Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army 

Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

Christopher N. Koontz

General Editor

CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY

UNITED STATES ARMY

WASHINGTON, D.C., 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Enduring voices : oral histories of the U.S. Army experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005 / 

Christopher N. Koontz, general editor.

 p. cm.

 Includes index.

 1. Afghan War, 2001—Personal narratives, American. 2. United States. Combined Forces 

Command—Afghanistan—History. 3. Counterinsurgency—Afghanistan. 4. Postwar 

reconstruction—Afghanistan. 5. Oral history. I. Koontz, Christopher N. (Christopher Noel) 

II. Title.

 DS371.413.E53 2008

 958.104’7—dc22

 

2008044190

First Printing

CMH Pub 70–112–1
iii

Page

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Chapter

 1. The U.S. Army and Afghanistan, 2001–2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

 2. Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

 Lt. Gen. David W. Barno (U.S. Army, Ret.), Commander, Combined 

 Forces Command-Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

 3. Building the Command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

 Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, C.B. [Companion of the Most Honourable Order 

 of the Bath](British Army), Deputy Commanding General, Combined 

 Forces Command-Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

 Col. David W. Lamm (U.S. Army, Ret.), Chief of Staff, Combined Forces 

 Command-Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

 Col. Tucker B. Mansager, Chief, CJ-9 Section (Civil-Military Affairs), 

 Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

 Col. Thomas J. Snukis, Chief of Staff, Combined Forces Command- 

 Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

 4. Waging War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

 Maj. Gen. Jason K. Kamiya, Commanding General, Southern European 

 Task Force (Airborne)/Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

 Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson (U.S. Army, Ret.), Commanding General, 25th 

 Infantry Division (Light)/Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

 Brig. Gen. Bernard S. Champoux, Assistant Division Commander 

 (Operations), 25th Infantry Division (Light)/Deputy Commanding 

 General, Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

 Col. Phillip Bookert (U.S. Army Reserve, Ret.), Civil-Military Officer, 

 Combined Joint Task Force-76, and Commander, Combined Task 

 Force Longhorn, Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303

 Col. Clarence Neason Jr., Commander, 3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, 

 Combined Task Force Bronco, 25th Infantry Division 

 (Light)/Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

 Col. Terry L. Sellers, Commander, 2d Battalion, 5th Infantry, Combined 

 Task Force Bronco, 25th Infantry Division (Light)/Combined 

 Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366

 Lt. Col. Timothy P. McGuire, Commander, 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry, 

 173d Airborne Brigade, Southern European Task Force 

 (Airborne)/Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

 5. Security and Assistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

 Lt. Col. Eugene M. Augustine (U.S. Marine Corps), Commander, Lashkar 

 Gah Provincial Reconstruction Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427

 Lt. Col. Robin L. Fontes, Political-Military Officer, Combined Forces 

 Command-Afghanistan, and Commander, Tarin Kowt Provincial 

 Reconstruction Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453

 Lt. Col. Anthony J. Hunter (U.S. Army Reserve), Commander, Gardiz 

 Provincial Reconstruction Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482

 Raphael Carland, Political Adviser, Farah Provincial Reconstruction Team 

 and Tarin Kowt Provincial Reconstruction Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509

Contents
iv 

 Page

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553

Charts

No.

 1. Combined Forces Command (CFC)-Afghanistan, October 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

 2. Combined Task Force (CTF) Bronco Task Organization, 6 April 2005 . . . . . . . . . 351

Maps

 1. Afghanistan, September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

 2. Afghanistan: Combined Forces Command, September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

 3. Afghanistan: Provincial Reconstruction Teams, September 2004 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Illustrations

Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Speak to 

Troops of Combined Task Force Bronco in Qalat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

General Barno Meets with Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 505th Infantry, in 

Paktia Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, General Barno, and Maj. Gen. Jason K. Kamiya During 

the Combined Joint Task Force-76 Transfer of Authority Ceremony . . . . . . . . . . 71

British Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist Addresses Troops of Combined Joint Task 

Force-76 in Kabul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Col. David W. Lamm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Maj. Gen. Jason K. Kamiya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

General Kamiya Confers with Jan Muhammad, Governor of Oruzgan Province . . . . 236

General Olson Joins Troops of Combined Task Force Bobcat on a Patrol in Cahar 

Cineh, Oruzgan Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

General Kamiya Speaks to Marines of the 3d Battalion, 3d Marines, Before Taking 

Command of Combined Joint Task Force-76 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

Brig. Gen. Bernard S. Champoux Shakes Hands with a Soldier After a Memorial 

Ceremony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

Col. Phillip Bookert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Lt. Col. Clarence Neason Secures a Convoy with Soldiers of Combined Task Force 

Steel in Kandahar Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342

Soldiers of the 3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, Position an M119 Howitzer near 

Forward Operating Base Cobra in Oruzgan Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354

Cmd. Sgt. Maj. Frank M. Leota and Lt. Col. Terry L. Sellers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

Lt. Col. Timothy P. McGuire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403

Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry, Patrol the Town of Naka in 

Paktika Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417

Lt. Col. Eugene M. Augustine (U.S. Marine Corps) Meets with Local Officials in 

Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428

Lt. Col. Robin L. Fontes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 454

Lt. Col. Anthony J. Hunter Briefs General Richard B. Myers (U.S. Air Force), 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Others on the Activities of 

Provincial Reconstruction Team Gardiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485

Raphael Carland, Department of State Representative to Provincial Reconstruction 

Team Tarin Kowt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511

Colonel Fontes and Raphael Carland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533

All illustrations are from Department of Defense files.
v

In October 2001, U.S. troops and their allies struck back at the Taliban regime in 

Afghanistan that had harbored and supported the terrorists responsible for the attacks 

of 11 September. This swift and forceful response deposed the Taliban and heralded the 

beginning of what would become a long struggle to bring stability and security to the 

people of Afghanistan. Not only did the Americans confront a persistent insurgency in 

Afghanistan, but they also faced the pervasive poverty and political instability that fed it. 

Two years into the conflict, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, the commander of Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan, devised a sophisticated counterinsurgency strategy that reoriented and refocused military operations. His new approach integrated military operations 

against insurgents with efforts to develop the government, defense forces, and economy of 

Afghanistan. 

The U.S. Army Center of Military History prepared this anthology of oral histories 

to document this critical period in the Afghan conflict. It records the memories, perspectives, and opinions of those who planned and implemented the counterinsurgency strategy at multiple echelons of command between 2003 and 2005. The interviews selected for 

this volume provide, in the words of those who participated in the events, insights into 

the complex operational environment in Afghanistan and the ways in which the Army 

adapted and adjusted its strategy and tactics to that environment.

Washington, D.C. JEFFREY J. CLARKE

30 October 2008 Chief of Military History

Foreword

vii

This volume represents a new venture for the U.S. Army Center of Military History: 

an anthology of oral histories. It is the product of the Center’s effort in 2006 and 2007 to 

continue the written chronicle of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, a project that involved the conduct of many interviews. As the research progressed, the value of 

the information those interviews contained became so apparent that the Center decided 

to publish the interviews themselves. 

The interviews spotlight the establishment of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan in October 2003 and the tenure of its first commander, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno 

(USA, Ret.). In less than two years, General Barno changed the U.S. Army’s approach 

to operations in Afghanistan by developing a program that aimed to rebuild that nation 

while giving its government the strength it needed to stand on its own. The interviews 

presented here make available for the first time the experiences and opinions of the American soldiers and their joint military service, interagency, and international partners who 

brought that program into being. In order to show how the ideas and decision making 

that shaped General Barno’s effort evolved and the military and political challenges he and 

other Army leaders faced, the interviews emphasize the perspectives of senior officers. 

As a result, the anthology is not a complete survey of the period spanned by the tours of 

duty of its subjects. Neither does it serve as an interpretive or analytical history. Instead, 

the anthology sought to include material that would leave the reader with a sense of the 

depth and complexity of the decisions driving the operations in Afghanistan as well as of 

the operations themselves. To that end, while seeking to preserve the conversational style 

and tone of each interview, I have introduced minor edits and cuts whenever necessary to 

preserve clarity or to highlight important themes.

In addition to thanking those who willingly and generously gave their time, documents, photographs, and memories to assist in this project, I would like to thank J. Patrick 

Hughes and Lisa M. Mundey, who conducted many of the interviews for the project, as 

well as William M. Hammond, Stephen J. Lofgren, Joel D. Meyerson, and Richard W. 

Stewart for their advice and assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. Two 

U.S. Army officers with expertise in counterinsurgency operations, Lt. Col. John A. Nagl 

and Maj. Dwight E. Phillips, provided gracious and insightful comments. I also wish 

to acknowledge S. L. Dowdy, who developed the maps included in this volume; Beth F. 

MacKenzie, who assisted with the photographs and charts; and Michael R. Gill, who designed the cover and layout of the volume. Finally, I am grateful to Diane Sedore Arms 

and Alisa Robinson, who patiently and expertly shepherded the manuscript through its 

editing phase, and Anne Venzon, who created the index. 

Washington, D.C. CHRISTOPHER N. KOONTZ

30 October 2008

Preface

Enduring Voices

Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan

2003–2005

The U.S. Army and 

Afghanistan, 2001–2005

The armed services of the United States responded swiftly to the terrorist 

attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that occurred on 11 

September 2001. These attacks originated in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda, 

a terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden, enjoyed the protection of the Taliban, 

the fundamentalist regime that had imposed its rigorous interpretation of Islamic 

law over most of the country. The initial efforts of the United States and its 

international Coalition allies to destroy al Qaeda and topple the Taliban produced 

impressive results, but they also served as the first shots in what would become a 

lengthy struggle to establish democracy in Afghanistan as an alternative to Islamic 

extremism. What began as a small-scale military effort soon became a complex 

campaign that coordinated the military and political contributions of the United 

States, the United Nations, and the Coalition to establish and develop the new 

Afghan government. This campaign required the U.S. Army to change its command 

structure and strategy in Afghanistan, resulting in the establishment of Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan in October 2003 (Map 1). 

In early 2002, General Tommy R. Franks, the commander of U.S. Central Command, 

established a new command to oversee operations in Afghanistan. General Franks 

and his staff were increasingly preoccupied with planning the impending invasion 

of Iraq. They hoped that a stronger command in Afghanistan would be able to maintain control of operations there while they devoted their attention to the preparation for the march to Baghdad. As things stood, the headquarters that commanded 

conventional forces in Afghanistan—Coalition Forces Land Component Command 

(Forward)—was small, in essence, the division tactical command post of the 10th 

Mountain Division (Light). The staff of the headquarters, established in December 

2001 at Karshi Khanabad in Uzbekistan with slightly more than 150 soldiers, was 

responsible for controlling conventional operations, coordinating with Special Operations Forces, and providing logistical support in the Afghan theater. To create a 

more capable headquarters, in May 2002, General Franks established Combined Joint 

Task Force-180 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and placed it in the charge of Lt. 

Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps. General 

McNeill formed the new headquarters around that of his own corps, which deployed 

from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and augmented it with joint service and Coalition 

staff and liaison officers. With a larger and international staff, General Franks hoped 

that Combined Joint Task Force-180 would be better able than its smaller predecessor 

T

1
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

2

to oversee tactical operations while taking control of an increasingly complex military 

and political situation.

General McNeill’s appointment came at a time of uncertainty in Afghanistan. A group of 

prominent Afghan exiles had concluded negotiations among themselves in Bonn, Germany, 

and had formed on 5 December 2001 an interim government to be led by President Hamid 

Karzai. This first Bonn Agreement promised the promulgation of a new constitution for 

Afghanistan and gained United Nations support for the new government, but the country 

remained shattered by decades of conflict and divided by political, ethnic, and tribal dissension. In the years following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, no central 

political authority existed, and conflicts had erupted among factional warlords controlling 

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Map 1
3

The U.S. Army and Afghanistan, 2001–2005

large militias. Many of these warlords perceived the new interim government as a threat to 

their ability to influence events in Afghanistan after the apparent defeat of the Taliban.

In addition to the menace of the warlords, the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies still presented 

a threat. A major offensive against them in southeastern Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda, concluded on 19 March 2002 in a victory for Coalition forces and the Northern 

Alliance, a major Afghan militia allied with the Coalition. This operation smashed Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, rendering them incapable of operating in large 

formations. Since armed resistance to the Karzai government from various factions still 

existed, however, it was clear that the United States and its allies would have to remain in 

Afghanistan for an indefinite period. Even so, leaders in the administration of President 

George W. Bush and the Department of Defense believed that conditions in the country 

would soon allow a shift in emphasis from combat to stability and support operations, 

in which troops would perform peacekeeping duties while supporting civilian political 

leaders and relief workers.

Taking charge of Combined Joint Task Force-180, General McNeill reorganized the command structure of his subordinate elements. The units of Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck’s 10th Mountain Division, which were already in Afghanistan, continued operations 

as Combined Task Force Mountain. The Special Operations Forces units hunting for fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—including bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the head of 

the Taliban—fell under a new Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. The Combined Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, comprising mostly civil affairs units, 

conducted humanitarian assistance missions.

Elements of the 82d Airborne Division began to arrive in theater in June 2002 to replace 

those of the 10th Mountain Division; in September, Maj. Gen. John R. Vines assumed 

command of Combined Task Force-82. Composed of 82d Airborne Division units already 

in theater and other units, this new task force replaced Combined Task Force Mountain as the main tactical headquarters subordinate to Combined Joint Task Force-180. 

As those changes continued, on 27 May 2003, General McNeill relinquished command of 

Combined Joint Task Force-180 to General Vines. The new commander’s tenure was brief. 

He departed Afghanistan in October, along with the headquarters of the XVIII Airborne 

Corps, when the unit’s yearlong tour of duty in Afghanistan ended. 

The limited number of troops and amount of resources committed to Afghanistan by the 

Department of Defense and the constant rotation of units in and out of the area of operations made command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan difficult. The 10th Mountain Division, 

for example, began its second rotation in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 

May 2003, when its division headquarters, aviation brigade, division support command, 

and other supporting units deployed along with its 1st and 2d Brigade Combat Teams. 

Because its division-level headquarters replaced a corps-level headquarters as the command element of Combined Joint Task Force-180, the division’s staff did not have enough 

personnel or resources to conduct the complex operations of a combined joint task force 

with an almost nationwide area of responsibility. Complicating matters further, General 

Hagenbeck, who had commanded the division during its initial rotation in Afghanistan, 

changed commands shortly after the force’s elements began to arrive in theater. His replacement, Brig. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, had, just weeks before, served as an assistant division commander of the 3d Infantry Division (Mechanized) during the invasion of Iraq. 

In May 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld declared that major combat 

operations in Afghanistan had ended and that American forces would begin rebuilding Afghanistan while maintaining peace and order. Until early 2004, however, Com- bined Joint Task Force-180 forces continued to conduct major military operations. 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

4

Typically, these efforts involved a series of assaults conducted by heliborne company- or battalion-size units against small bands of insurgents, who invariably suffered 

defeat if they resisted. In August 2003, for example, Operation Mountain Viper targeted enemy forces throughout Afghanistan with the aim of denying them sanctuary and destroying organized resistance. Operation Mountain Resolve followed in 

November and targeted Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin, a militia led by the Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other insurgent groups active in the mountainous 

region of the Hindu Kush near the border with Pakistan. The next month, by striking 

Taliban insurgents in Operation Avalanche, General Austin sought to set favorable 

conditions for the grand assembly, or loya jirga, that would meet in Kabul in January 

2004 to frame a new constitution for Afghanistan. Operation Mountain Blizzard

took place from January to March 2004, targeting enemy forces operating along the 

southern and southeastern border with Pakistan. A follow-on operation, Mountain 

Storm, began in March 2004. Newly arriving troops from the 25th Infantry Division 

(Light) continued this operation when the 10th Mountain Division began its phased 

deployment out of Afghanistan. All these operations inflicted heavy casualties on 

insurgents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of caches of weapons and ammunition. When the first units of the Afghan National Army began to operate alongside U.S. and Coalition forces, they helped demonstrate early signs of the viability of 

Afghanistan’s fledgling democratic government.

The Afghan National Army was one of the first institutions established by the interim 

Afghan government, and it would soon become an important element of U.S. strategy in Operation Enduring Freedom. At first, in early 2002, the training of the Afghan National Army was the responsibility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization 

(NATO) International Security Assistance Force. During this stage, British and Turkish troops formed the recruits into kandaks, battalion-sized units of approximately 

six hundred soldiers. In 2002, the ranks of the Afghan National Army numbered between two thousand and three thousand volunteers, and initial plans called for five 

kandaks to report to a corps-level headquarters based in Kabul. Combined Joint Task 

Force-180 received the mission to take control of the training process and assigned it 

to the Combined Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force. Later, the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan was established to oversee training and to coordinate 

security efforts in the theater of operations, and Maj. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry arrived 

in October 2002 as its commander. At that time, the office consisted of a small and 

underresourced cell in the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that supervised a French contingent 

of training officers, a group of British soldiers training noncommissioned officers, 

and a battalion from the 3d Special Forces Group instructing foot soldiers in infantry 

tactics. Plans called for the formation of a single corps, roughly comparable in size 

to a U.S. Army light division, that would command and control the Afghan National 

Army’s kandaks.

Political pressures produced major changes in plans for the Afghan National Army. In 

December 2002, representatives of the Afghan government met with envoys from the 

United States, Russia, China, and several European and Central Asian states. This meeting resulted in a second Bonn Agreement, which included provisions for a stronger force 

to defend Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter, President Karzai announced a plan to build a 

larger, professional, and ethnically balanced army of sixty-seven thousand. Its expanded 

number of kandaks would be organized into five corps rather than one. This enlarged 

Afghan National Army, led by a Western-style General Staff, would be subordinate to 

a Ministry of Defense composed of three thousand civilians. To accommodate the new 

plans, in May 2003 Combined Joint Task Force-180 formed Task Force Phoenix, composed of the headquarters of the 2d Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, and 

its subordinate 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, to assist with training. 
5

The U.S. Army and Afghanistan, 2001–2005

In July 2003, General John P. Abizaid succeeded General Franks as commander of U.S. 

Central Command. General Abizaid wanted to create a coherent and cohesive strategy 

by synchronizing the ongoing effort to build the Afghan National Army with other international efforts to create a police and judiciary for the Afghan government; to disarm, 

demobilize, and reintegrate armed factions and militias into civil society; and to confront 

the growing problem of narcotics production. Toward that end, he took steps to forge 

communications and working procedures between military commands and civilian agencies in Afghanistan. He also began work to establish a new command in Kabul, initially 

named Combined Forces Command-Central Asia, that would ensure better cooperation 

with the Army’s international and interagency partners. These included the constitutional Afghan government, Coalition forces serving with Combined Joint Task Force-180, 

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the United 

Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, and official and nongovernmental agencies 

and groups contributing to the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The command would also 

coordinate regional strategic partnerships and initiatives with the nations bordering Afghanistan and serve as a higher headquarters for Combined Joint Task Force-180. With 

these arrangements, Abizaid sought to divest the task force of its political and strategic 

responsibilities so it could concentrate on the supervision of military operations.

General Abizaid selected Maj. Gen. David W. Barno to lead the new command. General 

Barno had recently commanded the U.S. Army Training Center at Fort Jackson, South 

Carolina, and was overseeing the training, in Taszar, Hungary, of the Free Iraqi Forces, a 

militia of expatriate Iraqis formed to assist the United States during the invasion of Iraq. 

Arriving in Afghanistan in early October 2003 for a six-week preliminary visit to evaluate the situation, General Barno realized almost immediately that the nation’s problems 

posed a formidable political challenge. General Abizaid also understood this and was 

aware that the initial mandate of the new command to forge regional partnerships across 

Central Asia was exceedingly ambitious. As a result, he decided to narrow the new command’s focus and to rename the organization Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan. 

The command’s staff originally consisted of a group of six officers hastily assembled from 

units already present in theater. Because of the shortage of readily available personnel and 

the lack of an official joint manning document enumerating its personnel requirements, it 

had to share staff officers with the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan and had to 

transfer others from Combined Joint Task Force-180. Ultimately, the requirements placed 

on General Barno’s command forced the growth of his staff from an originally planned 

complement of approximately 100 to between 350 and 400 personnel, some of whom were 

joint service and Coalition members. 

The unexpected insurgency that arose in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad diverted resources 

and attention from Afghanistan. As a result, General Barno believed that Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan was not a major priority for U.S. Central Command; Headquarters, Department of the Army; the Joint Staff; or the Department of Defense. In addition 

to the inadequate personnel and resources initially provided to establish it, General Barno 

received insufficient guidance from higher commanders and policymakers. Promoted to 

lieutenant general and taking formal command in late November 2003, he had to compose his own mission statement during his flight from the United States to Afghanistan.

General Barno’s effort resulted in what became known as the “Five Pillars” strategy. 

Identifying the Afghan people as its center of gravity or decisive strategic focus, the 

approach sought to win their allegiance by taking five major actions: (1) defeating terrorist forces; (2) providing security for the population; (3) assigning “area ownership” 

to individual military units, each of which would remain in a single locality for its tour 

of duty to increase interactions with local Afghans; (4) performing reconstruction and 

encouraging good governance; and (5) obtaining support from Afghanistan’s neighbors 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

6

and the international community. To build support for this approach, General Barno 

began a public communications campaign directed at the Afghan people and the international community. It emphasized the accomplishments of the Afghan government 

and its international allies.

The year 2004 began with signs of hope for the campaign in Afghanistan. Although still 

facing staffing and manning problems, General Barno’s command was crafting policies 

and practices to reorient its military efforts. Since his forces had produced an unbroken 

string of tactical victories, General Barno wanted to follow them with counterinsurgency 

and reconstruction operations, which he hoped would bring long-term strategic success. 

At the time, he had reasons to be optimistic. The loya jirga, or assembly, that began in 

January 2004 approved an Afghan constitution on 5 February that created a liberal legal 

and political framework for the fledgling government. Then, in April, the Afghan National 

Army demonstrated greater effectiveness than it had in the past when its troops quelled 

the revolt of militia in Faryab Province, located in the north of Afghanistan along the nation’s border with Turkmenistan. Cooperation with Pakistan along Afghanistan’s unstable 

southern border also seemed to be improving. Pakistani forces were engaging Taliban and 

other enemy forces in their own territory with greater frequency than before.

The situation in Afghanistan, however, was far from secure. The nation’s president, Hamid 

Karzai, had an interim appointment to office, and it would take months to organize and 

carry out a national election. Determined to disrupt or prevent that election, enemy forces 

in Afghanistan were demonstrating an ability to learn from their tactical defeats. Recognizing the futility of trying to meet U.S. and allied troops in force-on-force engagements, 

they had begun to adopt tactics from the rapidly escalating insurgency in Iraq, including 

the use of improvised explosive devices. Meanwhile, although the region near the capital 

of Kabul was relatively safe because of the strong presence of NATO forces, local governance and security were still uncertain for most Afghans.

This lack of security made it difficult for the Afghan National Government and its allies 

to begin the task of rebuilding a nation still suffering from decades of Soviet occupation, 

civil war, and Taliban repression. To assist in rebuilding the nation, planners from U.S. 

Central Command, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International 

Development established provincial reconstruction teams. These groups were composed 

of small units of troops augmented with civilian reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, 

and governance experts. In early 2003, five of these teams began the monumental task of 

redeveloping Afghanistan’s devastated political and economic infrastructure.

In August 2003, Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson received word that his 25th Infantry Division 

(Light) would replace the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan in early 2004. As originally scheduled, the division would deploy its headquarters and its 2d and 3d Brigade 

Combat Teams, some of its aviation assets, and supporting units to Afghanistan in early 

2004. The plan changed, however, after the division began its predeployment preparation 

and training exercises. The 2d Brigade Combat Team and an attack aviation battalion were 

ordered to deploy to Iraq in early January 2004, while the 25th Infantry Division Artillery 

and aviation and support brigades joined the 3d Brigade Combat Team on the deployment 

schedule for Afghanistan. The forces bound for Afghanistan began to deploy in February 

2004, gradually replacing the 10th Mountain Division units through the following month. 

The formal transfer of authority between the two divisions took place on 15 April 2004.

The arrival of the 25th Infantry Division occasioned a change in nomenclature. To create 

a new name for the task force that was unconnected with particular units and to make a 

symbolic break with the past that would signify a new approach to military operations, 

General Barno redesignated Combined Joint Task Force-180 as Combined Joint Task 
7

The U.S. Army and Afghanistan, 2001–2005

Force-76 (Map 2). The organization maintained its headquarters in Bagram but divided 

its area of responsibility into three major sectors, called regional commands, to accommodate General Barno’s strategic pillar that specified area ownership by military units. The 

Headquarters, 3d Brigade Combat Team, took command of Regional Command South as 

Combined Task Force Bronco. This force included two infantry battalions, a field artillery 

battalion, a Romanian army battalion, two Afghan National Army kandaks, and four provincial reconstruction teams. Combined Task Force Thunder, under the command of the 

25th Infantry Division Artillery, deployed to Regional Command East. It was composed 

of the 2d Battalion, 27th Infantry, augmented by the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, 29th 

Infantry Division (Virginia National Guard); the 3d Battalion, 3d Marines; three kandaks; 







Indus River

Indus River

Bagram AB

I I

3 4

I I

280 RO

I I

3 7

X

25

DIV ARTY

I I

2 5

I I

2 35

X

3 25

I I

3 116

I I

2 27

I I

3 6

USMC

X X

CJTF – 76

XXX

CFC – AFGHANISTAN

I I

1 505

III

22

USMC

RC WEST

AO LONGHORN

XXX

RC SOUTH

AO BRONCO

RC EAST

AO T H U N D E R

AO ISAF

XXX

X

X

BADGHIS

FARYAB

JOWZJAN

BALKH

SAR-E POL

SAMANGAN

BAMIAN PARVAN

BAGHLAN

KONDOZ

TAKHAR

BADAKHSHAN

NURESTAN

KONAR

NANGARHAR

LAGHMAN

KAPISA

KABOL

VARDAK

LOWGAR

PAKTIA

KHOWST

PAKTIKA

ZABOL

GHAZNI

DAYKONDI

ORUZGAN

HERAT GHOWR

FARAH

NIMRUZ

HELMAND

KANDAHAR

TURKMENISTAN

IRAN

IRAN

PAKISTAN

INDIA

CHINA

TAJIKISTAN

KYRGYZSTAN

UZBEKISTAN

DUSHANBE

KABUL

Pesha ̄war ISLAMABAD

Quetta

Kandaha ̄r

Line of Control

0 200

0 200 Kilometers

Miles

September 2004

COMBINED FORCES COMMAND

AFGHANISTAN

Regional Command (RC) and

Area of Operations (AO) Boundary

Map 2
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

8

and eight provincial reconstruction teams. The 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, two provincial 

reconstruction teams, and a number of kandaks formed the smaller Combined Task Force 

Longhorn, which began operations in Regional Command West in June 2004. A multinational unit subordinate to Combined Joint Task Force-76, the Combined Joint Special 

Operations Task Force, conducted special operations and civil affairs missions within the 

combined joint task force’s area of responsibility but was not permanently assigned to a 

specific geographic area. At the tactical level, Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan 

issued guidance to the regional command task forces that emphasized new elements of 

its counterinsurgency campaign. Units would conduct combined operations with Afghan 

government and military forces to demonstrate to the Afghan people that the Coalition 

was an ally of their government and not an occupation force. An information campaign 

to broadcast the achievements of the government and U.S. and allied contributions would 

underscore that point (Chart 1).

On arriving in March 2004, Combined Joint Task Force-76 continued Operation Mountain Storm, the anti-insurgent offensive begun by Combined Joint Task Force-180. Over 

the year that followed, it undertook two more major operations. The first of these, Lightning Resolve, began in July 2004. Reinforced by the arrival of the 1st Battalion, 505th 

Infantry, 82d Airborne Division, the effort helped create a secure environment for the 

Afghan presidential election, which took place in October 2004. The U.S. Central Command also authorized the deployment of the 22d Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special 

Operations Capable), which conducted missions in support of the election in Regional 

Command South, taking temporary control of the U.S. Army units in the area. The Afghan National Army contributed as well by providing security at thousands of voting and 

ballot-collection sites throughout the country.

Beginning in December 2004, the second major operation, Lightning Freedom, suppressed enemy forces along the southern border with Pakistan. Under General Barno’s 

direction, Combined Joint Task Force-76 synchronized the effort with smaller operations 

that included Afghan political leaders and military units and with various allied reconstruction and relief efforts. In this way, General Barno could extend the reach of the Afghan government to demonstrate its growing experience and legitimacy to the Afghan 

people.

By the end of 2004, General Barno believed that the allies and the Afghan National Government had accomplished a great deal. President Karzai had been declared the winner of 

a successful election that had taken place with only scattered signs of armed opposition, 

and the number of provincial reconstruction teams had grown to nineteen, bringing increased security and humanitarian assistance to the countryside. Earlier in the year, General Barno dissolved the Combined Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, reassigned 

selected personnel to the provincial reconstruction teams, and increased the number of 

U.S. and allied personnel serving in the teams. Difficulties in finding civilian experts from 

the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Agency for International Development posed a persistent problem. So, too, did the sometimes different 

operating approaches between U.S. and NATO forces. Overall, the United States and its 

allies continued their tactical dominance in engagements against increasingly adaptive 

insurgent forces, but a decisive military victory against them remained elusive (Map 3). 

The Southern European Task Force (Airborne) replaced the 25th Infantry Division as the 

headquarters element of Combined Joint Task Force-76 in early 2005, with the official 

transfer of authority taking place on 15 March 2005. Its commander, Maj. Gen. Jason K. 

Kamiya, continued the counterinsurgency operations begun in the previous year. The 1st 

Battalion, 508th Infantry, 173d Airborne Brigade, arrived in February 2005 and began 

operations in Regional Command East. Supported by Afghan National Army troops, the 
International Security 

Assistance Force (NATO) U.S. Ambassador, Kabul CFC-Afghanistan

Combined Joint Task Force 

(CJTF)-76

Provincial Reconstruction 

Team (PRT)

Office of Military 

Cooperation-Afghanistan

CJTF-76 

Director of Operations

Task Force 

PHOENIX

Chart 1—Combined Forces Command (CFC)-Afghanistan, October 2004
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

10

battalion conducted air assault operations against insurgents and performed civil assistance and reconstruction missions in the war-torn region along the border with Pakistan. 

The remainder of the 173d Airborne Brigade deployed to Regional Command South as 

Combined Task Force Bayonet, while control of Regional Command West transferred to 

the NATO International Security Assistance Force. In April 2005, the 1st Brigade Combat 

Team, 82d Airborne Division, joined Combined Joint Task Force-76 and assumed control 

of Regional Command East as Combined Task Force Devil. The last unit of the 25th 

Infantry Division remaining in Afghanistan, Combined Task Force Thunder, transferred 

authority to Combined Task Force Devil on 1 June.







PRT Meymaneh – United Kingdom

PRT Mazar-e Sharif – United Kingdom

PRT Feyzabad – Germany

PRT Pol-e Khomri – Netherlands

PRT Bamian – New Zealand PRT Parwan – USA, South Korea

PRT Kondoz – Germany

PRT Herat – USA

PRT Farah – USA

PRT Lashkar Gah – USA

PRT Tarin Kowt – USA

PRT Ghazni – USA

PRT Kandahar – USA

PRT Qalat – USA

PRT Sharan – USA

PRT Gardiz – USA

PRT Khowst – USA

PRT Asadabad – USA

PRT Jalalabad – USA

RC WEST

RC SOUTH

RC EAST

AO ISAF

FARYAB

BALKH

BAMIAN

PARVAN

BAGHLAN

KONDOZ

BADAKHSHAN

KONAR

NANGARHAR

KABOL

PAKTIA

KHOWST

PAKTIKA

ZABOL

GHAZNI

ORUZGAN

HERAT

FARAH

HELMAND

KANDAHAR

TURKMENISTAN

IRAN

IRAN

PAKISTAN

INDIA

CHINA

TAJIKISTAN

KYRGYZSTAN

UZBEKISTAN

DUSHANBE

KABUL

Pesha ̄war

Ra ̄walpindi

ISLAMABAD

Quetta

Line of Control

0 200

0 200 Kilometers

Miles

September 2004

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAMS

AFGHANISTAN

Regional Command (RC) and

Area of Operations (AO) Boundary

Map 3
11

The U.S. Army and Afghanistan, 2001–2005

General Barno’s tour of duty ended shortly after the Southern European Task Force arrived. On 3 May 2005, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry assumed command of Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan and began his second tour in Afghanistan. Under his 

leadership, the command concentrated its efforts on training the Afghan National Army 

to be the long-term guarantor of Afghan security. On 18 September 2005, the soldiers of 

Combined Joint Task Force-76 replicated the previous year’s electoral success by ensuring 

a largely peaceful parliamentary election. The Southern European Task Force’s tour of 

duty ended in February 2006, when the 10th Mountain Division began its third rotation 

in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

The United States and its international allies had accomplished a great deal by the end of 

2005. General Barno had successfully established Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan and had put into place a strategy to address the poverty, lawlessness, and sense of 

despair that fueled the insurgency. The innovative provincial reconstruction teams increased the visibility of the Afghan government and helped spread hope to the countryside. The Afghan government and army seemed to be gaining credibility among the populace. Finally, it appeared that the Taliban had been weakened, and U.S. and allied forces 

continued their dominance over insurgent forces in battle. Nonetheless, the campaign in 

Afghanistan was far from over. The interviews included in this volume record not only 

the progress made by the end of General Barno’s command but also the difficulties that 

remain to be overcome. Counterinsurgency warfare and nation building are painstaking 

and trying endeavors. These interviews document not only the frustrations and sacrifices 

but also the perseverance and achievement of those who served in Afghanistan. 

Planning and Directing a 

Campaign: General Barno 

in Afghanistan

Lt. Gen. David W. Barno (USA, Ret.) served as Commander, Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, from October 2003 until May 2005. After returning from Afghanistan, he served as the Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management before retiring from the Army in April 2006. He then became the Director of the National Defense 

University’s Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at Fort Lesley J. McNair, 

Washington, D.C. He was interviewed there on 3 May 2006, 21 November 2006, and 

14 March 2007 by J. Patrick Hughes and Lisa Mundey, both of the U.S. Army Center 

of Military History. General Barno describes the inception and creation of Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan, stressing the shortages in personnel and expertise that 

plagued the command’s staff for over a year. He mentions the command’s purpose as 

a coordinator of military and political strategy and its relationships with subordinate 

military task forces and with military and civilian leaders at U.S. Central Command 

and the Department of Defense. General Barno, aware of the fact that the United States 

and the Coalition faced a counterinsurgency, altered military operations and tactics, 

increased the number of provincial reconstruction teams, disarmed and reconciled with 

Afghan warlords and militias, and engaged the government of Pakistan in an attempt 

to control the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. 

In another session, General Barno includes his thoughts on the command’s Coalition 

personnel, especially its British members. General Barno describes his relationships 

with subordinate commanders, the different ways in which the 10th Mountain Division 

(Light), 25th Infantry Division (Light), and Southern European Task Force (Airborne) 

related to his command, and his philosophy on command and control. He discusses the 

rotation of units and the impact on operational continuity. Public affairs were important 

elements of the command’s operations, and General Barno explains his thoughts about 

the media and the relationship between the State Department and Defense Department. 

General Barno discusses detainee operations and rules of engagement for civilians. General Barno concludes his interview with a discussion of best practices and prospects for 

success in Afghanistan. 

DR. HUGHES: Interviewing General David Barno in his office, third 

of May 2006, Dr. J. Patrick Hughes interviewing. 

Sir, you understand that this interview is to collect 

historical information and could be used for Army 

studies in the future?

2
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

14

LT. GEN. BARNO: Yes, I do.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. And you’re sitting voluntarily. Sir, could you 

describe the process of assuming duties and command 

in Afghanistan?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I was actually sent out there on about the third of October 

2003 in a temporary duty status from my position as the 

commander in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, with the 

expectation that I would be nominated and later confirmed 

to be the overall commander in Afghanistan. So, I spent my 

first roughly six weeks there as a two-star in the middle of a 

major transition of overall command in the headquarters in 

Afghanistan. We had been supporting in the effort there with 

the headquarters of the XVIII Airborne Corps throughout 

most of ‘02 and ‘03, and by October ‘03, that organization 

had left. The successor division headquarters, also known as 

CJTF-180 [Combined Joint Task Force-180], was being led 

by the commander of the 10th Mountain Division, thenBrig. Gen. Lloyd [J.] Austin, who had just arrived in late 

September. I came in just about a week or so after that. At 

that time, I was the only two-star American in the country, 

Lloyd being a one-star. We had a one-star acting head of the 

Office of Military Cooperation[-Afghanistan]. So, de facto, 

I became the officer in charge, I guess, of the effort until we 

got all of the other piece parts in place on confirmation and 

whatnot. When I came back to the States about six weeks 

later, and I was incidentally confirmed, about Thanksgiving 

time frame, as a three-star, my role was to stand up a new 

three-star headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, separate 

from the previous CJTF-180 headquarters, which was 

about a twenty-minute flight north at Bagram in an old 

Soviet airfield. So the intent behind this new arrangement 

was to both collocate the three-star headquarters with the 

U.S. Embassy effort, the other international embassies, the 

NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] International 

Security Assistance Force [ISAF], and the Afghan 

government to better create stronger political-military ties, 

and also to attempt to separate an operational-regionalstrategic level from a tactical level. About six to eight months 

earlier, we had had a separate three-star headquarters 

doing operational-level things, but we also had a two-star 

divisional headquarters, [Combined] Task Force-82, doing 

tactical things in the spring of ‘03. Those two organizations 

were then blended together and skinnied down, and the 

results of that effectively were that the organization became 

very tactical in its focus because it had one commander 

with one headquarters and one staff doing both tactical 

and operational and regional-strategic. CENTCOM [U.S. 

Central Command] recognized that this wasn’t the best 

solution by late summer of ‘03, so this new change was put 

in place to create an additional headquarters there above 

and beyond -180, which would remain tactical and do lowend operational. What would eventually become Combined 
15

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

Forces Command-Afghanistan headquarters—the threestar headquarters—would do high-end operational and 

what I call regional or small theater-level strategic there in 

Afghanistan. 

We started with six people in October of ‘03, and there 

wasn’t too much of an expansion planned beyond that. 

There was no joint manning document [JMD]. There were 

no real facilities to put a headquarters into at that point in 

time. There wasn’t any flow of people or resources to do 

that, so we slowly built by really raiding other organizations 

in the command in Afghanistan for people. We began to 

build the headquarters that, by the time I left in May of ‘05, 

had just over four hundred people in it, so a pretty dramatic 

change, but it was a joint and combined headquarters. It 

was stood up out of what I describe as the “instant coffee 

model”—just add water, and it springs out of the ground. . .it 

was an extremely painful and difficult process to build a 

joint manning document, and then even more difficult to 

get support from the services, who were very reluctant to 

provide any manpower to fill the joint manning document 

against its identified requirements, which were later 

validated by a joint group coming out of [U.S.] Joint Forces 

Command and each of the services’ staffs. But that took over 

a year to have that process go from my arrival until there 

was full recognition that the size of the headquarters was as 

we described it in the joint manning document. So it was 

very challenging for a time while we executed operations, 

standing up the headquarters, building a staff, creating 

office space, and getting computers while we were fighting 

the war and building the political-military relations in the 

capital. So it was a pretty sporting time there, for the first 

three or four months at least.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What was your reporting chain?

LT. GEN. BARNO: My boss was General John [P.] Abizaid and, above him, 

Secretary [of Defense Donald H.] Rumsfeld.

DR. HUGHES: What guidance did you give? What was your mandate?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Did I give or did I receive?

DR. HUGHES: Did you receive, and then how did you—

LT. GEN. BARNO: My basic guidance from General Abizaid was to establish 

the headquarters in Kabul; to focus on the political-military 

conventions; to separate the operation in Bagram physically, 

geographically, from what we’re going to be standing up 

in Kabul; and, essentially, take ownership of all of our 

operations there in Afghanistan; to build close relations 

with the Afghan government, with the embassy there; to 

try and work with the International Security Assistance 

Force to tighten that relationship up; and then look to how 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

General Barno and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld speak to troops of Combined Task Force Bronco in 

Qalat,13 April 2005.

we could improve our overall standing there, going into a 

critical year in 2004 with the Afghan constitution going 

through its creation in the winter of ‘03–‘04, and then a 

massive unprecedented registration of the Afghan people 

for a presidential election in October ‘04, which was a 

major political event.

DR. HUGHES: What was the situation on the ground when you got 

there—with the Afghan people, with the government, 

with our soldiers? How did you see the situation as you 

arrived?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I think there was some separateness, certainly between the 

U.S. Embassy’s effort, which had been overseen by a chargé 

[d’affaires] since the summer of ‘03 for four or five months 

by the time I arrived. No ambassador had been there since 

about the middle of the summer in 2003. About six weeks 

after I arrived, Zal [Zalmay] Khalilzad arrived as the new 

U.S. ambassador. He had been there for some visits during 

my first month or so in country, and he and I really forged 

a very close personal relationship and a very close militaryto-country team relationship that became, I think, the 

hallmark of our time over there. That was something that 

16
17

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

was not, I think, as good as it could have been when I arrived. 

I was out for a visit in September before I was deployed 

by General Abizaid on rather short notice. During my 

visit, I remember going to a meeting between a senior U.S. 

military official and a senior embassy official in which the 

military leader indicated he was going to brief the secretary 

of defense and President [Hamid] Karzai on our ground 

tactical plan, and the senior embassy official noted he’d be 

very interested in finding out what the heck our ground 

tactical plan was as well. So there was definitely friction, 

partly because of the geography of being an hour-andfifteen-minute drive or a twenty-minute flight between the 

two, and there were almost two parallel universes there that 

were at work and trying to move forward on our efforts in 

Afghanistan. Again, relocating our headquarters to Kabul 

was part of a directed effort to try and help that a little bit. 

I think from a countrywide situation, the northern half of 

the country was relatively quiet. The southern half of the 

country was, I think, still in the situation where there was 

a fair bit of Taliban violence, but not as substantial as there 

is today here in ‘06, obviously. And that the Taliban were 

pretty much still rocked back on their heels to some degree, 

although they were beginning to stretch their legs again a 

little bit in different parts of the country. The NATO forces 

were minimal at that time. There were about six thousand 

NATO International Security Assistance Forces in Kabul, 

only they weren’t in any other part of the country. They 

were all in the Kabul metropolitan area. The U.S. forces 

were spread primarily in the east, the southeast, and the 

south of the country and, of course, at Bagram, which was 

to the north of the capital there. We had four provincial 

reconstruction teams [PRTs] under the U.S. and Coalition 

at that time, only two of which were U.S., and those were in 

Konduz, in north-central Afghanistan, and in Gardiz, just 

to the east of Kabul. Then there were two other PRTs, one 

manned by the British up in Mazar-e Sharif, and then one 

manned by the New Zealanders in Bamian. So that effort, 

which took on a lot of emphasis very soon from us, was in 

its very early stages at that point. The United Nations was 

operating around the country, much less so in the east and 

south, due to their perceptions of the security threat being 

fairly significant there. 

The warlord efforts: There were still militia forces throughout the country that were remnants of the Northern Alliance times, and some of the traditional warlords. These 

were small armies, but many of these militias were armed 

with T62, T55 tanks, D30 howitzers, rocket launchers—very 

heavy weapons, so they weren’t lightly armed forces, and 

they had the opportunity to create a lot of mischief, which 

they did on a number of occasions, including my first week 

or so there. So you had that threat that I just described as 

the centrifugal internal forces pulling Afghanistan apart 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

18

internally from warlords to tribal rivalries to poverty and 

corruption and crime, lack of education, lack of health care, 

poppy production, etc. The internal dynamics of the country were very challenging, and that was the environment 

in which we were conducting military operations. Our 

military operations were my central concern, almost exclusively on counterterrorist operations—read: hunting down 

remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda and [Gulbuddin] 

Hekmatyar’s group [Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG] in 

the mountains and trying to find the rest of these elements 

and conduct military operations against their mark. The 

PRT effort, which was more hearts and minds, was again in 

its very, very early stages. There was a relatively slow expansion plan on the books to grow the PRT effort over the next 

several months. We took a pretty significant relook at the 

whole internal strategy when I arrived at the first sixty days 

and made some pretty dramatic changes to it.

DR. HUGHES: There must have been different challenges in dealing with 

al Qaeda, Taliban, the warlords. Could you elaborate on 

what the different challenges were?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, I think one of the things that we did is we assessed—

we, with our six people initially, and then about twentyfive, thirty, of us—assessed the overall environment that we 

were operating in. We decided very early on that this wasn’t 

simply a counterterrorist environment. This was really a 

classic counterinsurgency campaign. We began to build the 

structural support to execute a classic counterinsurgency 

campaign. We had no U.S. military doctrine whatsoever at 

that point in time by which to guide us. In fact, as I was 

searching about in my own memory for things I knew 

about counterinsurgency, I actually took to Afghanistan 

three West Point textbooks that I had as a cadet, dated 1974, 

Department of History, “Counter-Revolutionary Warfare,” 

and they were up on my bookshelf in the embassy in Kabul, 

because we really had nothing in the way of doctrine. None of 

us really had much of any training on the counterinsurgency 

business, so we were kind of scraping on how to think about 

this. I had, fortunately, a number of British officers there 

during my time, including my J-5 [staff officer for plans], 

who had had quite a bit of counterinsurgency experience 

of their own. Between us, we were able to think through 

what were some of the basic premises that we needed to 

put in place to execute a counterinsurgency campaign in 

Afghanistan. Among those—and this was the strategy 

we moved to in November–December ‘03, January ‘04, 

across the country—we laid out what we called the “Five 

Pillar” campaign strategy for our counterinsurgency in 

Afghanistan with the people of Afghanistan as the center 

of gravity of that effort, ensuring that how they decided 

ultimately would determine the outcome of that campaign, 

which is a pretty typical counterinsurgency outlook...trying 

to attain unity of effort in the interagency and international 
19

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

community in Afghanistan—not unity of command and 

not ownership or leadership of that effort, but just a unity 

of effort that moves all the players down the field and in the 

same direction, playing the same sport, as I used to say, but 

with different jerseys on. 

We had basically five pillars of our effort, which was the 

counterterrorism, deny sanctuary, which was what had 

been the primary focus of effort until that point in time: 

to continue to put pressure on the enemy to keep offensive 

pressure on him. To build the Afghan security forces was 

the second pillar, which was the Afghan National Army, 

Afghan National Police, which was a program at about the 

sixty-five hundred mark for the army and probably a bit 

higher than that for the police, but it was a dysfunctional 

program on the police side. The third pillar was really to 

establish and create area ownership, which was a change in 

how our military units actually operated in Afghanistan. 

Prior to the fall of ‘03, units typically would operate out 

of bases, enclaves, small military locations—fortresses to 

a degree—where they would gather intelligence, plan and 

prepare operations, and then go up to some distant location, 

typically for two weeks, and conduct a main operation like 

a [Operation] Mountain Lion, whatever it might be to 

hunt down insurgents, and exploit intelligence they had 

gathered. Then they would return back to their base and do 

maintenance, debrief, plan for another operation, gather 

more intelligence, then go perhaps to a completely different 

province for another couple-week operation, kind of a ”raid” 

strategy, if you will. We changed that to a different structure 

across the country, particularly in the south and the east, 

where we had most of our forces. Our units actually were 

assigned territory that they owned for their entire tour in 

Afghanistan. So if you were a battalion commander, you 

might have an area the size of Vermont or Rhode Island 

that would be your area of operation, but it was yours for 

your whole tour. You got to know the leaders, the mullahs, 

the key provincial officials; and your companies or platoons 

typically got areas they were assigned, became expert at, 

and worked closely with the key leadership in those areas. 

Again, basic counterinsurgency strategy, where units had 

territory for the first time since we’d been in Afghanistan, 

and they stayed with these areas for the whole time there. 

So that was a very important part of what we were trying to 

do. 

We also worked on looking at how we could engage 

regional states [the fifth pillar]. That was part of my 

charter, particularly with the border of Pakistan. My area 

of operations assigned to me by General Abizaid had 

parts of four different countries in it: all of Afghanistan; 

all of Pakistan, except for Jammu and Kashmir; and the 

southern portions of Tajikistan; and Uzbekistan. So I 

had four countries that I interacted with military and 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

20

senior security leadership on, particularly with Pakistan, 

where I could typically travel once, twice a month, meet 

with their senior military, senior intelligence, sometimes 

foreign ministry officials, to be able to work on 

maintaining pressure on the Pakistani side of the border 

and being able to minimize any border conflicts between 

friendly forces on both sides of the border as well. As 

part of that, we also hosted a, about every two months, 

tripartite conference. That was a meeting of the senior 

security leadership of Afghanistan, typically represented 

by their national security adviser; Pakistan, usually with 

their director general of military operations; and then 

me as the U.S. leg of that. We would rotate that typically 

between Kabul, Islamabad, and Bagram every two months 

to talk about various issues between the countries and 

the war and the strategic security relationships there. So, 

that was important. 

