United States Institute of Peace

Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Iraq/Afghanistan Provincial Reconstruction Teams: Lessons Learned

INTERVIEW #84

Interviewed by: Vince Valle

Interview date: September 15, 2010 Copyright 2010 USIP & ADST

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS Participant’s Understanding of the PRT Mission Interviewee worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development at two District Support Teams (DSTs) in Afghanistan from August 2009 to August 2010. He served for three months in Garmsir at Helmand province and then for nine months at Delaram in Nimruz province. He received little guidance in pre-deployment training about the mission of DSTs. His goals at both sites were economic development and creation of sustainable jobs. At Delaram he also focused on governance. Relationship with Local Nationals Observations: The relationship with local nationals, particularly the district governor, was excellent. The team also worked well with the executive committee of the community council. Insights: U.S Marine and Army female engagement teams were an effective means of bypassing Afghan protectiveness about their women and establish relations with them. Lessons: It is best not to try and tell Afghans what to build, but instead to play an advisory role for them. Ask them for a list of prioritized projects and fund those. Did the PRT Achieve its Mission? (Impact) Observations: From the development side, the PRT largely achieved its mission. Establishing a public health clinic was the interviewee’s most important achievement. The team also initiated a cash-for-cleanup program and refurbished a bazaar and a school. Insights: Using people nominated by the district governor for projects worked well, even if politics may have been involved in choosing them. Relying on a local-hire engineer to determine requirements for projects allowed for an efficient allocation of resources. Lessons: More people should be working in the districts in the southern provinces. The U.S.

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military leadership needs to instruct its battalion commanders to make a priority of supporting civilians doing development work. Overall Strategy for Accomplishing the PRT Mission (Planning) Observations: The approach was to be a low-key supporter and adviser to the local government and to help Afghan partners look good. The team looked for ways to improve infrastructure to help people in ways that the Taliban could not. There was not any meaningful planning with higher levels at the DST. Planning and coordination with the military was good. There were no International Organizations or Non-Governmental Organizations with which to coordinate. Planning with the community council executive committee was frequent and close. Insights: The U.S. should increase the civilian presence in Nimruz province in order to build up capacity and enable a turnover to the Afghans. There is too little understanding at the embassy in Kabul about what is needed in the field. Lessons: If the regimental commander sees a need to have a political adviser, it is better to first assign that person out in the field at DST for six months to get a feel for how the district works. One has to be ready to let the Afghans fail so that they learn from their mistakes. Daily morning meetings with the civil affairs group military person greatly facilitated coordination with the military. Daily meetings with the governor and frequent meetings with other Afghans facilitated situational awareness. Interviewee received only State Department training. USAID-specific training on its programs and implementing partners would have been very helpful. Pre-deployment training should also incorporate more language instruction. Having civilians who have served in Afghanistan brief trainees at Camp Atterbury was very effective. What Worked Well and What Did Not? (Operations) Observations: The Interagency Provincial Authority (IPA) at the embassy, which is supposed to support PRTs and DSTs, in fact provided very little support. Garmsir was a focus of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) but, because interviewee was not a member of OTI, the office was reluctant to fund his project proposals. Much U.S. military CERP (Commanders Emergency Response Program) funding was wasted on ill-planned projects. For example, schools and clinics were built which the Afghan government lacked the ability to operate. Insights: The bureaucracy at Embassy Kabul should have more confidence in people in the field and be more willing to release project funds to them. It is important is to have good unclassified and classified communications systems. The U.S. military is too prone to building things without checking with locals and without assessing whether the projects were sustainable. Lessons: Civilians going to PRTs and DSTs in kinetic areas should be trained in the use of firearms and given a weapon when going outside the wire. This increases force protection. DSTs should have their own security movement teams. Inexperienced people need more guidance as to how to work with the military and navigate the various USAID programs. Briefing of personnel by USAID staff in Washington needs to be better. 

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THE INTERVIEW Q: Where did you serve? A: I served for a year in Afghanistan. In my first three months, I set up the District Stabilization Team in Garmsir. Q: In Garmsir. Where is that? A: Garmsir is in Helmand Province. It’s just south of Lashkar Gah, which is the provincial capital. If you look at Helmand Province, they have what they call the green zone, which is the area along the Helmand River, because it’s the only irrigation in the area. So you have Lashkar Gah, and then you had Dwyer, which was a Marine military base. Then Garmsir which was a district center. I was with a battalion of Marines at their FOB (Forward Operating Base). South of that down the Helmand River, and there was another Marine base down there. When I got there, there was a gentleman who was a British stabilization advisor (StabAd). He had been there about a year. The Marines landed on July 2, and had a big fight with the Taliban and folks down there. They basically took over from the British. Up to that time, the British had had one company in Garmsir, at what they called Forward Operating Base Delhi. Because they had such limited resources, they couldn’t push out and stabilize the area. When the Marines came in, they came in with a full battalion. They put the company headquarters and security team and motorized armored recon at the FOB, and then they put a company down in Mian Poshteh a company in, I’m trying to get my names right here. There was a FOB at Fox, and Koshtay and Mian Poshteh. They are three fairly large villages, and the idea was that if you looked at a map, USAID had come there in the 1950’s and built an extensive canal system that came off the Helmand River. So you had a main canal and it branched into secondary canals and there were all the lateral canals which provided the irrigation. If you look at the map and the way it looks like a snake, the snake’s head is the district center, and then it narrows down into another larger village with a small scattering of rural areas along the way. The idea was to secure key points, if you aspire to the oil spot theory, where you secure points and then try to move and coalesce them. The problem there was, and it was a problem I saw everywhere, that there were just not enough resources. The companies in these areas would run platoons on patrols, but they never really secured the areas between the FOBs, so you still had Taliban traffic and planting of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) along roads and canals. When I got down there, there was this British StabAd, and he had set up a pretty good relationship with the district governor. Q: Your position was? A: I was a field program officer with USAID. Q: Which entails?

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A: Basically you would operate either at a PRT or as I was very happy to be, at the district level, because I still believe that is where the war is going to be won. Q: So that is more at the local level? A: Right. So when you look at a province, you have a provincial capital like Lashkar Gah. There was a PRT there run by a British officer, but we had Americans: USAID, Department of Agriculture, and State Department personnel as part of that PRT, along with the security element. When you get down to the district centers, that is where you set up the District Stabilization Teams, the DSTs. The PRTs are the province, and the DSTs are the district level. I was at the district level, so I got to know the district governor (DG) very well. He had set up a community council with 30 seats, and I think about 15 of them were unfilled, only because people in the southern part of the district were unwilling to serve because of security issues. So you had the snake’s head, which was really the district center, the bazaar, bridges and main roads that headed up to Dwyer, which were fairly secure. We had more visitors that you can shake a stick at come through there. Senators, other generals, all the CODELs (Congressional delegations) and everybody would walk around the bazaar with no body armor to show the security. Q: Helmand is a pretty hot province. A: Yes, things have stepped up a lot since I left, because when the Marines came in July 2, they were in a big firefight for about two weeks. Q: From when to when were you in that location? A: I was in Garmsir from August ’09 until the end of October of 2009. I went down there, and it was a little frustrating, because that particular district was one of the districts that were targeted as a district of OTI (Office of Transition Initiatives), which is a group within USAID that fancies itself as a Special Forces operation. It caused a lot of problems, because I went down there basically without any money. They said, “We need USAID down there. Get things started.” I said, “Fine.” Q: So you went there to establish a presence? A: To establish a presence. But I also wanted to get projects going. They had set up a community council, and they had a development community as part of the community council. So I met with the development committee, and I said, “Give me a list of the top 10 projects that you want to have done in the district. That means you have to go out and meet with all of the district council members. Everybody should put their heads together and then give me a prioritized list that everybody agrees on.” Well, they did. Their first priority was fixing sluice gates that control the flow of water from the Helmand River into the canal system. The gates were all broken, so they had basically no control of water levels. The way the canals work is if you open a sluice gate and you let water in, and

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then you close a sluice gate halfway down, the level goes up, and then there are cuts on the side and the water then flows into the fields from the canal. If you are not able to raise the water level, then people begin buying pumps and sticking hoses into the canals to pump water out to get water out into their fields. There are two problems with that. First, the water is usually controlled by miraps, which are designated Afghans in charge of water distribution, and it’s a responsible position. They are responsible for water management of a certain area in the district. There were 32 miraps in Garmsir. These guys were frustrated because they said there was a lot of illegal water taking because the sluice gates weren’t fixed. I said, “OK. Number one project. Let’s get money and fix the sluice gates.” So I went back to OTI, and they were very resistant to allocate money to me, because I was not an OTI person, even though we both worked for USAID. Q: And you were part of this district team? A: There was nobody else. The Department of State guy had not come down yet. It was just the Brit and me. Unofficially he was part of the DST, because normally a DST has a USAID rep, a Department of State rep, and often a Department of Agriculture rep, and then we work embedded with a military battalion. You maneuver with them while they provide security. We lived right in the FOB with a battalion. I went out on patrols almost every day. Either a foot patrol into the bazaar, or we would use the armored recon team to go look at other areas that could potentially be areas that we could put money into to get projects going. I finally sent a rocket up to the head of USAID in Afghanistan at the mission, and OTI finally shook some money loose. Their implementer was Chemonics. I don’t know if you know the way USAID works. Q: Contractors. A: Right. So under the various programs, OTI uses Chemonics in the southern area as their implementer. Under the LGCD, Local Governance and Community Development Program, DAI (Development Alternatives, Inc.) is the implementer. Under the AVIPA (Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Productive Agriculture) Plus voucher program, which was restricted to Helmand and Kandahar provinces, $300 million had to be spent a year. It was ridiculous. IRD, International Relief and Development, was the implementer for that. Anyway, I met with them and Fire Up, which is a food insufficiency response to urban population program implemented by Central Asian Development Group. I was really angry at having to fight for the money to start getting projects going down there, because I sat there for three weeks. The battalion commander walked in and said to me, “You’re the first USAID rep I’ve met that doesn’t have a checkbook.” We finally got the projects going. We had Chemonics come down and do an assessment to try to fix the sluice gates. Then they were looking for districts for AVIPA Plus, so I shot an email up and said this location was perfect, because it focused heavily on agriculture, and we could really use the help. So they designated Garmsir as an AVIPA Plus district, and I got IRD down there. I took them all around and showed them what things we wanted to do. I showed them the sluice gates. We wanted to dredge out the main canals because they were built in 1954 and because of 30 years of war, they

