But again, it really frames my answer because in a way, transition with a capital T in 2011 is kind of what it was like in the pre-surge period in Zabul province back in 2008. So the hard fact is that transition with a capital T is happening. It’s less of a question of whether the Afghan general population or government officials personally, or the USAID programs that are largely staffed by technical Afghan staff are ready for transition.

You’re generally familiar with that transition with a capital T, that U.S. or ISAF policy is driven by as much or more domestic political dynamics, financial dynamics—is more driving it than the relative preparedness of the Afghans to graduate or mainstream into the transition environment. So that really sort of taints or colors any response of what’s a successful factor or what’s driving the transition in, in this case, Zabul of 2011. The fact is that it’s a tidal wave coming but we, as US government officials, really have influence over how to sort of manage this tidal wave as it hits Zabul province. Which, to be honest, if you were to look at it objectively, wouldn’t be the first tranche or group of transitioning provinces, I think. Nominally, transition is happening in

14 places like Herat and Mazar and Panjshir. In terms of the transfer of security responsibility, ASF or GIRoA leads—but what it probably will look like in a place like Zabul is that the U.S. maneuvering units just aren’t replaced, so the USAID funding resources are going to glide past or sort of back into a curve. As I was leaving, I already saw that happening with particular programs in the democracy and governance portfolio. So that goes back to Congressional appropriations that are really affecting the overall mission portfolio.

So there are different aspects to this transition. There’s the whole security environment, which I specifically mentioned earlier in terms of my ability, the one factor that sort of affects my work more than other aspects. And then just in terms of diminishing financial program resources. Again, you’re asking the USAID person at a PRT so I deal with specific national programs. So there’s really no clean answer to that question. Because it’s a challenging, messy process that I saw the beginnings of as I was transitioning out.

So it’s not so much a question of a best practice or a successful approach or a lesson learned, because we’re at sort of the cusp of a resource-constrained environment, but it’s different than it would have been, given the comparable levels of resources available back in 2008. Because you’re coming off of a higher level of resources. So in terms of Afghans’ expectations, it’s different than it was in 2008, when frankly the expectations were probably relatively lower. So there’s been this surge or bulge of resources, and now frankly, we’re coming off of this higher level of resource commitment to something less than that.

But again, from my personal experience, back in the day, before there was a lot of resources to work with, you’re coming out of a different sort of aspect of curve. So it’s challenging any way you look at it. And it’s happening anyway, whether Zabul is ready for it or not, so it’s kind of hypothetical response as far as that goes. The final result of that is not a point in time; it’s on a larger slope. So the meat, or the sort of bulk of that process, is yet to happen. We’re just at the cusp of that.

Everybody is talking about the mission level. Certainly here in D.C., I’m generally aware as to how to determine these foundational efforts that may be put in place now or in the near future, so that by the time 2014 rolls around, the overall level of U.S. foreign assistance, USAID mission resources, specifically for my area, it sort of settles down to a sustainable level. Because to be frank, what we’ve seen the last couple of years has not been typical, it’s been atypical, it’s been unsustainable as far as you can’t maintain that indefinitely. Or even beyond that, it’s probably at a higher level that is appropriate, frankly, for Afghanistan. That’s not my idea, that’s been stated by other officials higher than me.

So again, I think that the success—getting back to the original question of what that might look like, frankly, is probably something like existed before this whole surge thing started. Which is to say, if you really want to get specific, it’s what funding levels and what level of technical interventions, programs, can be sustained by largely Afghan institutions, Afghan level of staffing in Zabul province—if you’re asking me, because I worked in Zabul province—but frankly, that’s below average in Afghanistan, so you sort of have to dial that down to a lower level of resource capacity.

15 So it’s a very big question if it’s a transition question. It’s a dynamic situation, there’s no set programs that a lot of us are—and I think this speaks for the mission in general—we’re making it up as we go. We’re responding to requests from Capitol Hill, Congressional appropriations on what the funding situation is, looking at all the expenses toward 2014, because unlike the 2008- 2011 period, if you take that same amount of time—now there’s this very specific U.S. foreign policy horizon, which is this transition horizon and then framing the question. So it’s more specific. It’s more focused. Now we sort of know what we’re working towards, which was not the case in 2008-2011. So again, to have this interview now, in the summer of 2011, is really timely.

