The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

26 OCTOBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL had only recently graduated fromWest Point. One private seemed so young that I was tempted to ask him: “Do you have a note from your parents giving you permission to participate in this war?” w As the senior civilian representative for the U.S. embassy in southern Afghanistan from August 2012 until August 2013, I covered four provinces with a collective population of more than three million people, scattered over an area the size of Kentucky or South Korea that was mostly desert. The work of embassy staff attached to Regional Command– South focused on Kandahar and included Maiwand, Zaray and the Horn of Panjwai, an area that straddles grape orchards and pomegranate fields, as well as the main highway west to Herat. Dozens of American and Canadian soldiers, as well as hun- dreds of Taliban members, lost their lives there. Spin Boldak to the southeast bordered Pakistan. A central point in the heroin smuggling network, it was a vibrant and violent town on the main trade route through Quetta to Karachi on the Arabian Sea. Most of the long border between Afghani- stan and Pakistan was open and easily crossed, punctuated at almost every point by small valleys, narrow ravines and high mountains. It was through these mountains that the insurgency organized multiple “rat lines,” bringing in explosives, young recruits and supplies from Pakistan. As civilians, we found ourselves working in several very dif- ferent, but overlapping, worlds. The first centered on the official American presence in Kandahar and the region surrounding it, known in Pushto as “Loya Kandahar.” More than 130 of us rep- resented Embassy Kabul in that part of Afghanistan, living and working in 14 different locations as a combination of Provincial Reconstruction Teams and District Support Teams. During the course of that single year our number dwindled to less than 40, all assigned to one location at Kandahar Air Field. Today there are no embassy officers serving in southern Afghanistan at all. Like the soldiers who surrounded us, we ate in crowded mess halls, worked behind barbed wire fences and lived in small hooches, some of which were built into what had once been metal shipping containers. Our members included politi- cal officers, agricultural experts, lawyers and aid workers. A few were fellow career members of the Foreign Service, but most were temporary hires recruited to carry out a specific task for a limited period of time. Many had recently served in Iraq or parts of Africa. One was a former judge, another had worked as a congressional staffer, and a third grew up as the son of Mennonite missionaries to Zambia. Another world involved liaising with the international mili- tary forces then serving in southern Afghanistan. The soldiers were led by Major General Robert “Abe” Abrams, who headed Regional Command South from his headquarters at Kandahar Air Field. He was assisted by three generals, all “one-stars”: Chris Hughes, Pat White and Mark Brewer, an Australian. They, in turn, led several battlefield commanders known as “battle space owners,” all of them colonels. Their mandate was to assist and train the Afghan National Army as it increasingly assumed control of the region. The Afghans were commanded by General Abdul Hamid, a soft- spoken but highly professional career soldier. Trained in the Soviet Union, he had fought in Moscow’s own long war in Afghanistan and had been a prisoner of the Taliban. The senior American officers respected Gen. Hamid and his soldiers, con- fident that they could withstand the onslaught of the Taliban when international forces finally departed. It was the youth of those around us that was so striking. I was tempted to ask one young private: “Do you have a note from your parents giving you permission to participate in this war?” Jonathan S. Addleton, a career Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development since 1984, is the USAIDmission director to India. Previously, he served on detail to State as senior civilian representative to Southern Afghanistan based in Kandahar (2012-2013) and U.S. ambassador toMongolia (2009-2012). He has written several books including Undermining the Center (Oxford University Press, 1992), Some Far and Distant Place (University of Georgia Press, 1997) and Mongolia and the United States: ADiplomatic History (Hong Kong University Press, 2013). Last year he received AFSA’s Christian A. Herter Award for constructive dissent and intellectual courage by a Senior Foreign Service officer.