Month 4 Day 6

Notebook entry
S-2 Assigned-unassigned. Meeting with Captain Nowak. Taliban treat.

Journal Entry
Yesterday I met with Capt Nowak and his mentee, Col Kareem. They have a really messed up relationship mostly because Capt Nowak treats him like a Colonel, not like a half-witted ANA soldier. That is, if Kareem asks Capt Nowak to bring him something, then he does, even if Kareem is just being a little bitch. Kareem tried to assign a new guy to the S-2 yesterday while we were in there. I spoke to the guy a little bit later and he simply didn’t want to be in S-2. I wasn’t going to fuck with yet another guy who doesn’t want to be in S-2, so I told him OK, we will not have him reassigned.

I also gave a final look at the Mission Essential Task list. It is pretty stupid. We got these half-baked goals from Division that don’t align with reality, and then we were asked to make subtasks. No one really bothered to ask the obvious question: are these even the right goals. They are right in the sense that they came down from Division, but if we complete them will the Afghans be ready? Sadly, no. But this is how we train back in the states, so this is how we must train Afghans here…

Edited to Add:
It is funny what things end up being important.  These goals of the Mission Essential Task list would later be something that we obsessed about weekly, but again, we didn't ask the obvious question were these the correct goals.  They were merely a cut-and-paste of what was expected of an American regiment.  Because this was what I was supposed to teach the Afghans, this is what I taught them, but I don't think it got them much closer to independence.  

Month 2 Day 26

Notebook Entry
Capt Samir Drinks non-potable H2O

Journal Entry
We are down to three linguist for the team. Two on leave and the other one departed for attacking on of his fellow linguists. It is difficult to get things done without them. Few [members of the team] have made a consistent effort to learn Dari, really just me and SSgt [Staff Sergeant] Young, so doing without is not really an option just yet. I had Combined COC [Combat Operations Center] watch yesterday morning and did the BATing [basically fingerprinting] of the ANA [Afghan National Army]. The first iteration was all screw[e]d up by the terp [interpreter] who was booted, he said we had a Lt [Lieutenant] in charge of first kandak [Afghan battalion, theoretically about 1000 personnel], and the LCpl [Lance corporal, young Marine with about 18 months in the Marine Corps] I had writing everything down didn’t know that was unreasonable. I managed to get out to see my S2A [Assistant intelligence officer] despite my terp shortage, I rolled into his tent and he was laying down with an IV in his arm, apparently he drank some of the water that was non-potable and got sick. As so frequently happens. The Afghans have a weird way of dealing with the Dr as well, they just tell him what they need, they don’t ask him what they need and trust his judgment. As a result just about everything is treated by ‘serum’ as they call it. As best as I can tell this is just a saline solution. I also spent a couple of hours working on the Mission Essential Tasks that the Afghans must complete to move from one phase to another. There lots of problems with this. It is driven my Maj Valquist, and to a man, the staff is confused by its purpose. The Division put out basic guidance for the tasks that we are supposed to accomplish to move the Afghans from one phase to another, we broke those into subtasks. The problem is twofold, first, no one has bothered to ask themselves if these are the tasks that the Afghan’s really need to know how to do. Every one of the tasks is about conventional maneuver warfare, not counterinsurgency. Why the hell do the Afghan’s need to know about how to conduct a Brigade-size (5 thousand man) defense. It just doesn’t make sense for them. They are never going to project power abroad. Second, there is a major opportunity cost in teaching them this stuff, first we done have time to teach them counterinsurgency doctrine and second we just may run out of time to teach them entirely. This is all a bunch of heat and noise so that we can quantify the Afghan’s progress. This is what the Major is used to seeing and this is what he wants, so he will get it, but it is the wrong goal.

Edited to Add:
A lieutenant would never be a battalion commander. If a lieutenant were filling the job of a Captain, about as high as you could expect them to go, then they would be in charge of just over 100 people.

Month 2 Day 7

Capt Samir gave me a practice IPB [Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace] presentation and we worked on PIRs [Priority Intelligence Requirements]. I got an E-mail from Major Kraus basically saying why are you teaching these guys about conventional warfare. I didn't reply to it yet, but I was basically playing shut-up and color. The general left on leave and the rest of the staff basically ceased to function. Maj Hesko told me if I want to do recon [reconnaissance] or MarSoc [Marine Special Operations Command] the time is right when I get back, groan, I think I want some peace for a minute.

Edited to Add:

Here was an instance where I was at least partly incorrect. I was trying to teach them conventional warfare doctrine (i.e. doctrine that applied to two armies fighting one another) when I should have been trying to teach them more about unconventional warfare. This was partially correct, and partially incorrect. As I would later find out, my soldiers didn't know the difference between North, South, East and West. That might not seem very important, but it is a big deal when you are trying to identify the location of things in a world without street addresses. They did need to learn the basics of conventional warfare, but I did end up teaching them a lot more about it than I really should have. Part of this is a problem with the US Military and part of it is a problem with me. At this point, I was still trying to turn my Afghans into little versions of myself. I thought that if they looked more like US Marines, then they would be better soldiers (this presumption is dubious, if we are so damn good, then why are we still in Afghanistan). Part of that involved the way that I was trained. Marines are taught how to conduct force-on-force conflicts first, not counterinsurgency campaigns, war amongst the people. The doctrine for force-on-force conflict is clear, there a best-practices, and doctrine is written down. This made training to these standards very easy. Counterinsurgency is not like this. The doctrine is still new, the definitions are difficult for tribesmen to grasp, and second and third order effects are critical. Much of it was too nebulous to properly gauge their progress on. It was quite simply too difficult to teach them very much of this, especially when they did not understand the things that were common to both types of warfare.

The two units I mention toward the end are some of the elite Marine Corps units.