Over the last month I’ve participated in two Department of Defense sponsored Bloggers roundtable on Afghanistan and one sponsored by the Army on the role and importance of our forces in Europe to our National Security policy. What I like about these forums is it gives me an opportunity to hear views about important topics directly from the key players as opposed to a report about their views that is provided by someone else. Of equal importance it also gives me an opportunity to ask questions and of note we are never told ahead of time that any topic is off limits. As anyone who has read my earlier blogs know, my approach is to provide as many direct quotes from the key players as possible in order to give the reader the best information so they can make up their own minds. As I’ve said many times, national security is too important an issue to be reported only in sound bites.
I thought I’d start out with the ones covering Afghanistan. There’s been a lot in the media about the differences in what the level of violence between the UN report which has said it’s increased by 39% over last year and the ISAF reports which indicates the situation is not that bad. A recent report written by “60 Minutes” associate producer Jeff Newton who has spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and reflects on covering the war for 10 years stated: “Roads that I used to drive for fun in 2002 and 2003 outside of Kabul are now no-go areas. Seems the Taliban has begun to move back into the provinces around the capital once held safely by American forces. In fact, it is now much more dangerous to leave the city than it was back then”.
There has also been much discussion on whether it has it been a 10 year wasted effort and that the NATO effort to build the Afghan security forces in the image of western organizations is wrong headed and doomed to failure. This was one of several topics covered during the bloggers roundtable I participated in back in September with Major General Peter Fuller, Deputy Commander for Programs, NATO Training Missions Afghanistan (NTM-A). The topic was “Providing Logistical Support to the Afghan Security Forces”.
On the subject of whether we were trying to build a security force in a western image, General Fuller stated the following:
“…we’re trying to be Afghan-right, we’re trying to be Afghan-first, and now, we’re trying to be Afghan-like.
And let me hit the first one: Afghan-right. We recognize that the Afghan army and police force are not going to be something similar to what the U.S. Army might have or some other Western country, so we’re looking at what capabilities they really need to have, meaning do they need to be equipped to be an expeditionary type of army?
And an example would be, in our Army, we have these mobile kitchens so we can go and set up a mobile kitchen until we can have a contractor potentially come in and provide us our food. Well, they operate out of — their corps are really regionally based and they stay in their region and fight in their region, so they go back and forth to their bases. Do we need to give them that type of capability?
Another example is in the infrastructure builds. Initially, when we started doing infrastructure builds for the Afghan army and the Afghan police, we thought of Western standards because we were using our Corps of Engineers with the Air Force and the Army and they have established standards that they follow. So in light of that, they put air-conditioning in all the buildings. They gave us Western-style toilets. They gave us really nice, propane-equipped kitchens, and they gave us really nice bathrooms.
Well, the bathrooms had pedestal, porcelain sinks because that’s, you know, a standard you would see in a U.S. side. But…the Afghans like to wash their feet before they do prayers. So they were trying to perch on the edge of a porcelain sink and it didn’t work out very well, so now we’ve changed it to Afghan-right… don’t give them air-conditioning in all the buildings, give them ceiling fans and the ability to open windows.
And we’ve seen a potential reduction between 100 (million dollars) and $150 million worth of fuel associated with all the generators that had to be powered up before and run to provide all that electricity. We have changed out the latrines. We’ve given them both a wood-burning stove outside because they have a lot of wood that they burn here in this country, and a propane stove inside. So if they don’t have propane, they can still burn — or cook their food on these wood burners.
Afghan-first. We are trying to generate industries here in Afghanistan that will allow them to be sustainable. And an example is we’re going to have 352,000 Afghans in the security force — that’s 195,000 in the army and 157,000 in the police force. Well, in light of that, we’re not buying any of the uniforms from the States anymore.
We’re having an Afghan company — or actually, several Afghan companies — make the uniforms, make the boots, make all the equipment items that they need. It’s a light-industry capability, though it is Afghan-owned, Afghan-operated.
