The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

58 NOVEMBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Eventually, our PRT sent a civil affairs and security team to live at one of the VSO sites, helping to smooth the Special Operations Task Force’s shift westward and southward toward Hel- mand’s Kajaki district. This, in our view, was how field coordination was meant to operate. Addressing Coordination Problems But not everything was rosy. Newly arrived officers of the vaunted “civilian surge” were disproportion- ately assigned to “regional platforms” co-located with the military’s various divisional headquarters. Living cheek to jowl with 20,000-30,000 other mili- tary and civilian personnel, thoroughly isolated from everyday Afghan life and grateful for any chance to visit a PRT, these officers turned their immense energies to the only thing one can do in such circumstances: staff work. They provided some value, to be sure; but to those of us in the field, they became simply another layer through which embassy-bound field reports must pass. In Kabul, meanwhile, an embassy bureaucracy designed to shield field personnel from a crushing influx of information and demands inadver- tently but effectively isolated us from many of the most critical discussions. One result was that PRT personnel regularly contended with opaque or critically delayed guidance on major political issues, security policies and evolving strategy. Even where clear-cut embassy guidance did exist, field personnel often received con- flicting instructions from their individual agencies. Interagency disputes and conflicts between the International Security Assistance Force and the embassy often prevented PRT report- ing and analysis from reaching the U.S. leadership, and this only further aggravated existing confusion. By all reports, the degree of coordination varied greatly across Afghanistan. In broad strokes, though, the bureaucracy we constructed was slow to grasp fast-break- ing changes and hesitant to approve initiatives respond- ing to them. PRT personnel who saw opportunities could wait for approval or beg for forgiveness. The result was that those of us in the field nodded obediently, then did our best to devise programs to take us toward the “main goals” as we understood them. In 2010 and 2011, for me, that meant deciding what was most likely to allow our troops to leave Uruzgan with a surviv- able, sustainable Afghan security and governance structure. Six Lessons These comments are a call to our current leadership to take a hard look at the situation. With troops departing, a civilian drawdown is a foregone conclusion. Now is the right time to tear down processes and structures that do not work. In undertaking such a review, Mission Kabul’s leadership could consider the following lessons learned by PRT Uruzgan: n First and foremost, adaptability is the key to our civilians having an impact in the field. What works on one day or in one location may not succeed under other circumstances. Master plans from Washington, Kabul and division headquarters can serve as useful signposts, but still not be tactically viable. So we must give our civilian field personnel the independence to get the job done. n Second, overly restrictive security requirements will render our efforts in Afghanistan ineffective. Field personnel must be given some discretion, not an ironclad list of rules from the regional security officer back in Kabul. Understand- ably, the RSO and senior embassy leadership do not want any of our people killed, but the sad truth is that personnel all over No road map showed us the way forward. We simply adapted to changing circumstances and shifting political priorities. The Taliban funded construction of this bridge in 1997. Though crude, the structure can be rebuilt every decade and the know-how passed on from father to son. TedBurkhalter