And then the fourth pillar there in between, I didn’t 

mention, which was essentially to build good governance, 

extend the reach of the Afghan government out into the 

provinces, which we did primarily through our provincial 

reconstruction teams out there. The base of all this is 

information operations, trying to win a war of ideas and 

continue to get the messages out through the Afghan 

government to their people to assist them in building for the 

future. So, that was a broad lay-down of what the strategy 

was that we moved to, which was much more comprehensive 

and had a lot less kinetic and a lot less traditional military 

components than what we were doing prior to that time as 

we evolved into a new phase in Afghanistan in late ‘03. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that earlier: the militias and warlords. The 

warlords’ power seemed to decrease over time. Is there a 

reason? I assume this was because of some actions?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, we actually worked closely with Ambassador Khalilzad 

and President Karzai during the course of late 2003 up in 

the northern part of the country, and then throughout 2004, 

to develop, essentially, measured, thought-out, controlled 

confrontations with different warlords, sometimes initiated 

by actions they took, but sometimes part of actions that 

were planned by the government to reduce their power 

base and to shift them into either peaceful positions inside 

the government as ministers, or to basically ship them out 

of power entirely. That happened through leveraging the 

use of Coalition military power, along with the Afghan 

National Army, which changed the dynamics in the north 

around Mazar-e Sharif. After some serious militia fighting 

and tank deployment and everything else in October and 

November of ‘03, we assisted in deploying the Afghan 

National Army up to separate those factions and to begin 

cantoning or locking up their heavy weapons systems, 

which we then spread to other parts of the country. The 
21

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

same thing occurred in August of ‘04 out in Herat Province, 

where the warlord/governor out there, Ismail Khan, had a 

confrontation with another local warlord. We helped to 

deploy Afghan National Army forces out there, along with 

our Special Forces, to separate the factions and to begin 

disarming them, and to leverage some of the U.S. airpower 

and other assets to help send convincing messages to 

these folks. In August ’04, when the vice president, Fahim 

Kahn (who was probably the most powerful warlord of 

the country in August of ‘04), was told by President Karzai 

that he would not be on the ticket with President Karzai 

in the upcoming election, we—myself and Lt. Gen. Rick 

[J.] Hillier, commander of the NATO ISAF forces—visited 

Fahim Kahn and explained to him some of the virtues of 

peaceful resolution of differences in a democracy. 

And all these were backed up by implicit, sometimes 

explicit, use of both the Afghan National Army and 

Coalition military power, including airpower. So, that 

had a big influence, and by the time I left in May of ‘05, 

through the accumulation of all these efforts, the heavy 

weapons had been removed from all warlords across the 

entire country and cantoned and put under the control of 

the Afghan National Army and the Afghan government 

through a disarmament, demobilization, reintegration 

process there. By then, also, some of the most prominent 

warlords in the country had been removed from power or 

had been morphed into being elected as members of the 

parliament, being appointed as governors, being appointed 

as ministers in the government. There were some significant 

changes and the people of Afghanistan certainly saw the 

commotion. Well-known so-called warlords across the 

country were no longer holding positions of power in the 

country.

DR. HUGHES: One of the questions which we’ve been asked is successes 

that the United States has had in working demobilization. 

Any details of how the militias were stood down? What 

lessons could be learned in that area?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I’m not sure if I’d put them in the lessons learned category. 

In reality, the DDR program itself—demobilization, 

disarmament, and reintegration program—which was 

administered by the United Nations in a kind of systematic 

way around the country with the Afghan police, Afghan 

army playing a role in that, but it was not something 

the U.S. military had a direct role in. What we did have 

direct role within, or a very strong indirect role, was when 

there were confrontations with warlords, militias, and 

warlords exerting their power in the face of the national 

government’s efforts. We were key enablers in working 

with the Afghan government to bring the Afghan National 

Army to bear against these problem sets and to facilitate 

more rapid DDR in those areas, and in some cases through 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

22

some direct application of military power. The implied 

use of possible U.S. military power was required to help 

convince people to see the right thing to do.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. There was a lot of tension in the U.S. press on the 

search for Osama bin Laden and then the leadership 

element of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Did that occupy 

a lot of your command’s attention? How did that play 

out?

LT. GEN. BARNO: There’s not too much I can talk about in an unclassified 

forum. We had a very focused, dedicated effort, 24 hours 

a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year, that worked on 

the high-value-target set that we were seeking to kill or 

capture, which certainly included bin Laden and [Ayman 

al-]Zawahiri, Mullah [Mohammad] Omar, [Gulbuddin] 

Hekmatyar, and a number of the other key lieutenants 

there. So, that effort was very closely held, but I stayed 

engaged with it. I got briefed on the status of it every day. It 

was a very well-coordinated, well-thought-out, ultimately, 

I think, well-resourced effort during my time there.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You mentioned operations in Mazar-e Sharif a 

couple of times. What unfolded there?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, there were a variety of different things at different 

times. The event that took place in late October–early 

November of ‘03 involved two different warlords of that 

area who were deploying their forces and beginning to 

shell each other and to have tanks out on the road shooting 

each other. We had a British PRT in Mazar-e Sharif, and 

they took a very aggressive, active role to get out and to 

confront the leaders of the two factions and to threaten 

them and coerce them into pulling their troops back 

apart from each other. Afghan Minister of the Interior 

[Ali] Jalali, after a late-night meeting one night in the 

U.S. Embassy with the acting chargé at the time, David 

Sedney, myself, head of the UN effort in Afghanistan, 

which was Lakhdar Brahimi at that time, and probably 

a couple other key Afghan players—Minister Jalali flew 

up to Mazar-e Sharif with the delegation of the Afghan 

government to confront the offending parties there and 

to demand that they reposition themselves. He then 

began an actual cantonment of heavy weapons process. 

So, that action, which was precipitated by their violent 

confrontation, actually led, through some coercion 

and indirect threats on the part of the Coalition and by 

the Afghans’ great work, great initiative by the Afghan 

government, to those warlords to be disarmed of all their 

heavy weapons within the following sixty to ninety days, 

which was a pretty big accomplishment. The British PRT 

played a hugely important role. It was a very small force 

acting very boldly. We have a picture in one of our briefs 

of them running up and down the road in their jeeps 
23

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

between militia tanks that were out on the road. They 

did some terrific work, and it paid some big dividends. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that part of your mandate was to work 

with the embassy staff. How did the interagency—

because I assume it was more than State and Defense in 

power—play out?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, it was interesting. I deliberately collocated myself at 

the U.S. Embassy compound. I lived on the compound in a 

half-trailer about fifty feet from the ambassador, who lived 

in a double-wide trailer. I had an office twenty feet from 

his office. I started my day there every day, and I finished 

my day there every night. I saw him in the morning at a 

country team meeting, which for a long time we did five 

days a week. I’ve been to over three hundred country team 

meetings, which is probably a “fatal dose” for a military guy 

over time. And then a smaller security core group meeting 

followed the meeting with the ambassador. So, I spent the 

first two hours or so of every day with the ambassador, and 

we were both very much in tune with what each other was 

doing, where we were going, and we had a common view 

of what our efforts were going to be. Typically, I would not 

infrequently see him in the evenings, too, when I was back 

there. So, that was a huge, powerful way to both ensure 

that our efforts were connected and mutually supporting 

but also that we sent the message that we had a single, 

unified U.S. effort there between the chief of mission and 

the commander of the military operations. I would supply 

a couple of things as well to help enable his effort. 

We very early on, even with my very small staff—I took five 

field-grade officers and seconded them to the ambassador 

to use as strategic planners, led by a colonel, a very, very 

capable fellow, and we kept that staff refreshed as people 

rotated. So, he actually had five military planners to do 

whatever he needed them to do, and they ultimately were the 

authors of the mission performance plan for the embassy. 

They built metrics for the embassy to use in measuring 

performance in different areas across the country. They 

helped provide a backbone of some pretty well-trained 

manpower, because the embassy itself was a very, very, 

small, very junior organization with an extraordinarily 

limited number of people who did not have a tremendous 

amount of experience. It was arguably the second most 

important embassy effort in the world, and in a war zone. It 

was not resourced well during the entire time I was there. 

For example, the State Department international narcotics 

and law enforcement division [Bureau of International 

Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, INL], which 

had responsibility in Afghanistan for building the police 

program, which was a program that would ultimately, 

supposedly put out sixty-five thousand Afghan police, also 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

24

had responsibility for the entire counternarcotics effort in 

Afghanistan. That dual-hatted effort, which was immense 

by any measure, was supervised, run, and executed by one 

person most of my time there, and it went up to a grand 

total of three people doing it by the time I left. So, that just 

was not humanly possible to have the kind of results that 

you would want with that kind of manning by the State 

Department. That was fairly endemic across all aspects of 

the embassy operation, so we tried to assist with that. 

We developed a very comprehensive campaign plan that fit 

behind that Five Pillar strategy I described to you—vetted it, 

worked it, shopped it around the embassy, tweaked it—and 

eventually it became the embassy, the country team plan for 

our effort in Afghanistan. We spent a lot of time shopping 

that around the international community there, as well, 

and getting buy-in, consensus, and good ideas in terms 

of that. We tried to make our efforts as complementary as 

we could. I didn’t work for the ambassador. He and I both 

recognized my chain of command went through General 

Abizaid, but we were absolutely partners and joined at the 

hip in our operation over there, and I think that’s one of 

the more successful iterations we’ve had of military-chief of 

mission cooperation in a war zone in the last ten or fifteen 

years, or maybe even dating back to Vietnam. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You mentioned that you gave units geographical 

responsibility. That had to change their tactical 

deployment—obviously, their entire way of operating. 

Would you elaborate on that?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, I think the best shorthand model I’ve seen is probably 

the Marine three-block war model, where you’ve got the 

description of an organizational company or platoon, 

whether it be doing kinetic force-on-force fighting in 

the morning, be doing peacekeeping operations in the 

afternoon, and you could be doing relief handout and 

supply operations and taking care of babies and sick people 

in the evening. That was not uncommon for our units out 

there as we shifted to a more counterinsurgency-based 

model. 

DR. HUGHES: As opposed to counterterrorism.

LT. GEN. BARNO: Correct. As opposed to primarily focusing on kinetic 

operations to kill and capture bad guys wherever you 

find them. Now, they still did that, but they also did: 

“Okay, let’s go to this village, do an assessment, and find 

out what the people’s needs are, see what we can do.” We 

had this Commander’s Emergency Response Program, 

CERP, that was an incredibly powerful weapon in the 

toolbox to be able to deliver immediate aid, immediate 

dollars, through the Afghan government, typically 

local governments, to be able to trade quick-impact 
25

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

projects on the ground: build wells, repair schools, buy 

schoolbooks, in some cases buy tractors or seed—a wide 

variety of things, only limited by the imagination of the 

commanders in the field. But again, this was new territory 

for them to be surfing on. They did a tremendous job, 

and I give huge credit to our young commanders and 

young noncommissioned officers and platoon leaders 

out there for innovation and adaptability. A good friend 

of mine was one of the battalion commanders down at 

the border of Pakistan. He had been one of my company 

commanders when I was a battalion commander. I went 

down to visit him a number of times, and one of the things 

I asked him in early ‘04 was: “Mike, we just changed your 

mission here from counterterrorism, which it was when 

you first got here last summer, to now a broad-based 

counterinsurgency approach. How did you get your 

platoon leaders and company commanders and first 

sergeants and platoon sergeants to be able to shift gears 

here midstream and go from one to the other?” He goes, 

“Easy, sir: booksamillion.com.”

He had actually ordered books on the Internet from 

Afghanistan on counterinsurgency warfare, had them 

shipped into his units, had his people read them as they 

were in the middle of this fight. So, it was, again, tuning the 

car while you’re going down the highway, great adaptability 

by our young soldiers. It’s also pointing out the fact that we 

were pretty bankrupt in our doctrinal process as we went 

into this war, and the units just responded magnificently 

well, and my feedback was that they very much appreciated 

having the flexibility to use a broader “hearts and minds” 

counterinsurgency strategy as opposed to a more narrow 

focus, and they loved the areas of responsibility they were 

given, because then they became expert in those areas, 

and they were able to hand those areas off to other units 

who would come into the same area. Barring tactical 

emergencies, we would not move them around. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. There was a shift during your time there from a 

command of a coalition to an effort that included NATO. 

Could you describe that process and its unfolding?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, that’s not really true. I think what actually occurred 

is this. When the Taliban fell and Kabul was abandoned 

by the Taliban in about November 2001, shortly thereafter, 

within sixty days, an International Security Assistance Force 

under UN authority deployed into Kabul, a force of several 

thousand, primarily Europeans, that began a series of sixmonth rotations. This was ISAF, International Security 

Assistance Force. That was a multinational, European-based 

effort, through ‘01 and ‘02; but in August of ‘03, NATO 

assumed the ISAF mission, and the International Security 

Assistance Force was still in Kabul, and that was about two 

months before I got there. So, when I arrived in October 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

26

of ‘03, it was now the NATO ISAF force, as opposed to just 

ISAF, and NATO had ownership of that program.

We were parallel structures in Afghanistan. There was no 

command relationship between the two of us. And again, 

as I mentioned, ISAF—NATO ISAF—when I arrived, 

only was located inside of Kabul. By January of ‘04, they 

had taken over the northeastern corner of the country. 

We had kind of chopped that territory out to them. Then 

they slowly began an expansion that included beginning 

to deploy some PRTs. They took over the American PRT at 

Konduz, and then by the summer of ‘04, began to spread 

out a little—across the north-center part of the country, 

including Mazar-e Sharif. By the time I left—shortly 

after I left, in May of ‘05—they spread all the way out to 

Herat and had the northern half of Afghanistan under 

their cognizance. But, again, there was no command 

relationship between the two forces. We reserved the right 

as Coalition forces to operate anywhere in the country. 

We advised the NATO force that we would coordinate 

and tell them what we were doing, but we did not seek 

permission. There was no command lash-up between 

the two. Now, our two headquarters were a quarter-mile 

apart. I saw the commander of ISAF all the time. There 

were four different ISAF commanders during my nineteen 

months in Afghanistan. They were on six-month tours. I 

was on a nineteen-month tour, as it turned out, and so 

there was a continual turnover of the ISAF commander, 

of the staff, of the ISAF units, and all of them would leave 

within about the same two-week period of time at the end 

of every six months. So, there was tremendous turnover, 

disruption, lack of continuity to some degree, and each 

commander—the four I knew were very, very capable 

officers, very capable commanders from four different 

countries, but as a metaphor, their direction for their 

command was each about forty-five degrees apart from 

the others, so you had a bit of a constant zigzag in terms 

of where they were going in Afghanistan, which made 

things fairly interesting. But, that said, we had a very 

good collaborative, cooperative relationship. We kept 

each other informed on what we were doing. But now, 

what’s happened since then and what will happen later 

this year [2006], is much different in that there’s going to 

be a combined command that unifies essentially NATO 

and the Coalition into a single command structure, but 

that won’t occur until quite a bit later here this year—late 

‘06 or perhaps early ‘07.

DR. HUGHES: I was reading Minister Jalali’s article in Parameters, 

where he had indicated that one of the problems with the 

different national contingents was that they were under 

constraints from their own governments as to what they 

got involved in, what they concerned themselves with. 

Was that your experience?
27

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

LT. GEN. BARNO: Yes, absolutely. I think each country had a different 

approach. NATO had some significant challenges trying to 

reconcile and harmonize these approaches, and it ranged 

from taking a PRT that might be eighty to one hundred 

when the U.S. ran it to making it four hundred to six 

hundred when a NATO country came in, and having a 

hospital with it and having all kinds of other things with it 

because of national concerns about casualties. We had one 

instance where a certain NATO PRT had an improvised 

explosive device [IED] that they discovered outside their 

front gate. They refused to leave their compound until a U.S. 

unit came in and disarmed the device. So, there were some 

real issues related to what their nations would allow them 

to do. A lot of them have smoothed out here allegedly with 

the upcoming rotations, because General [USMC James L.] 

Jones has worked very hard with the Europeans to remove 

all national caveats, supposedly. I hope that’s the case with 

this, now that the rotations are coming up here. But that 

was a big challenge because each country had sometimes a 

substantially different take on what they could and could not 

do. When the ISAF troop rotations took place, one nation 

that might be operating in one area would be replaced by 

a completely different nation, and that was not true with 

PRTs. PRTs stayed under the national umbrella during the 

time that they remained there, at least during my time. But 

with caveats and what people could and couldn’t do, it was 

difficult. NATO also had a lot of difficulty in marshaling the 

required resources, for both soldiers and aircraft and other 

high-dollar-value, high-cost items out there. They had to 

generate forces for every six-month rotation, and it took 

tremendous amounts of effort by senior leaders to get that 

done. They were a great partner there in Afghanistan, but 

they had to get themselves there, become established; and 

then to continue to sustain those rotations took immense 

amounts of effort, in my observation.

DR. HUGHES: You’ve repeatedly mentioned the provincial reconstruction teams. Was there a set model? It sounds like 

there were different things going on with the different 

PRTs. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, each PRT that was under the Coalition, at least—

and when I first got there, there were only Coalition 

PRTs (“Coalition” meaning U.S. and typically twenty 

and twenty-one friends and allies that are working with 

us under OEF rules)—when I got there, we had about 

fourteen thousand in the Coalition under what would 

become CFC-Afghanistan [Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan]. By the time I left, we had about twenty 

thousand to twenty-one thousand, and that included 

about sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred Coalition 

partners, with the remainder being Americans, which 

is important to recognize. We made a major push to 

expand PRTs rapidly as part of our counterinsurgency 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

28

strategy. With only four there in the fall of 2003 as we 

were going into the spring, we realized that PRTs were 

a key way that we would exert influence in parts of the 

country where there was no U.S. or Coalition presence. 

So, we said, “We’re going to triple the number of PRTs 

inside of six months,” and by spring of ‘04, we actually 

had deployed a total of twelve PRTs out in the country 

as we were going into the elections that spring. That was 

a huge event, and we deployed them all into contentious 

areas in the south and east of the country. We basically 

disassembled the CJCMOTF [Combined Joint CivilMilitary Operations Task Force] headquarters, which 

was where a majority of the civil affairs people in the 

country were located inside the fence at Bagram. We 

dispersed them out in the PRTs around the country. We 

had to cannibalize our own organizations to generate 

that much PRT power that rapidly because we couldn’t 

get it pushed to us from the U.S. in any way, most of these 

folks being reservists to start with. So, we basically took 

apart the headquarters and put it all out on the field. 

That had a huge positive effect on the elections and the 

voter registration in the spring of ‘04. 

The registration process, the benchmark for success for 

that effort, was set at about 5.5 million. If we got that many 

people registered working with the United Nations, it 

would be deemed a success, and by the time registration 

was over, 10.5 million Afghans had registered, and in the 

fall, 8.5 million came out to vote. The final slate included 

eighteen candidates for president. President Karzai won 

with about 55 percent of the vote, but this was a very, very 

interesting process that few people thought was going to 

be accomplished without being disrupted by terrorist 

organizations. 

DR. HUGHES: You had the establishment of the constitution, the 

registration, the presidential election—all took place 

during your tour. That had to be not only a major focus 

for you, but a major success for the efforts there.

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, I think—my sense is—I kind of look back on ‘04, 

which I thought was a watershed year for Afghanistan. I 

think the terrorists also recognized that it was a watershed 

year of success for President Karzai and the Afghan people 

and the Afghan government, and that they were going 

to have to do something—they, the terrorists—had to do 

something dramatically different in 2005 to be perceived as 

remaining a credible force in the country. They really got, 

in a lot of ways, shut out on the scoreboard in 2004, not 

through any effort of mine, for sure, but as all the events 

that accumulated took place. And there were successes 

across the board, as we kind of walked through that. The 

losers on all of those efforts were the Taliban, al Qaeda, 

and Hekmatyar’s group, Hezb i Islami. I think they very 
29

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

clearly understood that if they were going to have any 

future whatsoever, they were going to have to do some very 

different things in ‘05 and ‘06. You know, not being plugged 

into the intelligence anymore, my sense is that, as I read the 

newspaper, that a lot of the uptick in violence and some of 

the new tactics that they appear to be using is a result of 

that assessment, but that’s speculation on my part. 

DR. HUGHES: You have estimated that opium production was about 50 

percent of the economy. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: Not my estimates, but I think those were common figures 

of the UN.

DR. HUGHES: Yes, I think that was in one of the interviews, but it might 

not have been you that made that comment. But did we 

become involved in counternarcotics? You mentioned 

the embassy staff ’s responsibility, but ...

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, the Coalition military—we didn’t take any ownership 

of the counternarcotics fight, other than to enable the 

Afghans where we could be a bit more effective on that. 

One of the challenges I had was sorting out early on how 

many different disparate efforts we could take on with our 

military force over there. You know, one of the little-known 

facts on Afghanistan is that Afghanistan, as a country, is 

about 40 percent larger than Iraq, and it has about 4 million 

more people than Iraq, but our force levels were obviously 

about 20 percent of what we had in Iraq with about 

twenty thousand troops. So, we had to be very judicious 

about how we metered or how we tapped out our military 

effort where we used those silver bullets of our military 

capability. And so, as we looked across ‘04, you know, as 

to be expected, there were almost an infinite number of 

different things that people wanted us to do. So, my basic 

approach to that was that we were going to sequence our 

efforts in Afghanistan and not attempt to do them all in 

‘04, and I tried that. Instead of having a win, a win, a loss, 

then a win and then two losses, and a win and a loss, our 

goal was to have a sequence of wins, that everything we 

did, we’d build a win on a win on a win on a win so that 

you’d have an unbroken series of positive outcomes, which 

would build your credibility and your momentum. So, I 

intentionally took any direct military role—and the policy 

folks supported this back here in D.C.—any direct military 

role in the counternarcotics right off the plate, because I 

thought that would be a distraction for us in ‘04, especially 

with the elections. We tried to be helpful where we could. 

We shared intelligence. We actually built an intelligencesharing cell for counternarcotics before I left, and we 

were growing our efforts in late ‘04 to ‘05, but we were 

very focused. The main effort I assigned in writing to our 

military organization, our military units, in 2004 was: “Set 

conditions for a successful Afghan presidential election.” 
That was the military main effort for 2004. All of our various 

undertakings were designed to serve that purpose for us. 

DR. HUGHES: Did you and your command have a role in the building of 

both the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National 

Police force? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: We did in the case of the army, but not the police. The 

State Department [Bureau of] International Narcotics and 

Law Enforcement [Affairs], INL, had the police, and they 

were doing it through a contract with a U.S. firm. On the 

army side, we owned that lock, stock, and barrel through 

the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, OMC-A, 

who worked dual-hat both for me and the ambassador, and 

that was a pretty successful effort. We had a contract as well 

that did great work for us, in our case in helping to rebuild 

the Afghan Ministry of Defense, help us go through this 

selection process with the Afghans for who should be at 

what level and how they should be selected and trained. 

Then we had really a multinational effort to train the Afghan 

National Army that involved everyone from the French 

and the British and the Mongolians, who came in for some 

specialized training and which collectively really helped 

build a very well disciplined, very popular, very diverse 

force with ethnic representation across the country right 

down to the squad level. So, they were a very professional 

outfit that got great reviews everywhere they went in the 

country, and I was very impressed with them. They would 

not shy from a fight. You know, there were some of our 

allies who said the Afghans are genetically programmed 

to be warriors, which you can take or leave, but they were 

pretty tough, pretty effective, and did some great work out 

there. So that was our program.

We made the argument that we did not agree with the 

police program. I did not feel that the police program was 

a well-resourced, well-thought-out, effectively managed 

program; in part because of the lack of people involved at 

the supervisory levels, as I mentioned. So we made a pitch 

in late ‘04 that “Someone needs to take over the police 

program” (it didn’t have to be the military) “and here are 

the resources that would be required to go with that. Here’s 

how the program ought to be built differently from the 

way it is built, and here’s how you would lay that all out 

and package that all up.” We designed this and briefed it 

to the secretary of defense over a couple of months. And, 

ultimately, he was able to convince the secretary of state to 

sign off on that program. By about February-March of ‘05 

decisions were made to shift that under military purview, 

and by summer ‘05, shortly after I left, the military took 

that over and is now running that program, as well, with 

considerably more resources and more supervisory 

support. Now, instead of an Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan, which just did the Afghan army, it’s Office 

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31

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

of Security Cooperation-Afghanistan that does army and 

police. The State Department is very much a part of that 

effort—the deputy OMC chief is from the State Department 

office. So—from what I’m hearing, at least—it’s on the road 

to success, and it’s being resourced directly, because the 

police are, in my judgment, probably more important long 

term in a counterinsurgency campaign than the military 

is. But we had to focus, obviously, because of how the lines 

were drawn initially, on the army, because that’s what we 

had under our wing.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You indicated that you had a regional focus and 

met regularly with the Pakistanis. How did that unfold, 

particularly on that critical Afghani-Pakistani border 

area?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, we had a couple levels of that. You know, the tripartite 

committee, as it was called, met about every sixty days. That 

was designed to look at tactical coordination. I tried to move 

it from just tactical issues. It was originally created before 

I arrived. I think August of ‘03 was the first meeting, and it 

was really stood up because, if what I was told was correct, 

because of a border shootout that involved a blue-on-blue–

type incident between either U.S. or Afghan forces and 

Pakistanis that resulted in a Pakistani soldier being killed. 

So it was really designed to meet that immediate need to 

de-conflict issues on the border at kind of a tactical-level 

approach. I tried to move it from tactical level to the strategic 

level of security issues on the border writ large between 

the two countries, and starting to get them to talk more 

about their common security interests. At the same time, 

we spun off a border subcommittee that would continue 

to work border issues; we spun off a military intelligence 

subcommittee that helped to share intelligence; and we 

were beginning to work toward spinning off—and I think 

we actually handed this over to State—a counternarcotics 

subcommittee, because we thought that was an important 

issue for the two countries to work together on. But my 

goal in that was to try and use it as a confidence-building 

measure and relationship-building mechanism between 

the Afghans and the Pakistanis as much as it was to get 

any pragmatic work done. So, we would meet. We would 

typically brief what each of the organizations was doing. 

We’d get updates on the subcommittee meetings, and the 

subcommittees would actually go on visits which brought 

to the border, typically, a brigadier with each delegation to 

look at a particularly difficult area of the border—you know, 

work through how procedures might be improved in that 

area of the border, and then go to a different area next time. 

They did that about every month or so. That also resulted 

in us getting radios provided to the Pakistanis and shared 

frequencies and call signs so units could talk to each other 

on both sides of the border. U.S. units and Pakistani units 

could share information on conflicts, where the enemy was 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

32

using the border against both sides, and they actually were 

able, in one case, to have the Pakistanis direct U.S. artillery 

fire into the edge of the Pakistani border area and kill 

terrorists that were operating in between two sets of forces 

there. So those were very productive sessions. Again, they 

built a lot of confidence between the forces, as well. That 

enabled us to help provide information to the Pakistanis 

that they needed on things from IEDs to communications 

to shared intelligence. So it was, I think, a very successful 

effort that paid a lot of dividends other than just the 

pragmatic dividends. 

DR. HUGHES: The impression is that the Pakistani government was 

becoming a presence in areas of their own country that 

they hadn’t been much of a national presence in before.

LT. GEN. BARNO: Absolutely. By the spring of ‘04, they moved tens of 

thousands of troops into South Waziristan, where they 

had never had a Pakistani military before in their history, 

since the country was stood up in 1947. And so that was 

an area where there was an indication of a tremendous 

amount of terrorist activity—al Qaeda, Taliban activity, 

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan activity. The Pakistanis 

were in there in force, and they had a major campaign in 

South Waziristan in spring and summer of ‘04 that I think 

helped contribute to some of the peaceful outcomes of the 

presidential election that the Afghans held that fall. So, yes, 

that was a little-known fact that the Pakistanis really hadn’t 

operated in that area before, really hadn’t been out there 

other than a very thin veneer of Frontier Corps troops out 

on the very edge of the border. Most of them were local 

soldiers. So, that was a huge undertaking. They took a lot of 

casualties. They had a lot of fights. They were using airpower 

inside their country for the first time, tactical airpower with 

both helicopters and jets, and so there were some big fights 

there in the spring and summer of ‘04 time frame. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Were there any issues in western Afghanistan near 

the Iranian border?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I’m not sure what “issues” would be defined as. I guess the 

issues we had were internal to Afghanistan, obviously from 

a standpoint of primarily warlord fighting out there. In 

August of ‘04, there was some pretty significant what we 

call green-on-green, Afghan-on-Afghan, warlord fighting 

between the forces of Ismail Khan, who at that time still 

had tanks and artillery, and forces of Amanullah Khan, 

a warlord to the south of there, who was one of his great 

rivals. And there was a fight going on around the Shindand 

Airfield, which was one of the biggest Soviet bases in years 

past. We, together with the Afghan government ... the 

Afghan government decided that they wanted to take some 

strong measures to intervene in that conflict and put it to 

rest. So, we facilitated moving Afghan National Army troops 
Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

33

out to Shindand Airfield, taking control of the airfield with 

U.S. Special Forces, and then set up as a buffer between the 

two warring forces and began to demobilize the two forces, 

which was a very successful program. Ultimately, Ismail 

Khan, who was the governor of Herat, had all of his tanks 

surrendered and cantoned, and he eventually came back to 

be a minister of the government and was doing quite a good 

job by the time I left there. So, it really defused that whole 

situation out there in that part of the country, through the 

use of Afghan National Army forces at the forefront, but 

also through the use of our own military capabilities, our 

enablers, especially our air transport capability, our attack 

helicopter and scout helicopter capability, our rotary-wing 

movement capability, and our airpower. We had a lot of 

ability with a small number of troops—SF [Special Forces], 

cavalry forces we put out there to have a tremendously 

broad influence across that part of the country. We had a 

U.S. air cavalry squadron out there for a couple of months 

who did some great work. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. In the interview you gave with the press just 

after you got back, you indicated that there were some 

advantages in having a light footprint—that is, fewer 

visible soldiers in country. Would you please elaborate 

on your thoughts there?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, it was a fact-of-life issue as well, as we had twenty 

thousand or less troops there covering a huge amount 

of territory, so we had to operate in a way that leveraged 

Afghan forces as much as possible, and also recognize the 

fact that we didn’t have an immense number of forces to 

cover every bit of the territory. So, we operated at a fairly 

low profile where, I think, in most cases, we were able to 

leverage our airpower very effectively. One of the things I’ve 

mentioned in other interviews is that we had the ability to 

operate throughout the country, essentially at platoon level, 

because we had pretty widespread knowledge that twenty 

minutes away from any contact there would be airpower 

overhead. I can get A–10s. I can get F–16s out there. I can 

get attack helicopters out there. So, our forces could operate 

fairly small-sized units on remote patrols for multiple days 

and have the confidence that if they got into a fight, they’d 

have very quick reactions from reinforcing forces and 

from tactical airpower, and they’d be able to deliver some 

ordnance on the target. 

So, what that portrayed to the Afghans, though, is that you 

didn’t have battalions of U.S. troops typically tromping 

around. You had small units coming out. They were 

operating and getting face to face with the Afghans; they 

were interacting with the local people; they were having 

tea with the mullahs; they were meeting with the elders; 

and we had the PRTs—which, again, were a very small 

footprint. PRTs were eighty to one hundred soldiers, mostly 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

34

all U.S. military or Coalition military; always an Afghan 

Ministry of Interior official as part of the PRT; always a 

Department of State official; typically a USAID [United 

States Agency for International Development] official there; 

sometimes a U.S. agricultural [United States Department of 

Agriculture] official. But operating in a provincial capital, 

which is typically quite a small place, a long ways from any 

other American military power, unless it was really tough 

country; that projected a lot of confidence out there again 

that we could reinforce quickly. And so we talked “light 

footprint,” which made in some ways virtue of necessity. 

I’ve also been asked, “Did you have enough troops? Could 

you have used more troops? etc.” I was very comfortable 

with the troops I got, and I asked for troops when I needed 

them. I asked for additional troops for the ’04 election. 

I got a battalion from the 82d [Airborne Division] for a 

month and a half, which was just right at the right place 

at the right time. I got a marine expeditionary unit in at 

the spring of ‘04 for about seven or eight weeks. They ran 

some good disruptive operations up in Oruzgan Province. 

So, I had a lot of flexibility. General Abizaid responded 

very well to requests when I made a good case for them to 

bring in additional forces for specific operations for specific 

reasons. So, I felt very comfortable having that many forces 

in country and being able to accomplish the mission in the 

environment we had there—a very different environment, 

obviously, than Iraq, radically different. I think as an order 

of magnitude the number of attacks, typically when I was 

there, was about one-tenth the number of attacks I recall 

seeing in Iraq on a given day in the same period of time. I 

don’t know if that’s true or different or the same or anything 

else today, but when I was there, that was about the order 

of magnitude in terms of what we were dealing with for 

violence. 

DR. HUGHES: What were the big decisions you had to make during 

your tour there?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I think the first one was establishing what strategy 

was going to be and what kind of a campaign we were 

fighting. There was some dispute when I arrived—talking 

to subordinate units about whether this was Phase III of 

the operation or Phase IV of the operation, even though 

there had been a decision made in May of ‘03 that this was 

now a Phase IV operation in Afghanistan and in Iraq. So, 

I thought that was an interesting insight on some degree 

of confusion existing in terms of what we were doing and 

why and what our approach was. So, being able to develop 

and then get out and explain—and I went down to units 

all the way to battalion level and talked to senior leaders, 

company commanders, and CSMs [command sergeants 

major] at least, across the force, to include when we rotated 

new units in—to talk about the counterinsurgency strategy 
General Barno meets with soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 505th Infantry, in Paktia Province, 5 October 2004.

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

35

and to make sure they understood what was different about 

Afghanistan from anywhere else they may or may not have 

been, and what our approach was going to be; and that 

paid huge dividends. I got some great feedback. One of 

the nicer compliments I got from a retired four-star who 

had been visiting and had been out to see our units. He 

was taken aback to hear the exact same description of what 

our strategy was from platoon level all the way up to threestar command, which I felt very good about. So, I think we 

gave clear guidance out to our folks, and they embraced it, 

and they ran with the ball out there and made it happen. 

So, that’s exactly what you want to happen. But that was 

probably one of the biggest decisions we had to make. 

There were a number of other operational-level decisions in 

terms of how do you react to a situation developing in the 

country with warlords. A lot of the difficult calls were made 

on green-on-green–type situations and how the Afghan 

government might be moving ahead on its own and how to 

interact with them. We established what was called a “dualkey” system for use of the Afghan National Army, which 

was that both the Afghans and the U.S. had to “turn the 

key” in order to put the Afghan army into an operation. 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

36

Otherwise, there were cases where the Afghan army would 

make its own call and go out and get into a fight somewhere 

that we couldn’t support them or didn’t make sense in the 

broader strategy. So, that was an interesting little innovation 

we had. 

One of the other difficult decisions, I think, was to look at 

how we were going to modify our operations to take into 

account the growing Afghan sovereignty over our time 

there. I met with President Karzai on a pretty regular basis, 

ranging from three times a week to once in three weeks. It 

varied. I’d get called in about once a quarter, and typically 

there’d be a sizable group of Afghans, sometimes elders 

from the provinces and members of the cabinet, and most 

of the cabinet in there, to hear from them all the things that 

the Americans were doing that were getting people upset 

across the country. As a result of one of those, I promised 

President Karzai I’d come back to him in a month or so, 

and I’d kind of lay out how we were going to tweak our 

operations to make them more attuned to the cultural 

sensitivities inside Afghanistan. From that, we developed 

something called the Fifteen Points, which was a layout of 

basic procedures American units would take, Coalition units 

would take, to enable us to continue our operations, but 

do them in ways with slight modifications to acknowledge 

what the Afghan concerns were; to put an Afghan face on 

the operation; to try and always have Afghan police or 

Afghan National Army forward in our operations; to think 

about how much we were doing at night, if we didn’t have 

to, based on a threat situation; to see how we were dealing 

with women and making sure—that was a hugely sensitive 

point—how we were perceived in interacting with Afghan 

women, which is a true sensitivity across the region from 

my current job, as well. So, I mean, those were things that 

were not taught at [Fort] Leavenworth.

DR. HUGHES: Would you explain what exactly was the sensitivity? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: In the Afghan culture—and typically throughout much 

of the Islamic world, at least in conservative parts of the 

Islamic world—there is great sensitivity to women being 

seen by outsiders. In Afghanistan, if you go to any home, 

even in the city, you’ll find that there is a wall around the 

home. If an Afghan goes to build a home somewhere out 

in the middle of the country, the first thing they will do, 

inevitably, is they’ll build a wall around what’s going to be 

their home so that they can have their women work shielded 

from the outside, and then they’ll build their house. They’ll 

sleep on the ground inside the wall until the house is built. 

The reason for that is in the Afghan culture, it’s a great 

affront for outsiders to see Afghan women. We had one 

instance, I recall, where a woman died in childbirth because 

the men in that family would not allow an American male 

medic to touch the woman, to come near the woman. So, 
37

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

there’s a huge, huge cultural sensitivity, incomprehensible 

to Americans, to any perception that your women have 

been seen, which in some ways is viewed as being violated 

by other men. In our operations, day or night, when we 

would go into a walled compound (which they all are), one 

of the things we would normally do from a force protection 

standpoint is separate the men from the women. That 

created great angst among the Afghans. So, what they 

asked us to do, and what we eventually worked toward, is 

either we’d have a woman soldier there with the women, 

so at no time would the Afghan women be with American 

soldiers without Afghan men there, or we would get one of 

the elders to be with the Afghan women while they were 

separated from their men. The women were considered 

soiled after that, and it was a great offense to the family 

that the women had been separated from the men. It’s a 

very different cultural context than what we think about 

here in the United States. So, those were things that the 

average American is not going to bring to the fight when 

he comes to Afghanistan. I think we’ve gotten smarter over 

the last couple of years, and we’re starting to introduce 

that as a basic understanding that all soldiers have about 

the culture. That was a huge issue in Afghanistan in how 

we were perceived—and for the best of reasons—to be 

treating women in the country. Now, I’ve seen in the last 

month videos on the Islamic Web sites or postings showing 

American soldiers searching women in Iraq. That’s hugely 

offensive to the Muslim world. To the American, the picture 

looks like, yes, they’ve got the women separated off, and 

they look like they’re treating them with respect; to many 

people in the Muslim world, that’s a huge cultural offense. 

So, those types of issues are very, very important in that 

culture. We took some time to try to work our military 

operations to accommodate that, because, again, if your 

center of gravity is the Afghan people, if what you’re doing 

on these raid operations or these missions is offending more 

of the Afghan people than you’re moving over to your side, 

you’re losing ground, you’re not gaining ground. So, in the 

counterinsurgency, those parts are incredibly important.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What would you consider were the biggest 

challenges that you faced over there?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I think being able to set our program up for long-term 

success was probably one of the biggest challenges, with 

the amount of turnover to maintain continuity in the 

overall effort, and to build a set of relationships and a 

mutual understanding of the road map forward that could 

be sustained from unit to unit, commander to commander, 

ambassador to ambassador, because the Afghans remain 

the constant through all those things. In retrospect, I was 

there for nineteen months, which is considered to be a 

long tour. That’s probably not nearly enough in terms of 

how long we keep commanders there. Once you build 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

38

those relationships, those carry immense weight in that 

part of the world, probably a lot more than they do over 

here, where we’re kind of, in some ways, in a transitory 

culture. In that culture, the trust and confidence that you 

have in the individual is paramount. I remember many 

occasions where we were rotating units, and the local 

officials would have incredible angst at a change-out of 

the battalion commander. And the commander would 

have to introduce his successor and talk about how much 

he trusted him and talk about how their kids had played 

together to convince—and even that was difficult to do—to 

convince the local elders and the officials that this person 

was the trustworthy descendant of the person who was 

leaving. I saw that with Ambassador Khalilzad after he left. 

There was great angst over there. In a culture that places 

huge value on interpersonal relations, trying to sustain 

the direction and the airspeed and altitude, if you will, 

of an effort that’s going to rotate Americans through over 

and over and over again, I think strategically it’s probably 

one of our biggest challenges to build that confidence that 

we’re going to stay there for the long haul and that we’re 

going to have consistent policies and directions. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You have discussed a number of things that 

obviously went very successfully. What would you 

consider the major achievements of your tour?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, I think you’ve cited several of them. In my view, 

the following: the successful passage of the Afghan 

constitution in January of 2004, the most moderate 

Muslim constitution in that part of the world; the great 

success of the voter registration program, the first of 

its kind in Afghanistan, in the spring and summer of 

‘04, with 10.5 million Afghans registering to vote in 

their first-ever presidential election; and the election 

itself in the fall of ‘04, with 8.5 million Afghans coming 

out to vote despite lots of threats on their lives by the 

Taliban and al Qaeda; and the peaceful presidential 

inauguration in December of ‘04. Those were probably 

the highlights of that year which were very, very 

significant. There have been a number of achievements 

since that time—the parliamentary election in ‘05, for 

one—but those are probably the most important things 

I think we accomplished, all of which, interestingly 

enough, are in the political dimension. Success, in my 

view, in that type of counterinsurgency campaign, is 

going to come through political successes of the host 

nation government, not through some degree of military 

success. So, there was a great deal of confidence built in 

the Afghan people in their own future during that year, 

because they were able to take control of their future, 

vote for their future, make decisions about their own 

future. They got continued, very strong international 

support during that time. 
39

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

One of the things I regularly tell people is that the 

Afghans’ biggest concern is not Americans and Westerners 

overstaying their welcome; it’s the fear of abandonment. 

We were confronted regularly with questions about “You’re 

not going to abandon us again, are you?” because their 

perception was that we walked away from them lock, stock, 

and barrel after the Soviet war was over with, and that 

plunged them into a period of tremendous internal civil 

war, destruction, and devastation. They’re coming out of 

a 25-year civil war and the war between the Soviets and 

themselves, and that just devastated the entire country, 

so they are sick and tired of fighting, and they want 

international help to stay there to help them get back on 

their feet. So, we’re in a tremendous positional advantage if 

we can maintain our effort over there.

I also offer the return on investment for the United States. 

With twenty thousand troops there and about $10 billion 

to $12 billion a year of investment, that’s less than 2 percent 

of our defense budget for a year and less than 2 percent 

of our military manpower for a year. For that, we are in 

a regional position of great influence through Central 

Asia with people who want us there for the first time in 

several centuries. They want outsiders there that provide 

a positive influence to keep them in an orbit looking 

toward the West, not just toward Russia and toward China, 

who are very interested in bringing them back into their 

spheres of influence. It keeps a very positive supporting 

framework right up next to Pakistan, which is the secondlargest Muslim country in the world and has, we think, 

perhaps two dozen nuclear weapons, so Afghanistan is a 

very, very important strategic ally—friend—in that part 

of the world; and our presence in Afghanistan has a very 

positive influence. Of course, to the west we have Iran, 

and the fact that we have troops and influence and friends 

in Afghanistan has a moderating influence on them, as 

well. So, we’re in a very strong strategic position there, at a 

relatively low cost in manpower and dollars. It is a position 

of great advantage and great influence that I think we need 

to sustain over time. Time will tell if we do that or not.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What lessons should the United States and the U.S. 

Army learn from our experiences there? Your experiences 

there?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, I think one of our continuous challenges here is to 

understand the nature of the war that we’re fighting in that 

part of the world, not just at the tactical level, but how does 

the strategic level of war apply in a counterinsurgency fight 

that reaches outside of a single country and to the region 

and perhaps globally, certainly, if you include al Qaeda? I 

don’t know that we have, as an army, as a military at large, 

thought our way through the implications of that and how 
Enduring Voic

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40

you fight, how you succeed, how you design a strategy 

in Afghanistan that isn’t simply an Afghanistan-centric 

internal strategy but is a part of a global strategy—how 

those pieces all fit together. How does Pakistan fit into 

that? How do we look regionally, instead of simply at a 

single country? As many people have said—a few people 

have said, I guess, and I certainly say—this is not a war in 

Iraq and a war in Afghanistan. Those are parts of broader 

regional conflicts. They are part of a global war, and how 

you structure your long-term strategic approach in each 

one of those for a global war is not necessarily the same way 

you structure for a war inside a single country that hasn’t 

got regional and global implications. So, I think that’s a 

subtle but very important lesson yet to be learned on what 

we’re doing and have been doing in Afghanistan. So, I think 

that’s something we have to give some thought to. 

Otherwise, I think we’ve had great success, and we’ve 

shown the adaptability of our units. We’ve been able to 

reinvent ourselves on the fly to do counterinsurgency 

operations after a long hiatus of not touching that at all 

and not getting exposed to it and not training our folks 

on it at all. We’ve now got a very experienced force, both 

from duty in Iraq and duty in Afghanistan and from 

thinking about different types of warfare. I still think that 

we’ve got to work our way through this strategic level and 

what this means, not simply the tactical level. The Army, 

in my view, is an area where it needs to be careful that it 

does not become too tactically focused, given the fact that 

just like with my headquarters, the operational level and 

strategic level weren’t Army functions any longer; they 

are now joint functions. My headquarters was effectively 

an orphan headquarters. It didn’t have a post, didn’t have 

a flag, didn’t have a patch, didn’t have a museum, didn’t 

have a World War II history; therefore, it didn’t exist in 

the Army institutional hierarchy at all in any way, shape, 

or form. That also is true in terms of where the Army 

devotes its thinking about fighting. It no longer owns the 

headquarters and does those kinds of things. By and large, 

there’s a risk that we’re going to nosedive into only being 

experts at tactics, techniques, and procedures; and that’s 

where our dollars are going, that’s where an awful lot of 

our thinking is going, and that seems to be where a good 

bit of our writing is going. I have concerns about that, 

because I think the Army is an institution that does have 

enough depth to be able to talk, think, write, influence 

at the operational and strategic level, and to take some 

ownership of that once again. I think this trend is kind of the 

inadvertent second-order effect of the Goldwater-Nichols Act 

[which streamlined the military chain of command] because 

we don’t operate at the operational headquarters level and 

the strategic headquarters level any more in the Army. All 

of a sudden, the Army is now simply train, organize, and 

equip as a force, and that does not leverage, in my opinion, 
41

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

the immense depth that the institution has on war fighting 

writ large, and we need to be careful about that.

DR. HUGHES: Are there things I should have asked you?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Oh, there are a million different things we can go into, I 

think. That was a pretty good quick-look overview of the 

different aspects in Afghanistan. There are a lot of things we 

can talk about in the interagency operations; a number of 

things we could talk about in how we work with allies and 

friends and Coalition headquarters operations, perhaps; 

there are some interesting things we could probably talk 

about on relationships, vertically up the chain of command 

back to Washington, which is kind of an element now; 

how technology and modern communications play in the 

ability for people to reach out and touch you; and how 

you interact with different levels above your command, 

not simply internal to your command. I suspect that that 

is certainly more prevalent today than it ever has been in 

history, because the technology’s available to do it. So, those 

are things maybe for a different day. 

DR. HUGHES: Well, thank you very much, sir.

LT. GEN. BARNO: It was pretty interesting. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

[End of first session. Beginning of second session.]

DR. HUGHES: Sir, you were about to give basically an overview of your 

experience there. Would it be possible to ask you to go 

back a little bit? How did you find out you were tapped 

for the assignment?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I had some ongoing telephone conversations with General 

Abizaid when I was in my previous job as the commander 

of the Army Training Center at Fort Jackson. He and I 

have known each other for twenty-plus years. We had 

been company commanders together in the same Ranger 

battalion during the Grenada invasion, and we knew each 

other, and we stayed in touch pretty extensively. I had just 

come back from a three-month deployment in the spring 

of ‘03 to Hungary, where I had been tapped to deploy a 

task force from the United States to Taszar, Hungary, to 

train Free Iraqi Forces, which were intended to go in and 

accompany Americans on the front end of the invasion. 

That was a disappointing effort from the standpoint of 

getting few recruits, which we didn’t have any ability to 

influence. But I had been back probably about two months 

from that effort. General Abizaid originally attempted, 

shortly after we returned, to deploy our task force to 

Afghanistan to begin training the Afghan National Army 

forces, but that was turned down by the [U.S.] Army. 

Then he looked at possibly having me involved with that 

individually and that didn’t pan out. 
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42

Then, several months later, he approached me about 

going to Afghanistan to take over this new three-star 

organization that was being envisioned, not exactly 

planned out at that point in time. So, after going through 

the various wickets with the Defense Department and 

the secretary of defense and whatnot, I did get selected 

for that job. I went over for a reconnaissance visit in 

September [2003] for about one week; and I traveled 

around the country most of my time with General 

[Maj. Gen. Karl W.] Eikenberry, who was the military 

cooperation chief in Kabul, and the remainder of my 

time with Lt. Gen. [John R.] Vines, who was the CJTF180 commander, XVIII Airborne Corps commander, at 

Bagram. So, I got the picture of both the Kabul end of 

it and the Bagram end of it, both the political-military 

environment, which Karl Eikenberry had been tasked to 

do by General Vines as one of his priority efforts, while 

General Vines focused on the tactical-operational end of 

it out of the headquarters at Bagram. So, there was some 

discussion of how the new headquarters was going to be 

formed and stood up. It was pretty thin planning, and 

there really wasn’t an anticipation that I would come in 

quite as quickly as I did. 

DR. HUGHES: What sort of model did you use to set up? Is there a 

standard model for a joint headquarters?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Not one that is kind of one-size-fits-all. We essentially 

looked at what were the critical nodes that we needed to be 

able to perform right away. We clearly needed a politicalmilitary [POL-MIL] section, since my charter from General 

Abizaid was “Your job, Dave, is big POL and little MIL.” But, 

as I told him a month later, it became, very quickly, big POL 

and big MIL and big ECON [economics], so it was big on all 

sides of the house. So, we built a political-military section. 