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had been let go. The water was not flowing, and all the sluice gates were broken, so you couldn’t actually modulate the water flow down the canals and out into the field. They also had a voucher program where if we formed a co-op and got a bunch of the farmers together, they would provide equipment such as tractors, hose, and plows to that co-op, which the farmers would then share in order to better cultivate their fields. I had just got that started when Delaram blew up. They had a big riot out there because the Taliban had told the population that Marines had burned a Koran and dragged a dead dog through a mosque. It was all false but it was effective propaganda. So the people out there rioted, burned cars, and were going to storm the police compound where the Marines lived. The head of RC (Regional Command) South, the senior civilian and the brigadier general who was the Marine expeditionary brigade (MEB) commander, got together and said there were no civilians in Delaram; all they had was just Marines. So the general said, “Get that old Marine from Garmsir (the interviewee) down there. Send him out there. He’ll take care of it.” So I went out to Delaram, and I lived in the police compound in Delaram. I didn’t live up on the FOB. I lived in the police compound with 25 Marines and 30 ANP (Afghan National Police), who weren’t worth anything. Q: I know there have been a lot of problems with the Afghan police and the training. A: It’s been terrible. But the Marines have a 60-day course up at Camp Leatherneck, which is quite good. They give them uniforms and new equipment. The guys that come back from that are pretty good, but the problem is you’re putting five well-trained guys into a pool of 30 guys that are untrained, unmotivated, poorly-led, poorly-equipped, and live in bad conditions. All the markers for success are absent. Q: They are diluted. A: Exactly. They try, but when you have a commander who hasn’t been trained and is extorting money, as well as turning a blind-eye to the opium trade, it doesn’t work. Delaram is located right on the ring-road. It is an interesting town. The population of Delaram is around 16,000 people, including the outlying villages. The actual city of Delaram has about 10,000. Q: And that’s where you were? A: When I left, I was sent from Garmsir to Delaram, out in Nimruz Province. Q: How long were you there? A: Nine months. It was a Marine base. There was a FOB up on the hill about three kilometers from where we were. There was a battalion of Marines up there, and they were eventually replaced by a different battalion. Battalion headquarters and security units were up there along with Special Forces and Marine Special Operations Group (MARSOG). Of the operating companies, one was in Baqua, one was in Now Zad, and two-thirds of one was up in Gulistan. There was also a platoon from the company that actually formed a team in the police station where I lived. When I went out there, I was joined by a Department of State rep about the time I arrived there. We set the DST up. We lived in the police station.

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Q: It was just the two of you? A: Right. We lived in the police station in a concrete building in the back. It was just a big, empty, concrete house or office. I got a bunch of scrap plywood and two-by-fours, and I built rooms for us to live in. We didn’t have any heat or anything else. We had one extension cord that could go into our building that we could run our computer off of. The Marines finally put additional generators down there. They put turtles, which were distribution points, and basically electrified the whole place about a month and a half after I got there. I got there at the end of October, and it was starting to get chilly. I went home for Christmas leave and when I came back in January, they had a three-ton air conditioning and heating unit installed in our building. We had electricity, and things were much better. Q: What was your understanding of the team’s mission? How did you fit into it? What were you trying to do, basically? A: It’s interesting, because when I went through FSI here a year ago, last June-July (2009), we had District Stabilization Teams or as they called them, District Support Teams. I like stabilization, because you’re not supporting anybody; you’re trying to stabilize a district. It was only a quick mention. Q: So it wasn’t really part of the curriculum? A: There wasn’t any real discussion of it in the curriculum. It was just mentioned really briefly, as in, “We’re starting DSTs, and they will probably be comprised of Department of State, USAID, and probably Department of Agriculture people. Security will be provided by the military and good luck.” Quite honestly, of the whole PRT presentation, there was one slide out of the whole week on what a field program officer does. This is what I was. Q: Were you with USAID beforehand? A: No. I was hired by USAID a year ago, in May. Q: You were a direct hire? A: Yes. I was a new guy. Q: So you were hired specifically for Afghanistan? A: Yes, as an FSL: Foreign Service, Limited. That means I could stay up to five years, but they didn’t all have to be in Afghanistan. Q: And you’re still with USAID? A: No. When I left Afghanistan, I said, “My one-year contract is up. If you want to work out some deal where I could take five or six months off unpaid, then after January, I would be happy

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to go to Sudan, Somalia, or Yemen.” All the hot spots. They replied, “Well, we don’t have a mechanism for that.” It was nonsense. And they wonder why they’re losing people? I worked fairly closely with Marines up at Camp Leatherneck with the G-9 section, which was their civil affairs. They said, “You possess a wealth of knowledge that nobody has, because no one has been in Nimruz Province. We don’t know anything about it. For them to let you walk out the door, and not capture what is going on, who the key people are, and how things work there was not good.” I did a fairly detailed debrief with the Marines while I was there. I gave them my email address in case they needed anything, and asked them to update me if the situation changes, because I was contracted to write a provincial handbook on Nimruz, because no other civilian has been there. So understanding my duties. When I went through Kabul, they took me through some half-hearted classes. I would meet someone and talk to them for an hour at the embassy. I wrote a 10-page letter to the head of the Afghan-Pakistan desk after I went through orientation and training here, saying, “Here are my observations, here is what I would change, and here is how I would change it.” The orientation was horrible, just horrible. The whole hiring process was really messed up. I think it could be organized better. I understand the challenges of getting people to come in and do presentations, but you need to give people a clear picture. I have read a number of books on Afghanistan, on the Taliban. Give people some history and bring them up to the present. Talk about the politics. End with, “Here is where we are now, and here is why.” That would make much more sense than, “I was on a DST here. Here’s some of the area history. Here is what the Taliban did here. Here is something about the Russians.” It was all pretty disconnected. Q: A little more coherence in terms of presentation? A: Yes. A curriculum, instead of a hodge-podge bunch of presentations. So I went over there, and I talked with some other folks that were at PRTs. There were a couple of old Marines that were over there. They told me my main job was economic development and starting projects. I was supposed to find out the key tipping points in the district and try to get funds for people to work, as well as find sustainable projects and work with the district governor on governance issues. The British stability advisor had been there a year when I was in Garmsir. He really focused on the governance side but a little on the development aspect as well. When I arrived, I was no threat to him. He helped me out and told me to focus on the development aspect by working with the development council while he worked with the DG. But when the State Department guy came in, there was a little bit of territorial stuff that I didn’t get into. He came in about a month after I had been there, and I left a little less than two months after he came on board. I understood they were doing a good job, and they sent an OTI person down to replace me. Basically, they told me they were coming down and we are removing you because this is an OTI district. It was fortuitous, because I could go out to Delaram. Anyway, when I got out to Delaram, there was no district governor. The guy was in absentia. They had fired him, and brought a new guy in. He came in about two weeks after we got there. Our goals were economic development, governance and helping them to establish a community council. We worked a bit with the Marines on the security side, but we did not get too involved with it, because that was their area.

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Q: When you say work with them on the security side, what do you mean? A: If we wanted to go out, if I needed to run a patrol to go to the bazaar to see some things, I would have to arrange security for that. I would have to synch up with the Marines and say, “I need to get to the bazaar sometime today.” Q: So they would do your security? A: Yes. Or if I said, “Do you guys have a patrol going out today?” “Yeah, we’ve got one of many.” I said, “Where are you going?” “Well, we’re going to go through the bazaar and up through the northern part of Delaram.” I said, “Fine. I’ll jump in and come along.” I tried not to task those guys with anything that I didn’t really, really have to do, simply because every time we went out, there were IED’s, chances of sniper fire, and lots of bad stuff out there. Q: But you couldn’t go out without them, right? A: I did a couple times. Once, the district governor said we had to go visit a certain place. I jumped in his car with no body armor. There were three armed policemen with guns pointing out. The DG was driving with the mayor and four more armed guards behind him. I came back and the U.S. commander said, “Don’t ever do that again. If you get killed, I’m in big trouble.” I said, “I understand. I understand the career implications of my getting killed.” But this was one of these things, that when the DG said we needed to do this, part of building a rapport and trust and confidence with him was taking some chances with him. Q: When you did have to do a movement with the Marines, did you have to plan it several days in advance? A: Most of the time, no. What we did is we met every Sunday and tried to lay out what needed to be done and where they would be going for the whole week. Say that we had to go up to the FOB to get water, food, or other supplies. Every time you had to go to the FOB, you had to take four armored vehicles and 12 Marines. Each vehicle needs a driver, car commander, and gunner. Twelve Marines is half the force that is gone from the security of the police station. That’s why there were only one or two times the whole time I was there that I told them I had to go somewhere at a specific time. For example, one time I said, “Hey, I really need to go over here this morning because we have to meet with the headmaster of the school and check on the work.” We had a contractor coming in to refurbish the school, and it was a part of the project we were doing. The Marines had no problem with it. The nice thing was the school was right over the wall behind the ANP station. So, the gunny (Marine gunnery sergeant) asked if two Marines would sufficient. I said that would be fine. Also, officially, I was not armed. However, whenever I went out, they gave me a weapon, just because they knew, as a former Marine, I could handle it. It would also improve the security of the group that went out by another 10 per cent. I’ll put this in as well. The thing about USAID and the State Department is that when they put us out in highly kinetic areas, they tell us we cannot be armed. It’s not smart from a personal