Also to add to that, as I’m sure you’re aware from the headlines, new mission leadership. There’s a new mission director that just arrived in the last month, Ambassador Eikenberry just left this past week, the incoming Ambassador, Ryan Crocker, of course brings his Afghanistan career experience. So I think that a lot of the real, hard decisions are being discussed as we speak. And the reason that I bring that up is because that really is going to have really dramatic effects on people in my position—various FPOs at these various province levels who are at different levels of security transition. Earlier they were telling us about the fact that there will be a schedule of provinces in groups or tranches transitioning over the coming year, two years, leading up to 2014. So it’s really a multi-varying response net.

The short answer, just to sort of capture it in one sentence, is that in terms of Zabul, it’s going to be like it used to be before all this surge stuff happened. And that’s not the hard answer, because I already could see, as I was departing, that that’s where it was heading. It was just like a déjà vu of how it was when I first arrived. So, in this contrast between 2008 to 2011 and now 2011 to 2014 is kind of an interesting period to be working on this stuff.

Q. Some of what you’ve mentioned made reference to some aspects of what would be your answer to this question, but if you could restate or supplement, what was the overall strategy for accomplishing the PRT mission?

A. What was the overall strategy for accomplishing the PRT mission? Well, again, that’s rather complex, but are you asking for a point in time? Like I said, any question that I would give would be based out of this 2008 to 2011 period of time, which is just frankly saying that the mission changed quite a bit. There was a presidential election in ’08, and then there was the Afghan/Pakistan policy or strategy review, and then refracting from those decisions, the focus was shifted from RC East and RC South, as you’re well aware, to Kandahar, Helmand, etc., and now we’re clearly seeing that we’re on the cusp of a real focus toward the 2014 horizon. So we’re starting to ratchet this down a little.

Q. I guess the way that I would possibly restate it would be, if there were any particular threads throughout your tours that you would identify as consistent elements of the strategy? And then in terms of the major transition points, some of which you were just identifying, how would you characterize the changes in the broader mission over time?

A. Oh, those are big. Let’s just try to bite off the first one. I would say the earlier comments that have been made about these ad-hoc units; PRTs aren’t really like a brigade or a battalion in the

16 Army. Instead, PRTs are ad-hoc organizations, missions. There’s enough latitude embedded in the design of the PRT structure to allow the sort of command latitude of an 05 lieutenant colonel to manage these personnel for a particular province, in a particular year, under a particular battle space owner, because the other aspects to mention is that you can’t look at PRTs in isolation. They’re often…they’re saying—whether they’re holding true to their particular mission, however you define that, implied in your question, but the reality that I experienced was that this PRT just chugged along, nine months to nine months, and there was different commanders, different personnel. Some of the civilians, who were there for a while, were the institutional memory or continuity.

But specifically, from ’09 to ’11, there was more U.S. military emphasis on the South. In the South, in the directions that the PRT was told, frankly, or directed to, had a left parameter and a right-hand parameter. I saw interesting key things over the ’08 to ’11 period. And now that obviously had the implication that, when we move toward 2014, when frankly the battalion 06 (full colonel) or brigades, cavalry, battlespace owner that controlled Zabul, that will ultimately control the direction of the PRT, is not being replaced, and that’s the first indication of sort of the backside of the surge. And there may be two—they’re saying two or three—more iterations of the PRTs before the PRTs sort of go away.

So to answer the first part of your question, if there’s one thing that sort of was a thread or a success, frankly I would say—and again this is just for Zabul—I would say not to take too much credit for us, the civilians, but what I found influences the PRTs’ relative success on maintaining some course or continuity or institutional memory was civilian presence on the PRT. It wasn’t 100%, but there was enough that we could positively influence the course of the PRT, which was being pulled in sort of these different directions. That, I think, in a very modest way, was part of the PRT design. Otherwise you wouldn’t bother to put these civilian agencies in the PRT structure. You would just have it be a kind of all-military outfit and they would do what they do from nine months to nine months.