But again, out of the six people I started with, probably the 

most important part of that was that four of us had served 

together in the same battalion in the 82d Airborne Division 

about six years prior, I guess. Actually, it had been almost 

ten years. 

DR. HUGHES: Were you in a position to select your own staff?

LT. GEN. BARNO: No. That was pure coincidence. In fact, where I attempted 

to select my own staff, I was generally stymied from 

doing that by the Army over the next two years, and I 

will talk a little bit more about that, because that was 

very frustrating and uncalled for, in a lot of respects, 

given that we were a forward-deployed organization, 

and presumably the number-two priority effort for the 

military at that time. But my chief of staff had been my 

battalion S-3 [staff officer for operations]. He was there 

in the OMC, so I took him out of the OMC and made 

him my chief of staff. The fellow I made my political-
43

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

military officer was there working for General Eikenberry 

as a political-military officer. 

DR. HUGHES: Could you give us some of the names?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Yes. Col. Tom [J.] Snukis was the chief of staff designee. 

Second, now-Col. Tucker [B.] Mansager had been one of 

my company commanders in my battalion, and he again 

was working for General Eikenberry. I pulled him over to be 

my political-military officer out of the OMC. I had then–Lt. 

Col. Mark Stammer, who had been one of my staff officers 

in my old battalion. We pulled him up to be basically our 

SGS, secretary of the General Staff, or secretary of the Joint 

Staff. Then there was me. So, the four of us had all worked 

very closely together in 1992 and 1993, and we knew each 

other very, very well at a much younger point in our lives, 

when we were doing parachute infantry battalion kinds of 

things. So, we had a relationship already, and that enabled 

us to cut through all kinds of bureaucratic inertia in all the 

“getting to know you” and “forming and storming” things, 

because we already knew and trusted each other and 

understood how each other thought and operated. So, we 

were able to do a tremendous amount of “cut right to the 

chase” decision making and had a lot of respect for each 

other and a lot of confidence in each other to start with, 

which was pretty unusual.

I was a two-star at that time. I had not yet been confirmed 

by the Senate when I arrived in early October, but I was, in 

effect, the officer in charge in Afghanistan, because I was the 

senior American in country. I had a one-star promotable, 

plus another one-star, at Bagram. I had a one-star, the acting 

OMC chief, in Kabul. That was our whole contingent, I 

guess, of general officers in Afghanistan at the time. If you 

went back a year prior to that, you would have had a threestar, probably two two-stars, and several one-stars, and so 

the whole size of the operations had downshifted primarily 

through attrition and through unexpected absences and gaps 

in filling positions. So, now, when I returned to Afghanistan 

after my initial reconnaissance visit in September, when I 

went back somewhat unexpectedly on or about seventytwo hours’ notice to take over in early October, we had a 

very, very small contingent of senior leadership, and there 

were no general officers above the rank of one-star in 

the country when I returned, which was pretty stunning, 

considering we had fourteen thousand troops, give or take, 

at that point in time, and several very large organizations. 

The generals had rotated out and others had not taken their 

place, and one had departed unexpectedly for illness. The 

embassy, at the same point in time, had been without an 

ambassador since about July and had a chargé [d’affaires], 

an acting ambassador there, the deputy. So, the whole effort 

in Afghanistan was in a bit of a sideways drift, to use a 

current term. That was one of the reasons I got accelerated 
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44

very quickly, to get in there and kind of start getting things 

established, even though I had not been confirmed yet. 

DR. HUGHES: When you went over there for your reconnaissance, what 

briefings either there or here did you get? Who gave you 

briefings and what sort of information was shared with 

you as you were starting up?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I’m not sure of the exact sequence, but as I recollect, I had 

a series of briefings in the Joint Staff, although they were 

pretty rudimentary. There wasn’t a tremendous amount of 

preparation time that was available. I remember having a 

Pentagon roundtable with a number of different players 

who were involved in Afghanistan, interagency players, 

but mostly defense players. Ambassador Bob Oakley, I 

remember being at that; Debra Cagan, I remember being 

at that; and a number of folks from the Joint Staff. I had 

an office call with the J-5 [staff section for plans], Joint 

Staff, who, at that time, I think, was [Lt. Gen.] George [W.] 

Casey. So, we had kind of the beginnings of briefings, but 

there wasn’t really enough time to do any kind of in-depth 

preparation, which was a bit of a problem, needless to 

say. In many of these positions, you tend to get a month 

or two foreknowledge and preparation time. In my case, 

I had very little time from when I was notified that I was 

going to go. I went on my reconnaissance—which was done 

rather hurriedly and was about a ten-day effort with all the 

movement over and back—and I came back from that and 

expected that I would have about a month, roughly, before 

I might have to go to Afghanistan, but I got called within a 

week of returning and was told I had to be there in seventytwo hours. So, we were off and running at that point in 

time. The amount of preparation was pretty limited from 

that standpoint. 

DR. HUGHES: Did you get situation briefings when you got in 

country?

LT. GEN. BARNO: To a degree. I spent some time down in Bagram, but again, 

in my headquarters in Kabul, we didn’t have an operations 

center, we didn’t have a staff, and we didn’t have a J-3 

[staff section for operations]. Essentially, my approach 

was that I would let folks at Bagram continue to run the 

day-to-day tactical operations while I filled and began to 

oversee what I called the regional strategic effort. I viewed 

our headquarters mission as being a regional strategic 

headquarters. I had responsibility not just for Afghanistan, 

but for parts of three other countries: all of Pakistan, except 

for Jammu and Kashmir, and then the southern parts of 

Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So, reporting to General Abizaid, 

that was my battle space. That was, prior to my time, CJTF180’s battle space. But I wasn’t focused on just the building 

of the headquarters. I was also focused on running the 

operation and getting involved with the political-military 
45

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

aspects and understanding how the embassy was working. 

So, I was allowing day-to-day tactical stuff to continue to be 

run out of Bagram. I talked to General Austin, who was the 

brigadier-promotable commander of the 10th Mountain 

Division, who had his headquarters in there as CJTF-180. 

He and I talked daily, so I had a good set from him on what 

was going on. But I made some deliberate decisions that 

were counterintuitive, I think, at that point in time, to a lot 

of folks that were the right decisions to make in retrospect. 

One was I decided I would put my personal location at the 

U.S. Embassy, live at the embassy compound, and have 

about three or four of my key folks live there in a trailer 

complex with me. I had an office in the embassy where I 

would spend about a third of my time. It was right next to 

the ambassador and the DCM’s [deputy chief of mission] 

office, so I was sending a deliberate message that we were 

going to have an integrated effort and that it wasn’t just 

military guys down the road a mile at their own compound 

doing their own thing and coming up to visit occasionally. 

We were actually going to live there and be part of the 

community; we were going to be at meetings; we were going 

to go to the country team meetings; we were going to see 

the ambassador every day; and we were going to be part of 

an integrated effort. I wasn’t told to do that, but clearly the 

intent of the guidance I got was to try and pull this effort 

together and try to blend the political and the military. So, 

I made some very specific decisions to do those kinds of 

things. 

The only thing I did that I was questioned early on when I 

got there from somebody was about how I was going to get 

the twice-a-day videoconferences that were held with all 

the commanders in Afghanistan. In the morning and in the 

evening, typically, there was a video teleconference [VTC] 

done out of Bagram, where the senior commander and 

staff would sit down and get operational updates from all 

the commanders in the field down to about the lieutenant 

colonel level, roughly speaking, the colonel and lieutenant 

colonel level. It would last about forty-five minutes or so, 

and it would be at about eight in the morning and at about 

seven in the evening. I said I wasn’t going to do that, and I 

didn’t want to have that level of very granular tactical detail 

because it would cause me to focus on the tactical-level detail 

instead of looking at the big picture and understanding 

how the pieces needed to go together to fit it into a broader 

campaign. That was exactly the right decision.

But what had happened—inadvertently in Afghanistan, 

in my opinion, at least—during the summer of ‘03, in the 

spring of ‘03, we had the XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters 

in Afghanistan at Bagram, which was the joint task force 

headquarters, and it had what I would characterize as 

regional strategic- and operational-level responsibilities. 

He also had a division headquarters, a de facto division 
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46

headquarters, called Combined Task Force-82 [CTF-82], the 

82d Airborne Division headquarters. He had a two-star exdivision commander, John Vines, doing the CTF-82 tactical 

job, while [Lt. Gen.] Dan [K.] McNeill, as the commander of 

XVIII Airborne Corps, and his staff did the operational and 

regional (or low-level) strategic job. The decision was made 

in spring 2003 to get rid of [Combined] Task Force-82 and 

give the entire mission to CJTF-180 and replace the corps 

headquarters with a division headquarters, which occurred 

in about May or June ‘03. That was done for efficiencies 

and to save manpower. Afghanistan was thought to have 

become very quiet and going into Phase IV operations, so 

there wasn‘t a need for a corps and a division headquarters; 

but what it did, in my opinion, was it caused that one 

headquarters to default down to the tactical level. It started 

focusing only on tactics, and no one was doing operations, 

and certainly no one was doing serious regional strategic 

work. That was why, in part, John Vines—according to Karl 

Eikenberry, at least—gave Karl this mission. It was “You do 

the POL-MIL stuff. Keep me out of that. I’m going to be 

down here doing operational tactical stuff.” So, we lost our 

visibility at the regional strategic level. We started drilling 

down and being very focused on tactics, which I wanted 

to distance myself from the start, and we were able to do 

that.

Now, I had ops updates daily, face to face, in person, from 

my staff once I started building one. I originally had a 

first lieutenant marine reservist as my J-2 [staff officer for 

intelligence]. I had an Army captain as my J-3 for the first 

month or two there. But the idea—which was, I think, 

deeply flawed—was for the staff for Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan, as it became, to be a reach-back 

staff, where we would leverage all the capacity at Bagram 

but only have a handful of people up at Kabul, and we would 

be able to reach back and get all the information, and we 

would just share all this electronically. Well, that worked 

not at all. The staff in Bagram was responsible for and 

responsive to the commander in Bagram. They didn’t have 

any relationship with the commander in Kabul, who was 

an unknown quantity. This was their division commander 

down the road in Bagram there, and they all worked for 

him, so the reach-back idea wasn’t going to work in any 

logical frame of reference. So, we ended up having to build 

our own staff organization in Kabul and getting support 

from CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] to stand that 

up. We eventually went through a series of iterations of 

joint manning documents to go from six people, which 

was what we started with to several hundred. By the time 

I left in May 2005, there were over four hundred, but that 

took an immense amount of time, energy, and effort. We 

had to build that ourselves. We had no one helping us 

do that, particularly from the services. We identified the 

requirements, which were pretty modest—originally, I 
47

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

think they were in the 150-to-200 range—but then they 

eventually grew as we documented all the things we had 

to be able to do. The services fought every single one of 

those requirements and really pushed back on providing us 

manpower, especially quality manpower. So, as we began to 

make our requirements known, we began to get filled with 

Individual Ready Reservists, some of whom had been out of 

uniform for ten years, and an extraordinary array of people 

who were kind of at the end of the pipeline, from a military 

standpoint. The joke was when I went into our little-bitty 

joint operations center, the average age in the ops center 

dropped ten years when I walked in the room—and I was 

forty-nine years old at that point in time. So, this was not a 

young crowd. The staff used to say: “This is the world’s most 

forward-deployed AARP chapter.” We had a lot of reservists 

that were sent to us as individual augmentees because the 

services weren’t giving up active duty people who were 

assigned out there to their own divisions and corps. We 

were really an orphan headquarters in many respects. 

CENTCOM gave us lots of support during this period and 

worked this hard. General Abizaid and I talked regularly, 

several times a week, to try and help meet our requirements. 

He asked me to try and design the headquarters to be at 

least one-third combined so we could get the leverage of 

other countries. We built it that way, originally, but we 

couldn’t get the combined slots filled either. We ended 

up having to convert most of those to U.S. over the next 

year, because the Coalition wasn’t providing that level of 

manpower either, and the services certainly weren’t, so it 

was fairly problematic from that standpoint. In the midst 

of all this ... I don’t want to give you the impression that 

all we were doing was building the headquarters. We were 

fully in charge of doing operations across Afghanistan and 

responsible for the overall mission. 

DR. HUGHES: The last time we talked, you suggested that this time I ask 

you about what your and your headquarters’ relationships 

were with higher headquarters all the way back to D.C.

LT. GEN. BARNO: I think it was actually generally quite good. I thought we had 

a very good relationship. This was not what I expected. I was 

regularly—and I will cite the exceptions in a minute—very 

pleasantly surprised by how well that worked. The fact that 

I have a close personal relationship with General Abizaid 

was, I suspect, immensely helpful for his staff to see their 

way clear to help us out and to respond to our requirements, 

knowing that we were standing up from scratch with a pickup 

team of 100 percent of individual augmentees. When XVIII 

Airborne Corps went to Afghanistan, they brought nearly 

the whole corps headquarters, and then they augmented 

it by 20 or 30 or 40 percent with extra individual players. 

When the 82d Airborne came to Afghanistan, they brought 

the division headquarters, and they augmented that with 

additional players. When we stood up our headquarters, 
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48

there was no corps staff, there was no trained organization, 

and there was no outfit that had worked together, other 

than the four of us that had been in a battalion at Fort Bragg 

years back. So, we had to build a staff that was now running 

the overall Afghan effort out of individual augmentees, the 

vast majority of whom we had never seen before in our life, 

and most of whom were not from the active component.

So, we “stole” a bunch of our staff out of Bagram. We 

basically took the whole J-5 shop out of CJTF-180—about 

twenty-five people, led by a British colonel. They became 

the core of our thinking and operations and our plans and 

our strategy work, which was hugely helpful. Then General 

Austin and I agreed for him to give up his J-3 and his J-2, 

both colonels, who were augmentees, to provide to me, 

one of whom I provided to the ambassador to be his chief 

planner at the embassy to stand up his embassy interagency 

planning team, and the other one I made my J-3 in our 

new organization. General Austin, with the 10th Mountain 

Division, just went down one level to his own G-3 lieutenant 

colonel type, and to his G-2 lieutenant colonel type, in the 

division, and it worked out fine for him. 

Going up the chain of command though, one of the 

peculiarities we had in our headquarters was how few 

general officers we had. That was uncommon. In fact, 

we made some decisions in early ‘04 not to increase the 

number of general officers in the headquarters. We had 

the opportunity to bring in, or at least ask for, a one-star 

chief of staff and perhaps a one-star J-2, and we kind of 

talked amongst ourselves, and I encouraged them to think 

hard about whether they really wanted to do that or not, 

and we decided not to, in part because of the baggage that 

comes with general officers [GOs] and their expectations. 

We were operating in a very austere, focused, small-group 

environment, and for most GOs, unless you can pick them 

by name, you are not going to be able to put them in that 

kind of environment and have them be fully effective. So, 

we didn’t really want to add to the pain level of the staff by 

introducing more generals who could put demands on a 

small staff. So, again, that was kind of a counterintuitive 

move, but I’m very glad we did that, in retrospect. We 

brought in a British two-star as a deputy about eight 

months later in May of 2004, and I finally got a command 

sergeant major, whom I did get to pick, in May 2004, which 

helped us immensely. But going up the chain again to 

CENTCOM, the dynamic was that the CENTCOM staff, 

of course, were all flag officers—one-stars and two-stars 

in the staff principal positions—so when one of our folks 

would call up to their CENTCOM counterpart, it would be 

a colonel talking to a two-star, or sometimes a lieutenant 

colonel talking to a two-star. But to their everlasting credit, 

CENTCOM flag officers dealt with that with no issues. 

They were very supportive and understanding of what 
49

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

incredible responsibilities we were putting on these young 

colonels and lieutenant colonels in Afghanistan, who were 

principal staff officers in a three-star headquarters, who 

should have been the best colonels or one-stars the Army 

had, who were people that just happened to be there at the 

time to be pulled into these positions. So, they were very, 

very supportive from that standpoint. 

We also ran a very, I thought, open and transparent effort 

with the folks back in Washington, particularly with OSD 

[Office of the Secretary of Defense] and largely the State 

Department. The basic rules we had were that we were 

going to continue to keep everyone informed and not play 

a stovepipe such that we would only talk to CENTCOM 

and not talk to anyone else. We regularly talked to folks on 

the Joint Staff; we talked to folks on the National Security 

Council; and we talked to folks in the State Department 

to keep them informed and to build relationships. When I 

would come back to the U.S., I would make a point to get 

around and see these people to build those relationships. 

That was immensely beneficial to us. That was probably 

one of the best things that we did, partly just because of 

the personalities of the folks we had involved. We sustained 

those relationships through two different groups of CFC 

staff officers during the time I was out there, and that was 

one of our hallmarks. I felt, whenever I came back here, 

people had a good idea of what we were doing, and they 

knew we were talking to them. We had not cut out our 

higher headquarters. We always kept them informed of 

what we were doing. We weren’t trying to outflank them 

for resources or anything else. We kept a very broad lateral 

range of communications up all across Washington, and 

that paid big, big dividends for us, and we did not get 

crosswise with anybody in our chain of command, which 

was very helpful. So, I think I was surprisingly pleased with 

the chain of command moving up and out. 

Now, where I will register complaints is with the services, 

particularly the Army. The Army was unhelpful, to be 

generous, in terms of providing us with resources and 

capabilities and people. They clearly had Iraq on their minds, 

but there was no interest whatsoever in providing us with 

anything but the absolute minimum level of support. The 

frustrating thing for me was, as I looked at what we were 

asking our staff officers to do—stand up a headquarters 

in a new environment, being kind of on the cutting edge 

of running the whole show in Afghanistan. If you went to 

Fort Bragg and you went to see who the G-3 of the XVIII 

Airborne Corps was, the G-2 of the XVIII Airborne Corps 

was, and the chief of staff of the XVIII Airborne Corps 

was—these were all folks who were going to grow up and be 

generals in the Army. If you went around my staff, none of 

my staff officers grew up to be generals in the Army. None 

of the people the Army sent me were people who would 
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50

ever grow up to be generals in the Army. I couldn’t even get 

SAMS—School of Advanced Military Studies—graduates 

and I even asked the chief of staff personally for that at one 

point in time with no results, while the Army, through its 

peacetime personnel system, continued to fill billets for 

SAMS to units that were not deployed. I watched the 25th 

Infantry Division, which was in Afghanistan, with its staff 

officers frozen in position, get its annual slug of SAMS 

graduates sent to Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, even though 

I couldn’t get SAMS graduates on my staff in Combined 

Forces Command. So, the Army was continuing to pump 

out its standard rotation of each unit getting so many 

Command and General Staff College graduates, so many 

War College graduates, and so many SAMS graduates, 

and they would go right to your peacetime home stations. 

You could be deployed and not have those guys, but the 

Army was not going to send them to a joint headquarters 

that didn’t have a flag, a museum, a marching band, and 

an alumni association. So, there was a huge disparity there 

between how the services support their own organizations 

and joint organizations that aren’t part of their own. If 

CFC-A was XVIII Airborne Corps serving as a JTF [joint 

task force], it would still be an Army corps. Since CFC-A 

was not an Army corps or an Army division, I had virtually 

no influence within the Army in getting resources and 

capabilities out there, except what I could exert through 

CENTCOM and in making a lot of noise, and that was not 

appreciated. So, we had some real issues with that. We didn’t 

get the quality cut that you would get in former battalion 

and brigade commanders. 

I mentioned not being able to get individual staff officers. 

When I was trying to line up my summer ‘04 slate for 

key officers, I have a couple of interesting anecdotes on 

this. I sent a list into the Army saying to the colonels 

division: “Here are five colonels who I would like to have 

be considered to be my next chief of staff.” Colonels 1, 2, 

3, 4, and 5—they were all available, none of them were in 

command, and none of them would even be broken out 

of a key assignment to do this. After a month or two of 

waiting, it came back that none of those five would be 

available because they were all doing other important 

things out there. On one of them, I went to a four-star who 

had him in a fairly mundane staff position, and so this was 

a commander in the field to a four-star in a nondeployable 

organization back in the States, but it was “No. Sorry. He 

is really important to our organization. I am not going to 

give him up.” So, there was just no institutional support for 

this effort. The other incident—which is even more telling 

and damning in some respects, I guess—I had an officer 

call me up who I had served with before, who had already 

commanded a brigade, who had already done his joint time, 

so he had done all of his colonel-level requirements, and he 

said, “I would like to become your J-3 in Afghanistan this 
51

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

summer. I think I would be a great fit for the job, and it 

would be a great opportunity for me. I have all the stuff I 

need done, and I think branch is for it.” I said, “Well, that’s 

great. Sounds good. Tell us what we need to do. You would 

be a great fit. I would love to have you come out.” I got a 

call from him about two weeks later and he said, “I need 

to withdraw my name from consideration.” I said, “What 

happened? Some family problem or something?” He said, 

“No. I talked to the Army about it, and they told me that 

your J-3 slot is not coded for a former brigade commander, 

so I am being assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas, to be the chief 

of staff of a nondeployable division headquarters there that 

is coded for a former brigade commander.” So, I lost that 

guy. Those were the kinds of dynamics we were having to 

deal with on an individual basis, and they were the same 

issues on requests for forces, and requests for individuals, 

and requests for staff folks. It was a very, very problematic 

system. 

In building our joint manning document, we went through 

several iterations of that, and you have to have a validated 

joint manning document to get people requirements from 

the services, which they can still reclama and stonewall or 

slow down. But in our case, we eventually arrived at a joint 

manning document that had, I think, around 420 people in 

it for our headquarters, roughly speaking, and the services 

all objected to those numbers, disbelieving them. So, Joint 

Forces Command put together a team led by a Marine 

two-star, with representatives from all the services’ staffs 

up here and from the Joint Forces Command, to come out 

and spend a week with us and validate our requirements 

and to see what our workload was and all that, and they 

came back at the end of the week and said, “Every one 

of those requirements is valid.” That occurred in August 

2004, almost a year after I arrived in Afghanistan, and it 

took another four to five months before we started seeing 

the quality and the numbers of people coming in to fill 

those billets from the services. So, the whole process was 

almost an eighteen-month process, being the number two 

priority in the world for military operations in U.S. Central 

Command, fighting a war, to be able to get the kind of 

quality support in numbers and in the caliber of people you 

need to have to run any kind of organization. So, it was very 

disconcerting to see that in our relations back here with the 

services, particularly the Army, which, I think, suffered as a 

result of that. The Army didn’t “get it” from the standpoint 

of what was important and what wasn’t, and they really were 

in a conservation-of-force mode as an overriding priority. I 

understand that. You can’t simply send people down range 

at every whim of the commanders out there, but there was 

no effort made to try and find out what our needs were 

and to assist us. There was no effort, interestingly enough, 

and I’m at fault, I’m sure, for not banging this drum louder 

myself, but it wasn’t really possible to do that before I got 
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to Afghanistan. There was no effort on the services’ part to 

try and facilitate the stand-up of this key headquarters in 

the theater because it was a joint organization. If we were 

standing up a new corps headquarters, that would have 

been a different story. So, a very interesting lesson in the 

dynamics of Goldwater-Nichols and who is responsible for 

what and how we fulfill those. 

DR. HUGHES: You spoke a little bit earlier about meetings at the embassy, 

interagency meetings, etc. How did that interagency 

team come together? Who were the players? Obviously, 

the joint headquarters and the State Department, but 

who were the other players?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, the embassy suffered from almost the exact same 

list of problems I just arrayed for you that the military 

organizational structure did. They got, in my opinion, very 

little support from the State Department to get the quality 

or the quantity of players they deserved to have in what, at 

that time, was our only “combat” embassy. We didn’t have 

an embassy in Baghdad at that time. We were still running 

the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority]. But the embassy 

I saw there, when it got contrasted with embassies in 

Islamabad, Pakistan, or with the embassies in Tajikistan and 

Uzbekistan...in Islamabad, the embassy was three times as 

large. It had people with Ph.D.s who had lived in the region 

for fifteen years and who spoke four languages. When I went 

to Kabul, I would find people in their second assignment 

in the State Department who spoke no languages, had no 

experience, and had never been in that part of the world 

before, because that was all the State Department could 

get to volunteer to go to Kabul, because it was a volunteer 

system, as it is today. So, it was a very junior, inexperienced 

group. There were some very dedicated people, but also 

some people who should not have been there from a quality 

standpoint and an experience standpoint.

So, the ambassador had to struggle with that once he 

arrived. He got there, Zal Khalilzad, about six weeks 

after I did. He arrived in November ‘03. He actually 

had about six months’ preparation for it. He came after 

setting the conditions to arrive and working up his plan 

for accelerating success in Afghanistan. So, the country 

team itself was a very inexperienced, very small, very 

undermanned, overwhelmed country team. They had an 

interesting additional capability, though, called the Afghan 

Reconstruction Group [ARG]. It was an organization 

purpose-built in the six months before Ambassador 

Khalilzad got there to get high-quality, experienced talent 

from the private sector and put them in as an adjunct to 

the embassy in their own little mini-organization to work 

the various key ministries in the Afghan government, like 

aviation, some private sector things, and some energy 

things. They were able to get former COOs [chief operating 
53

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

officers] and CEOs [chief executive officers] and CFOs 

[chief financial officers] and other very experienced private 

sector people and put them on kind of a special contract 

for a year and have them come live like dogs at the embassy 

in Afghanistan in the trailer park, inside a minimumsecurity prison, inside a construction site, where we all 

lived—so, some very, very dedicated Americans. The first 

group was led by Jack Bell, who is an assistant secretary of 

defense up in the OSD world right now in logistics; and 

the second group, the second iteration of that group, was 

led by a fellow named Lou Hughes, who is a former GM 

executive, who is back out in the private sector now—but 

very, very talented guys. The ambassador actually built a 

stable of people outside the State Department to help him 

do State functions because he didn’t have the capacity to do 

that inside of his own organization. 

Another interesting anecdote there that is illustrative, I 

think, in the embassy, the State Department’s [Bureau of] 

International Narcotics and Law Enforcement [Affairs], 

INL, representative, that part of the embassy was a key 

component that had responsibility for the entire police 

training program, which was a hundreds of millions of 

dollars program; and it also had responsibility for the 

counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan, which was an 

immense challenge, as we all know, so both programs were 

very problematic and very difficult. For most of my time in 

Afghanistan, the State Department INL office at the embassy 

in Kabul comprised one person. There was one person 

doing both of those immense jobs. I mean, if that were a 

military organization, we would have had 150 people doing 

that, because it was so complex and so involved and took so 

much attention, supervision, planning, and coordination. 

One person. So, that was kind of the level of caliber of the 

effort that you had on the embassy side. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. I don’t know if this is just a wiring-diagram–type 

thing, but the change from the commander of military 

operations to the commander of Combined Force 

Command sounds like it had a great deal of significance. 

What was that shift all about?

LT. GEN. BARNO: It was probably less significant than it sounds. The 

commander of military operations was a term I never 

used during my time in Afghanistan. It was a convenience 

term, I think, that GOMO [General Officer Management 

Office] invented in order to have a Senate confirmation 

for an organization that didn’t exist because they couldn’t 

very well say, “We are going to confirm Barno to be the 

commander of Combined Forces Command” when there 

was no Combined Forces Command. We didn’t actually 

activate it until after the first of the year ‘04. We operated as 

though there was one. It was really more a matter of getting 

the crest and the name blessed by General Abizaid, and 
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I think that actually happened in probably November or 

December of ‘03. In fact, I have a crest somewhere that has 

Combined Force Command-Central Asia on it. That was 

the route we were going down, and then the decision was 

made back here, I think, that we didn’t want to send that 

message. We wanted it to be Afghanistan’s, so we went back 

to CFC-Afghanistan. We operated on that basis from the 

get-go, but they were very late in a changing-nameplates 

kind of a thing back here. But we were operating as CFC-A 

probably from about January 2004 on.

DR. HUGHES: So, the combined title definitely applies, at least in 

American terminology, to working with allies. You 

already mentioned a British deputy. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: Coming a bit late to the stand-up game, relatively. Maj. 

Gen. John Cooper got there in May 2004 and was replaced 

in December 2004 by a second British deputy, Maj. Gen. 

John Gilchrist, who is now the defense attaché here. The 

Coalition part of the headquarters was filled very slowly. 

The first Coalition membership would have been the head 

of the J-5 element we brought from Bagram. There was a 

British J-5 colonel down there and the British were replaced 

about every four months, but we had a series of British 

J-5’s that I maintain were just superb. They were very, very 

good, super high-quality officers. It is embarrassing for me 

to compare them with some of the American officers I got, 

in some ways. These Brits were top-notch folks, and many 

of them have been promoted to brigadier general. 

DR. HUGHES: What did the J-5 do?

LT. GEN. BARNO: He is the chief of plans and strategy in an organization. As 

time went on, I got a Canadian colonel to be my J-9, which 

was civil-military operations. I’m just going through the 

staff principals now. We had French officers come in; we 

had Korean officers come in; and we had Turkish officers 

come in, so we began to fill other staff sections in ones and 

twos, based on what the capabilities were of the officers 

who showed up, and from what service and from what 

country, on the doorstep, so that was a very slow process. I 

would say, even when we had several hundred people in the 

headquarters, we never had more than about twenty-five to 

thirty Coalition. Again, I’m just guesstimating. One of my 

chiefs of staff could probably give you a better number. 

DR. HUGHES: One of the things that you suggested I bring up was 

the impact that communications technology had on 

relationships both up and down, and with various 

different people you needed to communicate with. How 

did the technology impact your mission?

LT. GEN. BARNO: I think from a headquarters-downward standpoint, we 

had access, that we probably didn’t use intentionally, to 
55

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

be able to see in great detail, had we wanted to, what our 

subordinates were doing. I elected not to run a VTC-centric 

operation. I also elected to run an operation that was very 

light on process, which is unheard of in the military. We 

are very, very process-centric in our staffs. I was telling 

somebody the other day that staff officers and “the process” 

are like addicts with cocaine. They have to have process 

to be comfortable. If they don’t have it, it makes them 

extraordinarily uncomfortable. I was probably too light 

from the standpoint that it made the staff uncomfortable 

to deal in that environment, because they really have to 

have process to function, but I don’t like process. I try to 

avoid it at all costs, so I offloaded as much of that on my 

chief and my deputy as I could. On the technology side, 

we had the ability, if we wanted it, to look down into our 

units to see Predator feeds, to watch JOC [joint operations 

center] displays of where units were at, and to pipe into 

the nightly VTCs of the commanders in the field. We did 

none of that intentionally because I didn’t want that level 

of detail. The SITREPs [situation reports] we got every 

day, which I glanced at but didn’t spend too much time 

on, were disturbing in a way, because they really reported 

all the way down to platoon level, literally, in Afghanistan, 

and what platoons were doing all over the country; but 

what they missed in the detail was the importance of the 

big picture and what was going on outside of this military 

dimension. So, I found that I was not terribly interested in 

what platoons were doing, or even what companies were 

doing, in some cases. I was very interested in the political 

environment that was around the villages and the towns 

and the provinces and the districts these platoons were 

operating in, and I couldn’t get that reporting because 

we trained our military leaders to report on things like “I 

moved forty-seven kilometers down this road from 1515 

hours until 1800 hours. I went into a bivouac, and then 

I started a ground assault convoy,” and so on. It was all 

black-and-white military operations—logistics-focused; 

time-, date-, and place-focused—as opposed to what was 

the nuance there, what was the environment, what was the 

sense, and what was happening, unless there was contact, 

when you had fighting. Otherwise, there wouldn’t even be 

a report. Really, the best overall reporting I got was from 

PRTs, although they suffered from the same problem on 

the military side. These very good reports came from the 

one State Department person in the PRT, who would report 

out to the embassy on what the political environment 

was around the PRT once or twice a month. Those were 

extraordinarily interesting and valuable reading, because 

they told me all the things I couldn’t get from my PRT 

military chain of command, who were sitting in the chair 

next to the State guy writing this report in the PRT, who 

had all the same access to information but didn’t process it 

the same way and couldn’t make those kinds of reports. So, 

I thought that was an interesting observation on the foibles 
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56

of information technology. I could get lots of information 

on things I didn’t need to know, but I couldn’t get good 

information on things I really needed to know, and that 

was true on the intelligence side and it often was true on 

the operations and political-military side, as well. We are 

getting better at that, but our system is not built to do those 

kinds of things, so it is very, very challenging. 

Upward above our headquarters on information technology, 

General Abizaid and I typically talked frequently by phone. 

We did get these little Tandberg video desk teleconference 

things, Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP], Secure Internet 

Protocol Router Network [SIPRNET], or Nonsecure 

Internet Protocol Router Network [NIPRNET] on our desk. 

Those were great. They were just for fun. I could dial up his 

number on his desk in Tampa, and he and I could see each 

other and talk on the phone face to face, which was good 

stuff. There is value in that. You get some nuance and some 

perceptions from face-to-face phone calls that you don’t get 

just listening on a telephone, so there was utility in that.

The most debilitating—I use that word intentionally, I 

guess—aspect of this was the video teleconferences back 

to Washington from CFC-A headquarters. We had zero 

of those from October ‘03 until about the middle of June 

‘04, which was a very nice period of time. Then, in the 

middle of June ‘04, suddenly the Defense Department 

and the secretary of defense decided that he needed to get 

more involved in Afghanistan and initially directed that we 

would do a weekly video teleconference for about an hour, 

or forty minutes to an hour, in duration with the secretary of 

defense on things in Afghanistan, particularly the building 

of the Afghan National Army [ANA]. It was never intended 

to be a situational update on Afghanistan, except as an 

aside. It was “What is the building plan for...,” and it was 

all very objective, empirically oriented, data-centric type of 

discussions—“discussions” being a generous term. So, we 

would have to spend a vast amount of time, energy, and 

effort to prepare analytical briefings that we could defend 

to the secretary on the program for expanding the ANA, 

accelerating the ANA, what their attrition was, etc. Again, 

with a very small staff, this was a backbreaking effort. This 

about brought us to our knees at the once-a-week rate, and 

we finally got General Abizaid to convince the secretary to 

go to once every two weeks, which was barely sustainable. 

These each took several days’ worth of intense effort by the 

staff, and lots of my time. 

For our VTC participation, number one, it was me and 

maybe my U.K. deputy; we would be the only ones on 

screen. I would usually put a couple of staff officers on the 

wall, to include usually my British J-5, who was responsible 

for building these briefs, interestingly enough. Then, 

General Abizaid would normally pipe in from his aircraft 
57

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

or somewhere and kind of be there in moderate-andlisten mode, occasionally interjecting, and sometimes his 

deputy as well from wherever he was. The audience back 

in D.C. was the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary 

of defense, the undersecretary of defense for policy, the 

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the vice chairman of 

the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the Joint Staff, the 

J-3 of the Joint Staff, the J-5 of the Joint Staff, and a host 

of others at the deputy or next-to-deputy level. So, these 

were pretty intense affairs, pretty high visibility, from the 

perspective of who was on the receiving end. It wasn’t just 

you and the secretary of defense kind of sharing chain–ofcommand, commander-to-senior-level viewpoints. It was 

kind of trial by fire with the OSD staff, although the staff 

wasn’t there to kibitz and to criticize, but that certainly 

added to the intensity. So, the secretary of defense, who 

is much more amenable in person on these things, with 

an audience of fifteen people in the room, took a bit of a 

different approach than he would have if he were just sitting 

there with you. So, those were very contentious, painful, 

difficult, and tribulating kinds of sessions, and they put a 

lot of pressure on our organization and our staff to be able 

to understand what his requirements were and to be able to 

deliver on those requirements week after week after week. 

So, that was where I thought information technology was 

pernicious. The same technology existed in my first nine 

months as it did in my second ten months, but it was used 

in completely different ways. It wasn’t used—much like I 

wasn’t using it with my subordinates—for that first period 

of time, but once it started getting used, it became kind of 

a blunt instrument in the tool bag. 

DR. HUGHES: I’m a little bit fuzzy on exactly who reported to you. 

What was the chain of command underneath you? Who 

did you get reports from, and what was the structure?

LT. GEN. BARNO: The direct reporting chain was CJTF-180 to me, or later 

CJTF-76. So, essentially, the divisional commander who 

was in Afghanistan as the tactical commander—what I 

called it basically was CJTF-76’s responsibility or CJTF-180’s 

responsibility—was the tactical level and the low end of the 

operational level. My responsibility was the high end of the 

operational level and what I called the regional and strategic 

level of the whole country, the theater-strategic level. So, 

from a reporting standpoint, I would get reports from 

my subordinate headquarters, which was CJTF-180, then 

CJTF-76, and they got reports from CJSOTF [Combined 

Joint Special Operations Task Force], and they got reports 

from all their various component piece parts out there. I 

also got reports from the Office of Military Cooperation, 

where we normally had a two-star boss and often a one-star 

deputy, who was doing the training of the Afghan National 

Army. So, those guys reported to me. They had a dualresponsibility chain to me and to the ambassador, which we 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

58

had worked out early on. So, I got at least two sets of reports 

from that side of the house. I also de facto had a high degree 

of authority over the U.S. military ODRP [Office of Defense 

Representative-Pakistan] office in Pakistan. I also got some 

informal reporting, and a lot of operational visibility, on 

our classified Special Operations Forces in country.

DR. HUGHES: When you were first standing up, what were your 

intentions? You have already talked about very definitely 

building a working relationship with the ambassador and 

the team there, but what were your overall intentions for 

your command?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Largely to create a unified effort in Afghanistan that 

encompassed all the players. One of my buzzwords to my 

staff was “We own it all. I don’t want to hear ‘The State 

Department should be doing this and USAID is not doing 

that and the Germans are responsible for that.’” I said, “As 

far as I’m concerned, I don’t care if we have six people on 

the staff or six hundred, we own it all. We are going to 

take ownership of everything in sight, and we are going 

to fuse this into a single unified effort. It doesn’t mean we 

are going to be the leader of each of these lanes ourselves, 

but we are going to lead from the rear, and we are going to 

coach, mentor, shape, and push people around and get all 

the players on the playing field playing the same sport and 

going to the same set of goalposts. They can wear different 

jerseys and have mustaches and funny hats, but they 

are all going the same way, and that includes the NGOs 

[nongovernmental organizations], the United Nations, and 

the other embassies.” So, that was my self-appointed large 

charter, to get this thing moving in a single direction with 

some unified guidance, even if it was indirect leadership for 

it. 

We spent a tremendous amount of time laying the 

groundwork for the September ‘04 election that ultimately 

resulted in electing President Karzai, ensuring the 

Taliban weren’t able to interfere with that or that, through 

incompetence or lack of capacity, the UN was not going 

to fall down in its ability to get out and to get into every 

district in Afghanistan. We had a very fused effort with 

the UN. I have great regard for the UN in Afghanistan. I 

was very close to the head of the UN mission during most 

of this time. He and I built a strong personal relationship, 

which weathered a lot of storms and tough times while 

we were there. Again, going around and building personal 

relationships with all these ambassadors and with all these 

other key component players on the Afghan side and on 

the international side there paid immense dividends for us. 

That is not something in a manual, that is not something 

we tell people to do in counterinsurgency, and that is not 

normally a military task, but we would not have been able 

to have the success we achieved by any estimation without 
59

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

having built those relationships. So, again, that was a great 

reason to be in Kabul and to get out there and reach out 

and touch all these folks. So we really had a very unified 

effort with the UN, and the UN did an extraordinarily 

capable job in Afghanistan during my time. 

DR. HUGHES: You have mentioned the PRTs a number of times. 

DR. MUNDEY: Can we do something before we get to the PRTs, because 

I know that is going to be a long conversation. Could you 

lay out for us, when you first arrived, what you identified 

as the major challenges that needed to be addressed?

LT. GEN. BARNO: When I was flying back to South Carolina on a C–17 after 

my September ’03 reconnaissance visit, I sat and I built a 

briefing that laid out what I saw during my reconnaissance, 

and it really became the catalyst for what I needed to fix 

when I went back. So, having that available would be very 

useful, but one of the things I mentioned already was unity 

of command. In September ’03, there was a tremendous, 

in my view, dysfunctionality in unity of command inside 

of Afghanistan, inside the military in Afghanistan. This is 

it here. [Referring to document]. This is one I personally 

did. 

DR. MUNDEY: Great. PowerPoint briefings don’t necessarily have 

authors, so if you wrote this one, it is golden. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: Yes. That is one that my two little fingers did. I have done 

that a couple times. This was actually, I think, pulled off 

a whiteboard chart I probably drew up, because I did a 

fair amount of that with the staff at different times. Let’s 

see ... yes, this was all whiteboard. There is another good 

chart, and I have called it a couple of different things. 

There are a couple variants of this, as well. This may not 

be the one I was looking for, but there is one that kind of 

looks like this, that is kind of a sequence of wins, which 

was one of the assessments realized. There were ten things 

that needed to be done in Afghanistan that were critical 

to success, and we had pressure from ten different people 

to do all ten of those things right then, tomorrow, but we 

were not going to do that. We were going to sequence 

those out over the next two years, and instead of going 

and doing them all then and having win, win, loss, loss, 

win, loss, and win, we wanted to go from win to win to 

win to win to win to win, so there was not a broken series 

of successes, and we sent the message that we were only 

going to be successful. To do that, we had to sequence 

these things out, so we called it a “sequence of wins.” One 

of the things that we pushed off to write on that chart, 

which was something we continued to have a battle with, 

was the drug issue there. We intentionally moved that out 

of ‘04 and took that off the table as something we were 

going to spend a lot of energy on because it would put 
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us in competition with the other priority tasks we were 

trying to achieve.

DR. HUGHES: I had started to ask about PRTs, which you have mentioned 

a number of times and which obviously are very critical 

for the story. What was your role with the PRTs? What 

was their status when you arrived, what was your vision 

for them, and how did they change?

LT. GEN. BARNO: We had four PRTs there when I arrived. Two of them were 

American. The other two were British, in Mazar-e Sharif, 

and Australian—correction, New Zealand—in Bamian. If 

you call them Australian, it really ticks them off. The two 

American ones were in Konduz—a fairly small one, about 

thirty-five folks—and then in Gardiz. I actually got to visit 

the Gardiz PRT when I was there on my reconnaissance 

visit. Interestingly enough, one of the things I did get from 

visits to Washington and in what little study I did get to 

do in reading on Afghanistan was recognize that these 

PRTs looked like they were really a success story, and we 

needed to get them moving and really proliferate them. 

They were innovative, and they were meeting a need out 

there, it seemed like. Then I kind of had that reinforced 

when I went out to visit one, but the glide slope they were 

on was not a very robust glide slope. They were at four and 

they were going to eight in the spring of ‘04. That was the 

base plan when I got there, so I said, “Let’s see what we 

can do. We clearly have to have more PRTs out there.” So, 

we did a little assessment, and we found that we had more 

civil affairs soldiers in the Combined Joint Civil-Military 

Operations Task Force [CJCMOTF] headquarters than we 

had out in the field with PRTs. I said, “We can fix that,” so 

we disassembled the headquarters and cut it down to bare 

bones and shipped all the CJCMOTF civil affairs soldiers 

out to the PRTs, and we actually tripled the number of PRTs 

in the spring. Instead of eight, we went to twelve. So, by 

about April/May 2004, we had twelve PRTs out, and those 

eight new ones were all in the south in contested areas. It 

was a deliberate decision to put them out into areas where 

we were concerned about security, where the Taliban hadn’t 

been challenged in any way, to kind of put that marker out 

there. It was a risky move, as well, because we knew that 

these guys were going to be kind of out there on their own 

to some extent, but we also felt we had enough military force 

to back them up, and it was going to change the calculus 

in that entire part of the country in terms of the Coalition 

and the Afghan government vis-à-vis the enemy, and it did. 

That had, I think, a very impressive and intimidating effect 

on the enemy. 

The PRTs brought hope with them; they brought money 

with them; they brought the Afghan flag with them; 

and they brought recognition that this was not just the 

Americans. This was also the Afghan government because 
there was always a Ministry of Interior representative with 

the PRTs. And it wasn’t a fort that was out there to kill 

people; it was there to help the communities work with the 

local government. So, they were widely, I think, viewed as 

kind of outposts of hope in the future and optimism and a 

positive outlook for people who had not seen any sign of 

the government or the Coalition except for guys running 

around in Humvees with guns for a long time. So, we really, 

I think, took the initiative away from the enemy there. My 

goal was, when the snow was melted and the enemy came 

back out at the end of winter, there would be twelve PRTs 

in Afghanistan, and there were. I think that changed a lot 

of dynamics in the southern part of the country, which we 

saw manifest itself in success in the registration for elections 

and in the election itself. The downside of that was that it 

created expectations that, in some ways, probably haven’t 

been met now a few years later, so that is kind of being 

assessed in terms of what went wrong that we (or the Afghan 

government) didn’t deliver on, what the expectations were 

or what we didn’t deliver that we potentially could have out 

there, and how was that managed. That was one of our bold 

strategic moves for ‘04, to push out dramatic numbers of 

PRTs in the area in the south and the southeast. This was an 

important catalytic factor. 

You may have seen the Security Strategy South and East 

in some of the documentation. I went to a meeting in 

late October ‘03, shortly after I got there, at the head of 

the UN chief ’s home, then Lakhdar Brahimi. His deputy, 

Jean Arnault, later became the special representative to 

the secretary general and succeeded Brahimi. But Brahimi 

sat down with us over dinner one night and basically 

challenged me and the Coalition to do something about the 

security situation in the south and east of Afghanistan, and 

Jean Arnault had written a paper kind of articulating what 

the security problem was as he saw it out there in the south 

and east. So, we said, “Okay, we’ll take a look at it.” So, I sat 

down with my mini-staff there and we went through this. 

We came back about two weeks later and said, “Here is what 

we think the solution is. We think we are going to design 

a Security Strategy South and East” (which became the 

counterinsurgency campaign plan for Afghanistan) “and we 

are going to stand up regional development zones,” focusing 

the first one on Kandahar to deliver economic impact and 

accelerate the effects down there in the southeast part of 

the county. They were quite taken aback that we had even 

read the paper, much less decided to do anything about it. 

That helped, again, I think, cement early on our relationship 

with the UN mission, which was then spinning very hard to 

get ready for the constitutional loya jirga in December and 

January 2004. So, we began that, and that led us to the fullfledged development of the counterinsurgency campaign, 

and we wrote our own Security Strategy South and East 

that kind of came out of that. We took that and shopped 

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it around the U.S. Embassy, shopped it around the other 

embassies and the other embassy key players in Kabul, and 

to the UN, obviously, so we got a lot of buy-in for what we 

were trying to do from other actors out there, which was, 

again, kind of an unusual thing to do; but it got a lot of 

people engaged in this process and made it apparent that 

they were going to be a stakeholder in this and we were 

serious about doing something about this problem. 

The thing I saw when I came there on my trip and then when 

I came back a few weeks later was a UN document which 

seemed like a red flag in front of a bull with the military in 

Afghanistan. The UN produced about every two weeks a 

security map for Afghanistan in color that had red for “nogo” areas, yellow for “dangerous-go” areas, and green for ”go” 

areas. The guys preceding me—it drove them up the wall. 

They were enraged by this, because they disagreed with the 

chart and said, “This area is not dangerous!” and so on. So, 

there was this incredible negative dialogue going on and 

this contentious back-and-forth catfighting over the UN 

basically poking the Coalition in the eye over security and 

the Coalition totally disagreeing with the UN’s assessment 

of security, which was not by any metrics the Coalition 

agreed to. It was a stupid argument to have, in my view, so 

we just took it off the table and said, “Fine. We are not going 

to get upset about map colors. We are going to work on the 

fundamental problems here. There is obviously a challenge 

in security and the international community doesn’t feel 

like it can go down there, and we have an election coming 

up.” So, we said, “We are not going to argue about maps 

any more, unless we can talk about how you design it and 

whether you have the right factors, and we can help you with 

that. But we are not going to say you guys just aren’t telling 

a good story. You are hammering us for things you ought 

to be telling us,” which is kind of what we do with the press 

sometimes. So, we said, “Okay. We will work fundamentals 

here, and you guys can color the map whatever way you 

want to.” So, we just stopped having that fight with the UN, 

and that, in and of itself, I think, reduced tension between 

the UN and the military significantly, because you weren’t 

constantly in a battle over who had the right perception of 

security across the country. So, that is an interesting little 

mini-vignette on what mattered and what didn’t, and what 

kind of relations we had with different people in Kabul and 

why. So, again, I can’t overemphasize the value of physically 

being present there, interacting with these guys, building 

relationships, getting to know people, and making friends 

with folks who you wouldn’t back at home necessarily drink 

a beer with and watch football on Saturday or Sunday, but 

were very important to our effort in Afghanistan and who 

I genuinely have great respect for after my time there but 

were not people in the military sphere you typically would 

align with. That’s critically important in an effort, in the 

counterinsurgency field especially, that is not about just 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

finding bad guys in the mountains and dropping bombs on 

them.

DR. HUGHES: To a certain extent, I am very interested in that we had 

different nations involved in the PRTs, and the Air Force 

and the Marine Corps. How did that all come together? 

Were these disparate organizations and institutional 

cultures, etc., able to function together?