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protection point of view, and it’s not smart from a force protection point of view, because if you know how to use a weapon, and you’re with a 10-man patrol and they get hit, you can contribute to their survivability. Q: There was only the State guy, you and the Marines? Yes, but we were later joined, not by any members of a DST, but by a human terrain team that consisted of a sociologist and his interpreter that moved in, and then we had our DAI implementer, who was former U.S. Army Civil Affairs. Q: Who was a contractor? A: That’s right. He was called a Provincial Reconstruction Director. His job, because USAID gave DAI a box of money, and they earmarked $500,000 for Delaram, was to get together with me. I would work with the community council and the DG to get the prioritized list of projects. He then hired an Afghan engineer and an Afghan project manager who also lived in our building with us. The engineer would go out and look at the school. For example, we wanted to refurbish the school, and he would assess what we thought it would take, contract-wise, money-wise, time-wise, to refurbish the school. He would come up with what they call a bill of quantity, and said, “OK, you have to remove and replace all windows and doors, and replaster the inside.” Then it went up to Kabul, and USAID and DAI engineers would get together to validate it. They would then allocate the money. “OK, this is going to be an $85,000 project.” They would put out a call for bids from qualified Afghan companies, analyze the bids that came in, select a vendor, and have them get started down in Delaram. We wrote into the contract that 100 per cent of all the unskilled labor for any job in Delaram had to come from Delaram, so you weren’t bringing in guys from Kandahar and other places that would upset the local population, because they were self-help projects and you wanted to make them cash-for-work to engage the locals and get buy-in from them. Q: Basically, your responsibility was development and job creation? A: Job sustainability. I got involved in the governance side. I am not telling tales out of school here, but the State Department rep stayed at the police station when I went home for Christmas. When I came back, he had decided that he would probably be better utilized up at the FOB as a development advisor to the battalion commander, because we had had some problems with that specific commander. He was more interested in running around the boonies chasing the bad guys than stabilizing Delaram. Marines are trained for that, but don’t throw sand in my eyes and tell me you will work on stabilization but then disperse all your companies up north and run the Taliban down. He was a lieutenant colonel. We got the U.S. 4A Chief of Mission Support Agreement, which basically said that since I was the same rank, GS 14, as the lieutenant colonel, I was entitled to the same living conditions, equipment, and computers as him. He was reluctant to agree to that. I told him I needed desks, chairs, and finally, I just ordered six folding chairs from Home Depot, and they sent them over to me. It took six weeks. When I was up in Garmsir, and I’m flipping back and forth, but the battalion commander had a desk made out of old ammo boxes. He had an

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old folding chair. We all lived like that. When I bought six folding chairs, I gave him one, one to the StabAd, one to the State Department rep, I kept one, one went to the sergeant major, and one to somebody else. When I got down to Delaram, those guys in the battalion at the FOB were living fairly well. They had plywood living quarters, mattress beds, television, I mean, the whole nine yards. They had two printers and two computers. I told them I needed a printer. They said it probably couldn’t happen. I tried to get one through RC South, and it took me seven months to get a $200 printer. I got it the week I was getting ready to leave Delaram. Come on. So I know the agreements that are being made at the high level, but that has to really be pushed down to the battalions. Q: How would one do that? Does that have to come from the top? A: It has to come from the top. The MEB commanders have to get the regimental commanders and the battalion commanders together and say, “The civilians that are working with you are not a nuisance; they have a critical function and it’s stabilization. They need support.” By the way, USAID is paying the Marines $1,800 a month to support me, and I was not getting $1,800 worth of support. Q: Did you have contact with the regimental commander who was the battalion commander’s boss? A: We didn’t get a regimental combat team into Delaram until March or April. I had been there since October. Then I came home in April, and they switched out the battalions. The commander of the new battalion was much more open to civilians. He understood they were critical and that he needed to support the civilians. The regimental commander was even stronger. He said, “If you need anything, chairs or equipment, you tell me and I’ll get it for you.” Q: So you established that contact and it worked well. Would it have worked to go back to USAID or the embassy in Kabul? A: I did. I went through RC South and they had this incompetent who was the management officer there. Q: A Department of State guy? A: Correct. “We can’t give you anything. The force agreement with the chief of mission says you have to get everything from your attached unit.” So we weren’t getting anything. Not only was he not helpful, he was obstructive. I had gotten back to IPA, the Interagency Provincial Authority, which merged USAID, State Department, and Agriculture in an office to support DSTs and PRTs. They became like a controlling body. But to me, IPA was totally ineffective. I got to know the supply guy back there and he said, “I’ll send you a printer on the quiet. He was not going to tell anybody, but he put my name on it and sent it to me. It went through RC South, and they just held it. It finally appeared in Camp Leatherneck in June, and I was scheduled to go home in August. Those are the kinds of issues that caused heartburn out in the field.

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By the way, I went to Atterbury and taught down there. I’ll be going to Atterbury again this Saturday to teach. Q: Did you get training at Atterbury? A: Yes, I was in the first one-week class that went through there. Q: How was that? A: I thought it was great. I thought those guys did a superb job of putting that together. Q: People I’ve talked to have indicated that it is good for meshing with the military. A: Exactly. You get old guys like me who are a month or two out of Afghanistan, and we can give people the real scoop on what is going on and how to work with the military. For example, we tell them why they should put a garbage bag in their C-bag. When you fly in Marine helicopters, the hydraulic fluid leaks out of the ceiling. It’s little tips like that that make life bearable. If you don’t have it, it messes up all your gear inside the canvas backpack. I taught down there in January, when I came back. I came back home in early December, and I was down there with the December class. There were about 52 folks. It was a big class. I would say more than 50 per cent of them were over 55. A lot of grey hair. I think it’s people who have retired and then thought to themselves, “Let me understand this. Base pay? Hazardous Duty pay? Hardship pay? Special pay? I can do a year there.” My State Department partner was a 3161. I think my State Department guy at Garmsir was also a 3161. He was on loan from the Office of Naval Analysis. He had written a couple books. He was quite an interesting guy. Very competent. Very territorial, but very competent. Q: How would you characterize your relationship with the local nationals, the local Afghans? A: I would say excellent. When the new district governor came in, he was 58 years old. Q: So you interacted with him a lot? A: Daily and sometimes twice a day. First he had worked for the Russians for a while. He then switched over to work with the Mujahideen near the end. He then got into government down in Zuranj and had been an administrator. He had some real government experience. The governor at that time has since been replaced by the man who was governor in 2002. He just replaced the governor. I don’t know whether that is the elections or politics with Karzai or what is going on down there. I established a very close, warm and honest working relationship with the district governor. He used to kid me because one night, we were sitting there with a bunch of people, it was somewhat hot, and I dozed off real quickly. Every time I met him after that he said, “I’m so happy to see you awake!” It was a lot of good kidding around. Q: So it was that kind of relationship?

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A: It was a very good relationship. I trusted him. He was the one that initiated the programs for the women there. He initiated that. We brought an Afghan entrepreneur in who had been setting up women-owned businesses. We also got this woman down from Azuzu carpet manufacturing in Kabul. Then I pulled in the Marine female engagement team, the FETs. Have you ever worked with them? Q: No. A: The Marines set up four-person teams. They’re all women Marines. The idea is to go out on patrol with the Marines. Because men can’t talk to the women. I mean, all the women hide, or they wear their burkahs, and the men don’t want you anywhere near their women. But the women can engage with the women. Q: They’re called FETs? A: FET-Female Engagement Team. I don’t think it’s specific to the Marines; I think the Army may have it. But I was with the Marine team. There was no women’s council in Delaram, so the entrepreneur said they could use me, because I was an old guy, to meet with the women. They apparently think we old guys are harmless. I could use the female engagement team as the primary interface to set up this women’s council, and then find out how many women wanted to work. The DG figured there were 200 or 300 women who wanted to work, because they were wives of martyrs, single parent families, and widows. We had thought of setting up a tailoring business to make the simple Afghan army garments, because they bring them in from Pakistan. Q: So they could make them locally. A: Make them locally. We also looked at the Gabbean factory out in Farah city. CADG, the Central Asian Development Group, had helped set up and train women to make these big wire baskets that are filled with rocks and used to make retaining walls to prevent floods. I thought we could use that type of business here because most of the villages are along the Khash Rud River. When the river is high, it overflows its banks, floods the fields, and damages their crops. Every one of the villages that I had gotten out to, and I had only gotten out to six of the 21 villages because of the security problem and getting the MRAPS (mine resistant ambush protected vehicles) and getting the Marines, said they needed to build retaining walls. If we had the walls produced locally, we could take it out to the villages, and let the villagers put on the cash-for-work program, on a community development project where I could give money to the village chief. Q: And that money was coming from the military? A: No. It was coming from USAID under the LGCD program. Now the Marines also had CERP (Commander’s Emergency Response Program) funding. They didn’t administer that very wisely while I was there. Q: Why not?

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A: Part of it was the hurry to do something rather than doing the proper analysis. Somebody said we need some more wells, so they punched four wells in the middle of the Delaram bazaar. The bazaar straddles Route 1. They sunk the wells right there. I said, “Did you do water samples? Did you do a test well to make sure you’re down into an aquifer and clean water and not taking the runoff and drainage from the bazaar that would be getting into the drinking water?” Well, they had already had that project underway, and it cost $136,000. Q: Do you think that was because they are on short tours and there is pressure to deliver? A: Yes. “We need to make something happen.” There was also a proposal that was initiated by the Farah PRT when Delaram was part of that province. About a year and a half ago, Delaram flipped and became part of Nimruz Province. That was a government-initiated thing. I think the governor of Nimruz thought they were isolated from Route 1, because Route 1 runs through a lot of provinces, and it ran through Delaram and Khash Rud district, which butted up against Delaram. Delaram was part of Farah, and Nimruz had no access to the main road. So we think they got that so that they could have access to Route 1. But in 2009, the Indians built an asphalt, two-lane highway from Delaram all the way down to Zaranj, the capital, which is right on the Iranian border, across the river and down to the seaport in Iran. They did this because the Indians wanted to be able to get supplies into Afghanistan, because Balochistan in Pakistan is right on the southern part. Pakistan is to the east, and then you have India. So India had no way to get to Afghanistan, except through Iran. The Indians built that so they could have trade with Afghanistan directly without having to go through Pakistan. Of course, you know the problems between them and Pakistan. So they got Delaram into the province, which hooked Nimruz into the ring road, so you’ve got Highway 522, which goes from the center of Delaram up to Gulistan, which is a district in the northern part of Farah province. You have got the Baqua Road, which goes to Baqua, which is also in Farah on the eastern edge. Then you have Highway 606, which is that road that goes down to Zaranj. So the center of Delaram is a crossroads for major highways to other district centers. The bazaar there is thriving. I mean, there are almost 500 functioning shops there. Q: Did you help develop those? A: When I got there, there were about roughly 300. There were still some security issues. As the security got better, we started putting some projects in, and people started building and funding it themselves. Concrete stalls with concrete overhangs and roller doors. They apparently felt there was money to make and that there was enough security. They increased the number of shops by about 150 plus in the nine months I was there. Q: Did you do any microlending or financing? A: As I was leaving, MARSOG, Marines Special Operations Group, built a clinic up near the FOB on their own. They didn’t interface with the provincial minister of health, didn’t interface with BRAC (an NGO), nobody. They just went ahead and built it. The district governor said nobody will use it. Number one, the women won’t go up there because it’s right next to the