Others have observed that you know, when the criticisms of the Afghanistan experience were made, others have said—I didn’t make this term up—that we’re like, fighting the same war over and over again. I think you’re generally familiar with that term. I think, again, very modestly, not to take personal credit at all, or credit for the civilian agencies, but I think just by the nature of their contracts or the personnel pool that they draw from.

Which is to say that several of these exceptions that I mentioned earlier were very atypical, that a PRT commander would come back—he is or has been part of this program, which I think tried to institute, tried to “incentivize” the career tracks of military officers in the U.S. Navy, in the U.S. Air Force, to try to institutionalize a commitment or an institutional capacity that would sort of transcend these nine-month tours. And this is a generalization, but PRTs would come in and go out, and you’d kind of learn the same lessons over again. And that’s not something that a PRT may be very self-aware of.

That’s something that some of us, in this case civilians, noticed when the incoming PRTs came in. Which is to say, as well as they were trained back at Fort Bragg or Camp Atterbury, is that, once there was of course a handover process or a Release in Place Process—they called it a RPP

17 [pronounced “rip”] of about 10 days – but there’s only so much that is practical during that limited amount of handover. And then I think they would run into similar problems as their predecessors, and they often would learn the same lessons as their predecessors had learned.

And others have said that they typical arc of a PRT tour in-country of nine months—you have, I’m sure, heard this from other interviewees—the first month or two months were spent learning the province on the ground, the personalities, successes or challenged, and then had about five or six months during the middle of the tour where you’re sort of fully on, and then the last month or two months were preparing for your successors and demobilization and that sort of thing, and the handoff process or the tempo of PRT operations tended to slow down. So that was a natural cycle or arc of a PRT deployment. And those are just limitations of the respective services, because that’s just the way it has to be with a ten or twelve month deployment.

But certainly the continuity or the overlaps of those tours or rotations, to some modest extent—I don’t want to take too much credit, but I’m just speaking for the Zabul experience—was that I think the interagency staff members made a not-insignificant contribution to the success of the PRT mission in terms of bringing the incoming teams up to speed relatively quickly in staff meetings or in project meetings. Being able to pretty much say—not to close discussions off or to say “I told you so” sort of approach, but to say, “This tended to work better in Zabul province, this tends to work better,” or “This PRT has tried that before and it didn’t work for these specific reasons—you could come at this specific problem again, but just, you know, understanding the previous attempts at a similar type of problem”—examples like that. That is the constraint of the PRT structure in general, but by design having civilians who hold longer tenures, potentially worked out in that case in Zabul successfully. That I think we were, between the civil/military cooperation, I think it proved relatively successful. And this is completely independent of a larger policy tracks or resource constraint tracks that also are a big influence.

Q. Is there anything else that you would like to add in terms of how civilian and military team members coordinated on planning? And again, understanding that there were many changes in personnel. So I guess it would be more of a broad—

A. Yeah. I’ll start by saying this. I’ve said this to other parties, in other venues. I think that, given all of these variables, that PRTs are sort of designed in these ad-hoc organizations that has this limited period on the ground, and that they are designed to be sequential.

Which is to say that the idea is sort of a catch-as-catch-can approach where you release the military, which retains some institutional commitments, in terms of personnel career incentives for committing to this sort of Afghanistan/Pakistan initiative, is kind of—what I experienced, which is broader than just the PRT, which is to say with the other military units, in a given province and in Zabul province who sort of have interactions or who take it upon themselves to do sort of civil operations—it could be civil affairs personnel, it could be humanitarian assistance. Which is to say, the military, even the maneuvering units, the battalions that came in Zabul province, their primary mission was security in a place like southern Afghanistan. That crosses over into what would sort of be termed as civil operations or humanitarian assistance operations.

18 The point is that I think – I’ll make sort of perhaps a different response to what you might be expecting – but I think I have some strong opinions about the State-side training, the pre- deployment training, that went into these different units coming over to a place like Zabul. Again, that’s a mixed bag, so it’s hard to generalize, but I found that for the parts of the battalions that took it upon themselves to involve themselves in what would conventionally be considered more civil operations, sort of like the S9 shot, and their interactions with the PRT, and directing the PRT as a unit.