LT. GEN. BARNO: We didn’t have any Air Force or Navy PRT commanders 

when I was there. We had a Marine PRT commander, and 

Marines and Army ground guys are pretty common to the 

battlefield out there. There were certainly no issues with 

that. With the other nations, these were PRTs operating 

under the Coalition, which was different than operating 

under NATO. As we grew those Coalition PRTs out there, 

I felt that they had a lot of confidence, and I heard this 

on numerous occasions. There was a lot of confidence 

with the Coalition countries’ having their PRTs under the 

U.S./Coalition command because they knew that they 

would have fire support. They knew they would have a 

quick reaction force. They knew they would have aerial 

MEDEVAC [medical evacuation]. They knew they would 

have the ability to deliver airpower. They knew they were 

going to get logistically resupplied, and they knew they 

would be very well taken care of, as well taken care of 

as an American unit on the field. They did not have that 

confidence in NATO in many respects, in part because 

of NATO’s lesser military capabilities and in part because 

of the national caveats they were operating with and the 

uncertainties that go with relying on some other country 

for something. That was not the case with relying on U.S. 

backup in the PRTs. So, there was a lot of comfort in that, 

and there was a great reluctance, in a couple of cases that 

I saw, to move out of that model into a NATO model as 

the territory shifted around to NATO. Now everything is 

NATO today, from the standpoint of PRTs. I am aware that 

they are not talking about them today, but the American 

PRTs still operate very differently today than the PRTs 

coming out of some of the NATO countries. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. That, to a certain extent, got into a question I had. 

What was the chain of command for the PRTs? Who did 

they report to?

LT. GEN. BARNO: Again, a great question. This is part of that convoluted 

chain of command I saw in September ‘03. When I first 

went there for that reconnaissance visit, every unit in the 

country seemed to report up its own reporting chain based 

on what kind of unit it was. The aviation units reported 

all the way up the aviation chain; the infantry units 

reported up the infantry chain; logistics units reported 

up the logistics chain; Special Forces units reported up 

the Special Forces chain. No one reported into any kind 
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of a unified command apparatus below CJTF-180, so 

we pushed very hard—this took until about March ‘04 

to put this in place—to have two brigade headquarters 

in Afghanistan, one in the east and one in the south. 

Then, when we put those two flags on the ground, going 

from one brigade to two, we then aligned all of the units 

operating in their battle space with those brigades, so the 

PRTs then reported to the brigade commander, not to the 

CJCMOTF civil affairs soldiers back in Bagram. We had 

worked up some interim relationships to make the PRTs 

more connected to the maneuver units before that, but 

that finally crystallized the idea of area ownership. That 

brigade commander owned his whole brigade battle space 

and everybody in it. Now, CJSOTF had a slightly different 

lash-up, but the brigade commander had tremendous 

influence on that. Doctrinally, they have a little bit of 

a different setup than a regular maneuver unit would, 

but they were responsive to that brigade commander 

and they ran very well-integrated operations and were 

linked into the brigade headquarters. So, that was, in my 

view, the ideal setup finally in March ‘04. We had two 

brigades set up. We had them geographically put in the 

right locations. We had the right span of control for two 

brigades instead of having one brigade cover the entire 

country of Afghanistan, which was madness. Every 

other unit in Afghanistan covered the whole country of 

Afghanistan, as well. The aviation brigade commander 

had the whole country. The logistics commander had the 

whole country. It was a very uncomfortable setup from 

my perspective. So, we were able to finally, after all kinds 

of arm twisting, get that second brigade headquarters in 

there to be able to stand up to do that. Our predecessors 

never had that option.

DR. HUGHES: I’m a little bit concerned about the time at present. I have 

a bunch of questions left to ask. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: We can do a reprise of this sometime. Again, I really 

compliment you guys for taking the bull by the horns 

here. 

DR. HUGHES: Well, thank you, sir.

LT. GEN. BARNO: Thank you.

[End of second session. Beginning of third session.]

DR. MUNDEY: This is Dr. Lisa Mundey, interviewing Lt. Gen. David W. 

Barno (USA, Ret.) regarding his time as the commander 

of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan. It is 14 

March 2007. The interview is being conducted at General 

Barno’s office at the Near East-South Asia Center for 

Strategic Studies. Sir, are you sitting for the interview 

voluntarily? 
Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

65

LT. GEN. BARNO: Yes, I am. 

DR. MUNDEY: Do you have any objections to the interview being used 

by historians or researchers with the understanding that 

you will be quoted or cited accurately? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: No, not at all. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay, great. Now, we’ve actually gone over quite a 

bit of material with you already. We’ve talked about 

your transition to command; your initial briefings; 

communications with General Abizaid and Secretary 

Rumsfeld; standing up of CFC-A; problems manning 

CFC-A; your relationship with the U.S. Embassy; 

expanding PRTs; and a host of other things. So, we’re 

going to touch base on just a couple of things where I’d 

like to get a little bit more information and move on 

to some new topics that we haven’t covered yet. And 

to start off with, when we talked to Maj. Gen. [Peter] 

Gilchrist, he asked us to ask you why you had a British 

deputy. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: I requested a British deputy. First of all, in the midst of 

standing up the command itself, we had a fairly extended 

period of time where we had no other flag officers (aside 

from me) in the command. As we talked about in some of 

the early interviews, the stand-up of the command itself was 

a very rocky proposition. It was not done with a great deal 

of preparation and foresight by those that were considering 

the idea that this had to happen. I was launched out there 

without, really, any command to fall in on. There was no 

real major preparatory setup or any serious plan of action 

or milestones—just stand up the command, then show up, 

and begin to flesh it out of a very small core of people that 

we begged, borrowed, and stole from other elements in 

the country. So, there were certainly no flag officers in that 

structure. It had to be a Coalition organization. General 

Abizaid asked that we try and make about 40 percent of 

the organization Coalition forces, so it was logical for me 

to attempt to get a Coalition officer to be my deputy. In 

my view, having worked with British officers occasionally 

in the past, they clearly share a very similar culture, have 

no language issues, have a very common understanding, 

I think, of a military background; but in my view, also, 

they had a unique, broadly speaking, level of experience in 

counterinsurgency warfare. So, I thought that asking for a 

British deputy specifically would be a very wise way to go 

with the Coalition, a senior flag officer in the command 

with me, and also to leverage what I thought was a pretty 

extensive amount of counterinsurgency background that 

the Brits had from their time in Northern Ireland, from 

their time in the last fifty or sixty years where they’ve had 

some reasonably successful counterinsurgency campaigns. 

That led me down that road. I thought it was practical to do 
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that, that I had a pretty good chance of getting someone, 

and that I could get someone that could help us as we 

worked through the challenges of a counterinsurgency in 

this environment.

We also made a decision internal to the staff as to whether 

we wanted to request another flag officer to be the chief of 

staff. I remember having a meeting in the dining facility, 

the mess hall, one day with some of the primary staff 

officers and asked them what they thought of that. I made 

my opinions known. I frankly wasn’t too keen on the idea 

of having another flag officer. If I wasn’t keen, they weren’t 

at all keen on the idea because of the amount of, potentially, 

additional work and bells and whistles that another flag 

officer would bring to the headquarters. A deputy was 

one thing. So, we stayed with a colonel chief of staff for 

my entire nineteen months, and I think that was changed 

about the day after I left, or very shortly thereafter. There 

was a significant multiplication of generals that arrived in 

the months after I left. I’m not sure whether that was value 

added or not, but it was an interesting change to see in the 

headquarters shortly after my departure. We made out 

terrifically with an extraordinary amount of luck in both of 

our O-6 colonels who were chiefs of staff. 

DR. MUNDEY: You mentioned that you had a goal of 40 percent of the 

command being Coalition forces. Did you actually reach 

that? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: No, we never came close to that. That’s my recollection. That 

may be flawed. I know that the number General Abizaid 

asked for when we came in was an initial manning number 

for the headquarters—yes, to have a number very close to 

half the headquarters be Coalition. I recollect it was about 

40 percent in order to put less stress on the U.S. manning 

system back here and to give us a higher propensity for 

getting the fill on the American slots we were looking for, 

and so we went in with that. To fast-forward a year later, 

we had probably about 75 or 80 percent of the American 

slots filled and probably only about 15 or 20 percent of 

the Coalition slots filled, so we eventually recoded those 

out and made more American slots, because it’s very, very 

challenging to generate, particularly from Afghanistan, 

Coalition support to come and fill positions. We did get 

great support from a myriad of different countries, but 

it was never in the neighborhood of anything more than 

probably thirty-five or forty Coalition folks altogether in a 

headquarters that eventually grew to be over four hundred. 

It was going to be a pretty small number, because countries 

just weren’t prepared to send substantial numbers of people 

out to do that. 

We did have them in key positions. We had a British J-5, my 

director of plans, the whole time I was there rotationally, and 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

those colonels who filled those positions were absolutely 

superb. I thought they were some of the finest O-6’s I’d ever 

seen in my military career, so we got terrific support from 

the Brits on that. Having a British deputy didn’t hurt with 

that, either, I’m certain. We had a Canadian, typically, as 

our civil-military officer, our J-9—again, we got good folks 

from the Canadians in that department—and we had a 

variety of others in different positions. Those are two that 

really stood out as major Coalition senior staff positions, 

and we had others sprinkled throughout the command. 

There were challenges there in terms of who had what 

language capabilities; who had what computer capabilities; 

who had ever served in a Coalition headquarters before; 

who had staff experience that was multinational, as opposed 

to only their own country; so, there were some interesting 

dynamics. But the challenge, which I think we met, was to 

find the right niche for each of these people, so that they 

could contribute, they could learn from the experience, they 

could help us with some of the challenges that we had, then 

go back home; and it would be a positive experience for 

them, and one that their country would want to support by 

continuing to send officers out to fill those billets. I think we 

did that quite well and had a lot of success. I don’t recall any 

country ever pulling out of a rotation in the headquarters 

as a staff officer, which is a good sign, if my recollection’s 

accurate. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Great. We talked about your relationships with 

the people above you, Abizaid and Secretary Rumsfeld. 

How about the commanders below you? What were your 

relationships with [Brig. Gen. Lloyd] Austin and [Maj. 

Gen. Eric T.] Olson? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: In each case, all three of these officers I had known before. 

I had three different—we’re just talking on the CJTF-180 

and then -76—the three two-star commanders that served 

there sequentially. First, Lloyd Austin, commander of 

the 10th Mountain Division; he and I had been battalion 

commanders together at Fort Bragg. I had immense respect 

for him. I thought he was a supremely talented officer, and 

we got along very, very well. He, I think, was probably the 

most thorough and the most aggressive about keeping 

me informed about what his operation was doing. XVIII 

Airborne Corps had essentially pulled out in the spring of 

2003 and had replaced itself with the 10th Mountain Division 

headquarters that was reconfigured to attempt to be a corpslevel headquarters and a division-level headquarters at the 

same time, which was a very flawed construct. The outlook 

there was, we couldn’t afford to have both a division and a 

corps headquarters in Afghanistan. We could perform the 

mission with the division headquarters doing both levels—

doing theater-strategic, operational, and tactical missions. 

What I think occurred—what I observed, at least—was that 

when you remove the corps headquarters, you gave the 
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division headquarters that mission. Even though you had 

a three-star there for part of the same time, all the players 

defaulted down to the tactical level. They became tacticians. 

I thought there was significantly inadequate attention 

given to the theater-strategic role at the headquarters and 

the operational role at the headquarters because tactical 

activities consumed them. It was only a single headquarters 

performing all those functions, which, I thought, did not 

work fundamentally. So, when we brought my headquarters 

up to stand it up in Kabul, that was clearly the role I was 

going to take, what I could describe as the theater or 

regional-strategic role, the high-end operational role. At 

Bagram, separated by sixty kilometers, was a divisional 

headquarters that was still configured as a JTF, but they had 

the low-end operational role and tactical role, and we kept 

those fairly distinct. And, again, Lloyd Austin oversaw that 

transition and, I thought, did a magnificent job at doing 

that. And there were always broad pieces shared between 

the two organizations. People in one were standing up, 

taking people out of the other. He and I—again, we’re very 

good friends—had a great relationship over there in a very 

difficult environment because I was having to build my 

headquarters mostly out of his personnel strength. He was 

extraordinarily generous in giving me key people. He took 

his J-3 and his J-2 and gave them to me to use in whatever 

capacity that I wanted, and he defaulted down to the next 

level. He was totally a selfless soldier in this and really was 

instrumental in helping our success in the stand-up with the 

CFC headquarters and allowing us to focus on that theaterstrategic mission. So, I thought that went very well.

He was changed out in, I guess, about February of ‘04, with 

the CG [commanding general] of the 25th Infantry Division, 

Maj. Gen. Rick Olson, whom I also knew. He had just come 

out from commandant of cadets, West Point. Each of the 

three commanders I had were very capable guys. They had 

very different personalities, and each had a different style of 

operating. All three were effective in the environment over 

there, but the personalities and backgrounds clearly played 

a role in terms of how they looked at it and how their forces 

looked at higher headquarters. In 10th Mountain Division 

and with General Austin, who had spent a lot of time in the 

82d, it was normal for him for his division and from his 

experience to have an operational three-star headquarters. 

They always had XVIII Airborne Corps. He was always 

in an XVIII Airborne Corps unit, and so his outlook—

having been corps chief of staff, having served in the 82d 

several times, having served in 10th Mountain, which was 

a component division of XVIII Airborne Corps—is that 

it was a natural fit to respond to an operational three-star 

headquarters and relate to the division as part of the corps. 

25th Division and their successors, SETAF—Southern 

European Task Force, from Italy—had no such relationship 

with any three-star operational headquarters; so their 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

outlook—and it took me some time to figure this out—their 

outlook in a sense seemed to be that three-star headquarters 

were administrative burdens on two-star operational 

headquarters. And that’s probably a little too harsh, but it 

was clear that something wasn’t fitting together the way it 

had with 10th Mountain Division. And there were rocks 

and bumps with 10th Mountain, as well, because they were 

not used to having a higher headquarters in Afghanistan, 

except themselves. Whenever you impose a headquarters 

over someone, you get some degree of friction. But I finally 

did realize with 25th—and I had served in 25th a couple 

of times and knew the environment out there quite well—

that their three-star headquarters historically had been an 

administrative headquarters, had no operational functions, 

so there wasn’t that operational linkage of reporting, 

of information sharing, of back-briefs, of guidance and 

direction that you would expect from a division operating 

inside a corps, because that was a division operating by 

itself in the Pacific. Its administrative headquarters had 

no impact operationally on what the division was doing. I 

saw this when I was there as a lieutenant and captain in the 

seventies and eighties. I saw it again as a flag officer when 

I was there in the late nineties, and it hadn’t changed any. 

That perception was still there—that the division didn’t 

work for anybody, that there was no operational linkage. 

So, I think we had some growing pains there as the 25th 

came in to get them in an environment where they were 

used to operating with an operational headquarters above 

them, that there was a necessity to share information with, 

to seek guidance, or to get approval on certain things. 

I tried to run, I think, an extraordinarily decentralized 

operation over there and stay out of the tactical business 

entirely. We did, I think, over time, see that we did not 

have an adequate system of back-briefs and direction 

and guidance. On the good end of it, I think we gave 

exceptionally thorough and comprehensive broad guidance 

within which the CJTF at Bagram could operate. On the 

downside of that, I think that at times we saw them making 

moves, retrospectively, that we probably should have been 

involved with up front on the approval, decision-making 

process, whether it was repositioning a battalion that was 

perhaps 20 percent of your combat strength to a completely 

different part of the country or beginning an operation 

with goals that they hadn’t really checked with us on. My 

philosophy on command and control is that the two are 

a zero-sum game. The more command you have, the less 

control you impose, and the more control you have, the less 

command you actually have. And so, I tend to undercontrol 

and, I would like to think, be on the side of decentralized 

command. I never got too energized about much of that 

unless it got outside of the commanders’ intent. That’s the 

environment you’d like to put your subordinates in, which 

is give them as much latitude as possible when it comes 
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to accomplishing their mission, stay informed as to what 

they’re doing, and let them operate very aggressively and 

broadly within left and right limits. They’re well sketched 

out, but they’re wide enough to give them a lot of latitude 

in doing their job. I think we were pretty successful in 

doing that. Sometimes we got a little too far off the edge 

of that, I suppose, but I was more comfortable doing that 

than putting people in an environment where they were 

overcontrolled.

I think, culturally, parts of our Army—and that, maybe, is 

changing—my observation of the last ten years is that parts 

of our Army are very control-centric. Our technology, 

and to some degree our philosophic upbringing, in some 

cases, has made us very control-centric in wanting to know 

everything all the time and being involved in very, very 

detailed type things. I was quite averse to that. I mentioned 

in one of the earlier interviews that I declined to have the 

command and control system in place up in Kabul that 

they had in Bagram, which was a twice-daily, essentially, 

video teleconference or audio teleconference with all the 

commanders in the field, their battlefield update brief or 

battlefield update assessment, the BUB or the BUA, which 

was in the morning and the evening. I did not participate 

in those ever during my time in Afghanistan, intentionally, 

because I did not want to be involved in what Alpha 

Company, 1-87th Infantry, was doing that day in Kajaki 

Dam. That would take me down a rat hole I didn’t want to be 

in. I was very comfortable with them doing that. I thought, 

there’s clearly a necessity for tactical units and even low-end 

operational folks to be involved with that, but for my level, I 

wanted to try and be the integrator and the azimuth-setter 

for the entire operation and allow the details of that to be 

worked out by subordinates. That’s fairly uncommon. 

So, that was just an interesting observation on the 25th as 

they came in and, again, it took me many months to figure 

out why this was more problematic in terms of information 

sharing and back and forth than it should have been, both 

staff to staff and commander to commander, quite frankly, 

and I think that we sorted that out over time and reached 

a mutually agreed-upon position. There was much more of 

push-back or friction there than I would have anticipated. 

In retrospect, after a few months over there, I finally realized 

why that was the case—and certainly part of it’s always 

personalities—but it’s also, clearly, the environment that 

division came out of, where they had no history of having a 

higher headquarters, and so having a higher headquarters 

in a combat environment was strikingly new and different 

for them, and they had no grooves to fit into that which 

they were used to dealing with. It took me longer to figure 

that out than it should have. Their successor there, the 

Southern European Task Force—I only worked with [Maj. 

Gen.] Jason [K.] Kamiya, the commanding general, for 
From left, Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, General Barno, and General Kamiya salute during the Combined Joint Task 

Force-76 transfer of authority ceremony, 15 March 2005.

Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

71

about three months before I departed. I’d known Jason for 

many years. He took over my brigade from me at Fort Polk, 

so we knew each other quite well. He had the disadvantage 

of coming in with an organization that was not (for the 

very first time in Afghanistan) a divisional headquarters 

tasked to perform a divisional headquarters and CJTF 

role. I only saw the front end of that, but that was probably 

an unfair proposition for that headquarters to take on 

because of their very, very small size, relative to a division 

headquarters, and because they were not configured to 

fight like a division was configured to fight. Whereas the 

25th or the 10th Mountain might, to form into a CJTF, have 

had to add 25 to 30 percent—and I’m guessing roughly—

additional manning to flesh them out into a combined joint 

task force, SETAF, because of its very tiny size, had to add 

somewhere between 60 and 80 percent additional manning 

to flesh them out into a combined joint task force. So, they 

were much more of a pickup team, much more of an ad 

hoc organization that had been formed but was not yet 

complete, by the time they deployed to Afghanistan. The 

individuals didn’t always roll in until the very last minute. 
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They struggled, I think, with this lack of a cohesive core 

that had worked together for a very long time (unlike a 

divisional headquarters) for a good bit of time during their 

tour there. So, I think that one of the lessons learned out 

of that—again, I didn’t watch the second half or the last 

two-thirds of their time there—but one of the things that 

I’ve heard discussed is that it was probably not a reasonable 

mission to give that headquarters because they were not 

configured to execute that level of complexity and didn’t 

have the core base of people to be able to fall in on that, 

and then just add a relatively small percentage to flesh 

them out in the joint arena and in the combined arena. So, 

again, on their side of the house, I think that they, again, 

were not used to having a three-star headquarters but were 

also struggling with some of these internal dynamics. So, I 

think that that was the third of three different relationships 

between the organization in Bagram and us in Kabul. 

It’s also probably instructive to look at that from the 

standpoint of continuity and change. We—the U.S. Army, 

the military, the Defense Department—made a quick 

but conscious decision at the beginning of this war—

Afghanistan, Iraq—that we would not rotate individuals, 

but that we would rotate units into the fight. There are 

tremendous advantages to that from the standpoint of 

unit cohesion and teamwork and continuity inside of that 

unit as it prepares at home station, works together, deploys 

together, fights together, learns together, bonds even 

further in combat, and then redeploys back home again, 

so it is a very powerful organization, internal to itself. That 

has encouraged, I think, the great success we’ve had in 

retention of people with units, reenlistment of people within 

the same units, and being able to keep people for longer 

periods of time within the military because they’re with 

their brothers and sisters that they’ve bonded with through 

these combat operations. The downside of that was longterm continuity. Now, I was in one of the two individual 

augmentee headquarters in the theater. (The other one 

was in Iraq, with [General] George Casey’s headquarters, 

MNF-I [Multi-National Force-Iraq], which stood up in the 

same way that we did, although in a much more, I think, 

thought-out fashion and certainly a much better supported 

fashion than we did.) Our two headquarters, which were 

at the top of the two theaters of war, and we were the only 

continuity. We had commanders that were staying for a long 

time. We had staff officers that were eventually staying for 

a long time—they certainly weren’t on a one-year rotation 

where everybody came and everybody left at the same time. 

Our immediate subordinate headquarters came in with a 

worldview that they had derived from being at home station 

and reading newspapers and staying up on intelligence. 

They brought that worldview to the situation. Sometimes 

they adjusted to what was on the ground, sometimes 

they didn’t, and sometimes it took longer than it should. 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

They only had a one-year sprint that they were running, 

and so their viewpoints, their knowledge, their historical 

assessments, their continuity from their predecessors, 

were relatively weak. They did not have a view that took 

them beyond the end of their tour, necessarily. It became 

the responsibility of the senior headquarters, which was 

very problematic. When you’re trying to build bonds and 

relationships with individuals out there, particularly at the 

local area, but also at the governmental area—in my case, at 

Kabul, and at the provincial level for PRTs and for tactical 

units—this constant turnover had a deleterious effect on 

our confidence that we had built in the local population 

and the local leadership as we rotated units in and out. Now, 

we calmed that down significantly during my tenure in 

Afghanistan by putting in place what I call area ownership 

for our units. A unit would go into an area, and instead 

of operating out of a base and conducting a raid for two 

weeks up in some remote area and then coming back, we 

planted them in that province for their whole tour. We said, 

“This is your province. You own the whole thing.” It was 

the New York police precinct concept, which I think we’ve 

talked about before: “You’re responsible for the results. You 

get to know all the people. You get to know all the elders. 

You get to know all the mullahs. You get your units aligned 

with certain parts of the province. It’s yours, and you have 

the responsibility for this thing. I want everybody there to 

know who you are at the end of all this. We’re not going 

to send you six provinces away for a two-week operation 

unless we have some tactical emergency,” and that’s how you 

build the fundamentals of a counterinsurgency campaign, 

on that long-term knowledge and understanding and 

continuity and confidence and trust between units and the 

populations out in these areas.

A one-year tour in a province is an immense, positive change 

from these two-week in-and-outs that we’d been doing 

before that. So, that was helpful, but, again, one year has its 

own limitations. So, I think that’s one of the retrospectives 

we need to think about with regard to counterinsurgencies: 

Are you wise to put all of your units on a one-year rotation 

scheme, where everybody comes and goes at the same time 

and there’s no continuity? We tried in the last month or 

six weeks that they were in country to get 10th Mountain 

Division, not maliciously but for continuity purposes, to 

document, essentially, all the things that went wrong during 

their tour, all the things that were screwed up, that were bad 

decisions. At CFC, we shared it as well, whether it was having 

a bombing strike that killed nine children from an A–10 

or having bombs go awry or going in and breaking down 

someone’s home to find out he’s a government official and 

having a big brouhaha over that. These things are part and 

parcel of warfare. I had a running mental list of these that I 

had been involved with during my time in Afghanistan, but 

we couldn’t for the life of us get the division to document 
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those and turn them over to their successor, presumably 

because it was an admission that “We didn’t do everything 

perfectly.” So, when that division walked out the door, there 

was no one there in that headquarters at Bagram with the 

new division coming in that knew a darned thing about 

the mistakes that had been made. And so, within months, 

I started to see the same mistakes happening again. It was 

extremely frustrating. 

I’m told when the Brits did rotations in and out of Northern 

Ireland, they would always take 20 percent of the unit, and 

they’d give it a six-month overlap one way or the other, 

so you’d always have that base of “Wait a minute! We just 

did this and it didn’t work, and here’s why it didn’t work” 

or “We just screwed this up here six weeks ago in this 

particular village, and they’re now angry about this.” You 

had that knowledge. And when you take 100 percent of 

your people out in a two-week period of time and replace 

them with 100 percent new faces, you lose all of that. If it’s 

a mistake, or if it’s a problem, or it’s something that didn’t 

work, or it’s some other catastrophe out there, no one really 

wants to publicize that, so it doesn’t get captured for the 

next guys, and they get to make the same mistakes over 

again. I think there are some significant limitations that 

we probably underestimated in our rotational scheme. It’s 

done other good things for us. It’s certainly preserved the 

all-volunteer force, which I could argue is an overriding 

objective of our military right now, arguably even at a 

higher level than winning the wars that we’re in, in some 

respects. It’s certainly done that. It’s certainly contributed to 

doing that, but there’s a price to that out on the battlefield, 

which is your lack of continuity and your lack of long-term 

understanding. Every twelve months, it’s the first day of 

school. You’re starting over on the first day of school again. 

Everybody’s trying to find their lunch box and get their rain 

jacket and discover where their shoes are, when we already 

knew all those things six months earlier. Now a new crew 

has come in, and they’re trying to find their lunch boxes 

and their raincoats, and we don’t have to do it that way. And 

I don’t think we’ve challenged ourselves adequately to find 

ways to maybe get the best of both worlds out there. For 

example, we ought to figure out how to get the same units 

rotating back and forth to Afghanistan alone, and others 

back and forth only to Iraq.

DR. MUNDEY: It’s very interesting you say that. We’ve interviewed 

several PRT commanders, and that’s one of the things 

that they talked about, is continuity, because on their 

level, they are dealing with personnel who in some cases 

are only there for four months or six months at a time. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: That said, though, on the PRTs, a little bit of the saving 

grace there, by sheer coincidence, was that the nonmilitary 

components of the PRT were on a different rotational 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

scheme from the military guys. So, what I saw over and over 

again is the military element of the PRT—which is probably 

80 percent, 90 percent, of the population—they would get 

up and be replaced lock, stock, and barrel by a new military 

unit, but all of the civilians would remain because they were 

somewhere in the middle of their four-month rotation or 

their six-month rotation or their three-month rotation, and 

so, by sheer chance, you bought yourself some continuity 

and some knowledge, and so, those people became the wise 

men and the wise women out there in that PRT for the next 

month or two, until everybody else kind of figured out the 

lay of the land. 

Now, ISAF was the same, and more, and worse, because 

during my tenure there, nineteen months, ISAF had four 

different commanders and four different ISAFs. Typically, 

within a two-week period, the entire headquarters would 

change out and every single unit would change out. Two 

weeks later, you’d face a new crew of people who had 

absolutely no knowledge of what was going on, other than 

what they had read in a book. So, that was really a sporting 

proposition between new commanders with new azimuths 

and ideas and directions and a new staff—it was their staff 

from Europe, somewhere. You got some significant zigzags 

in terms of what ISAF was willing to do, what their direction 

was, where they played, and how they operated. And again, 

the horrifying part of that was, every six months—it has 

not dramatically changed, as best as I can tell, over there. 

Now ISAF owns the entire operation, so that ought to give 

us some pause. 

DR. MUNDEY: One of the things that you mentioned you wanted to talk 

about last time was the media. So I’ll open it up to you 

to—

LT. GEN. BARNO: I took what, I think, some people might refer to (for its 

time) as a different outlook on the media and with media 

in Afghanistan. I do not share the school of thought that 

sees the media as an adversary. Some of this may sound 

like it’s platitudes, but I genuinely have seen the media as 

a positive influence because of their role in keeping the 

American people and the global audience informed out 

there. Certainly they’re like the weather, which is to say, 

you can’t change the media; they’re going to be a fact of 

life. You have to deal with it, and my view has always been 

that the more you engage with them and the more time 

you give them, the more opportunities you give them to 

get out and see things, the better off you’re going to be. The 

best way of getting your story out is to get out and tell it, 

and the commanders have to do that. I firmly believe that 

commanders—including me as the senior commander—

have to be in front of the media, have to be talking to the 

media, have to be accessible to the media. We mouth that 

platitude sometimes, but we seem to rarely do that. 
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I did, I thought, a considerable amount of media while I 

was over there, and I sought opportunities to do media 

as much as I could. Number one, the commander’s got 

the vantage point no one else has. The commander and 

the public affairs officer and your spokesman are not 

the same people with the same outlook with the same 

responsibilities. Most of it was Western media, because the 

Afghans had a very nascent, undeveloped media structure. 

They had the beginnings of media, but nothing that was 

recognizable to the extent it would be in the West, and they 

were relatively passive in terms of how they approached 

media. There were a number of Western media reporters 

over there—BBC, New York Times, 60 Minutes—many of 

whom were transitory. There were several very, very good 

reporters who came and stayed, who were there before 

I got there and are still there today—Carlotta Gall being 

one, with the New York Times. So, I made a point of trying 

to get to know these folks and get inside their heads a little 

bit, and let them get inside my head a little bit, and get out 

and talk to them. 

Some of them, of course, were relatively negative and 

confrontational on certain things, and you could expect 

that. They also certainly respected your willingness to 

engage with them and talk with them. So, not only for 

visiting media that came in on a fairly regular basis—

although mostly only for high-visibility events, like the 

election—but for the long-term media, we tried to keep 

them in the loop. I tried to look for ways to engage them 

personally. I also made a very strong effort to get embedded 

media out as often as we could, out to our units, and that 

always paid big dividends. Probably some of the best stories 

came out of Special Forces and out of patrols with 10th 

Mountain Division. Some units even made enemy contact 

while reporters were there. We saw some very good stories 

out there, I thought. 

The Afghan story is a very good story, and one of my 

contentions on information operations writ large is that 

you can’t spin a bad story into a good story. You have to 

have good news to tell a good story. I thought we had a lot 

of good news stories in Afghanistan. I hammered on my 

PAO [public affairs officer] folks, not infrequently, about 

mouthing platitudes that sounded relatively sophomoric 

about the “cowardly Taliban” and things that I thought were 

unnecessarily offensive culturally to these folks and didn’t 

treat the enemy with the degree of respect that he deserved 

to be treated with. That might sound a bit odd, but I think 

that some of the things that I, to this day, read on how we’re 

characterizing enemy operations, how we’re characterizing 

attacks on American forces, etc., is as though they were 

illegitimate from the standpoint of warfare. So, I always was 

very conscious as I was looking at my own media—we had 

press spokesmen out usually three, four days a week—that 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

we weren’t saying things that I viewed as kindergarten-level 

approaches to the nature of the war that we were in. I mean, 

things didn’t translate readily between Western thinking, 

outlooks, and approaches and Eastern or Afghan thinking, 

outlooks, and approaches, but I was particularly concerned 

about some of the things where we almost were taunting the 

Taliban because of the way we described them and things of 

that nature, which I thought were very, very inappropriate. 

I rode our media guys pretty hard on that type of stuff, and 

I see us, today, defaulting back into that groove as we talk 

about what the Taliban’s doing. I find it a bit unprofessional 

in some ways, or unsophisticated if you will, in terms of 

how you interact with the enemy. 

Now, that said, I watched with a lot of interest how the 

Taliban handled their media approach, and, of course, 

they had the tremendous advantage of being able to say 

whatever they wanted. For example, every time an aircraft 

went down, literally within minutes, the Taliban would 

be talking to a spokesman and claiming credit for having 

shot down an aircraft, whether he even knew where it was 

or not. It didn’t matter. So, we kind of had to accept the 

fact that they were going to do that. Now, I’m encouraged 

that, as we worked our way through those things, that we 

kept the media informed as to what was happening, even 

though we didn’t have final results. The media now, as I 

watch them report out of Afghanistan, will report that the 

Taliban frequently will claim credit for aircraft that they 

didn’t shoot down at the end of the day. So, that’s a good 

outcome in terms of how you keep the media engaged and 

you talk to them and keep them informed. 

I will tell you that one of my positive experiences over 

there in dealing with media is that, again, as I made myself 

accessible to folks, on more than one occasion, we had 

media people that were very helpful to us in giving us a 

heads-up on stories that they were going to write in certain 

cases, that helped us at least prepare for them, especially if it 

was a negative story, on occasion, and also to give us insight 

that we didn’t have from other sources. So, I thought they 

were very, very valuable. I always read their reports with a 

lot of interest, because there’s a tendency to get into a “spincycle” thinking that what people are criticizing you for is 

simply balderdash. But the realities are, typically, most of 

the critiques of our operations in Afghanistan by the media 

have had a degree of truth in them that we had to seriously 

think about and assess, and look to see if we had to change 

how we were doing things, in order to address that. Reading 

their reporting was extraordinarily valuable because it 

was like getting a second set of situation reports from an 

objective observer, who wasn’t wearing your uniform, that 

was looking at your actions from a relatively unbiased 

viewpoint, if you will, or certainly an outsider’s viewpoint, 

and saying, “Here’s what it looks like from the outside.” You 
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can’t do that if you’re in uniform. You can’t assess your own 

operations inside your own organization and say, “Yes, this 

is what it objectively looks like.” So, that outside viewpoint 

is tremendously valuable perspective from the media. 

I also did a fair bit of media when I came back to the United 

States, whether it was Pentagon press or going up to CSIS 

[Center for Strategic and International Studies] and talking 

about our counterinsurgency strategy. I was amused at the 

thing I did at CSIS in ‘04, which was carried on C-SPAN, 

and I had innumerable people tell me they had seen it on 

C-SPAN and it was actually a pretty good lay-down of 

what our strategy was in Afghanistan, what we were doing 

with PRTs. So, that paid much higher dividends and had 

a much greater reach than I thought it was going to when 

we originally signed up to do that. So, it’s an important 

element of being able to tell your story. People inevitably 

were shocked and surprised and pleased at our approach 

in Afghanistan when they heard it, especially when they 

heard it from the commander, and were surprised that 

the commander understood what was going on from a 

standpoint of something other than sheer kinetics. So, the 

degree to which you can get commanders out in front of the 

public and in front of the media as a venue to the public, I 

think, is extraordinarily important. We don’t do enough of 

that. We don’t encourage people enough about that. 

Now, the other side of the coin. I was talking to somebody 

here a few weeks back that commented on a quote 

from [USMC General] Tony Zinni when he was the 

commander of CENTCOM. Zinni had said that when he 

was commander of CENTCOM, he only got chewed out 

five different times in his, I guess, four years. Four of the 

five were for things he had said to the media. And that was 

certainly my experience in Afghanistan. The only time I 

got chewed out in Afghanistan or took brickbats from my 

superiors were on two or three media-type things. Now, 

that’s an important point because the reality is that all the 

good media in the world doesn’t counterbalance a couple 

of stories that get spun wrong, you say something wrong, 

you make an inappropriate comment, or your words get 

taken out of context, and somebody gets upset about it 

back in Washington. This worries me because what we 

inevitably do here is we send a message to commanders 

that: “Yes, we want you out in front of the press, but if 

you goof it up, you’re going to get hammered.” You might 

not get chewed out for a single tactical operation in two 

years, but if something comes out in the Early Bird that 

reflects adversely on the administration, on you, on the 

military, on what policy is, you’re probably going to get 

chewed out in some fashion. You’ll get a nasty phone call 

from somebody. So, commanders are going to look at 

that and say, “Well, why the hell should I be out in front 

of the media? Tell me where the advantage is to doing 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

this because all the advantages are intangible.” Some of 

them are long term. Most of them you’ll get no positive 

feedback on from anybody, certainly not your bosses. But 

any negative thing that comes out in the media that you’ve 

got a fingerprint on, you’re going to get plenty of negative 

feedback on that. So, we’ve created a system, inadvertently, 

where we’ve tremendously disincentivized commanders 

from talking to the media, interacting with the media. 

It’s a losing proposition. What you’re doing is basically 

you’re out—and this is my outlook—you’re just going to 

go out and take risks. You’re going to take risks and talk to 

these guys, and it’s not always going to come out right, but 

because of what you get out of it intangibly, and what your 

command and what your mission gets out of it intangibly, 

that outweighs the fact that you’re going to get your butt 

chewed at some point in time. And it happens inevitably. 

But again, what our leadership has to understand, both 

military leadership and civilian leadership, is that if you 

go after commanders every time they screw something up 

in the media, they’re going to stop talking to the media, 

and at the end of the day, that’s far, far worse than anything 

that comes out from some individual story. And that’s the 

environment that we seem to be operating in today. 

I laughed when I heard Zinni’s comment, because that 

was exactly my experience. The only negative phone 

calls I ever got in each case were media things. In over 

nineteen months, that was it—nothing on a military 

operation, nothing on a political operation, nothing on 

anything going on with the interagency process, nothing 

on dealing with the embassy, nothing with dealing with 

allies—the media, yes. That’s way out of whack. I don’t 

know how you fix that, but I think it’s important that 

leadership on the military side and on the civilian side get 

sensitized to the fact that you want your commanders out 

there in front of the media, you want them engaging with 

these folks, and you have to take the lumps that go with 

that. Just like we will forgive mistakes our subordinates 

make and we’ll provide protection for them and shields 

for them on honest mistakes, we’ve got to do the same 

thing for senior commanders, or you’re never going to see 

them out in the media, by and large. So, we’ve got to get 

people out of that mode because this is a war that’s being 

waged in the media, on the Internet, in newspapers, on 

radio, on television, in al Jazeera, and if we don’t get the 

commanders out talking to these people, making their 

side of the story known, then we’ve surrendered that part 

of the battlefield, and that’s a very foolish thing to do. But 

we’ve incentivized commanders to do just that, which is 

kind of frightening. 

DR. MUNDEY: So, what I hear you saying is that the standard for media 

relations must be a positive story all the time, or there’ll 

be some chastisement down the road at some point? 
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LT. GEN. BARNO: Probably not necessarily a positive story, but if you’re in the 

story, and you contributed to somehow, a negative quote, 

something like that, whereas if you’re not in the story at all, 

then that’s the perfect world as far as everybody’s concerned. 

And, of course, that again incentivizes you to stay away 

from the media. If you stay hunkered down in your fighting 

position, you never talk to the media, you never get quoted, 

you never have a comment that a reporter spins back some 

other way, and there’s nothing about you in there, then 

you’re golden. I could have done no media in Afghanistan 

for nineteen months and nobody would have said “boo” to 

me. It would have been perfectly fine, because it’s a no-win, 

no-loss, even-score game. No one cares. If your mission 

suffered because of that, no one could really tell, and no one 

could really hold you accountable for it. But if I’m out in the 

media, and I have a hundred media encounters, and out of 

a hundred media encounters, I have three quotations that 

go bad, get taken out of context, said at the wrong time, or 

say something we didn’t want to say about U.S. policy, I’m 

going to get three phone calls. I’m not going to get ninetyseven good phone calls or ninety-seven anything for those 

other stories. I’m going to get three phone calls calling me to 

task for the three things that get out of the box. So, if you’re 

a commander, you don’t know which of the hundred calls 

that’s going to be, which of the hundred interviews that’s 

going to be. So, if you’re a commander, why on earth would 

you bother to do that, when it’s painful to start with? The 

ninety-seven things that came out, none of those are fun, 

easy, enjoyable, or positive, and of the ninety-seven stories, 

probably ninety of them are neutral stories. You might have 

seven positive, and then you may have three that get off the 

railroad somewhere. So, if you’re dealing with that kind of 

mix, why the hell even do it? I mean, you’ve got plenty of 

other things to do. Reporters are not fun people to interact 

with normally, unless you’ve got a high tolerance level for 

people that want to give you a hard time—and I kind of 

do—but you know, there’s no reason to do that. That’s how 

we’ve defined military leadership today. So, we literally 

have created an unfortunate environment out there where 

at least we’ve ceded—at least the propensity, the tendency, 

the trend line is to cede that territory to the enemy, let them 

just run with the ball, and we just stay out of the limelight 

and let our public affairs officers go out there and mouth 

platitudes off the talking points. I don’t think that’s good. 

DR. MUNDEY: One of the other things that you mentioned that you 

wanted to talk about was this relationship between the 

State Department and the Defense Department. What 

would you like to say about that? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: The old quote on that is that “Defense is from Mars and 

State is from Venus,” and there is a significant, well-known 

cultural difference between people that grow up in the State 

Department and people that grow up in the military. It can 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

be overcome, but it takes a tremendous amount of work 

and effort on both sides to do that. When I was doing the 

Free Iraqi Forces training mission in Hungary in early ‘03, 

I worked with our embassy in Budapest pretty extensively. 

That was probably the first time on a significant basis that 

I’d worked in and around an embassy and kind of watched 

how they operated and dealt with their folks coming down 

to see us. Obviously, I’d bumped around State Department 

people a little bit before, but there’s clearly a different 

culture there. In the military, you kind of grow up in the 

teamwork culture where accomplishing a mission, which is 

to get something done, is the overarching order of the day. 

In the State Department, to caricaturize it a bit, it’s a culture 

of “observe and report,” and the highest-value outcomes 

are the well-done reporting cables back to Washington. 

So, if that’s what your organization values and you’re 

doing that individually—by the way, you don’t write cables 

collectively as a team and then submit them—your skill 

in the State Department, in many ways, is graded by your 

individual performance, always in your individual written 

performance in terms of cables and other reports that you 

write. So, you’ve got a very individualistic culture there, 

and the selection process for State Department officers 

is extraordinarily tough. It’s based on individual merit, 

individual academic talent, and individual intellectual 

capabilities—much different than the military process. 

You’ve got two types of individuals that are radically different 

from each other, who have dramatically different value sets, 

who operate in very different ways, whose valued products 

are significantly different from each other, who don’t fuse 

together in groups well, who are both great patriots, and 

they’re both serving our country, but from completely 

different ends of the spectrum. Most military folks don’t 

have too much interaction with State Department folks, 

and vice versa. State probably has more than military. 

There’s an immense misconception in the military that if 

State Department people would only get out and do their 

jobs, the military effort would be a great success, and that 

this is not really a military thing, it’s a political thing. Well, I 

reject that outlook from several vantage points. One is that 

war is an extension of politics by other means. We fight wars 

in a political context, and winning the war at the end of the 

day is the ultimate political objective. It’s not “winning the 

military part of the war and losing other parts of the war, 

and that’s okay.” The military has somehow gotten off on 

what I call fragmentism, where we’ve boxed our little part 

of the war into a nice, neat container, and we’re working to 

get all green block checks in our part while everyone else 

goes down the tubes and gets red checks in theirs. Then we 

blame it on them. It’s a bit disturbing to see that.

Part of it is this misunderstanding about the capacity of the 

State Department. In Afghanistan, we did a wide variety of 
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missions that were traditionally State Department missions, 

whether it was setting up elections, or putting military 

people in the political or economic section of the embassy, 

or giving the ambassador a set of military planners, or 

writing the Mission Performance Plan for the embassy 

with those planners. We did all types of things that in no 

way, shape, or form fit the military context, and we did it 

because we had twenty thousand Americans in uniform in 

Afghanistan, and we had two hundred State Department 

people in Afghanistan. And those numbers mean 

something, and that’s a pretty good ratio of the capacity of 

the Defense Department and the State Department. This 

coming year, the Defense Department budget is going to 

be $716 billion. The State Department budget, if you roll 

everything in there, is probably going to be around $60 

billion. There’re sixty-five hundred Foreign Service officers 

in the State Department; there are 1.4 million military 

people in uniform. Those aren’t relatively close cousins to 

each other in terms of capabilities, but military folks think 

that their State Department ought to be contributing all 

this additional capacity, so that they come into it with that 

misconception that State and Defense are kind of co-equal 

organizations. Defense is an 800-pound gorilla, and State’s 

a 95-pound beach weakling, who’s losing weight. It’s going 

downhill, and we don’t have any conception of how the two 

organizations stack out capacity-wise to each other or what 

their missions are. And the State Department missions, 

again, with that individualistic focus and the observeand-report focus, are not necessarily to change things, 

accomplish things, finish things, or to complete programs 

or seize the objective like the military gets drilled in from 

Day 1. When you blend those two cultures together, you’ve 

got some huge disparities there. So, one of the things I 

tried to do, personally, was to break down as many of those 

barriers as I could. 

As I think we talked about, I established an office in the 

embassy thirty feet down the hall from the ambassador. 

I lived on the embassy compound, fifty feet from the 

ambassador. I saw him for several hours every morning. 

I saw him frequently in the evenings. I spent a lot of 

my time in embassy country team meetings, which are 

painfully boring events that have nothing to do with 

military operations, to show that I was part of that team, 

that this was a single, integrated team. We had a bunch of 

the military guys on the walls for those meetings. I’m sure 

people were wondering what the hell we were doing there 

because we were talking about all kinds of things that had 

very little to do with the security of the country or military 

mission or things of that nature, but it sent that message 

that we were one team. It caused us to get to know all these 

people. We became friends. I became good friends with 

the heads of the USAID there, both of them. I became a 

good friend of the ambassador. I became good friends with 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

the DCM, certainly great friends with the chief of station. 

All of the people there in that country team meeting knew 

who you were, and you knew who they were. You knew 

you lived on the same compound, and you were sharing the 

same hardships. You weren’t some remote force that was an 

hour-and-a-half drive away in some barbed wire–fortified 

compound. So, that changed the dynamic of the linkage 

between the military in Afghanistan, in my opinion, and 

the State Department and the embassy in Afghanistan. It 

became much more of a single-team, unified effort. 

As I thought about it—I never really thought about it 

this way when I was there, and I didn’t articulate it ever 

this way when I was there—but the relationship between 

me as the military commander and the ambassador as 

the chief of mission, really probably is best described in 

military terms as a supporting-supported relationship. 

The ambassador as the chief of mission was the supported 

part of the relationship, and I was the supporting part of 

the relationship with the military. Now I’m sure some of 

the military guys would have seizures hearing that, but that 

probably is a fairly apt description of what our relationship 

evolved to and how I understood what my role was there 

in the military sense. We had things, clearly, that we were 

doing that weren’t directly related to what the ambassador 

was doing, but we were in many ways a supporting cast 

player to an overall, integrated embassy effort that we 

helped plan, enable, provide people to, and think through 

together with the ambassador. 

Even in the last several days, I’ve heard again this idea that 

we’ve got this military and security situation over here in 

one box: The military does this, then—in this other box, 

over here, across the room—we’ve got this reconstruction 

problem, an economic problem, a social problem, and a 

narcotics problem, and that belongs to the State Department 

and INL and Commerce and Treasury. That’s balderdash. 

This is a single, unified fight, and it’s a single war, and there’s 

a single set of enemies who don’t look at it as a multipleagency effort that they have to stitch together. To the extent 

we could when I was there, we mashed those boxes together, 

and we had a single box, and everything was in that single 

box. All the different efforts complemented each other in 

an integrated counterinsurgency campaign that’s got to pull 

all of those different elements of power together in a single, 

unified campaign plan, which we had and which we built 

a lot of consensus for both within the embassy and within 

the international community there. That was, I think, a 

dramatic difference from what had occurred before and a 

part of it was through the collocation value and what that 

brought to the table in the second- or third-order effects. 

It also, unfortunately, was a significant difference from 

what we have today. What we found after I left and after 
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Ambassador Khalilzad left (within a few weeks of each 

other), was that the two organizations immediately 

defaulted back to their basic cultures. The next commander 

moved out of the embassy, moved back to his military 

compound. He stopped attending country team meetings. 

The ambassador and the commander feuded on a regular 

basis according to accounts from a number of different 

people, although of course, not publicly. Part of that 

was the organizational cultures. One of the things that 

was happening in the last couple months I was there is 

that—this is from Big State back in Washington—there 

was a “normalization” effort of the embassy under way, 

which was to make the embassy in Kabul like every other 

embassy in the world, and normalize how the embassy 

was designed and normalize the military relationship in 

the embassy, which was code for “Get the military back in 

an OMC-type of relationship with the embassy and not in 

this kind of bastardized arrangement.” I cautioned them all 

before I left, publicly, that normalization should not be an 

excuse for trying to separate the military and the embassy 

once again, but that’s exactly what happened, within a 

matter of weeks. Today, it’s gone to the extent where we 

don’t even have a three-star headquarters there anymore. 

So, we’re back to where we were in some respects in early 

2003, which I think we will come to regret very quickly. I 

think that was one of the great success stories of our time 

in Afghanistan—the degree of integration of embassy and 

military. I’ve got a good friend who spent a good bit of 

time out there, back and forth, doing assessment visits, and 

he told me recently that he doesn’t believe in integration 

anymore. I was shocked, and I asked him how he could 

say that because we had such success with integration. 

He said, looking at it now, he is convinced that—and I 

don’t agree with him, necessarily—the reason it was so 

successful was the personality of the ambassador and 

the personality of the commander. When those changed, 

everything went back to its normal groove of competition 

and lack of cooperation and lack of integration. You could 

make a pretty good argument there, I suppose. But if we 

don’t use the model that we devised, we’re going to have 

to devise a working model that can fuse the military and 

the mission responsibilities in a country that’s fighting an 

insurgency campaign. And to the best of my knowledge, 

we don’t have any better models in the last ten years 

than the one we had from ‘03 to ‘05 in Afghanistan. So, 

hopefully, some of our commentary will help illuminate 

that for others that are trying to find good ways of doing 

this and the best practices for doing this.