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Forward Operating Base. He said it had a lot of rooms and it’s away from the center of the bazaar, where people who are sick meet. They don’t want to walk three kilometers to go up there. Q: They didn’t bother to check with the locals? A: They didn’t coordinate. It’s been the story of the last nine years. “Oh wow. There is no school here. Let’s build one.” Didn’t ask if there was a teacher. Didn’t ask if there were students. Didn’t ask if there was any interest. Anyway, we had Kabul Bank come in June. My State Department colleague was handling it. He decided to get into the microlending, banking, and financial side. I said, “Fine.” Q: Even though he was more governance? A: Yes. To me, a lot more work could have been done in the governance sphere, particularly when you start talking about converting to community councils or to district development. But the idea was this would all be under IDLG, Independent Directorate of Local Governance, which along with MRRD, Minister of Rural Reconstruction and Development, set up the governance. They do civil service training. They organize community councils and the district councils that are formal, legal structures to build district development plans, which then feed into the provincial development plan to show what development activities are being started throughout the province overall and how they are going to interconnect with other activities in other areas. Again, it’s all about personality, but I think he became enamored with advising the new regimental commander on politics and flying all over the place with him. I said, “We got a district governor here who’s got no help.” He had nobody. It was him. There was no deputy district governor, no financial manager, and no administrative leader. We were trying to look at what we could do with the clinic. He said we should look at a bank for micro financing to try and help the community. I was up to my ears in $800,000 of committed money that we had already invested in other projects in the area. Q: Where did he get his money? A: He didn’t. He talked to Kabul Bank, and they came out and took over the facility that had already been built and paid for by MARSOG. They were going to turn that into a bank. Q: So it was Afghan money? A: It was Afghan money. And we had a corps of Afghan National Army (ANA) with two battalions right there, so it became a way of paying them by depositing the money in the bank. Then eventually, down in the district center, they could then use the bank for micro-economics, microlending, and getting business going. Q: In your opinion, did the objectives and goals of the U.S. government coincide with those of local leadership? Did you all see eye-to-eye?

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A: To be quite honest, I enjoyed being in the DST. There was no PRT in Nimruz, by the way. Because PRTs are typically located in the capital, and Zaranj was three kilometers from the Iranian border. There is a U.S. no-fly zone of 10 kilometers near there. Apparently the embassy had done some study about the issue in 2004 and found putting a PRT there would not make sense economically. So much Iranian money and influence exist there that having a PRT there would be a waste of time. If you look at the way Nimruz is set up, you don’t have very many cities. It’s a lot of desert. There are Zaranj and Gergori, but the latter is a relatively small city, and I actually don’t know much about that place. I went down there on a recon with MARSOG and just looked at the edge of it but never went into it. There is one more town, which is along the 606 Highway, then you hit Delaram. It is the big commercial area in the region. It is 220 kilometers between Delaram in the northeast and Zaranj in the southwest of the province. There is a lot of desert and not much in between. My approach was not telling the district government what they should build. I was there to provide advice and support. They had to tell me what they wanted to do to help change the face of Delaram for the better and help move people away from the Taliban. We looked at things from a perspective of sustainability. We set up a trash collection program where we had 40 people working six days a week at $6 a day going down to the bazaar and picking up the trash. They would take it to a big burn area out in the desert. I told the district governor that we could fund it through February 2011, but after that, the funding is done. I emphasized part of what they needed to do was understand they were not a municipality. That is, they did not collect taxes and use that tax money for services. They collected money from various sources such as businesses and customs, and then send the money to the capital, where a portion is kicked back to run the operation. I advised them to build the program into part of their government costs, because they needed to keep the trash program running so the 40 people could stay employed. Also, the bazaar owners loved it, because the bazaar was clean, and it enticed more people to come to the bazaar. So I had no direction from any PRT, unlike Garmsir, where Lashkar Gah was the big PRT. I think they had about 60 people. I wondered what all these people did. I never saw them. They never came out to the district. They made one visit in the three months I was there. Q: That may have been better. A: Listen, I am happy to operate on my own. I think, and take this for what it’s worth; you need more guys working with the Marines in the southern provinces. If you are out in a district, you’d be better having a man there. I say that not in any sexist way but when we were living on the FOB on the police station, we would have the FET (Facility Engineer Team) come down for a couple days, and they had to construct a special tent. We had to take one of the heads of plywood we had made, and reserve it for the women. We had to cover our outdoor shower, so the women could use it and make other adjustments. I mean, it’s not impossible, but it puts a stress on the troops. There are 25 guys living there. Q: So the problem is not necessarily the interaction with the locals, it is more logistical? A: No, I loved having the FET come down. We went out to the girls’ school. There was an underground girls’ school. It went underground because when the riots occurred last October just

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before I got there, the Taliban said, “If you make a big deal about the girls’ school, we are going to come in and burn it down.” So there was an agreement that the girls’ school would continue, but all the plaques and any markings of the school would be taken down. Well, we wanted to help them, so the FET came down, got dressed in Afghan garb, and the Marines parked the MRAPs two blocks away from the school. I rode in with the district governor with no body armor. So we set it up to look like a visit from the district governor to anyone who was watching. The FETs came down, and we had the ANP police trucks bring down the school supplies that we were going to provide the school. There were 160 students in the school with seven teachers. So before I left, one of the projects we had down for the LGCD USAID program was to refurbish the girls’ school. We were doing the boys’ school right behind us, and that was on its way to being finished up when I left. We had proposed doing the same thing with the girls’ school. Q: So basically, you worked with the locals in terms of determining what you were going to do, and there was coordination in that sense? A: Exactly. Now one of the places we got a little crosswise was when Delaram was part of Farah, the PRT at Farah believed they should electrify Delaram. They put in a $3.5 million proposal to bring electricity to 21 homes and 600 bazaar shops. When I got there, I said that the fact that these people do not have electricity is not a cause of the insurgency. These people had never had electricity. I said this, “You’re going to have to bring in big diesel generators, you will have to string wire, you will have to put meters up in everyone’s house, light sockets and switches will have to be put in, and most people live in mud huts. How is that going to work?” They started thinking about that and realized they hadn’t really thought it through. I made an alternative proposal. I suggested bringing in smaller generators and putting them in the bazaar. Electrify the bazaar, so people could have freezers and refrigerators so they could keep food. That way they didn’t need to have live chickens, but could butcher them instead. There were power tools that could now be used. We had probably 25 mechanic shops that were fixed, because Route 1 came right through, so people would come from Kandahar while going over to Herat City or over to Farah City. It was huge. There were buses and semis and trucks and cars and motorcycles. The mechanics were busy all the time. But they had their own little generators. I also said we should have been thinking about alternative power, because one of the things I did was set up a public health clinic that they never had. I got the Kabul Ministry of Public Health, BRAC, and the World Bank and convinced them that they needed a public clinic there, and then they funded it. They had built a clinic there a year before, but a week after it opened, there was a mysterious fire. There were also five private clinic owners there. The fire gutted it, but the structure was still good. In the second round of funding through LGCD, we did an engineering assessment and were going to contract to get the clinic refurbished. We bought about $15,000 worth of hospital beds, lights, operating room tables, obstetric tables, IV stands, and other equipment. All of that is going to go in there when it is finished in November. The tough part of that was figuring out how to power it. I had got a USAID pamphlet about what they had done in Rwanda using solar power and what the solar power requirements were, if you needed 15 kilowatts of power or 25 kilowatts of power to run clinics. So I put that in as a proposal for this clinic to use solar power, so they wouldn’t have to worry about diesel generators and diesel fuel costs. I said they should be looking at alternative power sources for the

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bazaars, because in Delaram, there are huge fields with walls around but nothing in them. I wanted them to set up solar panel farms there, because there are more than 300 days a year of clear skies, sunny weather, and 115 degrees. The idea then is to get the economic base going first, and then see how that runs. If it becomes viable and people can pay for the cost of electricity - so much for kilowatt-hour - then start looking at maybe hotels and residential areas first. The regimental commander really wanted to electrify the place. That was going to be a big checkmark on what we did with stabilization. Q: Did the Afghans that you dealt with, such as the governor… A: The chief of police, local business owners, members of the Shuras, the community council. Q: Did they make any commitments in your working with them? Did they carry out those commitments? A: It was a nascent organization. There was no community council before we got there and we were there before the new district governor got there, but they held a big Shura of about 450 elders in early January and selected about 42 members of the community council. Twenty-one came from the rural areas, 21 from the villages, one from each village, and 21 representatives came from downtown Delaram, the bazaar and other businesses. They didn’t announce when they would meet for security issues. Nobody wanted to stand up and take leadership because they would be targeted by the Taliban. So to avoid this, they selected an executive committee: a president, three vice presidents, a secretary, and a treasurer. Those were the guys that we, the CAG (civil affairs group), the Department of State rep, and me interfaced with. We would meet with them, and they would take back and bring forward things that the community council had decided. They told me that I knew what projects to do and to select them and I refuse to do that. I told them I was not going to make those decisions. I sent them back and told them to sit down with people from all the villages and downtown and come up with a prioritized list of projects they would like to have done that we could fund. Q: And they did that? A: Yes. It took about six weeks and some arm twisting. The next step I recommended was to get the independent civil service commission and the IDLG representatives down there to meet with these people and really go over what their responsibilities were as representatives of the people because nobody wanted to get crosswise with anyone. Again, we were fairly lucky, because even though most of Nimruz is a Balochi tribal area, Noorzai were prominent up where we were. It was about 95 percent Noorzai, so we didn’t have a lot of tribal clashes. We had a lot of sub-tribes that would get in crosswise with each other, but when it came to discussions and opinions and getting together, people did not refuse to support others based on tribal divisions and lasting grudges. I didn’t observe a lot of that. We also got the 11 key mullahs of Delaram together and met with them. We asked them if they would like to be part of the Lima Shura, if they would like to be get involved the legal decisions that occur. They didn’t want to do that, but they did want money to help with their mosques. I said, “We can’t give money to religious organizations, but if you call it a community center, and you need rugs and benches, we can figure out a way to take care of that.”