And now we’re getting a much lower price because the price we had to pay for in the United States was one that had a shipping cost associated with it. We have the Berry Amendment requirements in the United States, so we had requirements that it had to be all U.S.-manufactured and the end result was it was almost twice as expensive to have a uniform and boots made in the United States as it was here in Afghanistan. So we’ve gone the other direction and have them built here, or manufactured here.
Afghan-like is trying to have the Afghans understand this is our national treasure — and I’m speaking from an American perspective because we are funding 92 percent of the operation, in terms of the building of the Afghan security forces. So in terms of Afghan-like, we are articulating when we give you a piece of property and you identify the standard in which you’re going to maintain it, if you do not maintain it we are going to take it away from you until you demonstrate you are going to maintain property appropriately.
So one thing on vehicles is if we see they’re not maintaining them appropriately, we withdraw their fuel allocation associated with the vehicles that they’re not maintaining appropriately. Actually, in some cases, they have battle-lost vehicles and we’re trying to incentivize them to turn in the vehicles and we’re saying, I’m not giving you fuel associated with that vehicle because you’re not driving it.
So if you turn the vehicle in, we’ll give you another one. You have to follow your processes to turn it in and then you will get your fuel back. So we’re trying to do several things, as I said, Build what’s appropriate for Afghanistan, use Afghanistan companies as much as possible and then ensure that as they establish standards for accountability and stewardship, that they follow them. And so that’s the first, right and like”.
I asked General Fuller about a U.S. Inspector General July report on Afghanistan that stated: “While U.S. agencies have taken steps to strengthen their oversight over U.S. funds blowing through the Afghan economy, they still have limited visibility over the circulation of these funds, leaving them vulnerable to fraud or diversion to insurgents.”
His response: “I think there’s a couple things. One part of the report was saying we do have a lot of contractors on the battlefield and for a lot of different reasons. They are assisting us in inspecting the police at the police training sites.
We are trying to move away from having contractors do that, and we’ve gone to the international community and we’ve actually had about 500 policemen from the international community come in and support. But what we try to do is we try to train a policeman and then get that policeman out there, and then you have them out into their various stations and districts, et cetera, and we want someone to go out and inspect them.
So we don’t have enough policemen and we can’t use just military policemen, so we use contractors. And these are typically former policemen. So we have the contractors going out there, and one of the parts of the report was saying, you didn’t provide appropriate oversight of these contractors to ensure that they were doing their job. Well, we have changed that and we now are ensuring that the contractors that we have in the battle space have oversight, have an individual that knows what the contract says and knows what they’re supposed to be doing.
The second piece of that goes back to the only cash that we are injecting into — directly into the ministry of finance that goes down to the ministry of defense and the ministry of interior is the money that we are injecting, and we have oversight because we watch every project. We know exactly what the vouchers were for. We track that very carefully. It gets more challenging when, for example, we hire a contractor to go and build a building and then, in the process of getting their materials, they have to make a payoff for a different reason. And we’re trying…to stamp that out wherever we can find it. There’s actually a whole organization within our next-higher headquarters, which is the ISAF headquarters, and they have a whole anti-corruption task force that’s looking at, to move trucks on the road, does a trucking company have to pay a tariff to, you know, go through a particular area, otherwise the trucks are going to be attacked?
So we’re trying to attack this in any way we can. So that’s where, I think, that report — can it happen? Yes. Yes, we can pay a contractor to do something, pay him a fair value, and in the process of them being able to perform that contract, such as moving trucks on the road, they might have to pay money to somebody to ensure that the trucks don’t get damaged coming across the road, and that money could then go back to support the insurgency through the Taliban or whoever.
So we’re trying to manage that and we’re trying to have them come forward when they have that type of challenge, and we’re trying to address it. It’s an interesting culture, here, and we’re trying to address that”.
Think I’ll end here. More to follow. As always, my views and opinions are my own.