DR. MUNDEY: Turning our attention, for the moment, back to combat 

operations, just to clarify a couple of things, we were 

talking about how CFC-A had the theater, regional, 

strategic, and the CJTF-180/-76 had the operational. 

Who actually approved combat operations in theater? 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

LT. GEN. BARNO: Well, it depends on what level of approval you’re talking 

about. For example, if your company was going to conduct 

a raid some night in Badakhshan Province or in Paktika 

Province, the battalion commander would do that. 

Normally, the operations are approved one, sometimes 

two, levels above. So, a major military operation, like a 

named operation, Mountain Thrust or something like 

that—because it would normally be about a battalionsized operation—a division commander, CJTF-76 

or -180 commander, would approve that. I would be 

knowledgeable of it, but again, I think that was one of the 

things I was not entirely comfortable with, was the degree 

of visibility we had on the lay-down of those operations. 

I was generally pretty comfortable. They were always 

within our intent, and that was absolutely the case, I think, 

in ‘04 as we were doing our preps for the election and 

focusing on the election as our military main effort for 

2004. But the actual approval of the military operation, 

at the end of the day—I had responsibility for them, but 

I wasn’t personally involved in approving most individual 

operations. The exception to that would probably be in 

some of the special operations categories, but we will 

quickly get into classified stuff if we go down that route. 

I did approve specific operations in a number of cases 

there and got briefed in detail on most—essentially all of 

those—in certain categories. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. I was unsure exactly how to bring up this particular 

subject. So I’ll bring it up, and let you go with it where you 

would like. The issue of detainees. Obviously, we don’t 

want to go into any sort of classified discussion here, but 

could you speak generally about detainee operations in 

Afghanistan? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: We were all taken aback by the reporting out of Abu 

Ghraib. One of the things that I generated shortly after that 

all broke—and I was given some good advice on this by 

General [USMC Peter J.] Pace—was to take an internal look 

at all of our detainee operations in Afghanistan. And that 

was my own initiative as well, but he suggested putting a flag 

officer in charge of it, which I did, Brig. Gen. Chuck [H.] 

Jacoby. We did basically a top-to-bottom review of all our 

detainee operations to make sure that we were in keeping 

with all the laws of land warfare; with the guidance from 

DoD policy; we had all the right logistic systems in place; 

we had all the support systems in place; we had the right 

oversight in place. So, I launched Chuck out on a mission 

to go to every single detainee facility in Afghanistan and 

to go through a very detailed checklist of what was the 

situation in each one of those, from the major facility at 

Bagram all the way to field holding sites, and look at what 

our policies were, look at what units were doing, look at 

standardization. Very, very wise thing to do, and I certainly 

don’t take credit for all that. Clearly, I understood that we 
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had to take a look at our operations based on what we were 

seeing out of Abu Ghraib, and so we knocked that out in 

about a month or so and we found, fortunately, not much 

that was terribly wrong. Our basic policies were sound. We 

had some logistics issues out at some of our more remote 

sites in terms of having the right kind of facilities, in looking 

at how long we were holding people at different sites. We 

did put some metrics and markers in place that said we 

would limit the amount of time people were being held 

and flush them back into the system much more quickly in 

these more austere locations out in remote areas, that they 

weren’t staying there for weeks, that they were there for 

what became very short periods of time and then they were 

moved to centralized facilities where you had more of our 

professional military intelligence people and professional 

military police that could deal with them. So that was a 

positive change.

The good news in all that is that there was nothing that 

was of an Abu Ghraib nature, and there were no major 

systemic abuses out there. Throughout my period of time 

and before, in particular in Afghanistan, we would have 

occasional abuses that were documented and investigated 

and, in some cases, prosecuted. In early 2003—probably 

eight, nine months before I got there—there had been 

some deaths at Bagram, and General McNeill conducted 

a very extensive investigation of those deaths, which I read 

back through and looked at what they had found. I think 

that investigation helped preclude or maybe preempt some 

of the more egregious things that perhaps were found 

coming out of Abu Ghraib. Obviously, there was tragedy 

that entailed the beginning of that investigation, but I think 

that actually helped set better conditions by the time I got 

there for the overall detainee operations than might have 

been the case otherwise. I did feel that we had some degree 

of detailed oversight that had already been run through the 

system because of that investigation. But again, the Jacoby 

review was a very helpful thing and I thought it was useful 

for us. 

I was concerned about our growing numbers of detainees. 

Part of that was looking at whether we had a complete 

degree of confidence on whom we were picking up and 

that we were keeping the right people and letting the right 

people go. And, of course, inevitably, we found in both 

cases, on occasion, we would let the wrong people go and 

we would keep the wrong people. And so, trying to get that 

into more of a coherent groove was an important facet, and 

I think Chuck Jacoby’s top-to-bottom look was very, very 

helpful in helping us to really take a fine-toothed comb 

through the whole system to make sure it was working 

properly. I pushed pretty hard to try and get us to release as 

many detainees as we could, going through release process, 

and then turn them over to the Afghans. That was, I think, 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

a positive story, because one of the challenges of detainee 

operations is that there’s got to be an end state to them. You 

don’t want to keep people forever. Eventually, we’d want 

to turn them over to the Afghans, collectively; but in the 

meantime, we wanted to make sure that we were holding 

people properly with the right policies, with the right 

rights and protections, and that we weren’t growing that 

population, and that we were continually combing through 

it and taking people out that we didn’t think were a threat 

and turning them back to Afghan control. Those people 

were generally repatriated back to their home villages. Abu 

Ghraib really put a spotlight on that, but we did our own 

internal look to make sure that we were in good shape, and 

I felt pretty good after having seen the results of that. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. As with any sort of military operation, occasionally 

civilians are going to get involved in it, and there were a 

couple of instances in which a bomb went astray, civilians 

were killed. Who actually determined the policy with 

regard to the interaction with civilians? In terms of going 

through and looking for the cordon and search, who 

determined the rules of engagement, how the civilians 

were treated; and was there any kind of push-back from 

the Afghans toward U.S. and Coalition forces with that 

kind of interaction? 

LT. GEN. BARNO: That’s a pretty comprehensive subject, I think. The rules 

of engagement, of course, are determined and refined 

throughout the chain of command, but civilians are 

always treated appropriately with the laws of land warfare. 

Specifically, though, one of the things that we did—and 

I don’t recall if we talked about this before—was that in 

response to some of the complaints from President Karzai 

and from other senior Afghans about the nature of our 

operations, in spring of ‘04, spring/summer of ‘04, we sat 

down and devised some new guidelines. I went and briefed 

President Karzai on fifteen points of military operations 

that we had very carefully crafted to enable us to continue 

our military operations within Afghanistan, which now 

had a constitution and was getting an elected government, 

so we could still conduct the military operation we needed 

to while respecting the Afghan culture. So, we took some 

measures that impacted our tactical operations, which 

made them a little bit more challenging, in some cases, 

for our people to operate in, but in the strategic context 

allowed us to continue to do operations without alienating 

the population or the government. It was really a pragmatic 

effort to extend our freedom of action in the country as 

long as we possibly could. That was my goal. 

I saw a very strongly growing feeling of Afghan sovereignty 

and the beginnings of concern and resistance against 

foreign forces operating with impunity throughout the 

country, which was us, the Americans, and to a lesser extent, 
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NATO and America’s Coalition. I realized that we had to 

do something to address these concerns, as opposed to 

ignoring them until they came to a boiling point. I promised 

President Karzai that I would look at the various incidents 

and come back to him with some recommendations on 

how we could modify our operations to protect both what 

I used to describe as a “bag of capital,” which was Afghan 

goodwill, that we wanted to spend that goodwill very, very 

slowly, very carefully, and not expend it in foolish ways by 

exacerbating our relations with the Afghans, alienating 

them, and making them very angry for reasons that didn’t 

have any particular value to us tactically. So, I came back in 

with what we called the Fifteen Points, and it was a series of 

different things. We very clearly understood that we wanted 

to put Afghan police in front of our military wherever 

we could in going into areas. We would use tribal elders 

to go with us to a house to search and find individuals, 

arrest a person, rather than kick the door down and throw 

things around in the house and alienate the family. We 

would not have American soldiers cause Afghan women 

to be separated from their men, unless there was a tribal 

elder there with the women or, at worst case, there was an 

American female soldier there with the women, because the 

most sensitive topic in Afghanistan, by far, was treatment 

of women by foreign forces. That was explosive, gasoline 

on fire, in terms of the cultural sensitivities out there. So, 

we were very cautious about how we did that. We said 

that we would not conduct operations at night unless we 

had to in order to protect our forces. That sounded like a 

fairly dramatic change in our operations, but the realities 

were that most of our cordon and search operations were 

taking place during the daylight. We were trying to do 

that, because we were actually operating within a generally 

friendly population. What I heard from the Afghans, 

which resonates with Americans as well, was “How is it 

that we, the Afghans, with a constitution that gives us all 

these rights, can have people barge into our bedrooms in 

the middle of the night and drag our wives and children 

out of bed and throw them on the floor and point weapons 

at us?” Darn good questions. It was very clear to me that 

if we were going to extend our freedom of movement for 

many more years in Afghanistan, as opposed to bringing 

our freedom of movement to a stop in Afghanistan, that we 

were now dealing with a government that had been elected 

by the people, with a constitution that they had approved, 

with foreign forces that were in Afghanistan because the 

Afghans asked them to be there, not because they were in 

there to invade Afghanistan, that we had to operate in ways 

that would take that into account and protect that capital 

of goodwill, the bag of goodwill, for as long as we could. 

The day that ended, the day we spent the last of that, we 

were gone, we were out of Afghanistan, and that might not 

be in our national interest to do that. So, we were trying 

to modify operations in a way that would give us as long a 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

ride, as long a coast, as we could, and still be able to conduct 

our operations, but do them in slightly different ways that 

respected Afghan sensibilities. 

We specifically identified the population of Afghanistan 

in late 2003 as the center of gravity of our effort, and so 

anything we did that jeopardized the population’s support 

for that effort, population support for their government, or 

for the degree of hope which they all had for their future—

that put the entire mission in Afghanistan at risk. So, we 

realized that the strategic objective here—protecting that 

center of gravity, the population—was more important than 

maybe the tactical objective of a platoon that wanted to go 

into a walled compound and kick the door down. I had to 

take kind of a strategic outlook here: “What’s the United 

States going to want to do strategically, and how do we 

extend that for as long as we can? If we have to suboptimize 

some of our tactics, as long as they don’t put people’s lives 

at risk, we will do that.” I was there a year beyond that. I 

never got any feedback from tactical units that any of those 

changes accorded risk to their personnel, or that they had 

heartburn with that, which was encouraging. So I thought 

that was kind of interesting. 

One thing that I would comment on, on the civilian end of 

this, is the use of airpower. I think that one of the things that 

I observed in my first few months there—and fortunately, 

I’m observing from a distance, in the newspaper, at least 

now—is that there is a tendency to use airpower more 

robustly than was probably appropriate for an environment 

where the civilian population was generally on your side. 

In my first six months there or so, we had several instances 

where we were using airpower to attack individuals that we 

were trying to capture or kill, or we were striking at targets 

where we knew an individual or a cell might be in a certain 

area. We knew there were going to be civilians there, and, 

inevitably, we’d have civilian casualties. In several cases, we 

accidentally killed civilians while we didn’t even successfully 

attack the target we were trying to strike. So, I ratcheted 

down our use of airpower fairly significantly and really 

focused our airpower. Any time we had a unit in contact, 

there was no question that we could use airpower. So, it 

was kind of “protect yourself when you’re in a firefight,” 

being able to use bombs, rockets, and the appropriate assets 

against the enemy. We didn’t get terribly restrictive on that. 

Where I was very restrictive on airpower was when no one 

was in contact. Then we better be very thoughtful about 

whether we were going to use an aircraft with bombs or 

not. And that was a change. I see us kind of going back 

the other way a bit now, and I have some concerns about 

that, because what I saw in this initial use of airpower is 

that we were really alienating the population. Whenever 

we killed civilians—even in recent months here in 2007, 

President Karzai has been in tears at a press conference at 
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deaths of Afghan civilians because of Coalition airpower, 

NATO airpower in this case—that’s a big red flag. Airpower 

can serve as a substitute for ground forces, but it is not as 

discriminate as ground forces are once you introduce it into 

a fight. So, we were very judicious—and I really changed the 

game plan with our use of airpower to really restrict it to 

activities where we had troops in contact. If we didn’t have 

troops in contact—no one’s at risk if you’re not in contact. 

If you’re in contact, you’re at risk, then yes, we’re going to 

deploy A–10s or attack helicopters or whatever else we need 

to out there. If nobody’s shooting at you, if you’re not in 

contact, you can develop a situation further without having 

to use airpower and drop bombs on suspected targets. 

You’re better off putting ground forces in, surrounding 

the target, and discriminating who’s in the target area and 

pulling out the person you want. If you don’t then there’s 

a lot of risk to your overall strategic objectives, I think, in 

terms of turning the population against you. The Afghans 

have a lot of bad memories of the Russians [Soviets] being 

there dropping bombs on villages on a regular basis, and 

we have to be extraordinarily careful that we don’t end up 

being viewed the same way. 

I remember seeing an Afghan report once, after an air 

strike—and this was fully justified in our case. We were 

working in an operation and there had been a firefight with 

some Taliban. They ran into a compound. We sent in a rifle 

squad, platoon actually, to get these guys out, and they killed 

two soldiers in two separate attacks to enter this compound. 

We did this before we used airpower. Then we finally 

dropped, I think, two bombs on the end of the compound 

and killed, I think, some civilians as well—a textbook use 

of force appropriately, in concert with the laws of war. But 

I also commented to our folks afterwards—I think I saw 

some Afghan reporting on this—in our American view, 

what we did was, “We conducted a raid to seize a compound, 

and after receiving enemy fire and taking casualties, we 

used precision-guided bombs to destroy the corner of the 

compound that killed the enemy soldiers and inadvertently 

killed one, two, three civilians.” That was the American 

view. The Afghan view of that is, “Americans bombed a 

village, burned our crops, and bombed and destroyed cars 

and set them on fire.” Both views are accurate. It struck 

home to me, because it reflected the lens through which 

you view the operation. In our case, it was a very precise 

use of measured firepower after we had had two soldiers 

killed tragically. I ended up in an interesting debate with 

President Karzai and his cabinet not long thereafter. From 

the Afghan view, it was “You bombed a village, and you 

burnt the crops in the village, and you burned the cars of 

the people in the village!” Again, they were looking at the 

results from the “if you lived in the village” standpoint, not 

the “why is the Air Force there and how do we use it?” I 

just thought that was hugely revealing about how military 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

operations look based on which side of the fence you’re 

looking at them from. I use that as an example to send out 

to all of our forces that we had to be very thoughtful about 

how our operations are perceived by people that aren’t 

sitting in the joint operations center looking at a computer 

screen. We have to realize that, especially with airpower, 

when we’re using that, the connotations of that alone are 

really dramatic in Afghanistan. 

Now, on the good side of airpower, we were able to use it 

as a show of force on a regular basis, because there was a 

tremendous amount of fear and respect for airpower by the 

Afghan people—friends, enemies, neutrals, warlords—and 

we got a lot of mileage out of that. It gave us the ability to 

operate in small units all over Afghanistan, because when 

Taliban saw an infantry platoon out there with forty guys in 

it, they knew that twenty minutes from the first shot fired, 

there was going to be an A–10 over their head or an attack 

helicopter, and that’s big medicine. Everybody was very clear 

in their mind that we could draw on airpower to leverage 

our small units. That’s why twenty thousand Americans 

and Coalition forces could operate all over Afghanistan for 

four-plus years because we had airpower there to put right 

on those spots at the right time, in reaction to contact. So, 

we got immense mileage out of small units by being able to 

do that. But at the same time, using airpower separate from 

ground forces, out of contact, independently, I thought was, 

generally, pretty counterproductive from our standpoint of 

protecting your center of gravity, the population. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Well, we are running out of time. I had actually 

quite a few questions left to talk about, follow-ups with 

the constitutional loya jirga, the election 2004, the 

regional development zones, so I’ll let you choose what 

it is you would like to talk about in the last few minutes. 

LT. GEN. BARNO: We can return to target on these others, as well. Good 

question. Let me think how I want to kind of wrap up 

this session here today. I think I would probably not go to 

those questions, which we can address separately, but talk 

about best practices and models for success in the idea 

of international and interagency integration. The more I 

think about it and the more I talk to different groups on 

Afghanistan, that topic comes out more and more often. I 

think we had a very good working model in the embassy in 

Kabul and the CFC at Kabul for how to thoughtfully blend 

together a military operation, a military headquarters, 

military objectives, and all other objectives which are part 

of the overall campaign plan and the war writ large. One of 

the philosophical underpinnings of our success that I don’t 

see replicated today in a number of places is the idea that 

war is a holistic enterprise; and that war contains political, 

military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure 

elements; and that at the end of the day, the instrument 
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that the United States of America has charged with fighting 

and winning its wars is the U.S. military. I certainly 

took this approach in Afghanistan, that the military had 

ownership of all of those things. Not that we will be the 

lead in each of those in an economic environment or social 

environment, but that we had an ownership of the overall 

campaign that led to the end state of success, meeting U.S. 

policy objectives, winning the war. The idea that is more 

commonplace, it seems, today—and I think it’s pernicious 

and self-defeating—is that there’s a military component of 

war that the military has ownership of, and there are these 

other components of war that some other people have 

ownership of, and between the two is an unknown force 

that doesn’t exist and that doesn’t result in a war-winning 

strategy at the end of the day. In my view, the fact that we 

had a holistic campaign strategy that the military helped to 

write and originate. We shopped it around the embassy for 

changes, improvements, and additions; shopped it around 

the international community for changes, improvements, 

and additions; and at the end of the day had a generally 

broadly shared campaign strategy for Afghanistan. We all 

found what our niches were and played to those.

The military was the 800-pound gorilla, the glue that 

bound it all together, helped enable it, helped lead from 

the rear in a couple of categories, helped shape and direct 

it, and resourced it in a lot of ways, because most of the 

resources were in the military effort over there. We had a 

$12 billion-a-year expense account that we were using, and 

no one else had anything remotely like that. We had all the 

helicopters, the trucks, the communications, the aircraft to 

go with that to get things done around the country. So, the 

fundamental concept that we understood and drilled from 

Day 1 in CFC when we stood it up and when I was there 

was that this was a holistic enterprise, that winning this 

war entailed fusing all of these disparate elements of power 

into a single element that was moving toward the same set 

of objectives. Not everybody wore the same outfits, not 

everybody was wearing the same hats and from the same 

country, but everybody was moving toward the same 

set of objectives at different speeds, with different dance 

steps, with different outfits on, and the military was the 

enabler and the driver and the catalyst behind that. That’s 

a fundamental principle of success in counterinsurgency 

operations that I think is generally lacking most places that 

I look right now. The military, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it 

seems to me, has begun to distance itself from ownership of 

the outcomes, which is horrifying, and distance itself from 

ownership of the integration of the effort. We’ve begun to 

look inward to define our military objectives as separate 

and distinct from the overall, war-winning objectives. 

We’re beginning to grade ourselves as successes because 

we are accomplishing the military objectives, while others 

are failing to accomplish their objectives. That’s disastrous, 
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Planning and Directing a Campaign: General Barno in Afghanistan

and it is an aberration of the understanding of warfare that 

should not exist out there today, and I hope that it dies a 

quick and violent death here in the next six months. It’s 

the opposite of what our outlook was in Afghanistan, and I 

attribute a lot of our success to the fact that we put our arms 

around this whole thing—not to be in front of it all, not to 

lead it all, and not to beat our chests and say we’re in charge, 

but to enable, to understand it as a holistic enterprise and 

to enable the entire enterprise to be successful through our 

resources and support—and I think that was a big mark of 

the success we had there. So, I’ll leave it at that. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Thank you very much.

Building the Command

Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, C.B., of the British Army served as Deputy Commanding General, Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, from November 2004 to August 2005. He 

was interviewed at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., on 24 January 2007 by J. Patrick Hughes and Lisa Mundey of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. General Gilchrist 

discusses the mission of the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan under Lt. Gen. David 

W. Barno and Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry. After explaining command relationships in the 

theater, General Gilchrist discusses the presidential inauguration, the reconciliation of Afghan warlords and militias, counternarcotics, security sector reform, the training of the Afghanistan National Army, and the preparations for the parliamentary elections. He describes 

in detail the relations of the command with the Afghan National Government, Coalition and 

interagency partners, and the United Nations. 

DR. HUGHES: It’s the twenty-fourth of January 2007. Interviewing 

General Gilchrist at the British Embassy. Dr. J. Patrick 

Hughes, interviewing. Dr. Lisa Mundey, also. Sir, I was 

wanting to ask you about your time prior to getting to 

Afghanistan. What sort of duty position were you in? 

What sort of experience did you find useful when you 

finally hit the ground in Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: My previous duty I was the technical director of the Defence 

Procurement Agency in the U.K., and I had a wonderful title 

called Master General of the Ordnance, which goes back 

to 1425. Basically, I was the person in charge of military 

acquisition, army acquisition, in the U.K. for about four and 

a half years. And I’m a tank officer. I volunteered to go and 

do an operational tour because that’s what I joined the army 

to do. I actually asked to go to Iraq, but they decided to send 

me to Afghanistan. 

DR. HUGHES: How did you learn that you were going to Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Our Senior Appointments Committee reviews these things. As 

is the same in your army, I got a notification that I was to go. I 

had plenty of time. I think of interest to your history, I am the 

third member of my family to have gone to Afghanistan, the 

3
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others having gone in the 1800s, and many of my family having 

been in the Indian Army and been on the Northwest Frontier 

and so on. So, my grandfather was with the 52d Sikh, and then 

the 12th Frontier Force; a cousin of my father’s was a Frontier 

Force officer; and my grandfather was an Indian Army colonel; 

also, my great-grandfather, an Indian Army general, and so 

on. So, it’s sort of in the blood, a bit. I can’t remember precisely 

when I got notified, but it was probably March or April ‘04.

Originally, the deployment was going to be July/August 

‘04. We agreed that my predecessor should stay there to 

see through the presidential elections, so that we didn’t 

have a gap in the middle of it. So I arrived directly after the 

presidential elections, which then gave me more time than I 

had anticipated to get myself prepared, which was good. So 

I read a lot. I spoke to a lot of people. I spoke to historians, 

and I also got myself an Afghan ex-pat who tried to teach 

me Dari, which is not an easy language to pick up in a short 

time. But actually, I used it to spend a lot of time talking 

about culture, working out how to approach people, what 

made Afghans tick that wasn’t necessarily obvious if you 

didn’t know about it. And so, I spent, I suppose, about two 

months going up there two or three times a week, speaking 

British General Gilchrist addresses troops of Combined Joint Task Force-76 in Kabul, 6 February 2005.
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Building the Command

to him, and learned a lot about how I ought to approach 

Afghans that I might not otherwise have known had I gone 

in raw. And so, that was very helpful. I had a little smattering 

of the language, and I had read a lot of history, recent and 

past, and I think I was reasonably well prepared for it when 

I got there.

DR. HUGHES: I assume that included the military and political situations 

there?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Yes.

DR. HUGHES: Did you get briefed on that at any point?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Oh, yes, in London, at our Permanent Joint Headquarters. 

I was attending on a regular basis and then got briefed just 

before I went. I went to the intelligence people and got a lot 

of intelligence on what was going on. So I think I was as well 

prepared as I could have been.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What was your command relationship? You know, 

what was your position in the command there? 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: I was the deputy commanding general of Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan [CFC-A]. So I was General [Lt. Gen. 

David W.] Barno’s deputy. We felt that there was simply too 

much for any one person to do there because we were trying 

to do the whole of the security sector reform, and so we split 

the responsibilities between us. He gave me a framework of 

what he wanted me to do, and so I took a chunk of things 

and he took another chunk of things. Clearly, there was 

a crossover in these areas. The first thing I did was the 

presidential inauguration, which was interesting; and then, 

basically, I had all of the security sector reform tasks—police, 

army, judicial, and so on—all those strands. I took an interest 

in counternarcotics because it’s clearly part of the problem, 

and you can’t solve the problem out there unless you solve 

that. Also, the U.K. had the lead, and I just wanted to make 

sure that was properly coordinated. It was very disjointed 

when I was there, and I’ll come back to that later. My role, 

really, was to go around and speak to the ministers, speak 

to the intelligence agencies, and to try to drive the policy 

forward in each of these areas.

We also decided that we needed a campaign plan which was 

a coherent campaign plan. I’m sure General Barno’s spoken 

about this because it was a unique affair, and I think it’s very 

important that it’s captured. Between all the people you 

speak to, you’ll get the picture of how this came together. We 

agreed that you could not win a counterinsurgency campaign 

unless you looked at all of the lines of operation and all of the 

elements of government power that need to be brought to bear 

to deliver, in effect, a stable—whatever kind of—democracy 

that’s going to suit Afghanistan at the end of the day. And 
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so, initially, when we first started it (and you can work out 

all these lines quite easily; it’s not going to take a massive 

intellectual effort to work it out) it’s actually getting—and 

this was my first experience in working interagency, with the 

U.S. interagency—getting the interagency elements to work 

together with the military was an interesting task. And the 

way we achieved it was that Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad 

and General Barno formed a sort of strategic committee, 

and below that, they had a group that, basically, I chaired 

with the deputy head of mission, which looked at all these 

strands of activity and recommended to General Barno and 

to the ambassador on where investment should go or where 

efforts should go. So they drove the strategy. We delivered 

it and we recommended back to them where things needed 

to go in order to deliver their aims. And a clever bit about 

this was that—and I don’t know how this happened—but 

I managed to get some, I think you call them “fungible” 

funds (that’s not an English word; it’s an American word), 

which means that they had some autonomy over where the 

money could be spent. So if we felt that actually it was more 

important to go into health than it was to do roads, then 

they could do something about that, which was very helpful. 

And what we discovered was that most of the other agencies 

had no idea how to plan, which might sound odd. So we 

put with each of them a military planner or two. So, USAID 

[U.S. Agency for International Development] had a military 

planner who produced, to their direction, the campaign 

plan that would deliver the things that they were set up 

to do, including where the money was going to be spent, 

how it was going to be spent, and so on. And each of the 

interagency parts—the health, the education, and so on—all 

of those were done as individual plans, and then our role 

was to make sure that the plan rolled forward coherently, 

and that where bits were slipping, then we would invest in 

those bits to try to bring them further forward. I think it 

probably is unique in American experience to do that kind 

of interagency coordination in that much detail, and with 

the head of mission having that much autonomy over the 

whole process. It was a very sensible way of doing it. Sadly, 

later, it all slipped away. 

DR. HUGHES: How would you describe—the American Army calls it 

operation tempo—the pace at which you operated, the 

routine that you were able to deal with the various different 

pieces of the mission?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: In the headquarters? Well, we were there to do an operation, 

so it didn’t really matter. I suppose I was in the office at six or 

something like that, when you start the day off, because you 

needed to be there reasonably early to do contacts back to 

the States and to the U.K.; and then we would work basically 

through the day until nine or ten o’clock at night and finish; 

and then all over again. What we did do, which General Barno 

was very good at, was that we made sure that psychologically 
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there was a break every week of some sort, so that your clock 

worked. Psychologically, I never even thought about this, but 

this is why, I think, church was started and prayers and so 

on in terms of breaking cycles, so that you know when you 

finish one cycle, you start the next, so psychologically, it’s 

quite reassuring. So every Friday, we had a later start and a 

dress-down day. It was a day we weren’t going to go out to the 

ministries and really be working outside. So it was a day of 

housekeeping and sorting out and doing all the sort of things 

you needed to do to keep your personal administration and 

all that in order. So that was the cycle, basically. It was a 

Saturday-to-Friday cycle, with Friday being the down day 

and, well, almost no external activity in Kabul for us on those 

days.

DR. HUGHES: How would you characterize the mission for the command 

when you arrived, and did it change?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: The Combined Forces Command mission was slightly 

different than the CJTF-76 [Combined Joint Task Force-76] 

mission. You know, we were there to basically provide the 

strategic theater-wide view of things and to deliver the 

strategic elements of the plan, whereas CJTF-76 would 

deliver the tactical end of the plan. And so, we were setting 

the shape and foundations for how things would develop 

through the government. And because there was relatively 

little State Department input over there, we were doing quite 

a lot of heavy lifting in terms of the meetings and so on, and 

giving help and advice and direction. General Barno was 

very good at what, in the U.K., we call “mission command”: 

telling you what it is he wanted you to achieve, telling you 

what weapons you’ve got to go and do it—”weapons” being 

people, in my case—and then letting you get on with it 

within those boundaries, reporting back regularly. And 

that worked very well, because it meant that I could have 

multiple strands running and he could have multiple strands 

running. Provided we coordinated it a bit, the whole was 

better than the sum of the individual elements. Without 

getting too personal about this, his successor wasn’t as good 

at that mission command as he was, and so many of those 

previous strands of activity fell by the wayside and we ended 

up concentrating on very few, so we weren’t putting the 

whole weight of the government power behind the process. 

We actually ended up only putting it behind one or two key 

ones, but we needed to handle the spread that was required. 

And so, did it change? Yes. As far as I’m concerned, it changed 

quite dramatically from the first six months to the last few I 

was there.

DR. HUGHES: What were the priorities when you got there? There had 

just been the presidential election.

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: There had been the presidential election. So, immediately, it 

was a “This inauguration must be perfect and nothing must 
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go wrong. And, oh, by the way, I can’t tell you who’s coming, 

but there are some senior people coming, and if any of them 

die, then you’re going to get on the next airplane home” sort 

of thing. So that concentrated my mind. So we went through 

and we did all that right, and it was good. It went very well. 

And, you know, it was an interesting exercise because it 

was the first time the Afghans had ever laid on anything 

like this—well, not for years, anyway—and, actually, it went 

perfectly at the time and everything else. So, that was the 

first thing that consumed me, pretty much for the first few 

weeks.

But then, I suppose, the spectrum of things I got involved in 

was security sector reform and all of the elements that made 

up that. I got involved, as I said, in the counternarcotics 

side of it to try to coordinate that. I created a reconciliation 

program, a program which is still running but not as well as 

it could. I drove the disarmament of illegal armed groups 

to make sure that when we went to the parliamentary 

elections we would have fewer problems than we had had 

previously. On the DDR [disarmament, demobilization, and 

reintegration] side, I was the rep who did the disarmament 

with the Japanese. And so, I mean, it’s a broad spread.

DR. HUGHES: I would like to ask you about each of them, but maybe 

before I do that, what were the major milestones, the 

major phases, of your tour there? 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: The phases were the inauguration; big chunks of the 

inauguration; and then the parliamentary elections. So if 

you take those as being the big lumps, there were a number 

of milestones we needed to achieve before each one of those 

could take place. They weren’t specific missions, but I knew 

I had to get a reconciliation program under way. I had very 

little direction. The State Department couldn’t really work 

out how to do it. So I basically, with my POLAD [political 

adviser], sat down with the Afghans and worked out what 

the market could bear and then wrote for the Afghans their 

putative instruction that would then be the reconciliation 

program; and then I had to clear it, reverse engineer it, to 

clear it back through the State Department so it then became 

theirs, so it could then go through the bureaucratic process, 

which is fine. It all worked. Creating the structures for that 

was complicated enough and a time-consuming exercise. 

It took a long time to really get them bought in, and I had 

to go around each of the ministers of each different tribal 

persuasion and ethnic grouping to make sure that what we 

were doing would actually fit across these ethnic groups 

because there was no point in doing something that was 

good with the Pashtuns and not good with the Tajiks or 

Hazarans. And so, it was an interesting bit of spaghetti to 

untangle, but we got there. I mean, we did it. And then it was 

setting up the structure. So that was one of the milestones. 

You had to do that because unless they started to reconcile 
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and understand there was a process whereby fighting could 

stop and people could be brought back in, you couldn’t take 

this forward to the next phase, which was parliamentary 

elections. The program was called “Program Tachim e-Solh” 

[Dari for “Strengthening Peace Program”], or PTS.

DR. HUGHES: Before we go to the parliamentary elections, what role 

did the Coalition forces play in the inauguration—the 

presidential inauguration?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Pretty large. Inside the city, NATO [North Atlantic Treaty 

Organization] forces were in charge. Outside the city, it was 

us, basically. But there were some very senior American 

visitors who came, and I was given firm instruction that it 

was all to work, and so, basically, we made it work. Although 

NATO were there doing things, I was making sure they 

were doing what we wanted them to do. The Afghan army 

was doing things. I made sure they were doing what [we] 

wanted. We did rehearsals. We went down and checked 

that they were actually doing what we said they were going 

to do and corrected it, making sure that communications 

worked, tracked everything through. We made sure of that, 

particularly over the high ground where these high-ranked 

visitors were going to come flying in from Bagram and so on. 

That was a complex exercise that involved Special Forces, the 

Afghan army, the Afghan police, and NATO, and so on. It’s 

just making sure that everyone knew what everyone else was 

doing, so they’re not going to shoot each other, and make 

sure there was coordination and make sure that if something 

did go wrong, then we had the reaction sorted in such a way 

that it will work out, and we exercised it. And when you 

speak to [Col.] Dave Lamm, who was the chief of staff—and 

he worked through this with me—I actually put him in the 

presidential palace with the Special Forces as part of it: “If it 

all goes wrong, mate, you’re in charge of whatever happens,” 

which he enjoyed [laughs]. And, you know, silly things like 

derelict buildings that people hadn’t cleared. It was sort of 

a bit of a Northern Ireland experience coming back to me 

about things lying on the side of the road. All the routes in 

from the airport, because there were dignitaries coming in, 

had to be cleared and maybe pushed back, and bomb dogs. 

It was complicated, but good fun and nice to have done.

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that you were involved in the disarmament, 

demobilization, reintegration effort. What was your role 

in that?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: General Barno had given me that, which is an amazing sort 

of thing to take on. And so, the Japanese were the G8 nation 

in charge of it. The Japanese ambassador ran a meeting once a 

week. I also attended that meeting as the CFC rep, and it was 

from that that we worked out how we would go through and 

do the whole of this DDR process. And then we would issue 

the instructions out, should there have been any changes 
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102

in the process. Much of it, by the time I got there, was just 

monitoring that what had already been set in progress was 

working, and when it wasn’t, going out to make sure it did 

work.

DR. HUGHES: Who was doing what in this program? You said “give 

directions out.” Who were getting directions? What were 

they doing?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Well, theoretically, the Afghan Ministry of Defense was 

in charge of making sure all these militiamen who were 

taken in by the army were then taken to the right place and 

disarmed and then given the money and everything that 

was supposed to go with support from the UN Afghan New 

Beginnings Program. So it was making sure that the Afghans 

stayed honest. Quite often, we’d find the numbers increasing 

dramatically, but actually the numbers turning up weren’t 

there, and it was all one of those scams that they tried to play. 

And so, it was just a matter of making sure that we had the 

intelligence out there to see, actually, who should have been 

turning up and who did turn up, and whether A did meet 

B, and did the right number of weapons get handed in? So 

it was a monitoring issue. Some of my guys are monitoring 

it inside the headquarters and reporting to me, and I was 

titularly in charge of making sure it all happened.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You had talked a bit about the reconciliation 

program. What was the outcome? Was that successful? 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: To an extent, yes. Firstly, we weren’t allowed to call it a 

reconciliation program because, apparently, the Communists 

had had a reconciliation program. 

DR. HUGHES: History again.

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: So we had to come up with this name, and we tried all sorts 

of English words, but eventually we went with Dari, which 

was Program Tachim-e Solh. 

DR. HUGHES: And the results of that effort?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Well, firstly, we had to get a structure to make it work. I think 

that’s where I was persuaded to do something which, I think in 

retrospect, I slightly regret having done. We wanted to have a 

notable person who was independent from the cabinet, who 

was not seen to be one of the inner circle—and it was a pretty 

tight inner circle at that stage. They hadn’t had elections, so 

everyone was basically [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai’s 

mate. It had to be somebody who was of sufficient stature so 

that, internationally, they would be seen to be acceptable. So, 

we chose Professor [Sibghatulla] Mojadidi to be that person, 

and he was a wonderful man, but he knew how to work the 

system. I think he had worked the system over many years, 

and it was surprising the number of people he knew who 
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were from various parts of your government—that surprised 

me. But he had been president, so, a great man. He had been 

the first president after the jihad, and so he had that stature. 

At the time, he was living in Denmark and so was “clean.” 

He was titularly in charge of it. We hoped we would be able 

to manipulate it with him not actually wanting to do too 

much but, sadly, he decided he really did want to get deeply 

involved. Then we then had to create a structure of offices out 

in each of the provinces that really had the biggest Taliban 

problem, and so on. So it all became a bit more complicated 

than I wanted.

By the time I had left, we had brought, I think, about a 

thousand back in—I can’t remember the exact numbers—

but none of the really key players. I mean, a couple of key 

players came in during that time. But it started to work. And 

then I can only assume the emphasis went off of it because 

I don’t think—it’s a thing I keep reading they’re trying to 

rekindle. So it was a useful model, and it’s a model that 

works in Afghanistan because the tribal elders were made 

responsible for good behavior of those who reconciled; and 

the way we did it was, basically, the reconcilee and the elder 

went to the chief justice, and the chief justice made the elders 

agree that they would first accept this individual as part of 

their tribe, and then they would ensure the good behavior 

of that individual. They realized they were responsible for 

it; and if the individual didn’t behave properly, then it was 

the elders who would be the ones held responsible under 

the law. That worked pretty well, and it worked in that tribal 

environment. It was a good way of doing it, and we had very 

little re-offense, which was quite nice.

We also used it to help reduce the number of detainees. So, 

using the same process, we listed the detainees in order of 

nastiness, because I didn’t have any better way of doing it, and 

in the order of time they had been in the various detention 

centers, and then took the least nasty and longer serving 

and tested the system. We pulled out several hundred in the 

end, and it was the same process. They would come out of 

detention, be released into Afghan custody, taken to the chief 

justice; the chief justice would get together with the elders, 

who had already been contacted that they had to, again, go 

through the same process, and then off they went. That was 

a good model for emptying the burgeoning detention cells.

DR. HUGHES: Shifting, you indicated that one of the real big problems 

facing the Coalition there was counternarcotics and that 

you took a particular interest in that area. Could you 

describe the situation, the challenges, what responses we 

attempted?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Yes. When I got there, there were little, sort of, islands of 

activity around the place, none of them really coordinated 

or connected. The ministry hadn’t formed up, and there 
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was literally no coordination and a lot of interagency 

fighting—not only between your agencies, but between your 

agencies and our agencies, British agencies. So it was just 

dysfunctional. It just wasn’t working. We weren’t getting any 

traction at all. So I chaired a weekly meeting which brought 

all these people together, and we had a room bigger than 

this full of people, who all thought they were involved in this 

particular activity. What that enabled us to do was to at least 

talk around on what everyone else was doing, where they 

were able to. We were then able to coordinate between them 

and then, eventually, gradually move it to a more organized 

process. And so, I put down on paper what is now the new 

organization, which works. What we discovered was that 

your interagency wouldn’t share intelligence in Afghanistan, 

because the C meant “Coalition” to them, as opposed to 

“combined forces” and, therefore, they didn’t want their 

intelligence leaking, so that wasn’t helping the issue. A lot 

of our intelligence was shared with the U.S. and then made 

NOFORN [not releasable to foreign nationals], so I couldn’t 

read it, even though it was U.K. intelligence. And so, we 

had a dysfunctional process, although we had what was 

called ... we created an interagency kind of—we called it 

the counternarcotics intelligence fusion center. There wasn’t 

much interagency about it, and there wasn’t that much fusion 

either, because the people I put in that couldn’t work on the 

intelligence that we delivered. So, I had to work out a way of 

improving it and, really, the thing that needed to happen was 

there needed to be a better coordination process between the 

counternarcotics effort and the counterinsurgency effort. If 

you didn’t tie those two together, you were going to tread 

on each other’s toes and somebody was going to get hurt. 

And, quite often, there was a potential—it wasn’t there then; 

it probably is now—in migration to one and the other, and 

we’ll have the same people. So, you needed to coordinate 

that. So you needed an interagency operations coordination 

center to make sure that that bit was properly done.

And then, we had to create a sort of independent strategic 

intelligence center where people—your agencies, our 

agencies—were prepared to talk to each other, and that 

couldn’t be in Afghanistan. So that is now in London. That 

setup is called the Joint Narcotics Analysis Center, I think 

it’s called. It works in London. Basically, there, we have your 

interagency effort, our interagency effort, working, looking 

at the strategic picture, which is then working on the raw 

intelligence, and that is then sent in a—whatever the right 

word is, “disseminable”? I don’t know what it is in American—

in a way it could be disseminated out to the other nations. It 

went down to the counternarcotics fusion center, which then 

had intelligence that they could all work on, because they 

had been cleared at the upper level. So, you’ve got a strategic 

mapping of all the networks right across the world, doing 

everything. And then, the bit that was the Afghan bit could 

then be dropped into Afghanistan in a suitably expurgated 
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Building the Command

version so that they could use it, and then they were then 

able to operate and do arrests and so on. That could be done 

in parallel with setting up some work that was already going 

on when I arrived. The justice sector for counternarcotics 

is what they call “a vertical slice of the justice sector” there, 

which is being taken away, trained, vetted, and then when one 

of these guys comes in, deal with it without him being bribed 

out of court, which had happened previously. That actually 

works pretty well now, and all of that setup is in place. It’s 

maturing. I suppose it’s been in place now for about a year, 

and I think it will start to make a difference during this next 

calendar year. It’s not made much yet.

DR. HUGHES: Was part of that effort alternatives to the people where 

their lives depended upon growing that stuff?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Well, we had a five-part counternarcotics strategy, which we 

all contributed to, and so you had “Alternative Livelihoods” 

as one of those; and then, eradication, obviously, linked 

closer to it; and interdiction. I’ve forgotten what the other 

two are. I think one was education, and something else—

government? There are five strands to it. The key element of 

this was making sure that—David Barno used to draw these 

circles of dependency. He’s probably drawn them for you, I 

suspect. You know, if you haven’t got security, then you can’t 

... all of these things are interdependent upon each other. 

Without security, you can’t have Alternative Livelihood; 

and without the Alternative Livelihoods, you can’t do the 

eradication; and without the eradication, you can’t get rid of 

the narcotics. It’s a whole cart-and-horse thing. Security is 

the first thing you have to do because you can’t get any of the 

NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and other agencies 

working to deliver the Alternative Livelihoods unless you 

do it. So, what we started off with the year I was there was 

cash-for-work programs. We couldn’t deliver the Alternative 

Livelihoods, but what we could do is get people off the fields 

and stop them from growing the poppy and start to work 

on roads and irrigation schemes and so on. The process is 

really—the trouble is your Congress is very impatient. It’s a 

very long affair, this. You’ve got to create an economy, and 

there isn’t one at the moment—not one that you would really 

recognize—which means you’ve got to have, you know, 

roads; you’ve got to have a market; you’ve got to have— 

DR. HUGHES: Infrastructure.

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Actually, what we were trying to do was to build that 

infrastructure and build the structure of an economy, so that 

once you’ve got irrigation, you’ve got the roads, you’ve got the 

markets; and you had economists working with the country; 

you could then get the agricultural economists in—hopefully, 

once you’ve got the security—to deliver a product that was 

actually salable; and you have sort of a virtuous circle. But, 

sadly, everyone’s very impatient, and these long-term things 
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don’t work very well. And then, when the security situation 

dips, then your ability to deliver these things gets more 

difficult. And that’s roughly, I think, what’s happened in the 

last year; the security situation has got worse. It’s been more 

difficult for NGOs to get in, and so the delivery of Alternative 

Livelihoods has not been as good as it ought to be. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that you were particularly concerned with 

the security sector reform. What was involved there?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Police, army, minister of interior, minister of defense, and 

border police, justice, and customs.

DR. HUGHES: So, [Afghan] National Army and [Afghan] National 

Police?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Yes. I was the guy who liaised, mainly with [Minister of 

Interior] Ali Jalali, [Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim] 

Wardak, and their crew to make sure that we were 

delivering what was required and they were doing their 

part of that requirement. We were tied, initially, by a lack 

of investment by the Germans in the police force, which 

then we eventually got some money from the U.S. to 

actually start to produce the police forces, which helped. 

But there were always the background organizational 

structures and those things that need just to be talked 

through and worked through. They hadn’t worked out 

whether they wanted a national police force or whether 

it was going to be a national one with regional elements 

to it, sort of like the British police force, or whether it’s 

going to be more like an American police force—well, 

you don’t have an American police force; there are thirtytwo police forces in this town—where it could be more 

regionally based. We decided it’s basically going to be 

a national, but “national” more like a—when I say it, it 

wasn’t going to be a gendarmerie. It would be more of a 

constabulary now. I get a suspicion that might have moved 

a bit. I mean, a lot of my time was just spent in meeting, 

coordinating these activities, and making sure that all 

these strands were moving in the right direction, coming 

together, and, where people weren’t contributing, going 

back to the campaign plan, making sure that pressure was 

put on them. And the Germans weren’t doing their bit; 

I had to be nice to the German police ambassador and 

persuade him that more was required. It was largely just 

coordination of effort to make sure all of the G8 nations 

were delivering their end of the activity, and the Afghan 

government was doing their part of activity, and, where it 

wasn’t happening, working out where the gap was was my 

responsibility.

DR. HUGHES: Some people have contrasted: a greater success with the 

Afghan National Army than the Afghan National Police. 

Was that your experience?
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MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Yes. Because we are military, we are much better at training 

the military, and we’re not any good at training police because 

we’re not policemen. So, if you start from that premise, then, 

yes, it’s very—you know, we’re almost certainly going to be 

better at doing the army than we’re going to do the police force. 

There are other reasons, as well, which is we started the army 

before we started the police force. In a counterinsurgency, 

you could argue you should do the police force as quickly as 

you do the army because you need law and police presence 

and so on. We didn’t do that. What we did with the army, 

though, was we put them all through a selection process, so 

that very few of the militia came through; so we, in effect, 

trained a brand-new army. Afghans are good soldiers. 

They’re quite tough. They fight well. And so, we were able to 

create an army quite quickly.

We actually created it too quickly, and Dave Barno wouldn’t 

have seen this because he had already left by the time it became 

obvious. I did a study into the Afghan National Army. There 

is a study about this, which you can find for your historic 

records, which tells you what I found, or what I thought the 

market would take of what I found, which is slightly different 

to what I actually found. What had happened was that we were 

due to do one kandak at a time, a kandak being a battalion, 

and the SecDef thought this was a way of getting troops out 

of Afghanistan quickly. So, one to two at a time, to three at a 

time, four at a time, five at a time, to six at a time [tapping on 

table]. He wanted to try to get us to ten at a time. The trouble 

was there was only enough money to do this as a graduated 

process, which was one at a time; and then move to two at a 

time; and then move to three at a time. We could never get 

beyond that. So, although we accelerated the training, the kit 

wasn’t there; the barracks weren’t there. So, you had all those 

soldiers, but we didn’t have any infrastructure or anything 

that made them an army. So, although we pushed them out 

well, and where they needed to be going to do things, they 

did it very well, we actually had only excelled in one area and 

hadn’t brought up anything else. That wasn’t very obvious 

to us in CFC-A, which is why I went out and did this study 

because once I went out and looked, it was very obvious. And 

I think the other element, I would say, is that by necessity, we 

put the National Guard into that training mission, and by 

the very nature of the National Guard, they may not have 

been as good at it as regular soldiers. I couldn’t make it any 

stronger than that. But I think that this is sort of a compare 

and contrast.

DR. HUGHES: One would suspect that the National Guard would bring 

more police expertise to the table.

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: I’m sure they did, but we employed some of your wonderful 

contractors to do that for us.

DR. HUGHES: And the contract people were not up to the mission?
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MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: The problem was—I don’t mean to make this as a political 

statement; it’s not meant to be, but it’s just factual—the 

concentration that moves to Iraq—there was a huge 

requirement for police training in Iraq, and that was taking 

the large share of the good people. So, by the time they were 

trying to get people to come out to increase the numbers 

for Afghanistan, you’re starting to scratch the bottom of the 

barrel. I think that’s just fact rather than anything else. Again, 

there’re a finite number of these people, and I think we had 

gone beyond the point of sensible return.

The contrast was that the police force ... we tried to train 

the people who had already said they were policemen. 

We didn’t vet them, initially. We just pulled them in, 

trained them, and sent them back out again. And so, what 

happened was you had a corrupt police force. You take a 

few people away and train them, they come back; two or 

three days, and they’re really good policemen. And then 

somebody would get them under pressure and say, “This 

is part of the deal. We’re here to tax the locals,” and so on, 

and they’d become corrupted. So, when we rekindled the 

police force, we didn’t have the power to vet everybody. 

It just wasn’t possible. What we were able to do was take 

them away as groups of people and train them all at the 

same time and do an element of vetting in the training 

process. So, if the officer in charge was as corrupt as hell, 

then you could send him out and put someone else in. Not, 

to answer you, a roaring success, but better than doing it as 

a drip feed. And, really, with that level of corruption they 

have, the best thing to have done would have been to sort 

of pick a bunch of Pashtuns and chuck them in the Hazara 

area and to bring in a bunch of Hazarans into the Pashtun 

areas, but that might have caused a whole lot of different 

problems. So, you had to deal with what you had. I think 

they’re getting there, but corruption is rife in that part of 

the world. It’s an economically broken country, see? In a 

failed state of that nature, corruption is always there, and 

narcotics doesn’t help, either.