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Q: On their side, did they have to contribute or commit to anything? A: For the district governor’s house, we could not repair the roof, and he had a hole in his roof. We told the DG that we would do everything else if they could bring in a construction crew or local contractor. If they paid for fixing the roof, we would redo all the rooms and order furniture. So that was a contributory thing. Q: So they did that? A: Yes. Q: You got that repaired. It sounds like you had good relations with the locals. Is there anything you think might have made those interactions even better? A: I think, and I’m not just saying this because it turned out well, that given the situation there, the lack of support from Zaranj hurt. The only person I was able to get up there was a public health rep from BRAC when we got the public health clinic going. He also wrote a report to Kabul. When I went out to meet with the Minister of Public Health, BRAC, and the World Bank, they already had his report. We collaborated a lot. Q: This was an Afghan? A: An Afghan, yes. A doctor. He was a great guy and spoke good English. He and I hit it off well. The fact that we got a public clinic going, to me, out of all the projects I did there, that was my gold star. We could contribute to the health and safety of Delaram. And USAID funding is so convoluted, and there is so much red tape. The Brits have what they call Security Assistance Funds, SAF. The StabAd where I was would put together a budget for the year. He would say, “I think I need $50,000 for schools, $75,000 for the roads.” So he would get a budget for $1.2 million. He also kept $30,000 in the safe in Afghan money. So if somebody would say they needed barricades fixed in some location, he would bring in a couple guys to discuss the price, they would do it, and he paid for it. The U.S., with all these programs, such as Fire Up, LGCD, and OTI, just make it complicated. I understand what has transpired in the past. For example, under LGCD, we couldn’t do a building. I couldn’t build a vertical structure. In Delaram, are you familiar with the four phrases: “shape, clear, hold, and build?” That is what the military uses. You shape the battle environment, clear the bad guys, hold the area, and then build. Finally, it is turned over. Q: COIN (counter-insurgency)? A: Yes. I would say we were somewhere between the hold and build phases, so we didn’t need the small projects. We needed to build. They wanted to add six rooms to the school. Well, I couldn’t do that for them. I had to get together with the military, and they had to use CERP funding for that, which is OK. But to me, the original intent of CERP funding was, “We just rolled our tanks through this village, knocked down some buildings, and killed some cattle. Well,

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here is $2,500, and we’re out of here.” It has morphed into gigantic, mega-million-dollar building projects, which to me wasn’t the original intent of CERP. Q: That’s right. It’s for emergencies. A: Yes. Commander’s Emergency Fund. When you set out to build a high school or district center that is going to cost $600,000, that should be USAID funds, not military CERP funds. Q: Did you turn over any projects or programs to the locals? A: The community development projects were run by our Afghan project manager. We hired a supervisor, and we worked through the DG. We would tell him we needed 20 people, so they would vet people who were good guys. Who knew how much politics were involved? It could be someone’s brother or someone’s cousin. It didn’t really matter to us. We got 40 people to work on the trash pick-up. Our Afghan project manager would go up in the morning, sign everybody in with thumb prints, and check on where everybody was and what they were going to work on that day. They would work and the supervisor would oversee what was being done by the people he had hired. In the afternoon, he would come back and check them in for pay purposes. He scanned the records and sent them in to DAI. We kept $20,000 in Afghan money in our safe. Thursday was payday. He would go through all the numbers and figure out how many hours each person had worked, take the pay, and then go over on Thursday afternoon and pay them. I was more interested in capacity development, training these guys. This guy is going to be one of the future leaders of Afghanistan. He was going to be a self-sustaining project manager. He spoke Dari, Pashto, English, Urdu and a couple of other languages. The kid was 23 years old and a former army medic. We lucked out. We also got an engineer who turned out to be not as good. Technically he was OK, but he took off the day I left. The day I left, he said he was going to see his father. When they checked the room we had built for him, everything was gone. He had just taken off. But on the direct implementation projects, like garbage collection and cleaning up our local area, we had our project manager run those. DAI would contract with Nimruz construction companies to do the school, but we would go check on it twice a week, just to see how they were coming versus what their schedule said. Once we contracted with somebody, all I could do if I didn’t like what was going on was to go to the COTR, the Contracting Officer’s Technical Rep for LGCD, up in Kabul. The two COTRs were two of my best friends. Both of them had spent a year on PRTs out in Farah. These guys knew what the front lines were like. I would send a note to them saying, “I was just over there. They did this, and it was not in the contract. Run it down your chain and see what is going on.” As far as turning things over to the locals, that was it, because implementers took care of it like when we did the big bazaar project that was $227,000. They were going to level a 30-meter wide and kilometer-long area on each side of the road in front of the bazaars and then gravel it. Again, they hired local people to supervise and run it. I would go check on it

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occasionally. That was under the Fire Up program, which is another COTR who sat next to my two LGCD COTRs at the stabilization office in Kabul. Q: To what extent do you think the DST achieved its mission? A: I would say that from the development side, we did a pretty good job. I still think there was work to be done down where I was at the police station with the DG. But he wanted to be up more at the regimental level, flying around other districts and looking at governance and other higher level issues. Q: And he was a 3161 you said? A: Yes. And I think he took the Foreign Service test and was possibly looking at the State Department as a career. The other alternative would have been sending another junior person down to live with us and work with the district governor. But the other side of the coin was that we had also heard that Delaram was not a high priority target for the State Department, USAID, USG, or U.S. military. Yet it was the western anchor of the Marine area of operations. Then they created RC Southwest, which coincided exactly with the Marine area of operations. RC South had included Nimruz, Delaram, and Kandahar. Kandahar was army. A lot of Marines were funny guys. They would say, “Give us an area, stay out, and we will do what you want done.” So they created RC Southwest, where the civilian area exactly overlaid the Marine area of operations. Up at Leatherneck, they were in a building that had the G-9 on one side, then there was a wall, then the RC Southwest Management Team was right next to that, so they could talk to each other on a direct basis. Q: You mentioned some of this already, but could you discuss some of the short-term and long-term achievements? I know you mentioned the clinic. A: Yes. When I got there in October, DAI sent out one of their reps, and the guy for some reason didn’t get it, so he left. Then they got a new guy, who was a former army civil affairs guy. I met him in Kabul, and he came out to Delaram as I was on my way home for Christmas. I came back in January and we sat down with the prioritized list. He did an excellent job of laying out the steps that we needed to take. He actually wrote work orders and sent them back. We kept beating on DAI and USAID telling them they had to get this stuff approved instead of sitting on it. So in February, we started the cash for clean-up program. In about March or April, we started redoing the district center, the gravelling and leveling. Then in May, we got the contract to start work redoing the school. When I came back in April, we had gotten the money and the go-ahead for the public health clinic, and the hiring of the doctor, the midwife, and the vaccinator. We took over an old clinic directly across the street from the police compound where we were living so we could see how it was set up. I worked with the Special Forces to stock it with MedCap supplies that they said we would never use. There were drugs, bandages, sphygmomanometers, stethoscopes, EMT gear, patient examining tables, and what not. We got that all set up across the street.

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That’s when we got the new money and were going to contract to get the building that had been the public clinic started. I had gotten the supplies all ordered for that, such as the beds, the IV stands, the lamps, examining room stuff, refrigerators, centrifuges, and microscopes. Then Fire Up came in and started the bazaar leveling and gravelling. That was a $225,000 project. We had also ordered solar powered street lamps to put in the bazaar. They arrived the day I was leaving. We had also allocated money for a soccer field in downtown so the kids could have an athletic field. I was working with CERP to get money for four more classrooms, a laboratory, and a library to tack on to the existing school behind this, because they were going to start adding 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, one a year, after that. They needed a chemistry lab and a biology lab. I got CERP working on doing that. I also got CERP to pay for the generators that were put in the bazaar. I laid out a plan. I did a cost-benefit analysis. I thought if I put a 300 kilowatt generator, it will use 60 liters of diesel fuel an hour. I figured a dollar a liter. It’s going to cost $60 an hour to run it. So if you run it for 24 hours, and figure 60 times 24, plus 10 per cent on top for maintenance. How many shops will that supply? If somebody uses 20 kilowatt-hours a day, we could provide how many shops? How much would it cost per kilowatt-hour? Will the people be able to afford it? I needed to find that out. I could not just put a generator down and then tell the people it would cost them 15 Afghanis a day to run this thing. Some people would not be able to afford it. I had to do all the analysis up front, and then see what the answer was. My new guy came in. Q: Your replacement? A: My replacement. I gave him a brief on all my projects, and then we sent him back to Kabul for training on LGCD administration, and he came back. There was talk about him moving up with the State Department man to the regimental level. I said that would be a big mistake. Q: That was going to be my next question. What advice did you give to your replacement? A: I told him that if the regimental commander thought he wanted a development advisor, he should stay down at the police station for four to six months to get a feel for how the district worked and what the challenges were. Then he could move up and bring a new guy to the police station, so every six months they would be rotating. Then the new guy could be at the station for six months and move up to be with the regiment when my successor left. So it would always be repeating. That way, the regiment would always be getting guys who had had six months of experience working in District Stabilization Teams. They could then fly out with the regimental commander to other districts and provide valuable input. Q: Did they follow that? A: I don’t know. I am doubtful. He said, “Well, I should be up with the State Department, and I could come down here a couple of times a week.” I told him, “Do you realize to come down here, you need 12 Marines and four MRAPS, and what are they going to do? Sit here and wait for you then? Or are they going to drop you off? Every time they run the road, there is a chance of an IED or an RPG attack.” I mean, there were times when I didn’t go up to the FOB for 10 days,

