Russell in Afghanistan Update #10 – New Neighbors and Our Personal Exit Strategy

Hello all,

Our time progresses here in Afghanistan, but to what end I might not fully know until I someday have the advantage of hindsight.

On the strategic level, I feel like we finally might be starting to win this war after almost a decade. Some days I’ll look at a place or read news reports and see small victories we are making or targeted individuals who have been eliminated and feel grateful for the fact that things are happening way over my head to disrupt the insurgents’ game and enable me and my ANA to do our jobs better. It amazes me that some places we’ve been, we are the first coalition forces the residents there have seen since the start of the war. I often wonder what we’ve been doing for the last almost-decade. A quote attributed to retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann goes something like “we were not in Vietnam for ten years, but for one year ten times.” That can certainly be said about many parts of Afghanistan where we haven’t pushed into; or places where we have pushed into, since receded, and did not provide continuity for the next guys or simply abandoned. An ever-increasing high-water mark, first with coalition and Afghan forces, and later with only competent Afghan forces is the only way to flush out and eliminate insurgents or get them to reconsider their allegiances and reintegrate to a law-abiding life. Anything else is a game of Central Asian Whack-A-Mole. I know brighter and more eloquent minds than I push this platform for a living, but I’m throwing my weight behind it, for what it’s worth.

Then, sometimes I look at the lumbering garrison-minded bureaucracies of many of the larger Regular Army formations that surround us and wonder what purpose they serve and what they really think they’re here for. Sometimes we as an army make the right moves – when we send out a civil affairs guy with access to tens of thousands of dollars to put in wells and dole out generators and build relationships with key leaders and set conditions for the security elements to operate freely. But then there are large, conventional units in the area that have had absolutely no or minimal counterinsurgency (COIN) training and just don’t get how to interact with the populace and with their Afghan security counterparts. Additionally, the command climate – the tone set by leaders in the unit – is such that it makes their soldiers miserable with nitpicky attitudes and overweight and unhappy NCOs screaming left and right, treating their soldiers like lowlifes and just demonstrating small-unit leadership that’s not exemplary. It’s amazing that in the kind of fight we’re in, we still have soldiers whose sole concern for the day is catching another soldier carrying their laundry bag over their shoulder instead of down at their side (forbidden!) or wearing a red-white-and-blue velcro flag patch instead of a green one (also forbidden!). I understand that inane rules like these are the same kinds of rules that (ostensibly) get soldiers to wear seatbelts in combat vehicles so they’re not killed when the vehicle gets flipped by a roadside bomb. Our philosophy on this team is way out of line with the philosophies of the units around us in that if one treats one’s soldiers like men, they will act like men; if one treats one’s soldiers like children, they will act like children. Believe it or not, it has worked. People shun our team for it and our style is probably seen as cancerous to what the Big Army considers to be good order and discipline. It’s amazing, but we can tell our soldiers “wear your harness so you don’t get thrown from the vehicle like studies have shown” and they do. Other units scream at and berate their soldiers into doing the exact same things. It’s a wild dichotomy. My goal isn’t to foist my nature-versus-nurture opinions into the forum, but just speak about my mouth-agape amazement at how an active-duty military unit that is well-paid, well-trained and supposedly well-disciplined, can – across the board – rely on such a beat-your-head-into-the-wall style of leadership. My opinion won’t affect much and these guys will be suffering their own existence here for a year or so, but it’s appalling to see an NCO screw something up/fail/or fail to support their own soldiers and then tear that soldier down for their own failure. In addition, it sure confuses the soldier who may have done nothing wrong but is now rolling around in 100-degree dirt doing flutter kicks and pushups in full combat gear. Such is the environment that drove TE Lawrence apart from his military, fails to promote our brightest and most COIN-savvy mid-grade officers, and fails to imbue a COIN mindset for missions like these into the lowest echelons.

A von Steuben quote I love goes something like, “you say to an English or French or Prussian soldier, ‘Do this’ and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American, ‘This is why you ought to do this’ and then he does it.” For a nation which prides itself on centralized planning and decentralized execution and takes initiative for granted, I look at some of the units around here and wonder if they’re an aberration or if this is the new direction a war-weary army is taking. Speaking with my replacement today, I commented on our NCOs contrasted against all the other countries’ NCOs I’ve been able to work with. Our most junior E-5 Sergeants can do amazing things – control aircraft, provide accurate indirect fire with automatic grenade launchers (meaning they can’t see where they’re hitting and somebody on the radio is telling them where they’re hitting and how to adjust), employ sniper weapons, prepare and maneuver vehicles to better firing positions without a senior sergeant or officer present, or mentor and advise the ANA on the ground with or without interpreters. These 25 year-old guys who are electricians and college students back home are amazing, versatile young men over here and I sometimes don’t see it in adjacent units or other nations’ sergeants. It makes me proud to be in our army, and in the National Guard (I’ve since taken to referring to us as the “organized militia”) on top of that, but makes me wonder why some units in the Big Army have ‘it’ and some units don’t.

