Work

Recognize these two white-haired fellas? Sen. McCain and Lieberman, along with Sen Graham and Gen Petraeus, paid our camp a visit on the 4th. Unfortunately they didn't stick around long. Something about a national TV interview. Sheesh.

Today was the last day that I had someone to hold my hand for me if I needed it. My predecessor left this morning, his six months of service ended. At 0630 the MRAPs rolled out, carrying he and the former commander of my section (the new guy showed up yesterday) to Bagram Airfield, where they hopefully will catch a flight tomorrow evening or Wednesday morning to Kuwait. If all goes well, they will be in the states on Sunday, and home Monday night. (Update: so far things not going well. No flight tonight, may be having to catch a plane to Qatar, then to Kuwait. This does not bode well for me going home and trying to get there in time for Christmas.)

So from now on, its my ship to sink or sail. I feel pretty good about it, really. We've had more than two weeks of overlap, which was probably a bit too long. Andrew did a good job of letting me lead the effort the last week or so, but the people we were communicating with would usually default to him for an answer since they were familiar with him. It really didn't matter how much he tried to defer to me, he usually ended up giving the answer. With him gone now, there won't be any more distraction for whomever I'm assisting, which will be a nice change. I will, however, miss having the security blanket there.

Now that I've been here for a couple weeks, I have a lot better idea of what my section does around here. For review, I work for the Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan (CSTC-A, pronounced see-stick-a), which is under the umbrella of NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan (NTM-A - just say the letters on this one). This organization is concerned with finding ways to hand-off responsibility for Afghanistan's security from Coalition and US forces to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). This command reports to ISAF, down the street, where General Petraeus just took command.

So how do we transition responsibility from the Coalition to the ANSF? Well, first there has to be an ANSF to begin with. Building the force is job number one. ANSF has two heads on one body, so to speak: the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan National Police (ANP). I'm not yet an expert on their roles in providing security, but from what I gather, the ANA is a more offensive force, looking for the enemy in order to kill them, while the ANP is more defensive, running security checkpoints and cordon and search type operations.

Growing the force is hard. For starters, jobs in both the ANA and the ANP are dangerous. The insurgents like to attack these guys, because if they can demonstrate how unsafe it is to volunteer, less people are likely to do it, meaning a smaller and less effective security force, meaning more freedom for the insurgents. Second, once people sign up, it's hard to get them to stay. For the Army and parts of the police, they are deployed far from home, just like Americans. Several months out of the year they don't get to see their families. Another reason they quit is because they get intimidated by the Taliban, a secondary tactic when bombing them doesn't work.

So find people, convince them to stay, grow the force. Great. But how effective are they going to be? Somebody has to teach them how to be a soldier or a policeman. Thus, the second part of the problem of security transition, and of CSTC-A's mission, is training.

The first part of training the force is getting them an education. In order to have an organized, effective, professional, Afghan-led force, you have to have organized, effective, professional, Afghan leaders. In order to be all those things, you need to be able to read, and have some sort of education. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the country is literate, and for the Army officers and the elite police units, they need at least a 6th grade education. In a country where schooling was banned for several years, that's not easy to find. The pool of candidates is just too small to make recruitment easy. If we can't find them, we have to make them. As such, a lot of the training courses have a built in literacy component. This is actually a perk of the job to a lot of folks. They WANT an education. It has been denied to them their entire lives. Learning to read and write helps balance out the danger and the inconvenience of the job. Oh, the things we take for granted in America.

And of course there is the actual tactical training, ambushes and react to fire and all that fun stuff. After convincing the right people to join your fledgling force at great risk of life and limb and crappy family life, you have to get them somewhere to learn how to be a soldier or a policeman. You can't pick up this stuff on-the-job (though many were frequently asked to exactly that in the recent past - a large part of our problem now is figuring out who needs training and who doesn't). Training may require them to travel, again, and has to be done in a proper facility with the proper teachers. Both of these resources are scarce, facilities more so than trainers. The engineers here are building as fast as they can, but it's going to be later this year before we can really ramp up the amount of students graduating the academies.

So, to recap, dangerous job, far from family, requires education, requires training. Four out of five applicants can't read, training facilities and trainers are scarce. Oh, by the way, we have about 300,000 positions open. And we need them all filled by July 2011 so the Coalition can go home.

Sound like fun?

So what do I get to do in all of this? Essentially, my main responsibility is to be the data manager for the ANP. Other organizations are technically own the information, but they don't know how to analyze it, how to organize it in a spreadsheet, how to present it intelligently in a slide deck, etc, etc. If a question needs to be answered about ANP numbers (how many police do we have, how many did we lose last month, how many voluntarily signed up for another tour), it probably is going to get run through our office. So far I've handled requests for information (RFIs) from ABC News, General Petraeus and staff, the Afghan Minister of Defense, Sen. Levin, and the White House. Yes, that White House. Now, don't get any grand picture of things in your head. We don't have a bat phone in the corner where panicked policy-makers can call us for a fix to all their problems. The requests trickle down through all levels of leadership until they finally hit the level where an answer can be formed. That's where I reside.

From what I'm told, during the December Congressional hearings on Afghanistan, our office will turn into RFI hell. A senator asks a question that someone doesn't know how to answer, they turn to their aide who gets on their blackberry and messages the generals here, who tell us we've got 20 minutes to produce an answer. It's also about 3 AM here, since Congressional hearings are generally held during the day time. The last one was apparently a doozy. I think it kinda sounds fun. Especially since it will almost be time for me to go home by then.

*****

Small things I've had to get used to since I arrived:

- Navigating to yahoo.com and being directed to the Singapore version by default. Thankfully still in english.

- Wearing long sleeves in the summer time.

- Hearing the Muslim call to prayer broadcast over the city five times a day.

- The smell. Kabul sits in a bowl in the mountains much like LA, so pollution hangs in the air all the time. Also, nothing is ever clean here, from the streets to the people, leaving an odor everywhere you go. (Disgusting foot note: supposedly the most recent air quality test showed that 17% of the particulate matter in the air in Kabul is fecal matter. Ewwwwwwww!)

- Wearing a necklace all the time (dog tags).

- Using the Muslim solar calendar when working with dates at the office. That's what the Army and police use to track time, so we have to as well. Currently we are in the month of Saratan, year 1389.

That's all for now. Out here.