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because they were going to go up all day for maintenance, and I didn’t want to be away from the police station all day doing nothing up there. Q: How far away was the FOB? A: Roughly three kilometers, but then they had FOB Delaram 1 on one side of the road, which was a battalion-sized FOB with a fairly big landing zone. They had DynCorp and MARSOG up there and Special Forces had their own compound up there. They built another huge FOB right across the road called FOB Delaram 2 for a regimental combat team and its headquarters. They had an ANA corps headquarters there. The Georgians came in with a battalion, because they moved the Marine maneuvering units out of that area, because they put a company of Georgians up in Baqua and another one in Gulistan. They also had a company in our area and brought a platoon down to the police station. So we had 25 Marines, 40 Georgians, two civilian police mentoring team folks, and about 30 ANP folks living in our compound. Q: To get out, you said, you still needed the Marines to escort you? A: I still needed the Marines and MRAPS to go out. I started talking to the Georgians about them taking over if the Marines’ primary function switched to training the police. They would then start doing bazaar walks, and I would have gone out with them. Q: So you started going out with the Georgians? A: I went out with them once only because they were too disorganized. I was also getting ready to go home. They came down and assumed responsibility for the battle space, anything outside the FOBs. It was the Georgians’ responsibility to patrol that. Q: So with your successor you had a number of days of overlap? A: Yes. He came early. We probably had three weeks of overlap. But for 10 days of that he was back in Kabul. Q: But it was good? A: He was not real communicative. I was trying to figure out if he was just trying to do a lot of listening. I’m a real enthusiastic person. I really get into what I am doing. He was just the opposite. He was real quiet. I don’t know what has gone on since I left. Q: And you did not have a predecessor because you helped set up both DSTs?? A: Right. Nobody was there before I was. We basically did everything from the ground-up. Q: Is the situation on the ground closer to not requiring U.S. presence? A: It depends. This is what I tried to get from the regimental commander and from the folks at the MEB. What is the strategy for Delaram? What do you want to accomplish in Delaram? I

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mean, do we want to make it a secure area so that business thrives there? Because Route 1 goes through it and we have all these other highways. I thought if we had a well-trained police force that could go out and patrol the bazaar, two-man walking patrols, and use the ANA battalions that are down there to patrol the outer villages, I think it could be done. You could put a platoon of ANA along with a squad of Marines in six key villages and they could do patrols. The villages would be more secure and the people would be more secure, and they would probably start giving up Taliban and providing intelligence. If people are saying Nimruz province isn’t important, then why have we built a huge FOB and a C-130 landing strip there? Maybe we are just poking Iran, warning them because now we have a base close to them that we could use to reach them. To me, it’s worth it to invest in more civilians, not less, to try and build up Delaram and advance economic development. And then you start working in Zaranj. The provincial governor in Zaranj finally came up to Delaram with the MRRD minister when I was leaving and said to me how much they would like more U.S. support and projects because they have CADG by themselves under the USAID Fire Up program but no USAID trying to do projects, such as sanitation and canal cleaning in Zaranj. Q: So you think rather than being closer to turning things over, we should build up in the presence? A: We should build it up with the idea of turning it over. We should build it up and work on capacity development, which is what I was trying to do in Iraq with the minister of defense and ministry of the interior. I introduced the people capability maturity model (CMM), which I had used at private company when I was a management consultant. The capability and maturity model is a process-oriented monitoring and evaluation tool. You identify key processes that make for a successful operation. I brought that over in 2007. I met with the head of CPAT, and we were part of the Logistics Management Institute. I was there under contract with DOD under OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense). They were using a transition-readiness assessment that wasn’t good at all. It was a quantitative tool and they were trying to extrapolate qualitative improvements. So I brought in the CMM, and we first looked at the contract in purchasing and resource management as two key areas and identified 15 processes for each. We then set up a series of observations, reviews, and things that needed to be done to determine what level certain areas were at. For example, level one had no strategic plan. Level two has a draft but has not been socialized yet. Level three has a draft and it is starting to work. Level four has a well-managed strategic plan, and level five is world class. We were never going to reach that, so we were working with four levels and identified 15 key processes. I knew it was very labor intensive, but if you really want to get a feel for where a unit is, do not just assume that just because a unit has 75 percent of their trucks that the unit is 75 percent ready, which is what they were doing. Do they have drivers? Are they qualified? Do they have mechanics? Are they trained? Do they have tools? Does the battalion commander know how to use a motor transport unit? Those are the indicators of whether the unit is ready to go. Identifying those as key processes, and then evaluating and observing various reports and indicators will tell

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you where things are really. I did a presentation to newly assigned general, and he was impressed. Who knows where it went after that. Q: Let me ask you another question here in terms of the impact. What would you say is the most critical component involved in enabling a positive transition to the host nation? A: It would really have to go back to capacity development. You have to let them fail. We can’t always be there with fuel ready to fill their vehicles up when they run out. They have to learn how to do strategic planning; how to adapt. It’s more of a mindset and more of a training issue. Q: But are we training them to do that? A: No, I don’t think we are. I think we’re there, and everybody is looking at the scorecard and saying “They can’t fail in any small area. They must be successful 100 per cent of the time. If they’re not, we have to catch them and make them successful.” When I was an advisor to the district government, I didn’t need any medals or any accolades for getting things working. When I would send my reports, I would indicate the people tried something and it did not work. I would let them know I made certain recommendations, and they did not follow them. Their efforts did not work, and they learned something from that. But it wasn’t catastrophic. The idea here is that you have to stand far enough back to provide support and be very low key. You have to keep reinforcing that. With everything we did, We emphasized, “The district governor has come up with this idea, and we are just there to support him. The district governor is doing this. The community council has met and agreed that these projects will help the community.” It was never, “USAID is doing this or USAID is funding that.” We always tried to place the spotlight on our counterparts to make them heroes. Our two functions were to make the other guy a hero and work ourselves out of a job. Q: But we’re not necessarily doing that? A: I think there is still too much, “I want to look good, because I’m getting evaluated on what is being done. And why aren’t these guys moving faster?” I think there is too little understanding at the embassy and policy level about what goes on out in the field and what is really needed. You get too many people that go to Kabul, live in nice apartments, swim in the swimming pool, play tennis, stay there for two years, and then come back and say, “Oh yeah. I’ve been to Afghanistan.” They never get outside the wire. They never get down into the district. Our CT (counter-terrorism) senior adviser, until we became RC Southwest, which wasn’t until July, was only out to see me once. Once in seven months. I wouldn’t say we were a super critical district, but get somebody out from RC Southwest. You got all these people running into each other in Kandahar. Get some of them out of there. They need to ask what the situation is and how it can improve. It was never, “How can we help you?” It was always, “We want this report in. We want this information. We want this data.” I sent pretty comprehensive weekly status reports. They were usually about 15 pages with pictures, schedules, and budgets. Q: To RC South?

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A: I sent them to RC South, to the MEB, to Kabul. That was the nice thing about not having a PRT above me. I could send stuff to anyone I pleased, and nobody would get their nose out of joint. My feeling is that we don’t need more military effort. We need less, more focused military effort. When I was in Vietnam as a Marine officer, there were 15,000 USAID people there. Fifteen thousand. When I joined USAID a year ago in May, there were 2,600 worldwide. You say to yourself, is USAID going to be a viable organization? Clinton and Bush nearly killed that agency, and it’s the same with the State Department. I think if we are serious and looking ahead to what is going to be happening in areas like South Sudan, with the referendum in January, if we’re going to be involved in these types of conflicts, we need more civilians. Nobody wants to use the term “nation building,” but maybe we’re insurgency preventers by getting in early and helping to stabilize or change the existing situation. And you can’t be messing around with them like they’re doing with the FSLs (Foreign Service Limited appointees). I mean, I received a commendation from the regimental commander; the MEB commander, the district governor, and the provincial governor. I didn’t even get a thank you from USAID. Not that I was looking for that. I am not in this for that stuff. But these people seemed to feel the work we did was good and recognized it. Q: That is part of the reason for this exercise. It might make this work better. What was the overall strategy for accomplishing the PRT mission? This really gets to planning. A: Again, I was very thankful for my previous experiences in Iraq, Sudan, and Vietnam as to how to work with local nationals. My whole approach was to be the supporter, not, “I’m going to tell you how it is, or here is what we’re going to do.” It was more listening and trying to identify what their key issues were and to figure out how to best support that in the context of what we wanted to do. Had they said, “Well, we need $100,000 because we’re going to buy AK-47s and turn them over to the Taliban,” obviously, that was not going to happen, because it was not in the best interests of the U.S. But we tried to look at things that could make an impact. In terms of neutralizing any Taliban influence, creating jobs, and improving the infrastructure of the district to help the people in ways the Taliban couldn’t match. They couldn’t match getting the clinic and school going. So when people tried to compare what the Taliban were doing versus what our district governor was doing, ours was what was going to carry weight. With little or no direction, other than being told I was an activity manager for LGCD, I asked, “How much money do I have, how quickly can I get it, and what’s the mechanism to implement stuff?” That became my strategy. Q: What was the relationship between your planning and higher-level planning processes? A: There wasn’t any higher, really. It was basically my thing, and maybe that was because I was unique in that I was in a DST with no PRT. Even when I was in Garmsir and set the DST up there, folks up in Lashkar Gah at the PRT did not have any cohesive plan as to how Garmsir fit into the provincial development strategy. Their overall strategy was to improve the agriculture by cleaning out canals because Marjah hadn’t been cleared out yet, and it was the other big canal system.