I found that the logistics, for example—the military’s understanding of how the civilian agencies are mobilized to support the effort in Afghanistan – was frankly relatively limited. Which is to say that prior to their deployment—and I can’t speak for what training they received, either organically, or by this case, my case, USAID adaptively providing pre-deployment training in terms of what USAID is, as a U.S. government agency, what its mission broadly speaking is, specifically in Afghanistan, how it operates in terms of contracts and the overall embassy/civilian mission in Afghanistan is.

Such that, by the times they got to a place like Zabul and took it upon themselves to involve themselves in ongoing sort of civilian development governance missions or activities, there were unfortunately—some successes—but unfortunately there were other examples where we sort of had to trial by error, you might say. They would go off with the best intentions, according to the training that they were provided, enter into Zabul, mobilize, get out there, start doing stuff, without a full or somewhat complete site picture of what has been going on or what is going on, such that you would run into incidents where you sort of bumped up—where the two sort of bumped into each other.

And thankfully that was not unmanageable, but it created some unfortunate incidents where resources could have been leveraged better, or sort of doing something that had been tried before with mixed success could have been averted, such that resources could have been more efficiently applied to sort of awkward interactions with Afghan government officials. In the question that was raised previously, where you’re having meetings with government officials, but you don’t know the meetings that are occurring with other, in this case, military personnel, such that you’re sort of coming across as sort of the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is speaking about.

Now, these sorts of anecdotes or instances are perhaps inevitable with a dynamic, large-scale effort. But just as a general comment, a lesson learned, or a sort of area for improvement—I’ve said this to others, including the Office of Military Affairs (OMA), of USAID—that I think a little bit more resources should be devoted to pre-deployment training of various military units, including PRTs, specifically, but other units that are mobilizing for Afghanistan would pay off, in terms of the time that I chose to devote to bringing various military colleagues up to speed on various things could have, I think, in my opinion, been nipped in the bid or sort of managed in a little bit of a better way if there had been a more systematic or a little bit more in-depth training at the pre-deployment stage before they even got over to Afghanistan. So it’s sort of a broad statement.

19 But it’s not like I ended up training the various units that came and went for three years in Zabul. I sort of had to, I had no choice, just as a matter of interacting with new colleagues, but many of the same issues that tended to come up had tended to come up before. And of course from a professional standpoint I dealt with it, because that’s part of the job, but that would be one kind of general area where the issue of coordination could have been dealt with in different ways. But then beyond that, once you’re on the ground, as I mentioned, you’re a professional, so you basically at that stage or at that point it’s largely personality-based.

That particular PRT commander is an example. What his personal career experience, where he’s coming from, his understanding of the mission as he sees it coming in in 2011 or 2010 or 2009, going back. And through no fault of his own, just in general terms not having that on-the-ground experience to draw on, has or creates its own particular dynamics with the way that you present yourself.

In my case, USAID, the programs that are active at that point in time versus three years ago, the experience you have or haven’t built up over one year or more of experience, but you never want that to come across as being preachy or “I told you so,” or “You shouldn’t even bother trying that because it didn’t work.” To a certain extent, you have to know when to sort of allow things to play out and not try to be the one who’s always saying, “No,” or “You can’t do this,” or this and that. Because frankly, you can advise, but they’re often going to do it anyway. So that’s a sort of delicate balance to try and strike. But again, that’s a function of your individual personality, how you approach the decision—how I tried to, certainly—the getting to know the PRT commanders. In this case, just learning about the PRTs. How you get to know them, frankly, that takes a bit of time on the front end. But again, I can confidently say I saw a range over six different personalities. They were largely trained fairly well, in terms of the generic PRT mission, but they had their own bosses to answer to. The sort of battle space owner, the sort of O-6 (full colonel), and they had to align their staff to support the battle space owner in contrast to, say, whatever the civilians said or advised them on. So there’s a lot of different angles on that, to be honest. And again your original question was the coordination aspect of it. So—very complicated.

Q. It’s helpful, actually, because you’re touching on a number of aspects that I was planning on going into initially pretty well.