I know that in my last few updates, I haven’t commented much on our partnership with the Hungarian soldiers. Despite the great things I’ve said about the opportunity to partner with our allies the way we’ve been able to, the fact that I publish email updates which comment on our working together has drawn unexpected criticism from several directions. You’d think I was a spy or something. It’s lamentable to think that would happen when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, is so connected as to have Facebook and Twitter pages to speak through what he refers to as his great microphone to the public. I guess it’s his prerogative as The Chairman. I’m not quite there yet. I publish my thoughts because I feel, just like when I was in Iraq, that I’ve built a tool capable of garnering homefront support for and understanding of our mission and that it would reflect well upon the partnership between our two nations. My very narrow perspective here is not representative of all of the U.S. Army, Hungary or its army, only the almost year our teams of soldiers have worked together. I cannot be anything other than honest, but would never want to jeopardize or lessen a partnership that I still see as worthy of our best efforts. This is a largely personal forum and any criticisms I have of our team and our experiences in Afghanistan would be better presented in an academic one. I hope to do so someday. Our work as a combined Operational Mentor and Liaison Team serving as combat advisors with the Afghan National Army is so complex and novel that it deserves to be studied. I hope someday soon I might have a hand in improving the process and save a lot of countries a lot of pain and effort as we conduct counterinsurgency by coalition.

As the day nears when we’ll finish our time here and leave Afghanistan, I am a little anxious to get the tour over with, but also a little sad to have seen this time go by so quickly. For guys who came to this mission and these countries steeped in the works of Lawrence, Galula, Nagl, Gant, Kilcullen and others, we are all asking ourselves what more we could have done for the Afghans. I spoke time and again of expectations management with regard to the ANA – that they may not be doing complex combined-arms operations and that carrying radios and canteens might be enough of a victory for the day – but I think our objectivity has at times been clouded with the inspiration from our training and the cerebral, academic discussions we’d have regarding COIN. It’s easy to believe the opportunity exists for every advisor to become a Lawrence, but this is damn near the toughest job in Afghanistan and a large gamble in terms of security and operational payoff. As a team, we have done a good job and worked hard at building good rapport with our counterparts and training and advising them amid a real, hot war that we’re fighting. We’ve produced very real, very tangible results in what our units can do, where they can go, and how they fight. Compared to what we wanted to inherit, improve, and pass off, it’s only a mere incremental change, but such is the result of six months of our best efforts. Many more soldiers and civilians are going to have to work much harder for much longer to see this capacity-building through and leave the lasting effects we desire on the security situation in Afghanistan. I hope that we’ve collected and pass off to our replacements the proper tools and mindsets so they can further our efforts and our coalition does not give up on the work we’ve done here before our investment in the security of Afghanistan has matured.

I hope to update once or twice more before I’m firmly on the ground in Kansas or Ohio. Please no longer send mail, but my sincere thanks to all those who have. We’ve received enough humanitarian assistance items to fill a fifty-foot container, which will ensure our soldiers can build rapport no matter what village they go to. We have an idea of when we’ll leave here, and when we’ll arrive in America, and we hope the gap between the two will be as short as possible and no Icelandic volcanoes disturb our travels. Mary and I are looking at making our rounds and visiting family and friends and vacationing, and I’m still in limbo, waiting to see if I’ll be attending graduate school in September or making other plans. I’ll be interested to see what the future has in store for us, and if my next endeavor will be anywhere near as engaging or consuming as this one has been. If not, I guess I can always pick up a hobby or two.

As always, my most sincere thanks for everybody’s support and interest in what we’re doing.

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Pro patria!

RUSSELL P GALETI JR
1LT, IN, OHARNG
Operational Mentor and Liaison Team

“When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen; and we shall most sincerely rejoice with you in the happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundations shall enable us to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peaceful and happy Country.” – George Washington in a letter to the New York Legislature, June 26, 1775

www.russellgaleti.wordpress.com

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