So, the success of the army was they came in; they had to do 

some tests; they were vetted; they were trained; they went 

out. The officers had to take reading and writing tests and 

some military skills tests. We didn’t have that luxury with the 

police.

DR. HUGHES: We talked about the inauguration. What about the 

parliamentary elections? What was the role of the 

Coalition forces and, in particular, your role?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: My role in it was to coordinate, with NATO and the UN and 

the Joint Elections Management Body, all of the coordination 

and structures and things that went into the election. 

And we were fortunate because we had the model in the 

presidential elections, and we’d moved on a bit further, so 
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there was a model that we could utilize. We decided that for 

this election, it had to be an Afghan lead everywhere, and we 

didn’t want NATO or Coalition forces involved in the front 

line of security, which was quite a stretch, but it was the right 

thing to have done. It meant that people felt good about the 

elections in an Afghan way. I wasn’t there for the elections 

because I needed to come here. So, my successor came out 

in the August time frame, and then he did the rest. But I had 

done all the setting up, so we had all the structures in place. 

We had done rehearsals. It was all basically ready to go. The 

next phase they were going to go through was this sort of 

communication tests and reactions to various things and so 

on. And in that was just another series of tortuous meetings, 

but important.

We had to go through the poll sheets. I hope you’ve seen 

the poll sheets—books and books and books of people’s 

names. It’s very interesting. You have to look at it to see 

the complexity of the elections. President Karzai was 

offered various different electoral processes he could use. 

We would have loved him to have used some simple, easy 

system, but we came up with a convoluted process—which 

I can’t remember what it was called now—whereby you 

had a booklet with everyone’s photographs and names; 

but as only 20 percent of the country can read, that was a 

problem, so they all had to have a symbol that identified 

what they stood for. So, we then had to find hundreds of 

symbols that would separate them from each other. And 

then, the process was that they went in and had to cross 

one box in this great bible that they were given. In Kabul, 

you may have had a hundred people for one seat. So, quite 

a convoluted effort.

We had to go through all of that and work out what the 

logistics were of getting all that stuff out; how many 

airplanes we needed to fly around police; how you’re 

going to collect it; how you’re going to guard it; where 

you’re going to count it; how you’re going to protect the 

counting houses; how you’re going to prevent the Taliban 

from interfering with the process; how you’re going to 

prevent the locals from interfering with the process; how 

do we know where corrupt politicians are; and how are 

we going to get out in the outlying places that, actually, 

none of us had ever been to before? There were parts of 

Afghanistan where no American or European had been, 

probably, for a hundred years. All very complicated, but, 

actually, it all seemed to go on extremely well. So, it really 

was just a massive coordination process. As one of the 

grown-ups, I was there to make sure that it all happened. 

I had to work closely with the two-star at NATO to make 

sure that happened.

DR. HUGHES: I’d be very interested in your perspective on how the 

different forces that ended up there— 
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MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: A single, nontransferable vote. That was the SNTV. That’s 

what it was called. That was the election process. But the 

good thing was lots of people wanted to be members of 

parliament, which was great.

There was a vetting process I ought to talk about, which 

is where the illegal armed groups came in—because this 

is all intermingled. I decided, along with some of my 

Afghan colleagues, that we had to do something about 

the amount of groups that were armed and roaming the 

countryside. You could call them ... they were sort of 

second-tier warlord people, and they were extracting 

fines from people and just generally misbehaving and 

causing lawlessness. And so, we had to come up with a 

process whereby we could disarm these guys and make it 

a legal issue that anyone associated with an illegal armed 

group could not put themselves up for election to be a 

member of parliament and, by tying the two together, 

get the leverage we required to actually start disarming 

some of these groups. This was DIAG, the disarmament 

of illegally armed groups. And then there was a—you 

hand over a weapon, and you got some money for your 

weapon. You didn’t actually get money for your weapon. 

You got a package, which was not money for the weapon, 

but you know what I mean. It couldn’t be seen to be one. 

It had to be something slightly different. And so, the 

vetting of the candidate process was based around the 

intelligence we could all collect. We said who we thought 

the people were who were commanding these illegal 

armed groups and who were the members of the illegal 

armed groups—almost impossible to tell. And then we 

had a process whereby they would put their names in. 

The names would then be vetted by the international 

community and by the Afghan security services. We 

again came up with a list, and then it would come to a 

group I sat on, which was run by the deputy president 

and at the ministerial level, which would then decide 

what sanctions we would apply to each of them, or what 

notice we would give them. Sometimes, it was only going 

to them and saying, “You’re not becoming a member of 

parliament unless all your people turn up tomorrow at 

this point”; and we would send out a bunch of UN people 

who would then monitor the disarmament. And if they 

didn’t meet it, then their name got pulled.

So, how successful was it? Well, we got in a lot of weapons. 

How many nasties did we stop becoming members of 

parliament? Not many. Not many. One or two. But that was 

the theoretical process.

DR. MUNDEY: I started to ask you about the relationship between 

the different forces that were there. Most significantly, 

what was your perspective on how the U.S. and British 

got along?
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Building the Command

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: We always get on well, but it wasn’t really a U.K.-U.S. 

relationship out there. I had a number of British officers who 

worked in CFC-A, and we were just embedded officers doing 

American jobs in an American headquarters and providing 

a different viewpoint. And so, in terms of the headquarters 

and how that worked, very well. We had people in key posts. 

I was the deputy commander. I had the person who was the 

chief plans officer. I had the person who was in charge of 

helping me do the DDR. He was one of mine, and then did 

the DIAG, disarming the illegal armed groups. That worked 

pretty well, and we were able to give a different perspective 

to, sometimes, the American view. You know, I think at 

that stage people were still pretty kinetic in their thought 

processes, and we tended to be less kinetic in our thought 

processes. So, it was a good match. The guy who drew up the 

campaign plan was somebody—if you are allowed to go to 

the U.K. to meet these people, you should do so—was a guy 

called George Norton. He was one of the plans officers.

In terms of the relationship, the Brits actually were in Mazar-e 

Sharif in the north and in Meymaneh in the north. And so, in 

terms of how much do we get to see them? I would go to see 

them as the ... I wasn’t actually nominally the senior British 

officer, because there was a colonel who had that title, but I 

would go up there and see them. We had our headquarters 

in Camp Souter—another historic name—in Kabul, where 

we had our sort of logistics hub. The main relationship was 

actually between CFC-Alpha and the NATO headquarters. 

That was the interface that I worked, and it wasn’t always 

good.

DR. HUGHES: How so?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Well, you’ve heard the expression “European cheese-eating 

surrender monkeys” [laughs]? So, we did have some work to 

do to try to persuade some of my colleagues in CFC-Alpha 

that, actually, there was a place for NATO, and NATO had a 

role to play. We had this transition process we were running 

through, so it was a counterclockwise process where when 

I arrived, the north and Kabul were NATO, and then we 

were going to do the west and south, and then east. And 

so, we had to get closer into NATO. I think General David 

[Barno] hadn’t had terribly good relations with the NATO 

commander. We then had the Turks that came out, and that 

worked much better, because there’s quite a lot of Brits in 

the Turkish headquarters. They were perfectly cordial to 

each other, but it was surprising that whenever there was a 

meeting, David Barno was always somewhere else. So, I sort of 

worked that relationship. I got along pretty well with General 

[Jean-Louis] Py—a very nice bloke. So, I sort of worked that 

interface. I worked with the senior military representative, 

who was Mr. [Hikmet] Çetin. He had been the Turkish 

foreign minister, and he came out as a senior representative. 

And so, a bit of delicate politics that went between us. But we 
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operated in different areas. We didn’t have to tread on each 

other’s toes, so we didn’t tread on each other’s toes. So, it was 

almost like two independent operations within one country, 

with coordination being geographic, rather than actually 

a cross-military effort. And, clearly, as they swept around 

the country, we had to improve that, which we did, and we 

had to meet up with the two deputy commanders—and I 

think they’ve got about seven deputy commanders now in 

NATO. In those days, there were just two, and I picked up 

with them—the chief of staff and myself. We worked hard 

to make sure that, at each interface, there was a connection, 

and people met up once a week and discussed issues of 

importance.

The other area we worked together was at the Provincial 

Reconstruction Team Executive Steering Committee, 

which nominally David Barno chaired with [Afghan 

Minister of Interior] Ali Jalali, and the NATO commander 

was sort of co-equal. I found myself chairing all but two, I 

think, in the whole nine months I was there. So, I basically 

did that coordination, which let David Barno then do 

other things. So, that was where quite a lot of this work 

[was done], where issues were raised on the table. It’s 

where the NGOs came in with all those sort of statutory 

complaints, and the tree huggers and peaceniks that were 

out there. You have a nice meeting like this, and you’d 

have to listen to each one in turn and note it, and “Thank 

you very much.” But it worked because then they all felt 

better because they had their say and felt that somebody at 

least partially listened to them. That meant that you had, 

I think, government, NATO, CFC-Alpha, and NGOs, and 

all the lead nations were there, so that all the ambassadors 

of those nations were contributing. So, it was quite a good 

get-together.

DR. HUGHES: Obviously, there was an interface for the elections, but 

relations with the UN and the UN presence there?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: They were pretty good. The UN, basically, were in charge 

of the elections in terms of the process and so on, and we 

were in charge of making sure that the security worked. But, 

actually, they needed quite a lot of help with [it] across the 

board. I got along very well with Filippo Grandi, who was 

the deputy, who, I think, went to Palestine afterward, and 

Jean Arnault, who was the senior representative. They were 

very good, but I think that the problem that the UN had in 

Afghanistan was that they haven’t given someone to Karzai 

who can be Karzai’s mentor. So, although that’s a bit of a 

diversion from what we’re talking about, I think that’s one 

of the missing links, is that Karzai hasn’t got a grown-up, 

particularly after Khalilzad left, that he could turn to, who 

could give him advice. There was advice between the two 

of them, and it was done in a way that was subtle, but that 

doesn’t exist, sadly, and it still doesn’t exist. I think that’s 
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Building the Command

one of the problems, is persuading Karzai to do the difficult 

things, and he does need more mentoring.

So, relations at the UN were pretty good. We did a lot of 

work with them in terms of threat maps and risk taking, 

making them understand that you can’t just paint a province 

red because probably 90 percent of that province isn’t red: 

“That bit’s red, but the rest might not be”; and by doing 

that, enable them to get out in the country and actually 

start to do things. I think that’s changed a bit because I 

don’t think people are taking as many risks as they were 

then. We basically decided that a risk-taking process is the 

way to go, and until we had people killed—which we’ve had 

a couple of contractors killed—that worked pretty well. But 

the security part, it’s quite difficult, but we worked a process 

that enabled them to get out. So, I would say, generally, a 

pretty good relationship, particularly on the election side. 

It was very, very close.

DR. HUGHES: And probably one of the biggest—how were relations 

between the Coalition forces and the Afghanis?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Good, I’d say. We had the occasional misunderstanding, 

which you should expect. Occasionally, one of us was 

summoned and we would be told off. It worked pretty 

well.

I don’t know whether anyone explained the structure, but 

OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom], or CFC-Alpha, 

did not have command of some of the black forces over 

there—generally, a section of people who were doing 

things independent from what we were doing. Most of the 

trouble tended to arise from that because the coordination 

wasn’t there, because they’re very secretive and don’t want 

anyone to know what they were doing. So, you’d spend 

a long time sorting an area out, spending a bit of CERP 

[Commander’s Emergency Response Program] money to 

get people to become compliant and so on, and the next 

night, you find that two houses had their doors blown 

in and the people were arrested and taken away, which 

you didn’t know anything about, and it would then take 

another two or three months to recover from that. It was 

those sorts of things that got us in trouble. But, generally 

speaking, I thought it was pretty good. I made a lot of 

friends in the Afghan government. They, nearly all, are 

really keen to get it right, for the right reasons.

DR. HUGHES: Good. You saw the transition from General Barno to 

General [Lt. Gen. Karl W.] Eikenberry. Could you describe 

that transition? 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: I find it very difficult, to be honest.

DR. HUGHES: Were there changes in mission policy?
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DR. MUNDEY: Yes. I was just saying maybe there’re just some general 

comments that can be made about, maybe, shifts in 

priorities? Kind of just in terms of what were the most 

important things, issues that he was dealing with, which 

might have been different than General Barno?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: I think I’ll characterize it this way. I think General Barno 

had a good understanding of what was required in terms of 

a counterinsurgency campaign and understood we needed 

to have better traction. You had to have all these other 

things. That’s why this campaign plan was so important, 

and why the interagency process is so important, and why 

the coordination between the ambassador and Barno. 

Why, Barno actually moved to live in the embassy, so 

that he was close to Khalilzad and spent a lot of time with 

Khalilzad, and he realized that Khalilzad was pretty much 

the center of gravity in terms of Karzai’s world because 

they spoke on a regular basis. So, in terms of us having 

a properly coordinated country plan, in U.S. terms, that 

was very, very important for the cohesion that brought 

that plan together.

And it enabled me to have a bit more time to tie the other bits 

of string together and get on across the other strands that the 

campaign plan coordinated. We haven’t spoken about some 

of the things that were in there, like border security zones. 

I’ll use that as an example of where things changed. We’d all 

decided—and, in fact, it was [Under Secretary of Defense 

for Policy] Doug Feith, I think, who really got the grip of 

this one—that you had to find some form of getting income 

into the government because there wasn’t any government 

income, apart from the stuff we were paying them ourselves. 

There wasn’t any taxing system or anything. One obvious 

way of doing it was to secure the borders and put customs 

in place, and then do the usual customs activity—obvious, 

really, but all the customs officials are corrupt; the border 

wasn’t secure; there were bribes around; all sorts of things. 

So, we decided we would—I decided—we would run an 

experiment, and David Barno was quite happy with that and 

gave me the autonomy to do it. The money came from this 

committee to do what I needed to do. It had to be done very 

deliberately.

So, we took a bunch of border police. We trained them 

specifically for the mission. We equipped them for the 

mission. We took them out to the border crossing near Herat 

called Islam Qalah, where Ismail Khan had been the lord and 

master of his particular part of the empire, and he ran a nice 

little scam out there. So, every lorry coming through from 

Iran dropped fuel into a large underground tank, which was 

their custom dues to him, personally. And then there were 

bazaars and things in the sort of zone between the theoretical 

part where Iran stopped and a bit where Afghanistan started. 

There were easy ways around customs. So, it’s not, I mean, an 
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Building the Command

outrageous thing. It’s terribly simple. We replaced the border 

guards with trained border guards and took those border 

guards back to be trained and placed somewhere else. The 

border guards we put on were from a different tribe and 

ethnic background, so they did not have any loyalty to any of 

the warlords that lived in that area and, therefore, were more 

difficult to corrupt. We put the fences back up. We emptied 

the oil tank and got rid of it. We closed the bazaars, and 

then I made them drive through the customs station. Money 

started coming in, and it turned around pretty quickly. In 

two months, or maybe three months, of this experiment, we 

had a pretty good, something like 100 percent, increase in 

customs revenues, and this was without actually making any 

real effort. So, as far as I was concerned, it demonstrated that 

you could do something relatively simply at relatively light 

cost. We had already been able to rebuild all these customs 

places, anyway. It was a matter, then, of just going around the 

country and doing one at a time. It would take time to do it, 

but it seemed the obvious thing to do.

When General Eikenberry came in, he looked at the campaign 

plan, and he said, “That is ridiculous. That is like the Soviet 

Five-Year Plan. We won’t have any of that.” So, he got rid of 

a whole lot of strands of this, and so it came down, I think, 

to three or four strands that he would follow. The things that 

dropped off were things like the border security zone, which 

we had funding for. Counternarcotics fell off, and a whole 

lot of other things. So, the difference was that David Barno 

and I were able to multitask because he would do a bunch of 

things and I would do a bunch of things ... although I told 

him what I was doing, and he would say, “No, a bit more of 

that; a bit less of that.” 

So, I found it quite a different atmosphere. I think, in round 

terms, a counterinsurgency operation, which can only be 

conducted across all these lines of government power, or 

instruments of government power, was no longer being 

conducted in that fashion. The coordination disappeared 

because the commander no longer lived in the embassy 

and therefore was not in the ambassador’s pocket. I didn’t 

meet the new ambassador, so I don’t know anything about 

the ambassador, but I guess that the new ambassador, I’m 

told, was told that he was sent there to regularize Kabul 

and make it more like a normal station. It was light years 

from a normal station, but that was what he was told to 

do, and I think he’s succeeded in doing that, which meant 

that the military was not part of his organization. So, the 

interagency planning help and everything else all came 

back to CFC-Alpha and ceased. A lot of the structures that 

had been there [to] keep the coordination of all those other 

strands that came together were disassembled, which meant 

that there was uncoordinated activity going on, and some 

activity just stopped. To be honest, if I hadn’t been there for 

a large period of that time, just chasing them and making 
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sure that these things were moving, then people wouldn’t do 

them without the coordinating mechanism. I was trying to 

motivate the other agencies and just didn’t have the energy 

to do it without my staff working with them. 

DR. HUGHES: So, when did you leave Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: August ’05.

DR. HUGHES: Did you give any advice to your successor? 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Oh, yes. I gave him a handover. He came out for the first few 

days, and we had a good chat and talked it through. He had a 

very clear-cut mission which he concentrated on, which was 

getting the elections sorted out, and then the inauguration 

of the new parliament and so on. So, he concentrated on that 

as a package and, actually, because he hadn’t needed to start 

things like Program Tachim-e Solh and DIAG and so on, they 

were not top of his list. So, you know, he had a clear, simple 

task, a single task, as opposed to lots of multiple things to do, 

I think.

DR. HUGHES: What would you characterize as your greatest achievements 

in the time you were there?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: I don’t know. I was kind of proud of the reconciliation 

program because that started with a clean sheet of paper, 

with no advice from anyone, but it worked. I think I set the 

conditions for successful elections. I didn’t actually do the 

elections, but in terms of all these other strands of activity that 

need to be coordinated in order to get militias disarmed and 

vet the candidates and lots of stuff—that was quite a complex 

set of interactions, and I’m quite pleased that it all seemed to 

work quite well. I was pretty pleased with the border security 

zone. I was very sad it didn’t carry on. Those are sort of the 

lumps of big things that I think I did that helped. I was pretty 

pleased that the counternarcotics structures that I suggested 

are now being created and are now endorsed and happening. 

That should actually start to deliver some real effect.

DR. HUGHES: Were there particular challenges you remember that, you 

know— 

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Everything is a challenge in Afghanistan. I think that the 

challenge is you’ve got government ministers who don’t 

really know what it is they ought to be doing because they’ve 

never been a government minister before—and I’ve never 

been a government minister before. They didn’t have terribly 

good advice. And they really did need to be told to do things. 

So, it was a subtlety of talking to them on a regular basis 

and making sure that what they did became their own idea, 

and they delivered it. You actually did need to go there and 

sow seeds and then come back and ask him how the seed 

was growing, without keeping looking in on it. You had to 
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do that with all the ministries. I didn’t mind that. But that, 

I think, was really probably the biggest challenge. It’s a very 

unsophisticated group, some of whom were importees. They 

lived abroad for thirty years. They weren’t really seen as 

Afghans by Afghans. They seemed to be Americans coming 

back in who spoke Dari, and getting them to be Afghan and 

thinking in Afghan ways.

Stopping some of the worst suggestions from some of the 

agencies was a challenge. There was a company brought in 

to help Karzai put his message out, and after about three 

weeks, I read these messages. I said, “There’s absolutely no 

way anyone in this country is thinking this way.” It was 

structured in a sort of European-American fashion, you 

know? Well, they’re not that sophisticated. They haven’t 

had a government for thirty years, so they have no idea of 

it. So, you’re controlling those sorts of things, which were 

only going to get us a bad name, because then the rest of 

the world would see it as if we were pulling their strings 

completely—but you don’t have to tell them that and make 

it obvious that we were. So, it was making people be aware 

that everything had to have an Afghan face. You couldn’t do 

it all for them. They wouldn’t do things as well as we would, 

but you take the Lawrence [of Arabia] adage: they had to do 

it for themselves and do it in the way that they felt satisfied 

with. I tried it so as not to ladle Jeffersonian democracy ideas 

on a country that hasn’t got a hope of even saying really what 

“democracy” means—all those sort of things that you just 

spent your time just generally going around, and slowly, 

slowly catch your monkey. Yes, it was fun.

DR. HUGHES: Lisa, do you have any questions you were wanting to ask at 

this point?

DR. MUNDEY: No, I think we were very comprehensive in that. I think 

that the one last question that we have here because it’s 

always elicited some very interesting stories: Did you have 

a funny story when you were in Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: No, I didn’t particularly think so. Obviously, I mean, a lot of 

things happened. Airplanes break down, and you get to spend 

nights in odd places. So, all sorts of odd things happened, but 

because, you know, I was a boring staff officer, I spent all my 

time sitting in Kabul with not much of any great amusement 

happening. I can’t think of any, in particular. When I look, 

there are some things I found peculiar, but not amusing. 

DR. HUGHES: Is there anything we should have asked you? Did we miss 

something big?

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: You asked me some about something amusing—SecDef 

VTCs [video teleconferences]. This was a real cultural shock 

for me. David Barno had to give a VTC with the SecDef at 

first, every week, and then gradually we’d do it every other 
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Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

week. And you should see these guys—and they’re great men, 

grown up, intelligent, sensible, but like jellies when it came to 

going in front of the SecDef. But the worst thing was that it 

took my staff away for about a week at a time. So, when it was 

once a week, the staff were doing nothing else but preparing 

the VTCs for the SecDef, and I don’t think anyone in the 

U.S. had any idea of the staff effort required for what was 

basically a thirty-minute VTC. One of these presentations 

went through thirty-five different versions, and you just think 

of just the quantity of manpower used up to create that—just 

frightening. And I suppose the other culture shock is the fact 

that the secretary of defense was commanding, personally, 

the ground commander. Although General [John J.] Abizaid 

sat in on these VTCs, it was definitely the SecDef ’s VTC, 

which was sort of a longer screwdriver than I’d ever seen 

before.

DR. HUGHES: Well, okay. Well, that’s all the questions I have. Thank you 

very much, sir. I appreciate not only the interview, but 

what you’ve done. Thank you.

MAJ. GEN. GILCHRIST: Well, I enjoyed it. 

Col. David W. Lamm (USA, Ret.) served under Lt. Gen. David W. Barno as Chief of Staff, 

Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, from July 2004 until July 2005. He was interviewed in the Pentagon by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military History 

on 14 March 2007. Colonel Lamm begins the interview with a discussion of his previous experiences at U.S. Army Central Command-Kuwait and as an instructor at the National War 

College, as well as his acquaintance with General Barno before his assignment to Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan. He discusses his arrival in theater and transition with his 

predecessor, Col. Thomas J. Snukis, and his initial impressions of the command’s insufficiently manned, underresourced, and overworked staff, as well as improvements that occurred 

during his tour, including the stabilization of personnel, the securing of additional funding 

and resources, and improved communications capabilities. Colonel Lamm explains the command’s organizational relationships with Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, Combined Joint Task Force-76, the U.S. Embassy, and the Afghan National Government, as well 

as General Barno’s personal interaction and strategies for dealing with these organizations. 

The interview concludes with Colonel Lamm’s assessments of the command’s accomplishments during his tour and his comments on changes after General Barno’s replacement by 

Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the fourteenth of 

March 2007, and I’m interviewing Col. David Lamm 

(U.S. Army, Ret.) about his tour of duty as the chief 

of staff of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan 

[CFC-A]. Colonel Lamm is currently working in the 

Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy 

Director of Information ... 
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COL. LAMM: Information Operations and Strategic Studies. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Thank you, sir. First of all, are you sitting voluntarily 

for this interview? 

COL. LAMM: Yes, I am. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And do you have any objections with Army or 

other researchers using this material as long as you’re 

cited correctly? 

COL. LAMM: No. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Thank you, sir. You were at the National War 

College before you went to Afghanistan, correct? 

COL. LAMM: That’s correct. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Tell me about that transition. How did you 

find out that you were going to be asked to go over to 

Afghanistan to CFC-Alpha? 

COL. LAMM: Basically what happened was General [Lt. Gen. David W.] 

Barno was looking for a chief of staff. He had a couple guys 

on the plate. At the time, he was told that the position of 

chief of staff in Afghanistan didn’t require a former brigade 

commander. That frustrated him a bit, and so he was back in 

the building and had run into, in fact, the Army IG [inspector 

general], which was General [Lt. Gen.] Paul T. Mikolashek at 

the time, and I had worked for Mikolashek in Afghanistan 

a little bit. But my previous tour, before coming back to the 

National War College, I was the ARCENT-Kuwait [U.S. 

Army Central Command-Kuwait] commander forward, 

so I had a lot of experience in the region. We had moved a 

lot of troops up into Afghanistan, and as far as Mikolashek 

was concerned, my tour of duty over at the National War 

College, in his view, was sort of like “He’s wasting his time 

over there. He really needs to be out, doing Afghanistan.” 

So, basically what I heard was Barno got my name from 

General Mikolashek and then called me, had the aide call 

me, and said to come over and talk to General Barno. I came 

in, sat down, and he asked me why I wanted to be his chief of 

staff. I said, “Well, that’s news to me [laughs]. I really don’t. 

I’ve got a great job at the National War College.” But then 

we just discussed what he needed to do—the size of the 

headquarters, the right kinds of people, how he would try 

to get around the problems of hearing this former brigade 

commander stuff, not enough SAMS [School of Advanced 

Military Studies] graduates in the -5 and the -3 shop [staff 

sections for plans and operations, respectively]; then, 

basically, how we would look at the counterinsurgency and 

go about that business, and the interagency lash-ups, which 

dovetailed nicely with what I was teaching at the National 

War College, which was basically the core courses of strategy, 
Colonel Lamm in his office at Camp Eggers, Kabul, 9 June 2005

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Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

interagency coordination, and then counterinsurgency stuff. 

So, it tended to work. We had that discussion for about an 

hour and he said—well, I said, “Look. Let me go home and 

talk to my wife, and I’ll give you an answer tomorrow.” So, I 

went home. The wife said, “Yeah, go away for a year. It’s not 

a big problem” [laughs]. It turned out to be a little longer 

than a year, but it wasn’t a big issue. So, I gave him a call, 

and I think it was in May, and then in June I was down at 

CRC [Continental U.S. Replacement Center] and off and 

running. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You’d had a little bit of experience previously 

with General Barno, had you not? 

COL. LAMM: No. Our experience was in a common culture. We were both 

in the 82d Airborne Division on or about the same times. I 

was an ops officer in the 1st of the 504th, and then later in 

the 504th, I was the brigade -3—so, battalion and brigade -3. 

He was down the street, roughly the same time, in another 

unit, so you know of each other, but you didn’t work for each 

other. He once mentioned to me, a few months after being in 

the job, that the common culture’s very important. You start 

out on the same sheet of music about how you approach 
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problems. So, the only time we were also in the same place at 

the same time was in 1983. He was with the Ranger Regiment 

in Grenada, and I was with the 2d of the 325th. I was in the 

lead assault battalion, so we linked up very early with the 

Rangers. So, serendipity and at the same place at the same 

time, but not working together. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, you didn’t have an established professional or personal 

relationship with him? 

COL. LAMM: None. 

DR. KOONTZ: When you’re walking in the hallway, you would not have 

recognized each other? 

COL. LAMM: Well, no. I would say no, probably not. If you’re in the 82d 

and you’re walking by and you see him, you knew he was a 

battalion commander down in, you know, the 2d Brigade or 

3d Brigade, but that’s about it. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. At this time when you’re at the National War College 

and General Mikolashek offers your name as probably a 

good choice as chief of staff, what was your knowledge of 

what CFC-Alpha was doing at that time? How aware were 

you of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan? 

COL. LAMM: I was fairly well aware of what was going on inside of 

Afghanistan. I had sent a few of my officers, as General 

Mikolashek came in to move forward, to Third Army, to 

Doha, right after 9/11. They got there around Thanksgiving 

time. Of course, by this time, we had moved a lot of stuff 

into Afghanistan, and by the end of Thanksgiving, early 

Christmas—just before Christmas—we already had guys 

who were rolling into Kabul. So, you know, I was familiar 

with what had happened there: the Bonn process, the 

constitutional jirga, trying to set up the interagency 

pieces. I also had a deskmate across the hall from me, 

Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who had been the ambassador 

in Afghanistan at the same time I was in Kuwait moving 

military forces to keep people up, and I knew Crocker from 

before. He was in Kuwait as an ambassador. So, I was pretty 

in tune with what was going on in the ground from the 

macro, strategic perspective. I did not know about aegis of 

this headquarters being set up, other than they were trying 

to establish a POL-MIL [political-military] headquarters 

to sort of bridge the gap between the U.S. strategic goals 

and the operational military goals, and one of the findings, 

evidently at CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command], was 

that the [Combined Joint] Task Force-76 [CJTF-76] down 

at Bagram—Bagram was just too far away to do close, tight 

interagency coordination with the U.S. Embassy. So, I was 

aware that there was a requirement to do that and that this 

new headquarters, nascent headquarters, might be a place 

that that could get done. 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

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DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, General Mikolashek puts your name in the 

hat. You have an interview with General Barno, and you 

mentioned some of the things that you talked about in 

that hour-long interview that you had, and then your wife 

gives you your hat and kicks you out the door. What kind 

of preparations did you undertake or undergo before you 

got on the plane and left? 

COL. LAMM: Well, the formal preparation was the CRC, which basically 

by this time, the CRC group at [Fort] Benning—they were 

at the common-denominator level of actually getting people 

ready to go to Iraq, so what was talked about Afghanistan 

was an afterthought. So, my formal preparation to get 

ready to go to Afghanistan consisted of going back to the 

War College real quickly, talking to my buddies, my fellow 

professors, and getting some books to read: Christina 

Lamb’s book, The Sewing Circles of Herat, which was a 

contemporary book that was out; the other book that was 

indispensable was Dupree’s A History of Afghanistan; and 

then The Great Game, another book that was out; and then 

from a counterinsurgency perspective, Lewis Sorley’s book 

had just come out, A Better War; and then if you’re in the 

counterinsurgency business, Lawrence of Arabia is always 

good to read. So, you know, I was able to cram that in as best 

I could. I had another good asset at the War College, and that 

was a guy by the name of Mike Parmly. He’s now, I think, our 

State Department representative in Cuba, but Mike Parmly 

was teaching a course on Afghanistan. He had been there as 

a State Department person, so he offered me a perspective 

on how the embassy was working and those sorts of “eaches” 

and interagency lash-ups, or the lack thereof at this time, as 

he would have said. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, you’re doing this academic training. You’re 

canvassing your colleagues and you’re doing your reading 

up. Did you have any contact with anybody on the ground 

at CFC-Alpha at this time? 

COL. LAMM: I picked up the phone and called Scott [actually Col. Thomas 

J.] Snukis. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And he is your predecessor. 

COL. LAMM: Yeah, he was the chief of staff at the time. They had moved a 

core of about sixty people from the air defense unit of the 25th 

Infantry Division [ID] to sort of flesh out the headquarters, 

and he was robbing Peter to pay Paul. He had pulled some 

guys in those days from the Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan, OMC-A. He himself—his billet—he was 

supposed to be the chief of OMC-A, but they moved that, 

robbed that billet, and pulled him over, and he had about 

six guys. You mentioned [Col. Tucker B.] Mansager—Barno, 

Snukis, and they very quickly had a ramp-up and got a handle 

on things as they were moving. So, they had put together a 
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skeleton staff. They had really begun getting all the facilities 

in pretty good order—you know, the land and the buildings 

and so on and so forth. So, it was working along pretty well. 

It was a rotational staff, though—lots of people getting ready 

to leave, most of them. Mansager, Snukis, already out the 

door, and then we were faced with this interservice, IRR 

[Individual Ready Replacement] sort of hybrid headquarters 

where folks were sort of coming and going every three to 

four months, and that’s one of the things we had to address 

real quick—to get the manning document right and go from 

there. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You’ve mentioned several things, and we’re going 

to come back to those a little bit later. You’re on the phone 

with Colonel Snukis. Did he give you any kind of pointers 

or advice or guidance or warnings—you know, anything 

specific that you should—?

COL. LAMM: No, just get here as quick as I could [laughs]. 

DR. KOONTZ: He struck me as being a very practical type. 

COL. LAMM: Yeah: “Get here as fast as you can!” You know: “You’ll 

learn all the theory on the ground,” you know, the practical 

advice and theoretical. And he, as well, had a similar career 

background that I did. I mean, he was in a light infantry unit 

and so on and so forth. He may have known Barno for some 

time before. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let’s get you on the plane. How did you get to 

Afghanistan? 

COL. LAMM: Well, I fly down to Fort Benning. You do CRC for two weeks, 

come back up. We went from Benning to Baltimore, which 

was nice because I got to spend the weekend with my family 

here, and then hopped on the plane in Baltimore, flew in to 

not Mazar-e Sharif but into ... we’re only about two hundred 

miles from the Chinese border. It’s the rotational air base in 

Kyrgyzstan. 

DR. KOONTZ: Was it Manas? 

COL. LAMM: Manas, exactly right. And then from Manas, a C–17 into 

Bagram. Then, of course, you’re the chief of staff and 

Snukis wants to get out of there as fast as he can, so there’s 

a helicopter waiting for him at Bagram, and they fly you the 

twenty minutes down to Kabul. 

DR. KOONTZ: I should have asked you this before we got you on 

the airplane. You mentioned that while you were at 

CRC, Afghanistan was kind of ... I think you said, “an 

afterthought” was your exact description. 

COL. LAMM: Yeah. The common denominator was Iraq. 
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124

DR. KOONTZ: Can you give me just sort of an example of how that 

worked? 

COL. LAMM: Yeah. For instance, the security situation in Kabul is a lot 

different than the Green Zone in Baghdad, so in fact, this 

is the chief—I had to mull through this. I mean, there were 

immediate reaction drills for everyone to go through on 

what happens when you hit an IED [improvised explosive 

device], and, in fact, we hadn’t had an IED in Afghanistan 

in a long time. All the staff officers—somebody decided 

that everybody going over there, staff officers, no matter 

where you’re working, would have to clear an obstacle 

with a grappling hook and throw it over the barbed wire 

and pull the barbed wire away. I mean, it was a commondenominator Army training that was covering all the bases 

for all the soldiers, private through O-6 [colonel], no matter 

where they were going to work. You know, the Army’s a big 

bureaucracy, and you had to appreciate the way they get 

their people: “Hey, we didn’t have this. This guy got hurt 

because he didn’t know that.” But, I mean, they did a great 

job of doing the med records, getting all your uniforms 

squared away, getting your med records all squared away, 

the finances and so on and so forth, so there were some 

admin things they also did. But the training—and my guys 

complained about the training coming into Afghanistan, 

and then we had some issues we can get into later on about 

how soldiers were trained to drive in Iraq, but if they came 

to Afghanistan, they raced down the street. It was a whole 

different way of getting about town, between Baghdad 

and Kabul. So, good Army training—just the common 

denominator and the coin of the realm at the time, and 

probably still is—at CRC is the Iraq theater.

DR. KOONTZ: On top of just the common-denominator Army training, as 

you described it, did you have any kind of cultural training 

or any kind of preparation for being in Afghanistan itself 

or interacting with the Afghan people? 

COL. LAMM: No. Not through this process. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Colonel Snukis thoughtfully sends that helo out 

for you, picks you up, takes you into CFC-Alpha. You’re 

there. What happens? How do you get acclimated? 

COL. LAMM: The first thing you do is you go to bed for about five hours 

or so you get a good night’s sleep, then I met with Snukis 

the next day. Being sort of the same mindset that you don’t 

need two chiefs around at the same time, we both agreed 

it would be a real short overlap. He had already worked 

out with the boss, which was a good idea, to take a sort 

of an inspection tour around the country, not to look at 

facilities or procedures in any such way, but rather to look 

at the overall counterinsurgency strategy that we were 

working on: “Is it getting implemented? PRTs [provincial 
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reconstruction teams]?” and so on and so forth. It moved 

from regional control and pushing soldiers out, as opposed 

to having them living in small castle areas—you know, 

highly secured areas. So, he did that tour for about two 

weeks—and it just takes you that long to catch airplanes 

and fly around the country—but he visited most of the 

country, and the feedback he gave me was “Yeah, you 

know, by and large, things are coming along. There’s a lot 

of work to do.” He reported to the boss the findings, so we 

were fairly confident that things were going the way we 

wanted them to. It was June, so we were in the middle of 

the Taliban campaign season, if you want to call it that, but 

if I remember, in 2004, in June and then early July, I mean, 

there wasn’t much violence. He really could get around. It 

wasn’t too much of a problem. 

So, while he did that, I do what most chiefs do. I had the 

secretary of the General Staff and the assistant chief of staff 

type up a calendar, and then the first thing you do, you go 

in to see General Barno to get his commander’s guidance. 

He’s got a reputation of being very, very hard to work for. 

I found he was pretty easy to work for, as long as you were 

willing to take the initiative and get things rolling. So, I met 

with him. He laid out what his intent was; what he wanted 

to do; what he wanted in the chief; what we were going to 

have to do with personnel in the headquarters; you know, 

some of the things that were hurting funding for CERP 

[Commander’s Emergency Response Program] and other 

things; and lashing up very closely with the embassy. Then, 

basically, after getting that guidance from General Barno, 

you just grab the staff up, schedule them one by one, CJ-1 

[staff section for personnel] through CJ-9 [staff section for 

civil-military affairs]. Comptroller is huge; SJA [staff judge 

advocate]; you know, the surgeon, the whole group, one by 

one. And what I did is I went to their place. That way, I could 

walk around, find out where they all worked, see the facilities, 

so as opposed to having to just sit in one—actually, it was the 

defense mechanism to keep from falling asleep because you 

just sit in one room for one day and people are coming to 

you, it’s a little boring, whereas if you’re spending a couple 

hours with some folks, you need to get up and walk to the 

next place and, you know, grab a bite to eat in between. That 

works out better, so that’s what we did. 

DR. KOONTZ: I want to back you up and ask you something about that 

cross-country trip that you had with Colonel Snukis. 

COL. LAMM: Oh, I didn’t take that trip. He went alone, and I was doing all 

this. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, he’s out, and then you’re acclimating yourself 

to staff. You mentioned kind of briefly that initial 

commander’s guidance that General Barno gave you. 

What specifically was he telling you? 
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126

COL. LAMM: Basically, that the purpose of the headquarters was to lash 

up—was really to act as a POL-MIL headquarters at the 

strategic-operational level, not the operational-tactical level. 

And the problem that they had had was that by the senior 

military headquarters being [Combined Joint] Task Force-76 

at Bagram and being a long drive, and at least a thirty-minute 

flight ... that basically being out of the city of Kabul and away 

from the U.S. Embassy, what you do is, you default and you 

begin to focus on operational tactical things, military things, 

and we all saw the role for the headquarters and the solution 

to the insurgency in Afghanistan as a political, economic, 

governance solution as opposed to a kinetic military solution. 

So, on that we all agreed. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, you get your guidance from General Barno. 

Then you mentioned that you went through and met all 

of the people on your staff. Did any of those little staff 

meetings stick out in your mind as something that, you 

know, “This is working really well when I got here” or 

“This is something that needs a lot of work,” once you got 

on the ground? 

COL. LAMM: Well, all of the staff was undermanned—grossly undermanned. In the -3 shop, as an example, for a three-star 

headquarters with these types of operational, strategic responsibilities, they did not have one SAMS planner—not 

one. They were barely able to keep up with current ops to 

the CG’s [commanding general’s] satisfaction. The CG could 

often go to the embassy and hear that something had happened down somewhere else. You got it through ops channels, and vice versa, so that lash-up wasn’t good. There was 

a special office called the EIPG, the Embassy Interagency 

Plans [Planning] Group. Its Air Force colonel—they were 

rotating every four months, I think, every four months. That 

needed to be a longer-range position. We’d gotten ourselves 

a major and moved a couple of them in there, and they were 

there for a minimum of six months, but they were the last 

shop for measuring. As we developed a strategy, they would 

keep track of the measures of effectiveness and the number of things for each of the lines, what we were calling the 

military plan lines of operation, and what the embassy, in a 

mirror-image of that plan, called the lines of action. We’ll go 

over the strategy later, how we built the plan. 

DR. KOONTZ: And you mentioned it was very important for you to meet 

the comptroller. Why was that? 

COL. LAMM: Money’s everything. Resources are everything, and most 

importantly, in this environment, what were the resources 

that we could lift and shift fires on? We had the train and 

equip authority for the Afghan National Army, but no such 

authorities for the Afghan National Police. We were going 

to begin coming up on election period, where securing 

the local population so they could go to polling places, so 
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that we could secure polling places, so we could secure UN 

trainers, was going to be very important. We had to figure 

out a way to make the money a bit more fungible than it 

was. We had to be able to creatively use the resources that we 

were given so that we could impact the entire interagency 

operation in Afghanistan, not just the military operation. 

And, basically, we found a guy later on, about three months 

in, who could do that for us, and then we had great success 

doing that. So, your military comptroller tends to think 

... well, he’s doing military comptroller stuff, you know, 

MIPR-ing [sending by Military Interdepartmental Purchase 

Request] the money, for military units only. I had to figure 

out how we were going to control CERP money. He could 

do that, because that was the Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program, CERP. And then the other piece was 

“Okay, what other money’s in town? What does USAID [U.S. 

Agency for International Development] have? What are they 

working on?” And then, you see, the comptroller wouldn’t 

necessarily—he didn’t know that, so what we had to create 

in the embassy was sort of an interagency resource team. I 

could see that right away, because there’s aid money coming 

in—there are other State Department monies; there’s FMS, 

Foreign Military Sales; there’s USAID—what are all the U.S. 

programs that are coming to bear on Afghanistan, where are 

all those resources, and what do they add up to? And then, 

working with other ambassadors, which Barno did, what are 

the international donors doing? So, you needed all that. If 

the Japanese are doing DDR [disarmament, demobilization, 

and reintegration] and they needed a road built ... you 

know, Saudis and the Japanese consortium may be building 

a road, so Corps of Engineers money’s big. What’s the Corps 

working on? What are the big projects? Because what you 

don’t want to do is usurp money to build a clinic in a village 

and then find out two months later that USAID was going 

to build a hospital there. So, you want to be able to go to 

one place to de-conflict that. It was obvious early on that the 

comptroller shop in the CFC—in fact, we really didn’t have 

a comptroller shop; we had a guy doing money. We built a 

comptroller shop, but then what we had to do was link that 

up with our interagency resource guy at the embassy. 

DR. KOONTZ: As you’re going through members of your staff, was there 

anything that leaped out into your mind, something that 

you wanted to change immediately? 

COL. LAMM: Yeah. We had to solidify the staff principals into one-year 

tours, and we had to stabilize other key members on the staff 

and basically create a manning document that was approved 

by the Joint Staff—you know, the JMD [joint manning 

document]. You know, you’re going to have some money 

coming to you, and now you’ve got to have the people so you 

can implement programs. So, getting the JMD approved—

there were many JMDs out there. Snukis had—I mean, they 

thought they knew what they wanted. They had a document 
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that had about four hundred people on it, and I think one 

had two hundred people on it. So, we had to go through the 

staff: “Okay, what do you really need to work efficiently?” 

And here, you have to watch staffs. You could wind up with 

a huge staff, and then you’d build your own bureaucracy 

that you battle yourself. One manning document called 

for about four hundred, which was eventually approved, 

and basically the way we did that—we weren’t getting any 

traction on getting the document approved, so what we did 

is, we asked the Joint Staff to send the team over to validate 

our joint manning document, and we were very lucky. We 

had an old Marine Corps general who had some experience 

in counterinsurgencies, and then we had General Gary [E.] 

Luck (Ret.), and they were both out of JFCOM [U.S. Joint 

Forces Command]. When I took them around and had 

them go out to the staff, they were like, basically, sort of 

incredulous—I mean: “How are you getting all this work 

done?” I said, “Well, you know, it’s eighteen-hour days, but 

that’s okay. There’s nothing else to do. But we do need the 

document approved so that we can go get one-year rotation 

folks, six-month rotation folks, and we can lock it in.”

What we were doing is we were begging and borrowing 

from everybody, and we needed our own document that was 

approved. Most of that begging and borrowing we had to do 

with Bagram, you know, General [Maj. Gen. Eric T.] Olson, 

25th Infantry Division. In fact, he sent—one of the begs was 

for one of their SAMS graduates, a young major they sent to 

us, who became indispensable very, very rapidly—just the 

one guy. When it came to do with some quick contingency 

planning they had to do, he was very good, so that was it.

Looked at the resources—get at the embassy, get an overview, 

a lay of the land, of all the funding that was coming in, and 

the international pieces, as well, so we could put U.S. dollars 

to work most efficiently, and then we got to operate our 

headquarters. Liaisons with all the different ministries in 

Kabul, and Barno was very liberal about that. [Lt. Gen. Karl 

W.] Eikenberry, when he came in, pulled a bunch of that 

back, but we had liaisons out of the civil-military relations 

shop. They had [a] C-9 in every ministry in the Afghan 

government—women’s rights, women’s issues, schools, 

education; you name it, we had a liaison over there. So, we 

had to lock down the personnel. That was the key. 

DR. KOONTZ: How long did it take to get, for example, that one-year 

rotational basis for your staff principals? 

COL. LAMM: It took us ... from the time I got there until Luck got there, 

it was two months. The document got approved, and then 

what we did, by October, we had gotten approval—yeah, it 

was October, late October—we had gotten approval to pull 

some key staff out of the Army War College, and, basically, 

that piece went like this. We would—in fact, the one I pulled 
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by hand was Col. Mike Chesney. He worked for me before at 

Fort Hood and on the Joint Staff when I was here. I worked 

with him. He was at EUCOM [U.S. European Command]. I 

was on the Joint Staff, and we worked very closely together, 

and he was one of the key guys I was going to need. And 

then there were a couple others—a new comptroller, a new 

public affairs officer—we had looped along in that whole 

information ops realm because the perception part of the 

war was huge, so we wanted to get all that fixed.

So, basically, the deal was, those guys were in the Army War 

College class for a year. We pulled them out at the Christmas 

break. They came to Afghanistan, did a one-year practical 

exercise on the ground with us, and then returned the next 

January to start up with their class, so their families would 

be at the War College up there in Carlisle, which is an idyllic 

place to have a family—I mean, it’s just wonderful—they 

were there two years, so it was a win-win for them and their 

families. For the families, it was win-win. For them, the 

officers, it’s a win-win because the one year in Afghanistan 

got the joint ticket punched, okay, as opposed to coming 

to the building for a minimum two, or for other places, for 

three. So, what that did is now you’ve got personnel guys over 

at PERSCOM [U.S. Army Personnel Command]. They’re 

highly invested in this because they know they’ve got a hot 

rock that they want to move quickly through the ranks—not 

to accuse personnel of ticket punching—whether they got a 

guy they want to get joint qualified, they can get that all done 

in one year in Afghanistan. So, basically, it was knowing how 

that architecture would work on the personnel side that got 

us a windfall. I got about four or five key staff guys that way, 

and they were good guys. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. We’ve got your JMD squared away. About how 

big was the staff when you arrived, and how did that 

number change? You said you were undermanned.

COL. LAMM: Yeah. Oh, yeah. With Snukis—they started with six, okay, 

and they were mowing along and doing sort of the theoretical 

stuff, and he had a cadre of probably about ninety to a 

hundred at any one time there. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, was it about that same size when you got there? 

COL. LAMM: Yeah. 

DR. KOONTZ: How big was it when you left? 

COL. LAMM: About 350, and that was too big. Optimal was probably the 

late fall, early winter of 2004. After the first of the year, we 

had asked to have some people held back, because, I mean, 

we had logistical constraints and housing constraints and so 

on and so forth. So, we said, “Look, it’s really doing pretty 

well,” but having that extra capacity allowed us to give some 
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folks to OMC-Alpha, which was now undermanned for 

what they had to do, and it worked well because at the same 

time, we had gotten approval from the secretary of defense 

and the U.S. government to train and equip the police. So, 

OMC was about to double in size because they would have 

not only the Army training mission, but they would have the 

police training mission, and that came along as we began to 

develop our strategy.

It really fell out of the presidential elections and what had 

happened to the Afghan National Police out in Herat, 

when we were trying to solidify some security issues with 

Ismail Khan, a warlord out there. It really came to light, 

and then success sort of breeds success. The training for 

the elections went very well; the election day went very 

well; the inauguration went very well; so when we went 

back into the well a third time and said we really need to 

fix the police, they said, “Okay, you’ve got it for the next 

two years.” That extra capacity came in handy because then 

we could—OMC could start building—at that time Maj. 

Gen. [USAF John T.] Brennan was in charge of training 

the Army, the OMC-A chief. Then they called it CSTC, 

Combined Security Training Command. 

DR. KOONTZ: By the time that you left, were you still, as you said, robbing 

Peter and paying Paul by taking guys out of CJTF-76? 

COL. LAMM: No. We had our own manning document that backfilled 

all those positions we needed on the staff. It was important 

because in March CJTF-76 was going to rotate out, so by 

the winter, February, we had to have our own folks on the 

manning document on requirements, because all of the folks 

that we had stolen from the 25th Infantry Division [ID], they 

were leaving in March. They were going to rotate back out, 

and the SETAF [Southern European Task Force (Airborne)] 

folks from Europe were coming in. 