A. And one that I chose to bring up initially was the training aspect. I know we’re probably on the start of the sunset, or hit the latter half of the whole PRT experience or mission, which is the same thing as saying there’s more PRTs today than there will be coming. So the opportunities are diminishing for lessons learned, but I think one, I don’t know if this is realistic in terms of available resources, in fact the OMA office pretty much said to me several years ago that whatever training we are able to provide at these various pre-deployment trainings is probably about as big as it gets, as opposed to as good as it gets, because you have the advantage of more experts in a pool to draw on for these trainings.

But that’s one stage or aspect where I just generally thought that in some cases, military that I encountered coming over for example thought that USAID was an NGO of some kind. I don’t blame them at all, but in some cases they’d be more junior-ranked officers that you actually dealt

20 with on specific projects in the field kind of didn’t know what USAID was or what it was doing there or what its role in the PRT was. And again, I don’t expect them, or fault them for not knowing that. But I just couldn’t help thinking that more focus could have been done on the front side so you could avoid these sort of incidents that tended to pop up. And in such a large effort, those kind of incidents are inevitable, but it was a pattern enough that I took note of it as sort of an institutional constraint more than just a personality-driven situation where that particular person wasn’t familiar with USAID or what-have-you, or didn’t have a lot of exposure to governance or development, in the case of the PRT mission. So I don’t really have an answer for that, but I mulled over this aspect over the years because I’ve had a lot of time to talk about it.

Q. To move into the question of operations, is there anything additional that you’d like to add in terms of what worked well and what were the major impediments to accomplishing the mission in your day-to-day actions?

A. Oh, man. To touch quickly on impediments, I again, if you’re talking about on a day-to-day basis I would say—and this is not a cop out or anything – but just the real impact of the change in security environments and how it could change, and did change, from month to month. And you’re trying to forward or advance sort of these governance and development efforts, missions, programs, lines of efforts. And that’s very challenging, to maintain momentum or continuity.

Adherence to these PRT missions, which is a non-kinetic sort of military but a non-security mission—governance, development, sort of broadly speaking – by definition those kinds of efforts require fertile ground to take root in, and that ground is, to a large extent in a place like Afghanistan, the function of the soil, so to speak, is really security. So you think you’re building and are measurably improving governance in a given district, but then an assassination happens. Which we’ve seen recently is clearly a strategy of the other side, which sets that back. It’s the general comment that has been made in Iraq and Afghanistan, of building institutions, rather than a more leadership-based strategy of identifying leaders, individuals with capacity or potential and focusing on developing them. It doesn’t take too long for the other side to recognize that if you are to take out that type of personality, that you can really have a larger impact.

I think the point about this is that the larger constraints of the mission in Afghanistan are such that you really don’t have the luxury of allowing ourselves the time frame to resource an approach toward civilian operations of governance or development that in a place like southern Afghanistan really is a generational challenge. The president on down, you’re pretty much of the understanding that, in terms of the U.S. resources for a generational commitment, just does not exist. We have to get this mission accomplished in 2014, so it’s just a bit of a broader answer, but in a way, we’ve set ourselves up for an sort of unachievable—in terms of available resources—mission, such that anything less than that, or where we can’t achieve those goals with the resources and the time available to a certain extent is sort of setting ourselves up for not being able to meet those missions or those goals.

So that’s the challenge of transition. As in the earlier comments, it’s not a question of what provinces are going to transition when they’re ready for transition. It’s just going to be a function of the 2014 deadline. I hate to say it that way, but others have accepted or recognized that challenge. So it’s a convoluted answer, but it’s a real challenge in terms of how you are tasked to

21 best apply diminishing resources in any sort of cart-before-the-horse scenario where there are real drivers. Again, my original comments of how USAID’s support of foreign policy goals in a given country—I’ve seen USAID make some pretty dramatic shifts over the 2008-2011 time period, most recently with this transition framework, and how I just started to see real programmatic redirections orientated now toward the transition environments that cascade from the congressional appropriations. Really changing from like 3-4 billion dollar annual budget for the mission that’s already similar, to if you’re going to lay it down in the 2 to 1.5 level, and that will probably continue to diminish toward some sustainable, year-to-year budget somewhat below that. So I think the PRT military staffing situation is also changing.

