Month 9 Day 31

Notebook entry

meet teachers and Garrison support unit operations officer, five guys at class, meet with executive officer implicate operations officer, corps intelligence officer and general.

Journal entry

I met up with the teachers in the morning. There are two inspectors here from Kabul.  I tried to find Salim, but he was no where in sight.  In the morning.  I did take the headmaster to see the GSU OpsO.  He is a bit of a weak sister.  To hear him tell the story, he is living in squalor and the Afghans are treating him horribly, but when you go speak to the GSU OpsO with him the story becomes more clear.  The GSU only has 10 out of the about 50 tents on camp.  They have already dedicated one for the teachers, half of which is a classroom and half of which is their living quarters.  The headmaster also complains that they refused him water, but in fact they merely asked him to carry his own bottled water from the truck to his tent. He was unwilling to do this, he wanted a soldier assigned to carry his water for him.  I think he was born into quite a priviledged Kabuli family.  He probably had servants at home, and was certainly rich enough to go to college.  His expectations of how he should live, he wants his own shower, a container, running water, are simply beyond what is available. 

Three of our most capable officers have been selected to work in the Combined CoC, the Tachnique [Mechanic], the Malweni Mohabra [deputy communications/radio], and the Amer Engineeri [head of engineering].  Robbing peter to pay Paul.  It will look decent, but will it do anything, and will it help them with their jobs after we leave?

At 1400 I went to speak to the XO about the HUMINT source money.  I showed him the forms that Razaq supposedly signed while he was purportedly sick in India.  He claimed that they were merely backdated.  He fingered the S-3, the Corps G-2 and the General as culprits.  He said that the General took at least 60,000 Afghani himself and then told Razaq to sign for it.  I told him my concerns about band-aiding the problem.  He agreed, but he said if you think there is corruption now, wait till the Americans leave.

In the afternoon I went out to inspect their class and there were only 5 students.  The supervisors from Kabul were there and they did an on-the-spot inspection of some of the students, they could not do basic subtraction nor could they reliably put together words.  The inspectors said they were doing worse than the guys in Kabul and the Police they had seen in Lashkar Gah.  They believed this was not entirely the teachers fault, that the extended leave periods also set back literacy progress. 

Tried to work with Salim, but he was in bad shape, he had a tooth pulled and was in a lot of pain.  I suspect they didn’t use anesthetic.