DR. KOONTZ: I was going to ask you this later, but this might be a good 

time to ask it anyway. Did you notice any changes when 

the 25th ID rotated out and SETAF came in? 

COL. LAMM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did. And in SETAF’s defense, [Col.] Bill 

Mayville, who was the chief of staff there; Jason Kamiya, a 

major general, was the CG. They were good guys. Their two 

DCGs [deputy commanding generals] were sort of pickup 

guys that they didn’t know before, well, becoming part of 

the headquarters. And then, basically what that staff was, for 

CJTF-76 under the SETAF, was a composite headquarters 

which consisted of a brigade—it was the old 173d [Airborne 

Brigade], the brigade that came out of Vicenza—with plugs 

in it from all over USAREUR [U.S. Army, Europe]. They met 

and trained together for a few weeks at Grafenwoehr. We 

sent folks to Grafenwoehr, my -3 and others, to sort of speed 

them up and get them ready, but that was it. The brigade 
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headquarters, plugs, a couple months’ training—and not 

all of them attending the training, not all of the plugs—

and then, boom: “You’re in Afghanistan. Go!” The 25th 

ID was a division headquarters that didn’t need any plugs. 

You know, it was a big division and didn’t need any plugs to 

help it along, and they were together for whatever period 

they were together. When they were notified that they 

were going to Afghanistan, they locked all the positions 

in. Then they all trained together for four or five months, 

got ready to go, and then they spent a year together on 

the ground. So, that staff as an entity, every key position, 

was probably in their position for two years, one and a 

half to two years, and there’s no substitute for that. It was 

a very efficient, very good-running headquarters that just 

hit the ground running and it was very, very good. So, 

the SETAF guys had a lot to overcome, but did admirably 

well, in my view.

My personal feeling—after looking at counterinsurgency 

environments—is that we are probably doctrinally wise 

to rotate companies in and out, maybe every year, but 

brigade-and-above staffs, regional staffs (we had a brigade 

commander in each one of the regions) my view would 

be—and the CFC staff—my view would be that those folks 

you could move under an individual replacement system, 

but the key leaders, if we’re serious about this, like World 

War II, you need to go there, and then when it’s all over, 

they can come home. In that kind of an environment, the 

nuances of who gets along at the ministries—is the National 

Security Council adviser, Dr. [Zalmay] Rassoul, friends 

with [Minister of Interior Ali] Jalali? It takes you so long 

to pick that up that to be rotating every year is not a wise 

thing to do. Of course, the strategy over there suffered for 

that, in my view. 

DR. KOONTZ: About how long did it take for you to notice that SETAF 

was getting the ball rolling, or had— 

COL. LAMM: Well, a couple things. They had come with the notion that, I 

suspect, it was all going to be about soft power, and there’s a 

mix of kinetics and soft power. The 25th had to be trained to 

go from hard to soft. That might be easier to do than the other 

way around. But, yeah, I mean, two and a half, three months 

on the ground, they were okay. But I think it takes about 

two and a half to three months to get things rolling, to get 

to know the AOR [area of responsibility]; and at the tactical 

level, it’s the local guy—does he know where his minefields 

are? We sustained most of our casualties in this right-seat 

ride period. I know from Afghanistan, and it’s very true 

in Iraq, that the transition periods are dangerous periods. 

The other problem we have is we tell the enemy when those 

transition periods are going to be because we publish it back 

here—you know, when the next units are rotated—so we 

don’t do ourselves any favors. 
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DR. KOONTZ: All right, to get lurching back, you were talking about 

earlier the manning at CFC-Alpha, and you managed 

to stabilize your staff at anywhere between 100 and 350 

people. What was the physical infrastructure of the CFCAlpha headquarters like? 

COL. LAMM: It was grim. It was a double-wide trailer, two stories tall 

[laughs]. That was the command building. But it was fine. 

Everyone had carpet, and it was clean. And then what we did 

is, basically, we took over a neighborhood about a mile and 

a half from the embassy, about a mile from the embassy. We 

took over a neighborhood, and we put barriers up. Snukis 

did most of that great work. We expanded that a little and 

made some improvements. But the fact of the matter was 

you could literally be an Afghan, stand in the street, and you 

could throw something over the wall, and from the wall to 

where Barno worked was about a hundred feet. So, it was not 

a Green Zone fortress with lots of standoff, okay? I’m used 

to that. I commanded Camp Doha in Kuwait—huge fields of 

fire, lots of standoff all the way around it, except for a little bit 

on the port side, where the commercial area was—but this 

was a compound carved out of a downtown neighborhood. 

Our neighbors were the German school. Right across the 

street was the UN compound. In fact, we shared a wall inside 

the compound area with the World Food Program, and on 

the other side, with the UN De-Mining, and I could talk 

[about that] a little bit later. We had a very close relationship 

with the UN, for personal reasons, because I knew the chief 

of staff there.

Yeah, we were just in a neighborhood. We threw up some 

makeshift walls, and we got down to business. That meant 

that each—the -3 shop was connected but had a very small 

operations center; and then, basically, the -2 [staff section for 

intelligence] was in another building; the -5 was in another 

building. They were in different houses inside here, and our 

billeting was in houses inside there, and then what couldn’t 

live on Kabul compound, we had about eighteen different 

contract houses scattered around Kabul, between us and the 

embassy, that our folks lived in, and they took a shuttle bus 

into work—shuttle cars, taxis, so on and so forth. We had 

some contractors pick them up and drive them back and 

forth to work and then take them home at night. 

DR. KOONTZ: What was the security situation like in your little 

neighborhood there? 

COL. LAMM: Well, obviously, it was—we never had an incident at the wall 

or around the walls, so from a physical security—let me say 

this. From the U.S. standard of physical security, what we 

were doing, we were a nightmare because, basically, large 

vehicles were passing in front of one wall all of the time, and 

then after the DynCorp bombing in—when did that happen? 

It happened in the fall, I think, in September, just before the 
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Building the Command

elections. The DynCorp compound, which was wide open—

it just had an office—somebody blew a car bomb. We couldn’t 

close the street between the UN and our compound that 

ran laterally because the German school was there and, of 

course, the palace was here—but basically, there was a guard 

there that would look. But large trucks, water tankers, you 

know, would pass by all the time. So, from the perspective of 

physical security, from a standards perspective, we were just 

a nightmare, just a nightmare.

From the perspective of was it adequate security for the 

tasks that had to be performed? I would say, yeah, and you 

had to tailor that. We were in the business of telling the 

UN that you need to stay in country—this is after the UN 

bombing in Baghdad—“You need to stay in country. You 

need to continue training election workers and other folks. 

You need to stay here with your head in the game,” because 

they were going to pull up and go, because they had left 

Baghdad, and there were a couple incidents in the south 

that started to worry the UN headquarters in New York, 

and they were really seriously considering pulling out of 

the whole operation at one point. Barno had a very close 

relationship with the high representative, Jean Arnault, 

and the chief of staff over at UNAMA [United Nations 

Assistance Mission-Afghanistan] was a guy by the name 

of Larry Sampler. Larry Sampler was an ex–Special Forces 

guy I had known from Fort Bragg, and he was the UN chief 

of staff there. You had to convince a bunch of civilians that 

Afghanistan is a safe enough place for them to come run an 

election. You can’t live in a fortress, so we purposely made 

some force protection decisions that from a U.S. standard 

would be deemed a little risky—i.e., when you met with UN 

folks or you were traveling with them, no flak vests or battle 

rattle. It was soft cap, your DCU [desert combat uniform] 

or your battle dress uniform, and just a Lexus, not an uparmored Humvee, and that’s how we did liaison. That’s how 

I moved around Kabul. Yeah, there was one rifle in the back 

seat. Normally, the drivers might have a sidearm, but the 

ambassador didn’t like weapons in the embassy—neither 

did Barno—so we didn’t bring them into the embassy as 

a general rule. And so, basically, we tailored the security 

situation to what we had on the ground, and we took a little 

risk doing that. But the UN did stay. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Again, this is something that I should have 

asked you a long time ago. Just asking one last question 

about your staff there: What was the joint and Coalition 

presence on the staff like? 

COL. LAMM: Oh, it was completely joint and Coalition. You had 

everything from Afghans to French, Germans, Canadians. 

The heavy lifters in the plan shop were British officers. In 

fact, the CJ-5 was [British Army Col.] George Norton, 

absolutely brilliant, and his predecessor was [British Army 
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134

Col.] James Stopford. I sort of handpicked and moved 

over the chief of staff to OMC-Alpha underneath General 

Brennan, and prior to him, we had a tall Air Force guy—his 

name escapes me, but I’ll remember it later. The chief of 

staff over there was Bob Sharp, a British O-6 who attended 

the National War College the year before and was one of 

my students. So, Bob and I knew each other very, very well 

and got along just fine—just a brilliant guy. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You get on the ground; you’ve gone through and 

met your staff principals; you’re working on the JMD. 

How would you describe your duties as chief of staff? 

What were your immediate tasks that you were doing, 

other than trying to coalesce your staff? 

COL. LAMM: Well, not only just coalesce and get team building with the 

staff, but I had to do it with the interagency, as well. So, 

I had to get to know the people up at the embassy. There 

were some key players up there. Dr. Deborah Alexander—

she was, in fact, the functional expert on elections at the 

embassy. She would be indispensable. Patrick Fine, chief 

of the USAID—chronically short personnel. He’d asked 

me early on, you know, “Could you spare me any people?” 

and I said, “Well, I’ve got to take a look at this.” It became 

very obvious shortly thereafter that if the USAID piece was 

broken and he couldn’t monitor the contracts that he was 

letting, that we were going to have trouble implementing 

the rest of the reconstruction piece. So, I worked with the 

CJ-7 [staff section for engineering] John O’Dowd, who 

was Colonel O’Dowd at the time, and basically he gave 

Patrick Fine a handful of Army majors, engineers, to help 

monitor the USAID projects. So, it was a matter of letting 

everybody on the staff know that this was an interagency/

Coalition sort of place, that a functional expert like Debbie 

Alexander could come to General [British Army Maj. 

Gen. John] Cooper, who was the DCG, or General [British 

Army Maj. Gen. Peter] Gilchrist after him, or could come 

to a staff member and say, ‘I’m going to need all this for 

the election,” and then my subordinate staff didn’t have the 

right to tell that State Department person no. He had the 

right to say “I would recommend, no,” but he also knew 

that he had to give that full request of what she wanted, or 

what any interagency person wanted. They had to deliver 

the whole message to me with the recommendation, and if 

they didn’t, I’d kill them—not literally, but, you know, we 

would have some words—and the notion there was to let 

the folks at the embassy know that all the resources in the 

country were everybody’s resources. This was going to be 

one team at work here, and if some minor major in the J-5 

shop told Deborah Alexander “No, we’re not going to do 

that,” she knew very, very quickly that nobody except Barno 

or me could tell her no. And, generally, from the elections 

perspective, I don’t know of one time we told anybody no, 
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Building the Command

to include the UN. So, we were able to give resources to the 

UN offline and then build that whole election process.

So, we had to build the team, and that was the most interesting 

part of all. I don’t know whom else you interviewed. I know 

you interviewed Snukis and Barno. I’m not going to make 

any reference to those folks in the way they worked as a 

team, but the problem was they had really beat up the staff. 

Basically, they were just worn out. And Barno can be a pretty 

wicked taskmaster, and if that’s the case, then the chief of staff 

has to be a foil and insulate the staff from some of that stuff. I 

mean, it was basically Leadership 101 sort of stuff. You know, 

staff comes in and goes, “You know, the -3’s been sleeping 

under his desk. He’s like a basket case.” “This one’s about 

ready to go.” You’ve got to insulate the staff from the boss 

because he’ll just wear you out. So, that was my job—to place 

myself and then basically tell the boss, “Let me know what 

you want. I’ll run the staff. You work the high pieces with 

the ambassador, and as long as you trust me to get it done, 

then I think it’ll work out fine,” and I think Barno agreed in 

general principle to that. That was easy to do. We got along 

just fine. But it was a matter of building the staff back up, 

and their confidence, and then the country team—the whole 

country team. That was the major task. That was the major 

task. There was no shortage of talent there and know-how 

or expertise. It was a matter of really getting folks together 

and—I don’t know how else to say this—but to make their 

work fun. They were not having fun. They were miserable, 

and my view was “You’re going be somewhere for a year, 

and you’re going to be in the middle of Kabul and running 

around in Afghanistan. You need to make the work fun,” and, 

I think—I mean, even Barno began to appreciate it: “Hey, you 

know, this is fun.” I mean, we still have reunions with people. 

Not a lot of folks coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq are 

having sort of fun reunions in towns when they get together. 

But that was my major task—rebuilding the leadership and 

the confidence with the staff; and at the embassy with the 

ambassador; and then, key Afghans—Jalali, you know, the 

minister of interior, the minister of defense. I mean, I would 

even go fairly frequently to see them. If they called down to 

the headquarters and Barno wasn’t there, [Afghan President 

Hamid] Karzai knew I would do. And Barno was gone for a 

couple months in the winter, back here on business, which is 

the problem of going over to see those guys. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You’ve got this staff which, as you said, were 

kind of worn out— 

COL. LAMM: They’re toast [laughs]!

DR. KOONTZ: That’s a good adjective. You also mentioned a while ago 

eighteen-hour days. What was the battle rhythm like on 

the staff? 
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COL. LAMM: Well, there was no battle rhythm. I mean, when you have 

no people, it’s tough to stick to battle rhythm. It’s all sorts 

of work that had to be done. The general view was that 

you couldn’t do anything that would make Barno happy 

and, basically, they had to be told, “We can get all the work 

done. I’ll get you some more people, and, yeah, you can 

make the boss happy, and we have a few things coming up 

here that will make him happy.” We got to work with the 

UN and train up—so it was a matter now of looking out at 

the calendar and going “Okay, how do we establish trust 

and confidence with all of the team players here and build 

the team?” Well, you got to play the game, and you got to 

win it. So the first one is “We’re going to train up election 

workers, maintain security, build roads, run PRTs.” But 

one of the things out there that the Taliban said that 

we weren’t going to be able to do was that they would 

interdict and disrupt the UN training of election workers 

countrywide, so that the election, in fact, would never 

occur. Just the admin pieces of getting it going were going 

to fail. So, we devoted ourselves to getting the training 

done and preparing for the election, which included some 

firsts. I had a young major come in, actually a Canadian 

officer, working very closely with Debbie Alexander and 

General Cooper. He came in and said, “You know, we 

should treat this just like any other operation. Let’s have 

a CPX [command post exercise].” We brought in some 

folks from JFCOM and other places and, by gosh, we built 

a CPX. We red-teamed out the security pieces. We redteamed out the commo architecture for the Joint Election 

Management Board [UN Joint Electoral Management 

Body, or JEMB]—Afghan and UN led, always us in the 

background—and you find out they need more computer 

equipment. They need fiber optics run, so they can do 

a command and control center. In fact, the headquarters 

built the JEMB computer suite and control system for the 

Afghans and a command and control section for the UN 

across the street from us.

I mean, I was actually out there watching them with a 

backhoe, thinking, “I could trench across the Afghan 

streets so they could lay fiber over in the UN.” Now my 

friends in OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] look 

at me funny and go, “Well, who gave you the authorities 

to give equipment and do this stuff with the UN?” because 

the normal bureaucratic trail is you would have to go back 

here to the Department; get approval in the Department of 

Defense; they would have to go to State; State would have to 

go to the UN representative here, to get all that done. Nah, 

it’s the wonderful thing, having a presidential envoy like 

Khalilzad in your country. We figured out what we needed. 

Debbie Alexander, General Cooper, I, or the boss would 

go in—in fact, we sat down, we briefed the ambassador: 

“This is the plan. We’re going to run a training exercise to 

involve the Afghan government, the UN. We’ll put in all the 
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Building the Command

infrastructure, we’ll show them how to do it, and we’ll lead 

this thing from the rear”; and then, basically, that’s what we 

did.

So, we ran two CPXs. For the training, in fact, I was looking 

at the CPX. Next thing came: “How do we secure this?” 

“Well, we’ll do it with a number of rings.” Local police will 

take care of polling stations; backing them up would be 

the Afghan National Army; and then no more than forty 

minutes away would be the U.S. forces, in extremis force. 

Well, the UN had serious concerns about that, so basically 

what we did is we built a map of every polling place in the 

country—thirty-five hundred of them—all of the counting 

stations (I think there were eight counting stations), and we 

laid all of that out and had it all matrixed up. There was an 

alert roster. And then, the UN said, “Well, how do I know 

I can contact you if I’m in trouble? We don’t have radios,” 

or whatever. And I said, “Well, I guess you’re going to need 

cell phones.” “But we don’t have money for cell phones,” the 

UN said. And I said, “Yeah, but we do,” and, basically, we 

used some counternarcotics money to buy cell phones that 

we would use later on in the counternarcotics program, but 

we bought them cell phones. We had a very understanding 

and very forward-thinking player upstairs at the time. Kurt 

Amend was at OSD—he was an OSD civilian—and then 

Mary Beth Long, who is the principal deputy upstairs right 

now, she patrolled the counternarcotics pot of money, which 

had lots of policing money in it, so we could get all these 

things done. If securing the UN elections meant working 

with the police and there was a big pot of police money 

that was in the counternarcotics budget that was money 

for infrastructure—to build police stations, to build police 

infrastructure—we did not yet have authority to train and 

equip police, but we had money in the budget to work with 

the police on counternarcotics.

So, basically, we started early: “Where are the polling places? 

Well, let’s make sure we put those where we’re going to build 

a police station and get the police station built,” and so on 

and so forth. So, we rushed and moved on all that—cell 

phones, alert rosters—and then what we did is we brought 

all these folks in after the CPX, or before the CPX, and 

briefed them, and so all the international ambassadors had 

a piece. They had a piece of the pie; they were in there; they 

met over at the UN, where all these ambassadors would go. 

They sat down in their seats at the headquarters and we went 

over it, and then we did a classic AAR [after action report] 

afterwards, and then we ran the election. That was a huge 

success. And, you know, if you’re the CG and that goes very, 

very well, he’s happy. People get awards, they get patted on 

the back, and everyone’s happy. And then the election was, 

by all accounts, a bizarre success in many ways. We had no 

incidents of violence or deaths directly. We had one guy in a 

tractor run over a land mine trying to come to vote, and we 
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had some rockets shot off, but none in the capital, and this 

was after the Taliban was adamant: “We are going to disrupt 

this election”—and they didn’t. There was no problem at all. 

That was a big win for the staff. So, it was the little things—

getting ready for the elections, running elections.

And then the other one was, right after the elections in 

December, the inauguration ceremony for Karzai. The Taliban 

also said, you know, “We’ll do something catastrophic! We’ll 

kill all those buggers in one spot, and then we’ll start taking 

the country over.” Many heads of state—Cheney, Rumsfeld, 

their wives, the whole ball of wax. It was all really planned 

by the staff at CFC, with the Afghans, right down to the 

eaches. And I remember Barno smiling. Rumsfeld looked at 

him and he goes, “You know, this thing is running so well, 

I thought I was in Germany.” And so Barno snickered, and 

that was a big one for the staff. And then Barno, that winter, 

was gone a couple months, but things went very well. It was 

a quiet winter. Did a lot of work. He came back, and then we 

started blowing right into the parliamentary elections that 

were coming up. So, that worked very well.

One other incident that really proved the staff mettle 

and our ability to work with -76 and the embassy, which 

happened in August—it happened in September, before 

the elections—is the ambassador decided it was time for 

Ismail Khan, a major warlord in Herat, to go. And in about 

forty-eight hours’ time, the SAMS guy was drawing all the 

planning of how we were going to move the forces, deploy 

the forces, working very closely with -76, and, in fact, in 

a 48-hour time frame, maybe seventy-two hours’ total, 

moved the entire 3d of the 4th Cavalry from its positions in 

the south and east all the way out to western Afghanistan, 

seized Shindand Airfield, separated Assadullah Khan and 

Ismail Khan, while the ambassador was talking—I mean, 

it was a wonderful interagency operation. The ambassador 

talking to Khan: “Could you take a position in Kabul?” 

“No, I’m going to stay out here and make trouble,” and 

“Okay, fine.” Then he woke up one morning, and we had 

deployed, very, very smoothly, fifteen thousand Afghan 

National Army soldiers and Afghan National Police 

out to Herat. They took the airfield and moved up to 

Herat, seized all of his heavy weapons, his tanks, placed 

his palace up there in a cordon. We had about twentyfour hours of some petty violence with Ismail Khan’s 

thugs. It turned out that my clever folks in the National 

Directorate of Security, Amanullah Saleh, and our agency 

partners basically afterwards set up a sting operation for 

the troublemakers and said, “You’ve done such a great 

job! Ismail Khan would like to reward you by paying you 

for your services. Come to this place at this time.” They 

all showed up and they got arrested, like we do here in 

the States with TVs and that sort of thing. So, that was a 

major operation that occurred.
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I remember the boss was in and out of the country at that 

time. He came back. The warlord was under house arrest. 

The new guy was installed there. We used some CERP money 

and built the Herat Burn Center for women, something we 

worked very closely with the National Health Service on. 

And Peter Saleh was an ex-Iranian health minister, was in 

the Afghan Reconstruction Group as the Ministry of Health 

adviser, and they had been wanting to build a burn center for 

the Herati women out there. You’re familiar with the issue of 

the Herati women?

DR. KOONTZ: The women committing suicide, or burning ...?

COL. LAMM: Well, they disfigured themselves or committed suicide, 

but normally most of them live, and that way they’re badly 

disfigured. That way, they don’t have to get married to the 

arranged marriage guy. And we were going to build a burn 

center out there for quite some time, but as long as Ismail 

Khan was going to take credit for it, the ambassador didn’t 

want to do it. Many didn’t want to do it. So, what we did is 

we removed Ismail Khan and then, very rapidly, we built the 

burn center out there, which empowered the new governor 

very rapidly. When we installed the new one, they could 

announce that “We’re going to get this burn center built and 

take care of the folks out here.”

DR. KOONTZ: Ismail Khan’s still in Kabul? 

COL. LAMM: I think he’s the minister of power and energy, or something 

like that. But he’s—obviously, all these guys still have political 

connections out west, as does [Abdul Rashid] Dostum up in 

the north. And what that showed part of the election was, 

there was always this criticism of Karzai and the government 

in Kabul, just being “He’s the mayor of Kabul and can’t control 

much else in the country.” When the rest of the country, just 

prior to the election, sees a major warlord like Ismail Khan 

go down, you tend to look around and go, “Well, you know, 

maybe this government’s just not in Kabul. Maybe, if they 

can reach out and touch Ismail Khan, they can reach out and 

they can touch a lot of us.” And as the presidential election 

went on, what we found—there was some synergy—what 

we found was that the other warlords, like Dostum and 

[Muhammad] Atta, began to really negotiate with the 

ambassador and the international community about rapidly 

tying up and completing the DDR process. In fact, they were 

doing it in the middle of the winter, before the parliamentary 

elections were going to take place the next year. So, that 

helped out immensely. 

DR. KOONTZ: How would you characterize CFC-Alpha’s relationship 

with this kind of nascent Afghan government as the 

parliament’s getting elected and President Karzai is getting 

inaugurated? You mentioned Ismail Khan’s removal as 

sort of an example of the government’s growing power. 
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140

Did you notice any kind of changes or competency in the 

Afghan government during your tour? 

COL. LAMM: Oh, yeah. The Afghans had some immensely talented people. 

I mean, Karzai; Ali Jalali is an American-trained guy—in 

fact, he was an American citizen, he was the minister of the 

interior, so he was immensely helpful—Rahim Wardak is 

huge; [Lt. Gen. Sher Muhammad] Karimi was the chief of 

staff with the Afghan army, who was very helpful. Even a guy 

like Bismullah Khan—General Barno had a close relationship 

with him—in fact, I’ve had dinner with Bismullah Khan. We 

had close relationships with Dostum up in Mazar-e Sharif. So, 

Barno would get around; Cooper would get around; my staff 

would get around; and they would meet all these guys. I had 

Col. Jon Lopey, who was with the California Highway Patrol, 

a reservist who came in—they were going to do something 

with him, and I said, “Wait, let me get this straight. You’re a 

captain in the California Highway Patrol?” “Roger.” “You’re 

going to be in the C-9, and you’re going to be the new police 

liaison officer.” That was Jon Lopey, who went to Herat with 

the police and the army, and two other majors we had in the 

headquarters who really put together, with the -76, the whole 

operation out there to remove Ismail Khan, and he liaised 

with the police and the army and so on and so forth. So, there 

was a very close relationship that began to be built between 

the staff as this election process and everything started going 

on and we got the staff on the ground—between the staff and 

the Afghan government—at all levels, not just the BarnoKarzai, Barno-minister level, or my minister levels, but with 

working people in the government, police chiefs, and so on 

and so forth.

Police chiefs needed—for the elections—they needed riot 

equipment. We went to Herat. The police only had AK47s 

and helmets. I mean, they looked like soldiers, and Lopey 

said, “Look, they need police gear. They need batons.” We 

were very lucky none of the police—it wasn’t a very welldisciplined group—ever shot at the crowd. It could have 

been a real disaster because the police were very rudimentary 

trained and only armed with AKs and helmets, and Jon came 

in and said, “Look, they need riot gear, the shield, the baton, 

the helmet, and the face stuff,” and I said, “Holy moley! Give 

me a list,” and it was about $4 million worth of stuff. And 

they had a great CJ-4 [staff officer for logistics], and I said, 

“Look, here’s what I need. This is going to cost $4 million. 

Let’s look at the counternarcotics pot again, and you can 

get these police in some riot gear. We may need them for 

the election.” So, they went out, and Lopey would actually 

have three guys who were actually counting equipment as it 

came off trucks, doing the inventories, passing out with the 

cops, and then he coordinated with -76 to get MPs [military 

police] down there to basically train all these Afghan cops in 

basic riot formations, how to use their equipment, and then 

get them all deployed for the election. So, from September 
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Building the Command

to October, he basically is getting all that done, and at the 

beginning of September until the elections in October, 

Jon Lopey and a handful of guys in the -9 shop, with the 

Afghans themselves, are getting it done. We didn’t have 

any sergeants and soldiers to send. We could get some MPs 

from -76, and they would help, but, basically, what Jon was 

able to do is work with the Afghan police and, basically, 

lead the police and do that. We had great relationships with 

the women’s ministries. We had a female colonel who dealt 

with the women’s ministries, health ministries. My SJA 

had an officer who was the liaison to the Supreme Court of 

Afghanistan. What did the supreme court need? It needed 

a filing system; it needed a couple computers; it needed file 

cabinets and bookshelves; and they would go out and do all 

that stuff.

So, it was a very dynamic group, but Barno and Khalilzad 

were superb in this way, in that neither of them were into 

micromanaging anything, which is very helpful because, 

quite frankly, on any given day, if you were to ask me what 

the hell Jon Lopey was doing with the police, I couldn’t have 

told you. All I could have told you was “He’s doing real good 

stuff, and he’s going to call me from Herat in two days.” Sure, 

I could get a hold of him. In general terms, you knew what 

they were doing, but you—basically, the trust and confidence 

you established were an essential point, that you were able to 

let them operate and do all of their stuff without bringing 

them in and giving them the grilling all the time. And I 

had no time for it. There was too much going on. So, it was 

like the good old days. You gave them marching orders and 

said, “Get out there and do good things! Don’t do anything 

immoral or illegal. Other than that, you know the big 

picture. We’ve got to have a successful election in October, 

and whatever that means in your lane—if it means getting a 

hospital built somewhere, if it empowers the government, if 

it means getting police training, then that’s what you got to 

go do.”

DR. KOONTZ: And you did get that successful election in October. 

COL. LAMM: We had a good election. A good election. I mean, it went 

without a hitch. I think they were missing ink in one of 

the places at Kabul that Christiane Amanpour made some 

headway with. Actually, it was pretty comical to watch the 

international media. They came to Kabul expecting a freight 

train wreck, and when it didn’t happen, they left town. They 

said, “Well, there’s no story here. Nobody’s getting killed 

trying to go vote. We’re just going to go home.” So, she did a 

quick story from Kabul, and they all left. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. CFC-Alpha exists to coordinate the military 

and State Department civilian side—you know, POL-MIL 

integration, as you said. What was CFC-Alpha’s guiding 

strategy when you got there, and did that change any? 
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COL. LAMM: They had, basically, the nexus of the strategy figured out 

on a slide called “The Three Wars of Afghanistan,” and the 

three wars involved [drawing a sketch] the first one, which 

was kinetic, which was what we called “bug hunting.” Okay, 

there were bad guys—al Qaeda, Taliban—that are never 

going to reconcile. They’re never going to see the light, and 

those folks, we need actionable intelligence on them; we 

need to go find them; we need to apprehend them; or we 

need to kill them. That’s that circle over there. The circle on 

the far right, as we look at the page, are a whole bunch of 

centrifugal forces that really caused Afghanistan to come 

apart at the seams, anyway, and had nothing to do with the 

Taliban—well, nothing to do with al Qaeda and terrorists. 

That had to do with warlordism, poppy—the relationship 

between poppy growers and warlords, so on and so forth—

and those were the forces that would tear the country 

apart: religious, mostly tribal, and that sort of thing. In the 

center was really the major war, the insurgency, and it had 

the people as the center of gravity. So, the center of gravity 

for that far-left one is intelligence, good intelligence. The 

center of gravity on the warlords is military—kinetic power 

to some degree, some political. This centerpiece—how do 

we isolate the Afghan population from the insurgents, 

okay? That really placed the population of Afghanistan as 

the center of gravity, and we needed to do everything as 

an interagency team to figure out all the ways in which we 

could separate the insurgents from potential sanctuary, and 

that meant making friends with the people and taking care 

of securing the people.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect and read and write. That is a 

major difference between what we were doing in Afghanistan 

and what I saw us doing in Iraq. In Iraq, the major mission 

was protecting Americans, and we built castles and Green 

Zones and so on and so forth to do that, and we left the Iraqis 

hanging—the common Iraqi. The mission in Afghanistan 

was to use our Army to train the Afghan army to support 

the Afghan army and police and the Afghan government 

to secure and protect the Afghan people, and as a result we 

had—you know, the strategy was well on its way to being 

implemented, but the plan was we would assume regional 

control of areas. So, there’d be a colonel in the south, a 

colonel out west, and a colonel in the east, and everything 

that happened in their sandbox belonged to them. The PRTs 

worked for them. All the Special Forces that were there 

worked for them. If we were going to conduct an operation 

for a mid- or high-level Taliban that may be conducted with 

a Tier 1 special operating force, we would make sure that -76 

was briefed and that the ambassador was briefed before that 

would happen. So, that was all seamless. We empowered him 

to do everything there—spend CERP money, coordinate 

with USAID folks on the ground for what roads would be 

built and how they would synchronize security and road 

building; that all landed on pretty creative guys like [Col.] 
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Gary Cheek, who had the southern area, and so on and 

so forth, and [Lt. Col. Michael] McMahon, who was later 

killed in an aircraft accident, who had the western area. But 

they did that piece, and the job was to secure the Afghan 

population and then working with the Afghan government 

to provide good governance.

There’s a book by Barnett Rubin called The Fragmentation of 

Afghanistan. In the Introduction, I think about four pages in, 

is what I—there was a chart in there, which I called the Index 

of Misery, and, basically, Rubin postulates in the Preface that 

Afghanistan’s a real poor country, but what he has in there 

is he has the life expectancy age, the number of women who 

die in childbirth, the number of children who get to age one, 

number of people with less than a thousand calories a day, 

number of people who have never seen medical care. So, he’s 

got this whole misery index in there, and Rubin says this is a 

real crux of the problem. As long as so many people live like 

this, it’s going to be an easy place for Taliban and these folks 

to come in, spend a little money, improve the standard of 

living just a little, and then, boom, you’ve got a sanctuary in 

a faraway place and 9/11’s happened. I looked at that misery 

index, basically, with a C-9 and the rest of the staff and said, 

“Working with the USAID and the State Department and all 

these other folks, if we can fix these things that historically 

have been a real problem in Afghanistan ... we don’t have 

to make it West Germany, but if we can show incremental 

improvements over the long haul, the Afghans will come to 

respect and enjoy us.” And at one time, we had about a 78 

percent approval rating in the south. Just after the elections, 

it was very, very high. You know, the Taliban’s saying, “Don’t 

go to the polls. You’re going to get blown up.” I mean, the 

Afghans just blew them off and went to the polls.

So, that’s basically it. The strategy in place with the circles. 

There were some pillars, some league nations—narcotics, 

U.K., Japanese at DDR, and so on and so forth. But all the big 

pieces were there. It was just a matter of getting the staff spun 

up and then getting them focused on all the little pieces that 

are going to come, and the big lifter in all of that, about four 

months into my tour, was Col. George Norton. It was the 

CJ-5 and Norton who basically wrote the counterinsurgency 

strategy for Afghanistan, all four hundred pages, he and 

his shop. At the time he started, he only had five officers in 

the J-5. By the time we got the staff built up, he had about 

twenty. He was able to do this kind of work—twelve lines of 

operation, across the whole DIME, diplomatic, information, 

military, economic, with the military piece being a pretty 

small part, and social development, education, good 

governance, security, police, the major parts. He had a little 

bumper sticker: “If you want peace, establish justice.”

So, he wrote that plan, and then what we did with the plan was 

we briefed the ambassador and got his approval for the plan, 
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then we brought in a guy by the name of Marin Strmecki. 

Marin Strmecki works for a think tank. He’s very close to 

Khalilzad and the administration. We brought him in, and, 

basically, we demilitarized it. We vanilla-ed it because a 

military plan with lines and charts and lines of operation isn’t 

going to sell with our interagency partners real smoothly, or 

other ambassadors. So, we vanilla-ized it, we demilitarized 

it, and it became the MPP, Mission Performance Plan, at the 

embassy. They call it something else now, but, basically, it 

became the embassy’s plan, and then we formed it around 

vanilla-fashion, and it was easy, because once the ambassador 

said, “I like that. Let’s do it,” and got a vanilla wrapper for it, 

everybody else ... you know, it was a fishing expedition. The 

other guy we sold on that was Ambassador [Christopher] 

Alexander, who was the Canadian ambassador, and we got 

by in the international community. So, it was briefed to the 

interagency and the international community. Everybody 

bought into it, and then we briefed [General John P.] Abizaid, 

and that became the plan. Unfortunately, eight months later 

... he’d gone to Afghanistan after Khalilzad and Barno had 

left and asked the guys, “Where’s your plan?” They said, 

“Well, we don’t have one.” So, there’s some—maybe it was 

my mistake.

But in the interagency business, institutionalizing that sort 

of stuff is very difficult because what I found out was just that 

90 percent of it’s personality-driven. So, as long as Barno and 

Khalilzad, the station chief, the Afghan government, Jalali, 

Wardak, Karzai, and key ambassadors like Alexander and 

Jean Arnault, the UN ambassador, the UN representative—I 

mean, they were determined to make this work, and the force 

of their personalities really short-circuited these stovepiped 

bureaucracies that went back to the UN in New York and 

Washington: State and DoD [Department of Defense]. 

When those guys were gone, particularly Khalilzad, the 

stovepipes began to regrow themselves, sort of like a bad 

crop of bamboo—you know, just uncontrolled—and before 

you know it, everybody’s operating in their own stovepipes 

and all the synergy you get from working together just goes 

away. 

DR. KOONTZ: Looking at it from the interagency angle, were there 

any issues that you would point to where CFC-Alpha or 

General Barno had a strategic plan or a strategic goal 

where you came across opposition from the embassy, or 

where they wanted to do something that would be at cross 

purposes? 

COL. LAMM: In the beginning of every issue, there are differences. You 

know, counternarcotics is one. The State Department INL—

[Bureau of] International Narcotics and Law Enforcement 

[Affairs]—right after the presidential elections, they’d come 

on board and said, “Look, we’ve got $780 million U.S. dollars. 

Afghanistan’s a narco-state. You’ve got to clean this up right 
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Building the Command

now. We’ve got this whole plan to aerial spray,” so on and so 

forth. And Barno looked at this and he said, “Holy moley! 

I don’t want my guys running around being weed killers. 

This could be a big problem.” The good news was very, very, 

quickly Barno and Khalilzad were on the same sheet of 

music. We both saw that as very destabilizing, right after the 

presidential election, to have the U.S. or actually allies come 

in and actually physically do this. So, what Karzai asked 

was that he would convene a narcotics jirga, bring in all the 

elders, read them the riot act. We came up with a number: 

“Let’s cut the hectares under cultivation by 30 percent.” Barno 

and Khalilzad agreed. We agreed to do this—in fact, this is 

a good example. Some folks in the U.S. government wanted 

us to do everything, really wanted the military to get heavily 

involved in this. Cooler heads prevailed—Khalilzad from the 

political side, Barno and Abizaid on the military side—but 

here’s what we agreed to: “INL, you bring your teams in and 

so on and so forth. We’ll even write the counternarcotics 

strategy for the next five years,” which we did. Mary Beth 

Long was in counternarcotics, and I called her on the phone, 

and I said, “We will write the plan because INL cannot write 

the plan and get this synchronized,” and then we agreed 

on a number of things: “We’ll provide intelligence, we’ll 

have an intelligence fusion center. We can do that. We’ll 

provide you lift as required and that’s in consonance with 

our operation. So, if we lay out the strategy and you know 

when you want to do it, we can schedule aircraft and move 

your guys around. And then, we will always be there, like we 

are for everybody, for any in extremis support.” So, that was 

one of these deals where everybody in country was unique, 

where everybody in country was sort of on the same sheet 

of music—Khalilzad, Barno, Abizaid—on how we wanted 

to approach this narcotics problem, but the problem was 

in Washington. I mean, they just wanted to get the weed 

whackers out. Well, even the Brits, who were in charge as the 

lead nation—which has gone away, by the way; they had the 

lead for counternarcotics—even they didn’t want to aerial 

spray, so we had to fight all of that off with Washington.

I am trying to think of another instance—here’s how this 

worked. In the morning, I would meet with General Barno at 

about seven o’clock. Seven-thirty, be over at the embassy. I’d 

get all my updates between six and seven-thirty, go over with 

Barno and some key staff people, the public affairs officer, 

a G-3 ops guy, the Special Forces ops guy—that’s the black 

Special Forces ops guy—and then the public affairs officer, 

and that was it. It was an ops update, and Barno knew that 

the press was huge here, so the PAO [public affairs officer] 

was always there. We did the ops update and we’d get all that, 

and then we would go over at nine, and from about nine 

to ten every morning, he, I, the ambassador, station chief, 

and a note taker that the ambassador would have in there ... 

they would sit down, and they would meet, and they would 

talk over everything they were going to do. They were all 
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146

very open and transparent with each other. Khalilzad said, 

“I got a call last night. These psychos back in Washington 

want to do X. What should we do?” They would talk that 

out, and, basically, the notebook’s just like this: “Okay, what 

is it we want to do?” and then I would issue the stuff out for 

the rest of the staff, to include key embassy staff. So, it was 

functioning with both chiefs, which worked out pretty well: 

“What do we want to do? Where do we want to put assets?” 

because DoD brings 90 percent of the assets to these soirees. 

So, that worked out pretty well. But I don’t remember a 

time where they—quite frankly, I can’t think of a time when 

they openly disagreed about something and didn’t get it 

worked out. And nothing ever, ever had to leave Kabul for 

jurisdiction. There was a—I mean, it was understood that 

“We’re sort of a secondary theater of operation. We’re all in 

this together, and here we are, and so we’ll just get it done 

right here,” which is unique and refreshing in many ways.

DR. KOONTZ: Were you there when General Barno left? 

COL. LAMM: Yes. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Tell me about the changes—or, what changes were 

there when General Barno left and General Eikenberry 

came on board? 

COL. LAMM: Everything changed. And I liked General Eikenberry 

personally—and I think many other folks [did]. I don’t know 

who else you’ve interviewed, but there was what I would call 

change for change’s sake. It was almost a de-Barnofication of 

the operation. In many ways, it was a bit frustrating. I stayed 

there for about a month and a half to do the overlap, but here’s 

my sense. Immediately, General Eikenberry wanted to work 

in traditional channels with the security sector as his main 

effort. Other things weren’t going to be quite as important. 

Although he probably thought he was maintaining a strong 

relationship with the embassy, the fact that he moved his 

office and physically moved his residence from the embassy 

to Kabul compound sent a psychological message to folks 

that I don’t think many realized at the time how profound 

that was. The fact that Barno lived at the embassy and 

maintained an office and spent most of his working time 

in an office next to the ambassador, and then, basically, he 

spent most of the morning there. Just before lunch, Barno 

would come over to Kabul compound. We’d ping around, do 

a bunch of stuff with the staff so you wouldn’t have to shift 

the staff up to the embassy, work on routine stuff, sign OERs 

[officer evaluation reports], do all of the admin stuff that a 

commander’s got to do, and then generally have dinner at 

the embassy, not at Kabul compound. He would have lunch; 

he had breakfast at the embassy; dinner at the embassy; he 

had lunch at Kabul compound, and I normally had him for 

lunch. And so, he began his day and he ended his day, the 

bulk of his day, thirty feet from the ambassador. And when 
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Building the Command

your whole staff knows that, and more importantly, when 

the rest of the interagency people who tend to want to get 

stovepiped real quick—when they see that this guy’s best 

friend in country is the military guy and my guys see that 

Barno’s best friend in country is the ambassador, it makes 

the interagency coordination real easy, because they knew 

the next morning, if Debbie Alexander needed something, 

I was going to get them to adjudicate because I didn’t 

want to go in the next morning and say, “You know, we’re 

having this hissy fit between the staff.” That stuff had to get 

worked out, and it got worked out real fast. I think that 

that—could you have kept the same deal going and lived 

somewhere else? Yeah, you could have, but they weren’t 

meaning the same.

At the same time, remember that Barno left. Khalilzad left to 

go to Baghdad, and the new ambassador who came in—in 

fact, I began hearing this before I left—they were going to 

“normalize” embassy operations. Well, Afghanistan’s not a 

very normal place, and to think that you were in Paris or 

Beijing or Moscow—you weren’t going to normalize anything 

in Afghanistan. That meant “Defer to State, interagency 

working groups. If there’s a military question, I’ll send it up 

my chain. I’ll go across the department here in the building, 

and it’ll go back down to Eikenberry.” That isn’t going to 

work. It just isn’t going to work in a counterinsurgency 

environment. The bad guys can move too quickly to allow 

you to do that. So, that was the profound change—moving 

out and then focusing in on the headquarters.

I mean, Eikenberry told me, “Look. My maneuver elements, 

my commanders that I’m going to influence this operation 

with, are going to be the CFC-Alpha staff.” Well, really, the 

people he needed to be maneuvering with were the other 

ambassadors, the high UN representatives. That guy’s got to 

operate on that level, the grand, strategic level, keeping the 

allies in the game, keeping the UN in the game. Any good 

chief of staff will keep the staff functioning because my 

responsibility is to other embassy players laterally, and then 

to CJTF-76 and the muscle-moving parts. So, I think that, 

conceptually, he felt comfortable operating a level lower. Now, 

I spoke recently with Maj. Gen. [USAF John T.] Brennan, 

and Brennan’s view was that General Eikenberry had been, 

in the previous incarnation—two years since, earlier, he had 

had General Brennan’s job. He was the OMC-A guy in Kabul, 

and my suspicion is that what General Eikenberry did, he 

defaulted to what he was very comfortable doing, and that 

was training police and training the army—Brennan concurs 

with my assessment—whereas getting out and being a coequal 

and cajoling ambassadors and UN representatives to do stuff 

he was very uncomfortable with, didn’t want to do it. That’s 

my assessment. But in that environment in Afghanistan that 

larger piece that Barno was very comfortable with doing—

that, I think, made all the difference in the world. I mean, for 
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a military guy, you are way outside your box here. You know, 

you’re way outside your normal comfort box. 

DR. KOONTZ: When you left in—was it July of 2005? 

COL. LAMM: July, yeah. 

DR. KOONTZ: What was your overall impression of what CFC-Alpha 

had accomplished? 

COL. LAMM: Oh, well, I’m biased and parochial [laughs]. 

DR. KOONTZ: We all are! 

COL. LAMM: Yeah! I was extremely proud of the whole staff, and I think 

that the staff itself was very proud of what it had done, or it 

wouldn’t still be getting together in town here. I mean, we 

still have get-togethers. And when Barno retired, the former 

chief of the Afghan Reconstruction Group, a businessman 

by the name of Lou Hughes, and Ali Jalali had a big gettogether, and Khalilzad came, and we invited a lot of the key 

people in. We’ve had a meeting or two—not a meeting, but 

a party at Barno’s house. So, we were, first of all, immensely 

proud of what we had done, and, basically, the major tasks 

were, you know, the election, the two elections—setting 

up and getting the two elections going, getting governance 

going in Afghanistan; and the only way to do that was getting 

the president elected. And, I mean, had we not been able 

to accomplish the presidential election ... it would really 

have unraveled very, very quickly if Taliban had been able 

to disrupt the election. If anything would have happened 

during the inauguration, it would have been a big signal that 

“Here the new president can’t even control Kabul.” And then 

we worked through it and we were all set up, had the CPXs 

done, and all the planning for the parliamentary elections. 

In fact, Debbie Alexander was gone, but everybody in the -5 

shop had learned so much from her that they had become 

experts on running elections. So, that tended to work out 

very well.

The other big events were the warlords. How Khalilzad and 

Barno worked the warlords—that was absolutely masterful. 

And we had a great advantage here, because Khalilzad 

spoke the language and was a native Afghan at one time. 

So, he could pick up the phone and yell at the guy in Dari. 

I talked about Ismail Khan and Amanullah Khan, and we 

did do them, and how we worked them. But one of the real 

big warlords, as the parliamentary elections were coming 

up that winter, we didn’t know quite what to do with, and 

that was Dostum. Dostum was at Mazar-e Sharif and really 

controlled the north, and had always controlled the north. 

I mean, it was Dostum, basically, whom we linked up with 

early on—a lot of the Special Forces guys and guys that were 

coming out of K2 [Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan] went in 
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there. That began the Northern Alliance, because Massoud 

had been killed. So, he had huge power and, I mean, if 

Massoud had been around, he would probably have been the 

president and not Karzai, by the way. But, anyway, Dostum 

was a pretty powerful guy, a well-connected warlord. He’s no 

humanitarian. I mean, he isn’t a good guy, but one by one, 

we were isolating warlords, as opposed to taking them on 

all at one time. One by one, we would isolate them and take 

them.

Bismullah Khan went—in fact, Barno personally talked to 

Bismullah Khan on the eve of the election when the UN and 

Karzai announced that Bismullah Khan could not be the 

vice president. And Bismullah Khan was a big warlord, and 

we were worried, well, he’ll get his tanks, and the guy could 

take the government down and he’d drive the tanks down 

the streets of Kabul and raise all sorts of hell. The day after 

the announcement was made, Barno went to Khan’s office 

and talked with him. And he was—Barno told me—he was 

deeply upset that he wasn’t going to be able to run as the vice 

president, and Barno said, “But look. I mean, you could be a 

politician. You’ve just got to take the uniform off,” and Khan 

looked at him and said, “Really?” Then he said, “Well, yeah. 

You have that in your country. Wesley Clark’s been running 

for office.” “You’ve got to retire, put on a suit, public citizen, 

but you can’t be a warlord and run for vice president. That’s 

the way it is, you know?” And Bismullah Khan shook his 

head, and he’s been wearing a suit ever since, you know. He’s 

the chief of staff now, so he’s very influential in the military, 

but he sees himself as a civilian leader. So, he went first, and 

then Amanullah Khan and Ismail Khan. We began working 

on the south.

But basically, what happened to Dostum is Dostum got 

sick, had liver failure, because you know—a good Muslim 

guy—he was drinking a bit, and most of his life. He lived a 

hard life, and basically he had liver failure, and his handler 

called me up one night and said, “Colonel”—we met at the 

dinner—“Dostum, he’s dying. He’s very sick. The doctors 

here don’t know what’s wrong. Can you help him out?” And 

I said, “Yes. What we’ll do is, take him to Bagram and we’ll 

have him checked,” and we had a very good medical facility 

at Bagram. So, they fly Dostum from Mazar-e Sharif down to 

Bagram, and I get a call from the chief of staff down there—I 

think it was Col. Chuck Cardinal, was the chief of staff—and 

he goes, “He’s going to die. Liver failure,” and I said, “Well, 

can we keep him alive?” And he says, “Yeah. We gotta get 

him to a Level 1 medical facility,” and I said, “Well, what in 

the hell are those?” And he says, “Well, Walter Reed,” and I 

said, “He’s going to Washington? We’ve got to treat a warlord 

at Walter Reed? The ambassador isn’t going to go for that.” 

And I said, “Wait a minute. How about Landstuhl?” And 

so we sent Dostum to Landstuhl, and they cured him. They 

fixed him, and they worked out the equipment he would 
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need to stay alive, and he basically came back. He was back 

about a week and a half, and he called the ambassador and 

he said, “I want to come to Kabul and have dinner with all 

of you.” Barno was out of town at this time. And so, we had 

dinner and he announced, “That’s it. You guys saved my life. 

