Month 3 Day 9

Notebook Entry
Received one report re pending attack

Journal Entry
Met with Samir (the Afghan Assistant intelligence officer) briefly in the morning. We are still running really low on linguists, so I had to go through with my broken Dari. It is made more difficult by the fact that Samir has no desire to understand what I am saying and gets easily frustrated. English or Dari, if you put a noun and a verb in a declarative sentence you should be ok. I even put them in like they do in Dari, e.g. You how are? Any way did that and then was tasked with collections stuff. I don’t mind collecting intel, as long as they understand that I only have so much time in a day, but when I do, I want to make sure that it is not wasted. Right now people are just collecting information for its own sake, then it does not end up in any databases, and ends up being lost. I want to make sure that the data we collect is actually useful. It is immensely frustrating.

Edited to Add:
The loss of information and the lack of institutional memory were very frustrating to me. Each level of the chain of command maintains their own file system where data is lost. Each service branch has their own network, and even if they are the same network, oddly, sometimes they do not talk to one another (i.e. I would send an E-mail to someone in the Army over the same secret network and it would not go through). Fixes did arise, like posting all relevant information to secret websites, but those were ponderously slow outside of the area they were in because people wanted to put scrolling items and large images on them. All this led to some frustration on my part. Many of my reports were never read, or if they were read they were buried in some share drive somewhere never to be seen again.

I believe that I put this photo in here Merely to show that even when the Afghans stole from us, they did it in a lazy way, note that they did not even fully paint over the "Park" on the sign that they took from us.