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Q: You mentioned earlier when we were talking that this gentleman came down, and you did some planning with him about how to execute certain projects? I had the IRD rep come in before. Again, he was an implementer. I took him around to say, “OK, there is $20 million plus we’re thinking of spending through the AVIPA Plus program.” There was lots of work for canal clearing, fixing the roads, getting the saplings to start growing, diversifying crops beyond corn and wheat, which are the principal crops other than poppy. Working with him was like what I did with my DIA and Fire Up guys to establish that if we have the money, here are the projects we want to do, based on my discussions with the district governor. Q: So you were telling him that these were the projects that we were going to work on? A: Right. Q: Was there planning between you and the military? A: We had weekly meetings discussing what CERP was doing and what I was doing with the locals. We had what seemed to be a strategy for both Garmsir and Delaram. We found out what they needed, and discussed what I couldn’t do that CERP could. I used to meet with my civil affairs group guy.. He had been there since April, and I got there in October. We became very good friends, because I was a former Marine, and he was a Marine. Every morning we would get together at 8:00, have a cup of coffee, and discuss the plan for the day. If he would be going out, say, to the school, I would ask to go along, if he had a security patrol, to look at what we wanted to refurbish. I would say, “Oh, I have some business leaders coming in. Would you like to talk to them when I am done?” “Sure.” They would come over here and then my human terrain team guy would interview them, and I would talk to them about business and things that needed to be done. It was very cooperative. Q: Did you do any planning with any other organizations, such as NGO’s? A: There were none. No NGO’s there. We tried to get the United Nations, but no. Too hot. Q: Did you involve the local Afghans in the planning process? A: Oh, absolutely. Somebody had said to me, “What projects are you going to do for Delaram?” I said, “I’m not going to do any for Delaram. I’m going to do what the Afghans want to do for Delaram.” So we set up biweekly community council executive committee meetings where they would come into the district governor’s place. I would give them an update on where the projects were, and they would bring up other projects they also wanted to do, as well as higher priority projects. We would shift to a different, more important project. I would have to write it up, and it would take 60 days. That’s how long it took from the time we met with the council and filled out the paperwork to get the approvals through LGCD, through DAI, through USAID. It would have to go up and come back down. We would take a concept, and make it into a project. The project would get approved. Then we would have to go do the details, then get them approved. Sixty days.

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Q: How did you take resources into account in the planning process? Budgeting? Human Resources? A: That was why we had the engineer with us. Because everything we did was pretty much engineering-oriented. For example, we analyzed how many square meters of the compound we were going to level, how much gravel we would need to put four inches in, what the cost was per cubic meter of gravel, roughly how much ground could a worker level in a day, and how many workers we would need and for how long. Q: Did you have enough in your budget? A: I had $500,000. When we got near the end, we couldn’t get projects quickly enough to spend it all. Q: So you had more than enough? A: Yes. So we got cut back to $350,000. But when we got to the second round of funding, we got another $300,000. Then Fire Up came in and had a lot of funds, and they funded a $225,000 bazaar project. I signed off on it. They came out with a list of things that needed to be done. I met with their regional manager and away we went. Q: The bureaucratic requirements weren’t too onerous? A: No. Again, both DAI and USAID, who were COTRs of the LGCD project in particular said, “As soon as you send me something, we’ll review it and approve it. It won’t sit around on anyone’s desk.” Q: How did you acquire situational and political awareness for working in your area? A: On the job. Once the district governor and I got to know each other real well, it was fine. He came in October, and we invited him over for Thanksgiving. The Marines came down and put on turkey and what not. I had several dinners with him. Then we got into a habit of me going over there at 1630. He would take a nap in the afternoon. I would come over and have tea, and we would discuss what was going on, what he had heard, and what could I help him with. Q: This was on a daily basis? A: Yes. Sometimes it was business or bazaar people or mullahs or other folks would come on. We would sit around and talk for about half an hour. Then I figured that he had work to do, so I would leave. Sometimes, he would ask me to stay for dinner, and we would eat dinners of rice and nan, and sometimes some type of meat, if we were lucky. Or if he said, “Hey, I need to see you about something,” one of his guys would come over. Now the Afghan project manager and engineer worked for DAI. They did not work for me. I was not their boss, but it saved me having to get an interpreter, because I would just ask one of them to come with me and interpret. Mostly, the district governor talked to me about development stuff, which would also impact the project

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manager. And it was very easy to go see the governor since we lived in the same compound. It was a 200 meter by 200 meter compound. And as I said, I learned a lot from some of the business folks in the bazaar. I had come up with an idea to make a super garage, because there were these 25 or so little mechanics shops with pits dug in the ground instead of hydraulic lifts to get under the vehicles. I asked for a list of equipment, and they needed lathes and brake turning machines and other stuff. DAI felt really uncomfortable about that and felt that equipment could be stolen. They were going to look into it further after I left. But I listened a lot. The district governor eventually started to confide in me about things. He told me there weren’t many Taliban in the area. They would sometimes come in from Vashir or Baqua to plant an IED then leave. Or he would tell me how he did not trust a contractor in Delaram and warned us to keep an eye on him. He also would tell us about those involved in activities, such as an official of the AHP, the Afghan Highway Patrol, being involved with illegal drugs. Q: We talked a little about training before. How adequate do you think the training prepared you for your assignment before you left? A: I would say it was OK. But I would say that the real things that you need, particularly from a USAID perspective, is to spend more time on the programs that USAID has. I didn’t understand implementers or funding or anything like that. Q: Did USAID give you any training? A: No. Q: It was just the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) training? A: Yes. Well, when I went to Kabul, I did meet with people. But that was when they were starting to go through the merger of the PRT offices. When you would go over to Kabul before, there was a USAID PRT office. There were two executives and the various COTRs that were implementing the program. They were like a family. Those guys looked out for me. They would tell me if I needed anything, I should come back, and they would get it for me through the EXO, the executive office. That’s how I got my vest, my helmet, my compass, and all this stuff you live with. The idea was once you get settled, you come back and say “I need a desk, a lamp or this,” and they would send it to you. At the time when I went back, IPA was taking over all those functions. They had no clue. I think it really discouraged them. I hope I’m not saying anything really out of school, but our PRT office all but disintegrated. I felt like I was out there with nobody I could call back to and say, “Hey, I’m really stuck here. How do I do this?” I was out there twisting in the wind. I did not meet the IPA people until I came back in December. I had been in the field since August. So I came back, and they told me they were IPA and had taken control of things. I

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talked to their management guy, the guy who was supposed to get me the printer. I made a list of equipment that I needed, but they never got me the stuff I asked for. It was discouraging. Q: That is disconcerting, that you were out there and you didn’t feel there was somebody for support. A: Yes. I’m so thankful I had the two COTRs for the LGCD to talk to. They would try to do whatever they could for me and talk to people who could help me out. I wanted to find out about electrical projects and had to go back through USAID’s OIEE (Office of Infrastructure, Engineering, and Energy) to try and find somebody to talk to. “Can you send someone to come out and do an electrical assessment?” They stalled and didn’t give me a straight answer. The strongest support I got was from the medical side, in particular, from two people. I worked well with them, and that’s how we got the clinic going. But, projects with MRRD and MAIL (Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation, and Livestock) did not go so well. I told them we needed to get some people out there for hydrological assessments because there was not enough water. Khash Rud River was down to a trickle. There was a planting season coming up in the fall, and we had to look at how to get the irrigation water going. Q: And they didn’t deliver? A: They gave answers like “This person is leaving.” There were always reasons why they couldn’t do it. Q: Let me get to the last category here: operations. What worked well, and what were the major impediments to accomplishing the mission in your day-to-day activities? I think we just talked about some of the impediments. A: One of the recommendations I made that nobody wanted to hear was for the PRTs particularly, to have their own security. When I was down in Garmsir, the StabAd had his own security, Armor Group. They had three armored SUVs and 10 guys. That was his security. He didn’t care what the Marines did. When he wanted to go see the district governor, he would talk to his head guy; they would crank up the vehicles and go. The Marines never really denied me anything. Sometimes they said it would be tough, because some guys were on guard duty and others were on leave, so to get a patrol out on that day would have been tough. If the American PRTs and the DSTs had their own security groups, then they could get out and about to do whatever they needed to do when they needed to do it. Having to rely on the military was difficult, because they have their own operational challenges. They freed up some vehicles for me to go out to visit six of the 21 villages once, but then I said, “I would like to go out sometime next week and visit more.” They told me they could not do that because they did not have the vehicles anymore, as they were moving a group up to Gulistan, so those vehicles were gone. So I had no way to get out there securely. Part of that is arming us. One of the reasons I was armed was that when I went in the bazaar the Marines were spaced in either range or file or two columns. Somebody could have run out of a building with a pistol, come up to me, and pull the trigger before the Marines could even have

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stopped them. So personal protection is important, and as I said, if there were a firefight, it would be another weapon they could integrate into the fire-support plan. I would say, and I’m sure that other people have said this same thing, is that people sometimes could not get out for a couple of weeks at a time. I was able to get out almost every day, and I had the district governor there with me. But if I had been up at the FOB with the district governor downtown, I would have had to rely on them. I probably would have heard, “Well, we’re not going to go to the police station today or tomorrow.” I would never have gotten to see him. Q: Sure. So being on the same compound was an advantage. A: I would say the movement was an impediment. I would also say the red tape and bureaucratic process of trying to get money was another. They have got to put more trust and confidence in experienced people that are out in the field at the district level to say yes when someone says, “I need a bank account of $500,000, and I will document everything and keep receipts. Just let me spend the money, because I am working with the district governor every day, so I know what the key priorities are.” Q: So delegate more responsibility down to the district level? A: Down to the district level as far as financial management, project management, and other things of that nature. Q: What were the processes and structures in place to help you achieve your goals? A: There weren’t any. There were no processes. And I say this only because it is what it is. I may have been unusual. I ran my own company for nine years, I was a Marine officer in combat, I did a lot of instruction, designing, and training, and I was a management consultant with, so I’m used to running big teams and putting processes in place to make things happen. I can see where less experienced or qualified people would have trouble. I saw it in a couple instances, or I would hear through the grapevine that a young USAID person was lost and looking for help, but they had to find a way to help him out. Maybe part of the training here could be improved. I didn’t get much out of the PRT training here. As far as focusing on, “Here’s what you’re going to do every day, here are tools that will help you, here are people you are going to contact, and here are scenarios and situations that you will encounter as well as alternative ways to deal with them.” Or, “Here is how you set a process up for assessing, monitoring, or evaluating things.” Or, “Here is the mechanism for working with the Marines on CERP funding and integrating that into what you’re trying to do through LGCD, Fire Up, or AVIPA Plus.” And after a while it was just me on the DST, because the State guy was up there at the FOB. I think it takes somebody who is pretty motivated and pretty interested in doing something. I’ve heard of and seen people who have their external hard drive with 500 movies on it, and they would sit there and get up at 8:00 in the morning. I was up at 6:00, worked out for an hour in the gym, had breakfast, and then would go talk with our guys that started coming in around 8:00 to work on the local projects. I would go up and say, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you just

