The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

56 NOVEMBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ted Burkhalter, the senior U.S. civilian member of the Provincial Reconstruction Team based in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, from 2010 to 2011, received the National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation for his work there with the 3rd Special Forces Group and Special Opera- tions Task Force-Southeast. He has done two other Foreign Service tours in Central Asia, among other assignments, and is now in long- term language training in Yokohama. Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1998, Burkhalter was a naval officer, and then worked as a logistics and security coordinator for the International Rescue Committee’s operations in Bardera, So- malia. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government or the Department of State. nication, coordination and organizational management. We owe it to ourselves and our colleagues—and to those whose sacrifice is eter- nal—to carefully scrutinize our experiences for lessons to apply elsewhere. I hope that this article, based on my year as the senior U.S. civil- ian member of the Provincial Reconstruction Team based in Uruzgan, contributes to that process. Guarding the Back Door Uruzgan is a mountain- ous province, making it an ideal hideaway and a back door to both Kandahar and Helmand. Mullah Omar once lived in Uruzgan; Hamid Karzai launched his 2001 offensive from there; and the Taliban used the province as a major transit route. In 2006, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, who at that time commanded the International Security Assistance Force (and would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan), described it as one of the least secure provinces in the country. In July 2010, U.S. and Australian conventional forces began a coordinated effort to extend the Afghan central govern- ment’s authority beyond the three small population cen- ters it then controlled. But training the Afghan police and army was fraught with challenges, and progress was slow. So the joint U.S.- Australian-Slovak Provincial Reconstruction Team began looking for ways to jump- start the process. One promising option was to work with the newly established, co-located Spe- cial Operations Task Force- Southeast. SOTF-SE, which had replaced a smaller U.S. Special Forces element, was establishing the first of the Afghan Local Police detach- ments. This program, along with the governance-oriented Village Stability Operations, would over the next year completely turn the tables on the Taliban in Uruzgan and neighboring Dai Kundi prov- ince. Though the ALP program has received mixed reviews in the mainstream U.S. media, it was—in our part of Afghanistan, at least—what General David Petraeus called “a game changer.” During this period our small, civilian-led PRT began coordinating more closely than ever with U.S. Special Forces. Precedents for this existed: During the April 2010 anti-Taliban uprising in Dai Kundi’s Gizab district (reported on the front page of the New York Times ), Uruzgan PRT political officer Russ Comeau had accompanied a team of Green Berets seeking to capitalize on improvements to set up the first-ever Afghan local police detachment. Similarly, PRT political officer Dan Green had worked with U.S. Special Forces in 2005 and 2006, providing invaluable political reporting and tribal mapping. Now a reserve naval officer on the Special Operations Task Force-Southeast, Green has recounted his experiences in The Valley’s Edge: A Year with the Pashtuns in the Heartland of the Taliban (Potomac Books, Our small, civilian-led PRT began coordinating more closely than ever with U.S. Special Forces. USDA adviser Stew Swanson demonstrates Afghanistan-appropriate “modern” farming. A sustained effort began winning over skeptical farmers. Swanson eschewed complicated machinery and anything that required fuel or outside support. TedBurkhalter