I could give you an example: the National Guard battalion, from which the SecFor platoons, or the different PRTs are drawn, typically come from one state and then they’re broken up into these platoon-sized detachments on different PRTs. Part of that same battalion I think is responsible for some duties and responsibilities in the Kabul area. And now I think that this 10,000 1st Toronto surge troops will be drawn down to the pre-surge levels, and I think the military is looking around for ways to maximize combat power in the provinces. We are even hearing that some of the duties and the National Guard battalion in Kabul, they might start picking from the different SecFor platoons from the PRTs. And what does that mean? It will be, say, three squads instead of four squads, for example. So it is that many less missions that the PRT will then be able to accomplish and taking the fillings around to accomplish. It really has concrete implications for this transition environment and the ways the PRT will be asked to do more with less, in terms with personnel and CERP (Commander's Emergency Response Program) funding. It cuts across every aspect of the PRT mission and makes for some challenging things.

Q. In closing, are there any issues that were not raised in the discussion that you would like to share on how PRTs work and how they can be made more effective?

A. Well I’ll chose to answer that more looking forward then behind. To be frank, the transition framework, whatever experiences the PRTs have accumulated are – not to say they are irrelevant—I think we are really entering a new environment where the conventional PRT structure is stretched even more than it has in the past. Because in the past, from 2007 to 2009, I think what it was asked to do was less than it is being asked to do now. The PRT structure, staffing, training and deployment really has not changed and I do not think it is likely that it will be changed that much. But you have to look at the good job of the Department of Defense. If you go back as far as 2007 and you are looking back at the mission leaving in 2012 I do not think the command structure has changed that much which in one way is a credit to its robustness and responsiveness.

The other side of that is I think the PRTs will find themselves increasingly challenged to do more with less funding resources and even grants and staffing resources. It comes down to the battle space and the areas of operations. They will be asked to do more over bigger geographic areas, which will push them to the brink and may compromise them.

I do not think that we know what will happen yet, but my colleagues seem to agree that in 2012 and ’13, if PRTs will still be around, realistically it does not say a lot in terms of institutional

22 framework of the training center as we discussed. When for example the battle space collapses into ASF forces who have different logistical or movement capabilities you can see a scenario where the PRTs will probably be tasked with helping. The battle space of the effective principal space is not shrinking and more difficult choices will be asked. Back to the question of what PRTs area asked to do but the terrain and the mission has changed. They have to do more with less—it is tapping the more end, more territory with less funding.

The civilian side – you talk to others in this project – there is already assistance and emotion and it is sort of shifting to the Iraq exchange and changing from the province level to a regional hub framework. I think that we are already starting to see more staffing or coverage for the regional hub framework. It is already set in place at the regional platform—so again we are right at that transitional point in the summer of 2011.

We would talk in depth for lessons learned and best practices from PRT experiences and you cannot discount any of that—I think that the ground is shifting beneath us. The onset of that it is almost a question of apples and oranges. Because I think this is a general catch phrase, “Have to do more with less,” and still have to do a whole heck of a lot, with clearly less resources. As the surge subsides and the military subsides the U.S. will likely lead to less personnel from the current level to pre-surge levels or below that. I think that the challenges facing the PRTs are capacity to be secure and are simply being asked to do a whole heck of a lot with less, and the PRTs need to be redesigned somehow or broken apart and reassembled. There is sort of a conventional PRT structure with USAID and O5, office command staff, medical, engineers and civil affair staff, National Guard, security forces platoon.

But as far as I see the challenges we need to focus on a transition mission in a place like Zabul province and a few others. In the representative province in RC South area I think it is just going to be a challenging environment. There might be individual lessons learned and best practices but they were a function of particular peoples’ personalities or particular circumstances that generated the best practices. It is a challenge to draw lessons learned or draw success stories or best practices that can be applied broadly moving forward in a transition environment.

I would not say that you have to rewrite the book, but you have to be creative and adapting to pre-lessons learned or best practices to make a different environment moving. If you were to break up the phases of the PRT experience as others have you would be pre-surge environment -- 2003-2004 to 2008-2009 phase -- you have to be very focused on surge period, which took us and is continuing to the end, and a closing chapter to what we have known as PRTs. It is interesting—I am kind of rambling.

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