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coming in?” I got to know the Afghans. I would check and see what was going on, check my computer. They put a VSAT (satellite communications system) in for me in January. So I had NIPR, SIPR (unclassified and classified military communications networks, respectively), and VSAT, so I had an open line I could use to communicate with the State Department, the embassy, and USAID, anytime. NIPR was restrictive because if somebody was wounded or killed, they shut down all external communication. They didn’t want someone calling home, so the family would find out before they made an official announcement. But SIPR wasn’t a problem. That was a secure, secret network. All classified. Traffic went through there. Having VSAT and three phones with U.S. area codes was nice. Once I got that set up, we were running. Then they told me, “Now we’re going to bring out (State Department) OpenNet.” I said “What is this?” “Well, its communication.” “I don’t need it. I’ve got VSAT.” “Oh, but we’re going to give it to you, and by the way, it is 4,000 pounds.” I told them not to send one down to the compound. When I went up to the State Department guy’s office up at the Regimental Headquarters, I saw this huge box and asked what it was. I thought it was his air conditioner, but he said, “Oh, that’s OpenNet.” I thought it was a total overkill. I did a Power Point presentation. It was about 55-60 slides describing life in a DST, how to deal with life here, with such things as WAG bags. Do you know what a WAG bag is? Q: No. A: The guys in the class didn’t either. I pulled one out and said, “Those of you who think you’re going to have a flush toilet, let me tell you how you go to the bathroom.” I had one with me. I described to them how to use it and dispose of it. I did this down at Muscatatuck and Atterbury in December. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. I told them that those in Kabul won’t have to worry about it, but for those out on PRTs or DSTs, this could help. I also showed them what an MRE (meals ready to eat) was, and told them that they had better learn how to use the heater (a chemical device that heats the food), because you will be using that. It just alarmed some of the people who thought they were going into a cottage somewhere with running water, flush toilets, and the whole nine yards. Q: I think we have pretty much covered things. Anything else, cultural sensitivities, security and logistics, that you would like to talk about? A: I would say that, if at all possible, the introduction to Afghanistan should include language training of some of the languages in Afghanistan in the mornings. Whether it is Pashto or Dari, it would help. There is enough time in the afternoons to talk about the history, such as the rise of

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the Taliban, the Russians, where we are today, and current events. I could almost sit down and put together a curriculum of what I would say are critical things to know about in an introduction. Then maybe for the PRT lectures, spend more time on programs, acquiring and managing money, administering the programs and what not. Mornings could be for language there as well, and afternoons can be explaining the purpose and activities of the PRT. I would also recommend avoiding using somebody who was in a PRT five years ago talking about Bamyan and the statues that were there. They blew the statues up. Don’t include irrelevant information such as tourist sites, e.g., lakes and mountains. I remember one lecture that told me to bring a good suit or tuxedo for parties at the embassy. When I got home, I threw a sport jacket in, and it sat in my trunk for a year in storage. Q: Did you get some cultural education from your local interactions? A: When I was talking to them, yes. I would ask and say, “Is this what we normally eat?” I would watch how they eat. For example, they roll the rice up in the naan bread with the right hand. I would ask what was appropriate when I wanted to give a small gift and even asked if gifts were appropriate at all. I also asked about proper procedures for talking to the mullahs, such as certain places to sit. I was inquisitive, because I certainly didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. After a while, you roll with it. I had an Afghan engineer and a project manager. We ate together every night. We would get stuff from the bazaar and cook up potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and beans, usually. We didn’t have a DFAC (dining facility). We would supplement that with MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). Usually we did get big boxes of cereal. We were able to get those and soy milk. That was breakfast, and I would usually eat an MRE main course for lunch. Then sometimes we would get some chicken or beef from the bazaar and cook that with our potatoes and onions. I ate a lot of potatoes, onions, and tomatoes. Q: How did you get down to the bazaar? A: We didn’t. We’d give money to the supervisor who was supervising the folks working inside the compound. His son owned a produce store. I would go down to the money-changer on one of the patrols, and ask how much, say, three kilos of tomatoes, three kilos of potatoes, two kilos of onions, two kilos of okra, and a watermelon cost? It would be around 500 Afghani, and I would give him $10. His son, who was working here, would go down in the afternoon, pick up all the food, and bring it back. The nan bread cost 20 Afghanis a loaf. We were bound and determined to not have to eat 3 MREs a day. That’s just a killer. We tried to be innovative with the food. We would get canned stuff from home. Occasionally we would get vegetables. Then we found out about the dry stores up at the FOB. That would be what the DFAC was getting, items like the big Number 10 cans of peaches or the Number 10 cans of ravioli. We finally got a little refrigerator. DAI, because they have money to take care of their local guys, got us a refrigerator, which allowed us to put watermelon, water, and leftovers all in there. Then, we started to get meat, because the Marines got a freezer at the police station and told us, “Whatever is ours is yours.” The first group was stingy. They didn’t tell us about the

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stores up there or about the pop or the canned stuff, but the second group told us everything. So we would be able to get meat, turkey, hot dogs, steaks, and we would cook some of that stuff up with our beans and rice. Q: How was mail service? A: Mail was terrible. I had stuff that my wife sent at the end of September that did not reach me before I left for Garmsir at the end of October. It actually got sent home after I left. It took six weeks to get mail. Q: Are there any other comments you would like to share about your experience? Anything about how to make it work better? A: I think part of it is improving the hiring and orientation process. The people I dealt with at USAID were marginally competent. And I do not believe that we were the first two people to go to Afghanistan, so they should have had it figured out by then. They didn’t tell us about stuff that we needed such as diplomatic passports, visas, business cards. I knew about the CAC (common access card) card from Iraq. They said we didn’t really need it. I knew that was completely false. I was not going to get in a military helicopter or eat in a military facility without a CAC card. These were USAID people here in Washington. Another guy and I came in and got sworn in on a Monday. We didn’t have class until the following Monday. I figured we needed to get our security card. I was told they didn’t fill out the security information right, so I didn’t get it until Wednesday. I had to have help from some woman to go to the bathroom because I couldn’t get in and out of the rooms in the building without a card. Then I asked if we needed visas or anything. “Oh yes. You need to go over and get your passport.” I told them I had a passport. “No, you need a diplomatic passport.” This was on Wednesday. I went there and filled out the whole thing, and asked where I should take it. They told me to find some contracting person that handles the travel and passports. I didn’t know I could go down to Carlson, and they would have handled everything. I asked about the CAC card as well. They told me to go to the Pentagon someplace. No specific location, so I finally had to find my way around by myself. I thought, “What do they do with the people who are brand new to the real world? To the 24 year-olds who just got their MBAs and joined USAID? What are they going to do?” I had to figure out how to find my business cards without much help as well. One guy did help me. He found out that much of my paperwork was not completed, so he helped me finish it up. But it was just a mess. So I would say, first of all, fire everybody and hire people who really care and want to help out. I found out my HR (human resources) person was gone before I came back. I don’t know whether she had been fired or if she retired. But it was just a horror show. It was the same way coming into Afghanistan and filling out all the forms. This woman told me they were going to determine my salary. I told her it was an FS-2 position. She told me the salary was based on my last job. I was surprised that it wasn’t based on experience but I told her what my salary was as a consultant. I also sent her my pay stubs from that job. She couldn’t tell how long I had worked there. I notified her it was on my resume, but she told me they could not confirm that. So I had to contact the HR department at my previous employers to get a letter

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from them that provided the dates that I had been employed there, my position and job responsibilities, and my salary. First, she was going to offer me a level 1 for FS-2, which is around $79,000 a year. After I sent all the materials to her, she offered me a job as an FS-2, level 14. That was better. It was 35 per cent plus 35 per cent plus 20 per cent more on top of that. That is a more decent wage. Their whole administrative system is messed up. I would again say that they should look at the structuring of the curriculum for the PRT and the introduction to Afghanistan. I would have language and culture in the morning because everyone is too tired in the afternoon. Then, tighten up the lectures and presentations in the afternoon to focus on what people do, how they interact, and what the challenges for administering the programs are. I understand it is going to bore some of the State Department folks, but maybe it’s only two sessions. But they need to understand what their USAID counterparts are going to be doing, as far as getting money. The FACT (State Department Diplomatic Security course) training was fun. The two days of combat car driving? I never did that. It would be better to have more familiarization with weapons, and even have people qualify with weapons, so that they are qualified to hold a weapon when they get to Afghanistan. But not if you are going to be in Kabul.. But if you are going to be out at a DST in a bad, kinetic area, yes. The surveillance training was interesting but didn’t have any relevance to what we were doing. Q: The medical stuff? A: The medical was very good. I’d even expand on it a little bit more. That was well done. The two days of SOS (Security Overseas Seminar) was a waste of time. The fact that I could have two dogs and the Air Force would take them home from Africa if something bad happened didn’t matter. If you could just modify the curriculum to better address what is going on in the day-to-day activities, it would be more effective. Not everyone is going to be a diplomat or a diplomat’s assistant in Kabul. And if they’re really serious about the PRT/DST idea, then focus on what needs to be done to improve the training. Q: Anything else? A: No. Q: Thank you very much. It was a fascinating interview.

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