[PRB]

pt2

Not so easy. Most people and most warlords are illiterate. Also, there are a number of Afghan officials from Kabul down to the smallest government offices that also cannot read or write. I believe the population is about 90% illiterate and from what I have seen that seems correct. The bar for being ‘literate’ around these parts is pretty low, further underscoring a huge problem. Understanding the lack of capacity in their own government, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) asked the Coalition to help implement this law, specifically to help find and stand up teams that would go to the Governors of the 34 Provinces and provide the brains to help explain the reintegration program and to fill out the paperwork. As an example, in Kandahar Province, the home of the Taliban, and the seat of the Taliban Government in its day, the current Governor does not have many Afghans around to help him run the Province. If you go into his compound and into his big building, you will find him working to solve everything. He is smart [former professor in British Columbia] and dedicated [been here since Dec 2008] but he is mostly alone. His last Deputy Governor was blown up on the way to work, and many others who tried to work in the government have been assassinated. So, in order to start the reintegration process there needs to be a group of Afghans that are educated and can handle the paperwork. I keep saying paperwork because if money is to ever be shared from Kabul to Kandahar, the typical inefficient bureaucratic machine must be fed. By the way, the “money” they should be spending was actually donated by many countries, including us, and is held in a trust account for the Afghan government to spend toward peace and reconciliation.


I have spent the last 6 months trying to put a team together for the Kandahar Governor. I cannot dedicate enough time or space to explain the difficulty in setting up this team. It became an obsession and a defining goal for me as I approached a year in Kandahar. I was rewarded by actually signing them to a contract and getting them started on helping the Governor build the long road of peace. I was recently present at a Reintegration Ceremony along with three other AFPAK Hands [we were the only westerners attending but more on this ceremony later]. I watched the Team I helped create begin to do their job, interacting with Taliban and government officials alike trying to interject some organization into a cultural process that allows two sides to come back together. This was gratifying but I am getting ahead of myself.


The view I see. In Kandahar and we are experiencing Insurgents that want to stop fighting…imagine that. The surge worked, just as a stick is supposed to work and the talk about reintegration has worked, just like a carrot is supposed to work. In the birthplace of the Taliban, some of them want to “take a knee” and come back. However, a lot of Afghans make money from the war in contracts plus the war keeps us from interfering with the enormous drug trade, so there are a lot of reasons this could fail, but I am here to tell anyone, we have at least reached the point where it was possible to talk with the insurgents. I am talking about the ‘middle management’ of the insurgency here, the big insurgent leaders are “dancing” with Karzai in Kabul, which is a nearly detached world, far away from Kandahar.


It may just be wishful thinking on my part but I see hope. Now, I am not directly responsible for military operations in my job here, but having been in this business for a little while I am comfortable commenting and I think we really put a hurtin’ on the insurgents. They got a glimpse of what we can do on the battlefield when we put our minds to it. Add to this the fact they have been fighting for over 30 years and you can imagine the motivation for trying something new. The two previous peace program failures did not have the financial support, the political attention, nor the presence of so many US forces backing them up and creating the right conditions. The insurgents can afford to take a break and wait three more years until we leave, and it appears they want to “dip their toes” in the peace process right now. If it does not work out they can always start fighting again. They benefit from taking a break now because it gives them time to build up their numbers and quality in the relative safety of Pakistan until we leave. However, we have approached our one opportunity in the campaign where we have a chance to implement a formal reintegration program in Kandahar. I say “formal” because if you do not follow the Afghan law, the APRP, your reintegration is “informal” and there is no money set aside to help you. There have been some events in Kandahar that are called reintegration events and they even include the Governor and other officials and powerbrokers, but they are not ‘formal’ by the law. The Governor knows this but must play along, he does not wield the power around here, the drug dealers, powerbrokers, and warlords do. That is why he must play along even if the reintegration is informal.


One of the ways to encourage formal reintegration is to support efforts to follow Afghan law. To do this,the Afghans still need some people to handle the paperwork. It is like having all the bullies from a grade school playground in charge… they need the weaker but smarter students to actually enable them to do something more sophisticated. These sort of Afghans are in short supply and it is they who we are trying to put into place to run the program in a sense. We are not involved in putting ‘our guys’ in place to do our bidding, these Afghans are making this process their very own. The theory goes that if we could just get some educated Afghans in the right place at the right time, they might make a difference. The success will be if the locals learn to make peace, peacefully. Assassination will be the preferred method for the summer I suspect, but underneath will be a guided effort that offers a better way. With a lot of luck and if “the creek don’t rise” there may be a better future this year.

Hiring a Team. Kandahar is a dangerous place full of dangerous people, my hope is the men that rose to the occasion; to talk peace and promote a peaceful reintegration effort, do not perish like so many others. I sat with them, I drank tea with them, they discuss life with me, they showed me what they can do and I came to respect them. I will hand them over to my replacement and do what I can to help from back home at the Pentagon.


They actually had to form a company called “Kandahar Peace Consulting Company” to accept a contract to provide the services needed by the government. The story behind the creation of a company is part of that long story best told over a beer or 12 if anyone wants to hear. Suffice to say, the rules of spending money in this campaign are hard to understand and near impossible to comply with at times. Our desire to prevent fraud waste and abuse has created a system that is wholly unresponsive. I am not smartest man, but I am fairly educated and getting through the funding request system to actually spend money to support the peace process was a labor. As of 6 April 2011, in Kandahar, perhaps one if not the best place to spend Reintegration earmarked money, the USG has not spent one dime. After my year working to support this program, I finally created a contract that was signed effective 7 April that will spend money in Kandahar to support the peace process. You hear a lot about how much money is spent here and the stories are true, campaigns cost a lot of money. There was money set aside by US law and regulation for the last two fiscal years, intended to be spent on Reintegration, however, it is so encumbered with conflicting, vague, and unsupportive rules that we are just now spending a few dollars in the Taliban homeland to offer something other than war. It wasn’t for lack of trying, just lack of foresight that held us back so long. I have served in Iraq. I was the Executive Officer of a 6,250+ Marine Regiment. We were in Fallujah just after the big battle and we stayed for a year. I learned a lot about spending money in a campaign. I think in the early stages of Iraq we did not have enough oversight or controls in place. When I got there in February of 2005, the rules started to tighten up. I think somewhere between 2005 and 2010, we put too many rules in place and basically we over corrected. Someday after the “Big Audit” of the first decade of this century, maybe we will come to grips with how we employ our strategic powers, the military and our economy.


The Ceremony. This is not a war story in the classical sense of a battle and things done under stress. This is a short account from me of the event I mentioned in the beginning. I find myself honored to have been present and think this event sort of puts a fitting end to my many experiences campaigning as a Marine.


There was a Taliban leader from Kandahar. He was important to their cause, so much so, that he was recently promoted to what we call a “Shadow Governor” position for a Province up north. The Taliban tries to run a shadow version of government around the country. I cannot say exactly what his motivations were, but the local Afghan leaders basically believe he did not want to go to a foreign land. Moving a Kandaharis to the north is just that, even if you are Taliban, it is moving someone away from what they consider home. I am reminded of General Lee CSA commenting on his push into Pennsylvania as being a foray into a foreign land. The analogy of using our Civil War (War Between the States) is useful when describing what I saw that day in April, in Kandahar City.