I want to become a political person. Can you DDR all my 

heavy equipment in the middle of the winter?” So, basically, 

that’s what we did. We went up there, got all his heavy 

equipment, and Dostum’s got some nominal position inside 

the government—still a powerful guy, connected. But that’s 

sort of how we went about the eaches of getting rid of these 

guys one by one. So, I don’t know what question you asked 

me that got me down that path. 

DR. KOONTZ: I was just asking you your assessments of what you had 

done. You pointed to the elections, the inaugurations, 

DDRing the warlords ... 

COL. LAMM: Oh, yeah. DDR was Japanese. Our role in that was cajoling 

warlords to give it up. The election, the successful presidential 

election, the training, the election watching, a political 

process, if you’re a warlord and you’re watching this political 

process grow, that not even the warlords or the Taliban is 

able to interrupt (and we never get any indication of if the 

warlords are going to interrupt it) because quite frankly, in a 

parliamentary election, you’re probably going to get—it’s like 

Chicago, and they’re going to get the local guy in, anyway—

but the kicker was, they watched this, and it was a successful 

presidential election, and they go, “Hey, this parliamentary 

election’s going to happen.” And there’s a UN mandate out 

there: “Oh, by the way, the UN has decreed you cannot run 

for political office if the UN says you’re a warlord.” And it 

comes—how does it know you’re a warlord? You have a local 

militia. So, you’ve got to DDR the militia and turn in all this 

heavy equipment.

So, by the time the parliamentary election was rolling 

around, the Japanese had like a 99.9 percent success rate 

in policing up heavy weapons. They had policed them 

all up—FROGs, Scuds, tanks, missile launchers. You 

wouldn’t believe the crap these guys had. And basically, it 

was the synergy of that election and that political process 

taking off that convinced these warlords: “Hey, I got to 

truck it in here, or I’m going to be on the outside. It looks 

that way now. I’ll be on the outside, and if I want to be 

a new political warlord in my area, I’m going to have to 

get elected, or get my people elected.” And I think that’s 

the major success—the major success that brought in the 

warlords, turned in the equipment, contributed to security 

and government, was watching this political process of the 

elections go by. And then, having the right military force 

on the ground to secure that process as you went along. So, 

it was a combination of all those interagency things that 

made it work. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I’ve monopolized two hours of your time here. If I 

could ask you one last question, when your son gets out 

of the Army, or when your daughter gets done with her 

grad studies in Arabic studies and you’ve got grandkids 

bouncing on your knees, what’s going to be the one 

story that you’re going to tell them about Afghanistan—

something funny, something that touched you, something 

that, you know, really made an impression on you? 

COL. LAMM: Yeah, I’ll give you a sort of—the command-sponsored 

orphanages. It was in the dead of winter, and we were patting 

ourselves on the back—the -4 and a number of folks in the 

-9 shop—that were working on the orphanages. I mean, we 

had a liaison with orphanages and, in fact, the command 

sponsored one of the orphanages. We had gone down one 

day. We’d gotten coats from the AAFES [Army-Air Force 

Exchange Service] guys that were left over from Europe for 

years, probably lying around the warehouse as donations 

and other things, and we had gotten all of these coats and 

mittens and hats. And the winter of ‘05—I mean, ‘04 to ‘05 

was brutal. I mean, it started snowing on Thanksgiving, and 

we had snow up to the waist in Kabul compound until the 

spring. It was beautiful, but it was cold, and we were passing 

out these hats and gloves up at the—this is in Kabul—and 

I look down, and none of the kids have shoes on. I mean, 

they’re out there in their bare feet, getting a coat and mittens 

and gloves. And I said, “Man. ...” And, my guys were aghast, 

too. I mean, it never occurred to them: “They need shoes.” 

So, they worked very quickly, and then we made a boot-andshoe run. So, that was very interesting.

But I think the one thing that I will remember—and that was 

a success in its own way, from a very human aspect, and I 

didn’t get to do a lot of that because I’m chained to a desk, so 

that touched me in a very personal way—but the best event 

that we had there, that really had everybody in the building 

high-fiving, and even Barno came in glowing and hugging 

people, was the First Lady’s [Laura Bush’s] visit to Kabul. The 

First Lady’s visit to Kabul was one of these other seminal 

events that just drove a stake into the heart of the insurgents. 

First of all, we planned that with three or four guys. The 

station chief, myself, and a handful of people knew she was 

coming, and the first thing was her handler said, “This is the 

first time where we’ve gone anywhere where it didn’t leak.” 

And I said, “Well, it hasn’t leaked because nobody knows. 

The next thing we’re going to have to do is execute without 

a whole lot of people knowing.” But we had an A-list cut out 

and big visitors coming, but we were a little put out because it 

was the First Lady. She went, visited—obviously, obligatory, at 

the end of the visit, stopped by Bagram and had some dinner 

with soldiers, but just for a short period of time. She spent 

the entire day at the Kabul’s Women’s School for Education 

and, of course, as the chief, Barno’s with her—everybody’s 

out with her, all the key leaders, Khalilzad, all the bigwigs are 
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152

with her. I’m just waiting for her to get into Afghan airspace 

and get the hell out of Afghan airspace, but it was just a great 

visit. It went extremely well. It made huge political capital 

for us. The Afghans were absolutely thrilled. But then, 

never underestimate Khalilzad. As this very micromanaged 

operation is going on to get her to and from places, her 

convoy pulls out to take her to the helicopter. I’m watching 

on the Predator, and the damn convoy stops in the middle 

of the street in Kabul. The door opens up, the ambassador’s 

car, and the First Lady and Khalilzad hop out of the car. 

They’d told me they were going to do it. I said, “Well, okay. 

Let me take a look around,” and they walk across the street 

into an Afghan bakery, buy bread, come back out, and drive 

away. Well, it’s not what us ops folks would have liked, but 

it was a great moment for the ambassador. He was thrilled. 

Obviously, by doing that, the First Lady’s walking around 

the streets of Kabul buying bread, it sort of sends a message 

to folks everywhere: “Hey, you know, it’s not a bad place 

to go.” Obviously, I could drive around Kabul and nothing 

happen to me. The ambassador could, and you know—just 

with your driver—but to have it be the First Lady, basically, 

citizens look at that and say, “If the Taliban or al Qaeda 

really wanted to make a statement, they could have. That 

was the chance. And we’ve watched these elections; we’ve 

watched the inauguration; now we had the American First 

Lady walking around the street buying bread. Maybe this 

new government is the way to go.” So, yeah, that visit was 

the best time.

I will tell you, one of the funniest lines was Major Beaton, 

a Marine major—he had been in country about eight 

months. That young major, it was his visit: security, where 

she was going, where she was staying, where she was eating, 

where the planes are going, the whole thing, because 

we’re a small staff. You know, I’ve got an ops chief—[Col.] 

Cardon Crawford, whom you’ve probably heard of—and 

he’s running it, but this major, it’s his visit, and basically, 

afterwards, he came up. He was almost in tears, and he 

goes, “I just want to thank you for letting me do this.” And 

I said, “Well, it’s your job.” I mean, “No one else could do 

it, buddy, and you did a great job.” And then he looks at me 

and he goes, “Sir, you know, you should have come down 

and met the First Lady. Her handlers wanted you to meet 

her because you were putting this thing together with us.” 

And I said, “No, my job’s here.“ And he goes, “Well, you 

really needed to come down there”—and this was the funny 

line—he goes, “Sir, the First Lady, she’s hot! I mean, she’s 

really good-looking, and her folks who are with her are 

really hot!” And I looked at him (of course I’m snickering) 

and I said—I got the -3’s sitting here with me—and I said, 

“You know, you’ve been deployed too long. It’s time for you 

to go home and see your wife.” He said, “The First Lady’s 

hot!” I said, “You know, that’s about right.” So, that was that. 

That was the funny story. 
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DR. KOONTZ: All right, great. Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

COL. LAMM: No, I think we covered all the bases. I do, at the end—

because I’m into this quite a bit—the interagency and 

DoD are spending a lot of time and a lot of effort trying 

to figure out how to institutionalize and build processes 

to conduct these counterinsurgencies and nation-building 

operations, and my gut feeling is that we’re making it much 

more complicated than it needs to be. First of all, good 

officers like Gary Cheek and the guys in -76, staff officers, 

they know what to do inherently. American officers, they 

know what to do. They know the way things ought to go. 

You don’t need a whole lot of specialized training. I mean, 

they’ll get in there and they’ll figure it out, and they’ll 

get it going, and you’ll learn more on the ground doing 

it than you’re going to learn at NDU [National Defense 

University] in a classroom, anyway. I can say that because 

I’ve taught at those places.

The key that the interagency has to figure out is how it 

builds teams and puts them in there and then empowers 

them to do what they need to do, as opposed to having 

them beholden all the time to some policy guy back in 

Washington. There’s got to be a policy dialogue all the time 

so that you’re in sync. But in these sorts of situations like 

Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places, that guy on the ground’s 

got to be able to make national-level decisions with the 

people on the ground and just execute without wasting a 

whole lot of time getting an interagency operations group, 

you know, in D.C.: “Big stuff! Yeah, that’s got to come back 

here.” Small stuff like “Do we send Dostum to Landstuhl?” 

We didn’t even ask that question in Washington. Do you 

know how long it would have taken us to get the answer on 

that one? I told the guys, “What are we going to do? Don’t 

even bother! Don’t even bother. I mean, they’ll be calling 

the German Embassy: ‘Do you want an Afghan warlord 

there?’” Turned out, the Germans loved him! He’s like a 

rock star over there. But, yeah, basically, you knew that 

as a presidential envoy, Khalilzad could cover you—you 

know, just cover your rear as you did these things, and as 

long as he and Barno and everybody else are on the same 

sheet of music, it really empowered you to do a lot of stuff, 

very rapidly, that you don’t see a lot of in many places. So, 

that’d be the last tidbit. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. All right, sir, I want to thank you for taking the 

time to do this. 

COL. LAMM: No sweat. It was a pleasure. 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

154

Col. Tucker B. Mansager served as the political-military officer of the Office of Military 

Cooperation-Afghanistan from July to October 2003, when he transferred to serve as 

Chief, CJ-9 Section (Civil-Military Affairs), in Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan. 

He was interviewed by telephone on 20 April 2007 by J. Patrick Hughes of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Colonel Mansager discusses the work of the Office of Military 

Cooperation-Afghanistan in coordinating security sector reform and the mentoring and 

development of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Afghan 

National Army. Task Force Phoenix trained the rank and file troops of the Afghan National 

Army. Colonel Mansager mentions the office’s staffing and command relationships with U.S. 

Central Command and the Department of Defense. One of the original six members of the 

staff of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, Colonel Mansager relates the difficulties 

of building a new staff to coordinate strategic policy and liaise with the U.S. Embassy, the 

Afghan National Government, Coalition partner nations, and the United Nations, as well as 

with field forces such as Combined Joint Task Force-76 and provincial reconstruction teams. 

The interview concludes with Colonel Mansager’s comments on the challenges and rewards 

of interagency operations. 

DR. HUGHES: It is the twentieth of April 2007. I am interviewing 

Colonel Mansager by phone. This is Dr. J. Patrick Hughes, 

interviewing. Sir, could you give your full name and your 

duty position?

COL. MANSAGER: My name is Tucker Mansager. I am a colonel in the U.S. 

Army, and I am currently the installation commander for the 

Presidio of Monterey and the commandant of the Defense 

Language Institute Foreign Language Center.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Good. And you are sitting for this interview 

voluntarily?

COL. MANSAGER: I am.

DR. HUGHES: And don’t mind it being used for an Army study?

COL. MANSAGER: No, I do not.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Sir, what was your duty position and station before 

you deployed to Afghanistan?

COL. MANSAGER: I was the assistant Army attaché in Warsaw, Poland.

DR. HUGHES: And how and when did you learn you were going to deploy 

to Afghanistan?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, we had been working in Poland for some time, getting 

the Poles to cooperate both in Operation Enduring Freedom 

to begin with, and then in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which 

obviously started—I was there in March of 2003 when the 

war started. So, we had been doing a lot of work with the 

Poles to help build the Coalition, and I had gotten sort of 

tired of sending my Polish friends off to Afghanistan and 

Iraq, and so I contacted my branch manager. I am an Army 

foreign area officer [FAO]. I said even though that is out of 
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Building the Command

my area, my area being Europe, I would volunteer to do a 

tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. And, strangely enough, I came 

out on the [Army] War College list. I had been slated to go to 

the Hoover Institution. I went and picked up a car that I had 

bought in Germany. I shipped it just before Easter of 2003. I 

came home. I shipped it to California where I thought I was 

going to be. I came home. I checked my e-mail on Easter 

Tuesday, and there was the infamous e-mail from your 

assignments officer saying, “Remember how you volunteered 

to go someplace if we wanted you to go? Well, we would like 

you to go to Afghanistan.” So, I found out probably in late 

April of 2003 that I was going to go to Afghanistan in July. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Did you know at that time that you were going to 

be political-military [POL-MIL] officer in the Office of 

Military Cooperation-Afghanistan [OMC-A]?

COL. MANSAGER: No. The original orders came down with me being the 

security sector reform coordinator in the Office of Military 

Cooperation-Afghanistan. So, that is what I was anticipating 

doing, going over there, although many people had warned 

me that you get over there and you sort of do what you are 

told to do, but the actual orders, I think, said security sector 

reform [SSR] coordinator. 

DR. HUGHES: What your actual role was going—?

COL. MANSAGER: Exactly! Well, in fact, there was a little bit to debate about 

it for a while, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself, 

but the actual security sector reform coordinator, by 

designation from Secretary [of Defense Donald H.] 

Rumsfeld, was Maj. Gen. [Karl W.] Eikenberry, the chief 

of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan at that 

time. So, that title was taken by a two-star general, not a 

lieutenant colonel, at the time. He had an assistant who is 

a Brit, a British lieutenant colonel. So, even the assistant 

to the SSR coordinator was filled. And so, I got there, and 

I think the bottom line was, Maj. Gen. Eikenberry being a 

fairly renowned Army foreign area officer himself, wanted 

to get a foreign area officer on his staff to do POL-MIL 

things, but in the process of figuring out what the slot 

would be called and everything, I think they just looked 

for something that was familiar.

DR. HUGHES: You obviously—with your experiences in Poland, you 

already had a consciousness of something of what was 

going on in Afghanistan. How did you get smart in the 

area of Afghanistan?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, I did know a little bit but, you know, not a whole 

lot. We worked on getting the Poles to commit forces and 

getting them to allow overflight, but not on the details 

inside the country. So, I just did a lot of reading, and I was 

thinking about that—what I read—and, unfortunately, 
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156

I can’t remember the authors. But I read stuff like The 

Great Game. I also read Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan. 

There is a military history of Afghanistan. I think it’s 

The Military History of Afghanistan from Alexander to 

the Present Day,” and then a fellow foreign area officer 

recommended—in fact, I think he had been maybe the 

first defense attaché that went back into the embassy at 

Kabul, a guy named Henry Nowak—had recommended 

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, believe 

it or not. He volunteered to go in, and I believe he was 

the guy that helped open the embassy back up and, based 

on his experience, he thought, “You know, there’s a lot of 

stuff about warlords and things that Stillwell was dealing 

with in China.” So, I read that as well. And then my only 

other real personal preparation really was making sure I 

was physically fit and my family was squared away for the 

year that I was going to be gone.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Did you get any official briefings for that?

COL. MANSAGER: Yes. We came out of Poland, got my family back to the U.S. 

and settled them in Arizona, where we’re from, and then I 

went out to Central Command in mid-July and got a good 

series of briefings on what was going on there; and what a 

provincial reconstruction team was because the concept 

was just coming up then; and who was who and what the 

tribes were, and things like that. So, I probably had a good 

week, I think, sort of working with the J-5 [staff section for 

plans] folks in Central Command. In fact, we will get into 

this later on. [Lt. Col.] Robin Fontes, who succeeded me in 

the position in Afghanistan, was actually the J-5 desk officer 

who briefed me before I went in. So, it worked out really well 

in that regard.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Did you go then from the Central Command 

headquarters to Afghanistan?

COL. MANSAGER: Right. It’s sort of circuitous, right up to Baltimore and over 

to Frankfurt and into Turkey. Actually, I went to Manas, 

Kyrgyzstan, to Ganci Air Base there in Uzbekistan for about 

a day or two as they were trying to coordinate the flights into 

Afghanistan. I finally got there on the twenty-fourth of July, 

I think, in 2003 in Bagram.

DR. HUGHES: It sounded like they really didn’t have a predecessor in the 

command there before you. Is that true?

COL. MANSAGER: Right. It hadn’t existed. As you know, at least in Army 

assignments, it is all sort of a mystery. Nobody will ever tell 

you exactly how they came to you. Sort of the anecdotal 

evidence I heard was—you know, General Eikenberry, he’s 

a China FAO. As you may know, he was a defense attaché 

and assistant Army attaché. He speaks Chinese fluently. He 

wanted a foreign area officer of some kind. In Afghanistan, it 
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Building the Command

is actually in the 48-Delta region, sort of South Asia, I think 

it’s called, so guys that deal with Pakistan and India and things 

like that would have been the natural pick. Apparently, they 

offered him several folks from that region, and for whatever 

reason, he didn’t accept them, so they sort of broadened the 

circle to include guys like me, a 48-Charlie European FAO. 

And so, I got there, and that is why I think they were sort of 

“Well, what do we do with this guy now that we have him?” I 

think General Eikenberry had an idea, but since none of the 

other guys on the staff were foreign area officers, they didn’t 

know exactly what capabilities the FAO brought to the fight 

that they were in.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What was the mission and scope of the Office of 

Military Cooperation-Afghanistan?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, of course, I would always defer to General Eikenberry, 

who was in charge, but my perception was just—I mean, 

the biggest thing we were working on was to rebuild the 

Ministry of Defense [MOD] and the General Staff [GS], and 

we provided sort of staff and combat development support to 

Task Force Phoenix, that was actually training the Afghan 

National Army [ANA] and the various U.S. units—largely 

National Guard—rotated through. There was active duty and 

reserve units that would fall in to train the ANA out at Pole-Charki on the outskirts of Kabul, but sort of the equipping 

of those guys, that’s another—it was interesting. You know, I 

was in Poland, trying to get Warsaw Pact kind of equipment 

for the army in Afghanistan. Then I got to Afghanistan and 

had to call back to Poland to my friends to try to pull this 

stuff forward. So, OMC-A worked on equipping them, and 

then they worked on sort of developing the TO&E [table of 

organization and equipment] and the tactics, techniques, 

and procedures, sort of, but really more of the organizational 

stuff of the ANA—how big should companies be, how should 

they be structured, what are the weapons that go into it, 

and then getting the weapons. We did that for Task Force 

Phoenix. There’s a Marine Corps colonel while I was there 

named Rick Schmidt, who was the guy in charge of that 

particular division.

And then the other major effort, and the one that I was 

much more involved in because of being an FAO, was the 

reconstruction of the Ministry of Defense and the General 

Staff for the Afghan military. One of the other things I 

should mention to you, particularly because of the person 

of General Eikenberry—he was, as I mentioned, the security 

sector reform coordinator for the United States in the security 

sector reform, which consisted of building the ANA, which 

the U.S. is responsible for; counternarcotics operations, 

which the Brits were doing; rebuilding the judiciary, which 

the Italians were doing; demobilization, disarmament, 

and reintegration of the militia forces, which the Japanese 

were doing. I think there is another one in there, but I can’t 
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recall—oh, the Germans were building the police. So, he 

was the American general. Eikenberry was the American 

rep to that international body that was trying to do that as 

a result of the Berlin Accords [actually, Bonn Agreements]. 

And then, you know, the other thing, which is to say Bagram 

and Kabul are not the same. There’s about an hour’s drive in 

between them.

So, General Eikenberry was actually—even though Lt. 

Gen. [John R.] Vines, the CJTF-180 [Combined Joint Task 

Force-180] commander, was the senior U.S. Army officer 

on the ground—Maj. Gen. Eikenberry was the senior U.S. 

person in the capital. So, when something happened and 

they needed to see an American real quick, it oftentimes fell 

to him.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. The Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, 

how was staffing when you got there?

COL. MANSAGER: It was—you know, as I was looking at this—it was not bad. 

It was, to some degree, combined. We had, as I mentioned, 

a British officer, who was the assistant to the general for 

security sector reform. There was also a British lieutenant 

colonel who worked with Col. Rick Schmidt in the division 

that dealt with building the ANA. I just want to make sure 

that that’s clear. It was very clear that Task Force Phoenix, 

which, interestingly enough, was not directly subordinate 

to OMC-A but was subordinate to CJTF-180, did the 

training with those folks. OMC-A built the structure. Let’s 

put it that way. So, we had a Brit inside that and a couple 

other folks, a couple other allies floating around, as I recall. 

But it was fairly austere. I got a picture of us someplace, and 

there is probably not more than—oh, I don’t know—fifty 

people on the whole staff, as I recall, in OMC-A proper.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What branches of the military were there?

COL. MANSAGER: It was dominated by the Army, but there were a number 

of marines. Like I said, Rick Schmidt, who is one of those 

very few colonels that we had—we probably had maybe 

three or four colonels, I guess, in the whole organization. 

So, he was in charge of a major division there. He was a 

marine. We had a Marine lieutenant colonel, Joe Moore, 

who was like the logistics officer, trying to get all of that 

equipment for the ANA. We had a couple Navy Seabees 

that would come through on a pretty quick basis, but we 

had a couple naval officers and then a couple Air Force 

officers. The admin officer, sort of the secretary for the 

General Staff, was an Air Force officer. So, we had all 

of the services represented, but it was far and away, I 

think, an Army organization. We had a good number of 

reservists and national guardsmen in the team, as well, 

from the Army. So, there was a pretty good smattering 

of everybody.
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DR. HUGHES: What was the experience level?

COL. MANSAGER: I would say, you know, for some folks, it was very good. In the 

experience—let me sort of say, experience in doing what? In 

doing this particular job, probably not much. You know, this 

is a job that I don’t think anybody could have really trained 

to have done before they came in there because even—and 

as I mentioned, I’m an Army foreign area officer. So, we do 

what is commonly called Office of Defense Cooperation 

[ODC], defense security cooperation activities, that kind 

of stuff; and sometimes you’ve got things like an Office of 

Military Cooperation, if it’s big enough, like in Turkey, for 

instance, headed by a general. But this OMC did nothing 

like an OMC in a noncombat zone. So, the experience level 

for doing this particular job was fairly minimal. I think the 

guys that were building the structure for the ANA probably 

had some more experience because we do that for our own 

Army. We build structure in TO&Es and TDAs [tables of 

distribution and allowance] and things like that, but for 

rebuilding the General Staff and the MOD, there is not a 

whole lot of experience for that. I should also point out—we 

were talking about the organization—we did have a large 

number, a growing number, of MPRI [Military Professional 

Resources, Inc.] contractors who were brought over to serve 

as advisers and things for the rebuilding of the General Staff 

and the MOD. And then the other thing I would say about 

experience is that there is a large number of reserves and 

national guard guys, and this early into it, in 2003, so we 

hadn’t activated that much of the reserve and guard. They 

hadn’t gotten sort of in the battle rhythm that they are now 

where you effectively can’t differentiate the experience level 

between an active duty guy and a reserve guy because we have 

been fighting the war six years now, but back then, you could 

sort of tell a difference between folks that had been on active 

duty their whole career and guys that had just been pulled 

out of Fort Leonard Wood and sent over to Afghanistan.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What was the relationship of the office to 

Washington, D.C.?

COL. MANSAGER: I think General Eikenberry and we had a pretty straight 

channel back up to the secretary of defense, under secretary 

of defense for policy. We were sending sort of weekly reports 

back on what is going on there. By the time I got there in July 

of 2003, to be quite frank about it, I think Washington had 

probably lost a little bit of interest in Afghanistan, to be quite 

frank with you, because that’s July 2003. We had just been 

fighting the war in Iraq, and a lot of attention had shifted 

over there. That is not to say that we were neglected, but, 

clearly, people had their eyes on Iraq a lot. I should mention 

the Coalition. I mentioned the folks that were in our team, 

but we also had a lot of folks as we were going through 

that we were building up in Task Force Phoenix and the 

Coalition, and we did a lot of cooperation with the Coalition 
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160

forces or embassies there in Kabul to try to build support for 

some of this stuff we were doing as well. But our relationship 

with Washington, I think, was good; but I think Washington 

by this point in time was a little bit distracted by Iraq, to be 

honest with you.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What were your duties and responsibilities?

COL. MANSAGER: They were sort of—you know, it’s the beauty of going in and 

making your own job up. Ultimately, I worked an awful lot of 

General Staff and MOD reform, working on the international 

aspect of that. So, the whole idea—General Eikenberry, I 

think his intent at the time that we were there was to make 

sure it was a Coalition effort and not a U.S. effort—you know, 

it is Afghanistan and the Coalition, not the U.S., and not the 

U.S. and Afghanistan; it is the Coalition and Afghanistan. 

So, a lot of the stuff that I did that I could use my FAO skills 

on was going out, and we would work. We had to build the 

structure for the General Staff and the MOD, and we had 

to get everybody to buy into it. We couldn’t impose it on 

people—not properly, anyway—so we had to develop this 

structure, and then we sort of went around, and we went 

on a traveling road show and sold it to the major players. 

So, first the international guys. So, we would talk to the 

United Nations Assistance Mission-Afghanistan, UNAMA. 

I guess Secretary [Lakhdar] Brahimi was there at the time. 

We talked to the EU. Then we would go around talking to 

the major embassies, the French and the Brits in particular, 

the Germans, and get them to sort of sign on to this thing, 

and then we would take it around to all the different major 

ministries inside the government. This is before the election 

and before the second loya jirga, the constitution loya jirga. 

So, these were folks that had been sort of appointed in the 

aftermath of Bonn, of the Bonn Agreements of 2002, I guess, 

and so they represented different ethnic groups, and we 

needed to get them all signed on. So, that is a lot of what I 

did. I did a lot of prep for that. I would go with the general 

when he would brief them. I would take the notes. We would 

write them up and send them back. I did a lot of sort of, 

in some regards, the strategic communications work to 

figure out, how do we approach the French on selling them 

on MOD, GS reform, and getting them to maybe provide 

some advisers and things like that, and getting them to play 

a bigger role in the training of the Afghan National Army. 

As I mentioned before, General Eikenberry was really intent 

on making sure that it was the Coalition and not just the 

United States. Even if the Coalition wasn’t stepping right up, 

he was willing to go in and ask them for stuff. So, that is a lot 

of the stuff that I did in OMC-A—did a lot of writing, a lot 

of talking points for folks. And, in fact, I would usually draft 

stuff when we would have VIPs in. So, the chief of staff of the 

Army would come in, or different visitors would come in, 

and they were going to go talk to the Afghan government. 

Oftentimes, I would draft up things for somebody else to say 
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for us back to the Afghans, so that they would hear the same 

message from a different voice, if you see what I’m saying.

DR. HUGHES: Did you have a routine of meetings or reports or whatever? 

Was there a routine in an average week?

COL. MANSAGER: I would say not a whole lot. I think we had one big command 

and staff meeting a week, and I recall that being on the day 

off. The Muslim Sabbath is Friday. So, that would usually be 

the day, that if you got a day off, that would be it. That was 

sort of a designated day off. It was never a regular weekend. 

You never had two days off. So, if there was a downtime at 

all, it was Friday. I recall command and staffs being on a 

Saturday, and then General Eikenberry would have either 

two or three meetings on Sunday regularly with the most 

senior guys, two of the most senior guys in the Afghan 

organization. There was a guy named [Nasarullah] Baryalai, 

whose first name I don’t know, and he was sort of a deputy 

minister of defense to Fahim Khan, and so he was a little bit 

more approachable to get to. And then General Eikenberry 

would also meet with the chief of the General Staff, who was 

an Afghan general, [Asif] Delawar. So, he would go in, and 

these are the talking points that I had prepped for him, you 

know, obviously working with the staff. He would go in and 

sort of, for lack of a better term, sort of beat up on these 

guys about “We need to move forward on whatever these 

particular issues are,” whether it is getting volunteers into the 

ANA or equipping or releasing some of the weapons over or 

doing any of the myriad of things we had to do. He would do 

that on Sunday, every Sunday, for, gosh, two or three hours, 

sometimes with each one of them.

And then as I was going through my notes, the other thing, 

battle rhythm-wise, quite regularly while I was there, he and 

a small group of folks—I traveled with him a couple times—

would take a trip on that Friday that was the nominal day off. 

He would then go out and visit different parts of Afghanistan. 

I went with him to a town called Baghlan, which is north, on 

the other side of the Hindu Kush from Kabul. He would go 

to different parts of the country to sort of drum up support 

for the ANA and do the same kind of things we were 

doing inside Kabul. You know, largely, I think even though 

Secretary Rumsfeld had declared major combat operations 

over, CJTF-180 was still very much in the right looking for 

terrorists and looking for the Taliban, and in many ways, 

I think General Eikenberry was the big POL-little MIL 

portion of going around and dealing with the politicians and 

getting them to give way and support reform of the Ministry 

of Defense and the General Staff and the building of ANA 

and things like that. So, he would do that on Fridays, and 

Saturdays would be command and staff. Sundays would be 

these sort of long meetings of the very senior Afghan folks. 

And then on a frequent basis, but not regular basis, we would 

have lower-level meetings with individuals inside the General 
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162

Staff and the Ministry of Defense on the Afghan side who 

were responsible for taking particular steps to reform those 

two organizations. So, we would go over there probably once 

or twice a week—you know, because of the Afghan schedule, 

it could vary just a little bit—to review their progress, and 

then based on all those things, I would write up different 

SITREPs [situation reports] to send up to Washington to let 

them know what was going on.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. During the time that you were with the office, what 

were the major events or issues that you dealt with?

COL. MANSAGER: I think the single biggest one was MOD and General Staff 

reform. Step one was getting people to agree what positions 

there ought to be in the General Staff and what positions 

there ought to be in the Ministry of Defense; and once they 

agreed with that, getting them to agree to an ethnic—not 

balance, because the country is not ethnically balanced—but 

an ethical equity within those positions, without immediately 

jumping to “I want this guy to be the minister of defense. I 

want this guy to be the chief of the General Staff.” “Well, let’s 

agree that there is going to be a chief of the General Staff, 

and is there going to be a deputy or isn’t there going to be 

a deputy? Is there going to be a G-3 [deputy chief of staff 

for operations], or is it going to be something else? Some of 

them are common sense. You have got to have an operations 

guy. You got to have a plans guy. But then there’s—reasonable 

people can disagree about the structure. So, that was probably 

the single biggest thing that I did, and I was only there—I was 

in OMC-A for only three months—but that was probably 

the biggest single issue I think in making sure that we got 

that right and we got everybody to sign on to it, both at the 

international community and in the Afghan side and the 

beginning of that implementation, I would say.

Let me go back. There was one other meeting that we did on 

a regular basis in OMC-A, that General Eikenberry did. We 

used to call it the “core meeting,” for lack of a better term, 

where the U.S. military rep being General Eikenberry, U.S. 

civilian rep—at the time, we didn’t have an ambassador. 

Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad hadn’t come yet. The 

previous ambassador had gone home. The chargé d’affaires 

was David Sedney. General Eikenberry would meet also 

with the special representative of the secretary-general, 

who I am pretty sure is [Lakhdar] Brahimi, and the U.K. 

ambassador sort of on a regular basis to talk about issues that 

they could affect to make sure that we were sort of speaking 

with one voice, particularly U.S., U.K., and UN Brahimi was 

the special representative of the secretary-general of the 

UN to Afghanistan. He went on to do a little bit of work in 

Iraq, but he was the UN rep, for all intents and purposes, in 

Afghanistan during the time that I was there. His deputy was 

a Frenchman named Jean Arnault, and we dealt with him 

a lot, too, because Brahimi was very busy. So, we had that 
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meeting about once a week, but you could never tell what 

day you could get everybody back together. The key issue, 

I think, that was the single biggest thing that was going on 

there—and then I think a lot of the other things were sort of 

minor, but there were all the political-military kind of issues 

that were going on in the country at the time. You know, 

President [Hamid] Karzai fired the governor of Kandahar 

Province during that time, which was sort of a bold move for 

him because the governor of Kandahar Province is a pretty 

renowned guy. I think his name is [Gul Agha] Shirzai. So, it 

was pretty gutsy of the president. When the president fired 

him, that was sort of a big deal, you know. He also told Ismail 

Khan, who is the provincial governor out there in Herat—

there was some fighting within—he quit calling himself a 

corps commander, and he used to, I think he used to use 

the title “emir,” too, but the president told him to stop doing 

that. That was sort of a big deal, you know, for President 

Karzai to step up like that. So, we were dealing with those 

kind of issues to make sure that open warfare didn’t break 

out between guys. But that is sort of a day-to-day kind of 

things going on for the senior U.S. guy in the capital. Once 

again, General Vines just sort of running the kinetic part of 

the war, but I think General Eikenberry, in a lot of ways, was 

doing these other things.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Were there particular challenges that the office 

faced while you were there?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, I think we had sort of an immature staff—you know, 

guys that, because you rotated in and out and everybody 

had—I should have pointed this out. You talked about our 

service representation. Everybody had different rotational 

schedules. I was the only guy there, at least planned to be 

there, for a year. I knew when I signed up I was going to 

be there for a year. This is back when people weren’t going 

for a year. I was actually on PCS [permanent change of 

station] orders effectively to Afghanistan. It was very weird 

for people to deal with that. But all the services—you know, 

the Brits were coming for (I can’t remember) three or four 

months; I think the Air Force was coming for maybe four 

months; maybe the Marines were there a little bit longer; but 

I was sort of the continuity in that regard, and that wasn’t 

particularly helpful. Not that we all had to be there for the 

same amount of time, but when you had such a turnover, 

that was sort of a challenge. Effectively, it kept the staff new 

all the time, you know what I mean?

In some ways, we had some challenges with our command 

relationships. I am sure on a wiring chart, we were assigned 

to—I don’t know!—somewhere in there, we were probably 

assigned to CJTF-180, because they were the higher 

headquarters there. At the same time, at least some of the 

folks in OMC-A were on—gosh, I should remember this, but 

it has been a while. It is called an NSDD, national security 
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164

something [decision] directive. It is basically the TO&E of 

an embassy. So, guys like General Eikenberry were actually, I 

believe, subordinate to the ambassador because in a normal 

embassy, in a normal OMC or ODC in an embassy, you 

would be subject to the chief of mission, the ambassador, 

in charge. So, there was a core group of eight or nine of the 

guys inside OMC who were technically sort of assigned to 

the embassy, not to the CJTF. Then, as I mentioned before, 

we had Task Force Phoenix, which was in charge of training 

the Afghan National Army, both in basic training and 

educating their officers and things like that, and those guys 

were subordinate to CJTF-180. However, we were the ones 

that were doing sort of the staff work for them to build their 

structure for the Afghan National Army. So, that was sort of 

a challenge, you see. It had some conflicting things. I think 

everybody understood the overall intent, but it led to things 

being a little bit unclear sometimes. Then I think the final 

thing that challenged us ... you know, Afghanistan is just a 

fascinating place, and everybody you talked to would say the 

exact words that you wanted to hear on the Afghan side, but 

that doesn’t necessarily translate to what they would do or 

what they meant. So, those are sort of our big challenges, I 

think.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Then how and when did you become selected 

for a position with Combined Forces [CommandAfghanistan]?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, I got there end of July, as I said, and by about the 

twelfth of August—I was looking through my notes. By the 

twelfth of August, we heard—well, first—well, I guess the 

most important thing was that we had heard that General 

[Lt. Gen. David W.] Barno was going to come in to take over 

the OMC-A job because General Eikenberry was going. 

He had been there for more than a year when I got there, 

and I think he was tired, and I knew he was fairly ill, you 

know, from—it’s just a rough life. It turned out at the same 

time the new chief of staff of OMC-A was going to be a guy 

named Tom Snukis, who is a colonel in the U.S. Army, still 

on active duty, works at Joint Forces Staff College. He was 

going to come in as chief of staff. Well, strangely enough, 

Snukis had been the S-3 in 3d Battalion, 505th Parachute 

Infantry Regiment, in the 82d [Airborne Division] when 

I was the Bravo Company commander and when General 

Barno was the battalion commander. The stars went that 

way. So, General Barno was going to come into OMC-A, and 

ultimately he did, sort of down the road a little bit, and then 

got the directive to stand up Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan, and so there was a little bit—I think General 

Eikenberry left. We had a guy named [Brig. Gen.] F. Joe 

Prasek. He was the CG [commanding general] out at Task 

Force Phoenix, an active duty general, but I think his forces 

came from the Oklahoma National Guard or something 

like that. He sort of filled in for a while as the OMC-A chief 
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while also being the Task Force Phoenix CG, and then there 

towards October, I think it was—I guess General Eikenberry 

left the twentieth of September—and by October, General 

Barno was in, and he started off at OMC-A, but I think by 

the time he came, he already knew he had marching orders 

to stand up this Combined Forces Command and assume 

overall command away from CJTF-180. So, he came in, and 

I had escorted him when he came in on a fact-finding tour. 

Before they were going to assign him, they let him come in 

and sort of look around, and I had escorted him around. I 

had known him back when I was just company commander 

for him, and then we touched bases a couple times when he 

was the commanding general of the Free Iraqi Forces training 

effort that went on in Hungary. It wasn’t initially going to be 

in Hungary. They were looking at various places, and so they 

ended up contacting me, so I had been in contact with him a 

little bit before about that.

He showed up, and as CFC sort of took form, he basically 

grabbed me and took me with him, for a couple reasons: one, 

because he knew me; but two, because OMC-A was going to 

go really back to—it was going to get out of the, sort of—the 

POL-MIL business with CFC standing up. That was CFC’s 

job, really, was to do the big POL-little MIL thing. OMC-A 

had done that because, I think, of General Eikenberry’s 

background and his residence in the embassy and in Kabul, 

as opposed to Bagram, but basically, OMC-A was going back 

to doing what it really should be doing, which is focusing on 

MOD and GS reform and building the ANA. So, that POLMIL function actually migrated to CFC with General Barno. 

So, I ended up going with him.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You obviously got in fairly on the ground floor for 

the creation of the command.

COL. MANSAGER: Yes, I did. Well, I was there. Snukis was there as the chief of 

staff of OMC. General Barno’s EA [executive assistant] came 

in, and I am sure this is—I don’t know how it came about—

but lo and behold, Lt. Col. Mark Stammer had come in as 

I was leaving 3/505 as the S-4 [staff officer for logistics] of 

the battalion. So, we all knew each other from that. He came 

in as General Barno’s exec, basically. General Barno brought 

an aide with him. I think we ended up having to borrow a 

PSD, a personal security detachment, and, really, that was 

effectively it for a while. The initial intent was for it to be sort 

of a pocket staff and have reach-back to everybody. We can 

reach to CJTF-180 and get them to do this for us, and we 

could reach to OMC-A and get them to do this for us. 

It was just sort of a brain trust. I am sure there were a couple 

other folks in there, but it was really small, and then really 

quickly, we discovered that that just wasn’t going to work. 

First, General Barno had some big ideas for Afghanistan, 

and the word that describes him is pretty relentless. He is a 
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166

very nice guy, but once he gets what he wants in mind, he is 

going after it, and having to wait for things to go to Bagram 

and come back—and, of course, folks in Bagram are also 

working for a two-star that’s up there. By this point in time, I 

think, General Vines had left and General [Maj. Gen. Lloyd 

J.] Austin was put [in] charge. So, they were sort of caught. 

So, slowly but surely, we started to migrate folks, certain 

elements, up from Bagram to CFC. We brought up most of 

the CJ-5 [staff section for plans], to include the British CJ-5, 

a guy named Col. Ian Liles, and a couple of his real smart 

guys, a lieutenant colonel named Tony Rodriguez, who was 

his American lead planner, SAMS [School of Advanced 

Military Studies] graduate and everything. We brought up 

some intel guys, and what we really didn’t bring up, though, 

was sort of the operations folks. We brought up one CJ-3, 

a guy named [Col.] Eddye Daley. But it was a really small 

operations thing. What it was really focused on was, sort of, 

intel and plans, and as we started to do that, we had to sort of 

bump folks out. So, OMC-A, who had been sort of the senior 

folks with the two-star in charge of them, started to have to 

move out of some of the buildings they had been [in] for a 

long time as we started to spread that thing out.

I came in sort of as a POL-MIL officer, and, slowly but surely, 

we actually grew a POL-MIL division. I had several—I had 

General Barno fairly early into it—basically disassembled 

the Combined Joint [Civil-]Military Operations Task Force 

[CJCMOTF]. I was a beneficiary of a couple of those guys. 

They were reserves, like civil affairs folks, but they did a lot 

of FAO-type work. So, I got a couple of them out of there and 

got to stand up sort of a small three- to five-man division, 

depending on how long people were there for. I also got a 

British POLAD [political adviser] from CJCMOTF. She was 

a DFID [British Department for International Development] 

officer.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What were the challenges building the new 

command? Obviously, you are getting people, and you are 

starting out on a new mission.

COL. MANSAGER: Yeah. Well, you know, the analogy that we drew that I wrote 

in one of my books—have you ever been associated with the 

82d Airborne Division at all?

DR. HUGHES: A little bit.

COL. MANSAGER: Okay. Well, there is a thing called—there used to be, 

anyway—a thing called the parachute holding area. So, when 

you were getting ready for a big jump, like a real tactical jump 

and they had to lock you down so that you didn’t blow OPSEC 

[operations security], they put you in the parachute holding 

area, the PHA; and the PHA was nothing but a bunch of empty 

old barracks with beds, you know, so you could rest before 

you did your training, before you did your jump, but it was 
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Building the Command

nothing. So, you basically got the keys to it and you occupied 

it with whatever you had. We used to describe standing up 

Combined Forces Command [CFC] ... you know, here is 

a two-star promotable, going to be a three-star general. He 

is a corps-level commander in charge of all of Afghanistan, 

and he has got an AOR [area of responsibility] that extends 

into Pakistan and up into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, right? 

Standing up CFC was a lot like being handed the keys to the 

PHA—you know: “Here it is. Figure it out” [laughs]. I think 

for a while we didn’t have like an establishment order. I think 

the command was established on the third of February ‘04, 

where we actually had an activation ceremony, but, basically, 

I think General Barno was operating on orders from General 

[John P.] Abizaid to get things going. So, that was a pretty big 

challenge. We were having to borrow staff—“borrow” isn’t 

the right word—take staff from CJTF-180. So, that didn’t 

endear us to them very much, and, of course, as far as they 

were concerned, they were the carnivores, as they like to 

describe it. You know, they were the meat eaters, the guys out 

shooting people, and we were the sort of herbivores trying to 

do this touchy-feely, POL-MIL stuff. So, I think there was a 

little stress there in that regard. 

The physical structure—all of a sudden, things started to 

grow. It had just been OMC-A there in Kabul, and now a 

lot more folks are moving in. You know, a three-star general 

brings certain things with him that a two-star doesn’t or 

that maybe a two-star like General Eikenberry, the way he 

operated, didn’t need those kind of things. So, that got to be 

sort of a challenge as well. I think the other challenge that 

we did very well on, really, though, was establishing good 

relations with the embassy because we had a very small 

footprint with the embassy before, and now our footprint 

expanded quite a bit.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What were your duties and responsibilities?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, this is where I really finally got into sort of the FAO 

business. I did all the kind of stuff I was doing before. In 

many ways, I was sort of like an EA to General Barno in 

that I went to all the meetings, literally almost every single 

meeting that he went to, to take notes and make reports out 

on them. I would prep him for meetings when he had any 

kind of interaction with folks outside the U.S. government. 

When he would go to meet, you know, the minister of defense 

or President Karzai or the French ambassador or General 

[USMC James L.] Jones came through, the SACEUR [NATO 

Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] came through, or we 

would go to see General [German Army Goetz] Gliemeroth, 

the commander of the International Security Assistance 

Force, ISAF, while we were there, I would do all the research 

and prep, and, you know: “Here’s the guy. Here’s the kind of 

things we want to talk to about,” and stuff like that. ISAF was 

originally a UN mission. I think the Turks did it; the Brits did 
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it, but the Brits did it on their own; then General Gliemeroth 

came in with a NATO mandate to command ISAF, and that 

is what it’s continued to be ever since then. So, I’d do all that 

prep for him, and then I did an awful lot of work sort of on 

the international relations side.

I described—his AOR went all the way off into Pakistan and 

Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and, of course, Pakistan was the 

biggest piece of that. So, I would work a lot of those kind of 

issues, particularly when we would go and travel, to make 

sure he was briefed up on those kind of things, what the 

issues were. We had a relationship. That was something that 

actually started, and the lead was usually from CJTF-180, but 

it migrated to us, a thing called the tripartite commission, 

which was Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States. 

Initially, it started as a border conflict–resolution body 

because the border is not very clear there. We were trying to 

keep peace between both sides, and if somebody had strayed 

across the border, we would go in hot pursuit or something. 

They set up sort of this three-sided meeting force to make 

sure that we didn’t actually hurt each other. We tried to 

grow it during the time I was there into more of a security 

confidence-building arena to get, from the U.S. side, to try 

to get Afghanistan and Pakistan to talk to each other. They 

wouldn’t really talk to each other, I don’t think, without the 

U.S. sort of sitting there over them in many regards. That 

was fascinating. So I did a lot of work with that. There was 

a political adviser who was actually assigned to CJTF-180 

that for a while we borrowed, and then, ultimately, we stole 

him for CFC-A. So, those are the kind of things, the really 

classic FAO stuff. Even though I didn’t know much about 

Afghanistan before I came in, you know, I knew a little bit 

about international relations. I knew how embassies worked 

and how embassies worked between each other. So, those are 

the kind of things that I did.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Did you have a battle tempo or routine there at the 

command?

COL. MANSAGER: Yeah. We certainly established one. I don’t have it written 

down, but Tom Snukis was the chief of staff. He really did 

his best to impose discipline on it because he had seen OMC, 

which did not have maybe the most coherent battle rhythm 

going on, and he was really—his mantra was sort of a “plan 

the work, work the plan” kind of thing. So, he really had that. 

On a daily basis, the boss, General Barno, and I would attend 

country team, and the country team meeting is led by the 

ambassador with all the reps from the embassy around it—so, 

the political officer, the station chief, the chargé or the deputy 

chief of mission, I guess, when the ambassador is there, those 

kind of guys. We had a law enforcement liaison there that 

was trying to help rebuild the police. We had USAID there, 

the [U.S.] Agency for International Development there. I am 

sure there were some other folks in there. There was sort of a 
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Building the Command

small econ section, an economics section, and then General 

Barno from the military. And after a while, when Air Force 

Maj. Gen. Craig [P.] Weston came in as the chief of the Office 

of Military Cooperation. He would also attend these country 

team meetings, and so you’d talk about coordinating U.S. 

policy kind of stuff there, but it was sort of a big group.

So, after that, there would be a different core meting. I talked 

about a core meeting earlier. This core was the ambassador, 

General Barno, and the chief of station, effectively, and 

maybe the deputy chief of mission. That is oftentimes where 

a lot of the business really got done because there was just 

stuff that didn’t need to be talked about in a big forum that 

these guys would talk about. I would usually attend those 

and make sure that if there was something that we needed 

and knew, based on what ambassador—at this point in time, 

Ambassador Khalilzad was pretty much there—we’d get it 

out.

We would have a staff meeting. I can’t remember what day 

of the week it was, though. I think we only did it about once 

a week. And then later on, towards October-November time 

frame, we started doing sort of a weekly strategic update for 

General Barno that was modeled on the meeting that General 

[Creighton W.] Abrams used to do in Vietnam. If you read 

the book A Better War, by a guy named [Lewis] Sorley, it’s 

about Creighton Abrams in the last couple of years, 1968. At 

the time, General Barno had read this book, A Better War, 

and he gave it to all of us to read. So, we started just sort of a 

weekly update where we would go around Afghanistan and 

talk about issues and things like that. I would say, while I 

can’t describe the details of it, it was definitely a much more 

stable battle rhythm of what we were doing in there.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What were the major events during your time with 

the command?

COL. MANSAGER: I think that the biggest single thing was this development 

in implementation of our [Security] Strategy South and 

East, which consisted of five pillars, and I have been 

going through my mind exactly what they were now. 

I am sure they are written down someplace, but one of 

them was increasing the competency of the security 

forces, meaning the ANA. One of them was a regional 

development zone that we wanted to try focusing our 

efforts in one particular area to make it better and then 

move that effort somewhere else. We chose Kandahar. 

General Barno, through all of our perception, really was—

there was a lot of stuff coming into Afghanistan, a lot of 

resources of different kinds, whether it was cash or food 

or whatever, but it spread like peanut butter across the 

whole country, so nobody really noticed any difference 

because it was diluted or spread thin. So, the idea would 

be “Hey, let’s concentrate this in one area. Let’s do police 
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reform here. Let’s secure this.” I think the thing would 

be sort of like the oil spot that they are talking about in 

Iraq, and then we will spread out from there. So, that was 

another big pillar. Another one was sort of an enduring 

presence of the forces. If you had looked at a map or an 

operational graph of Afghanistan back in December of 

2003, you wouldn’t find a lot of unit boundaries on it. 

Basically, 10th Mountain [Division (Light)] was there. 

It was really about a brigade at 10th Mountain, and they 

basically owned the whole country. Obviously, that is not 

necessarily the best way to do things. And so one of these 

pillars was “Hey, let’s get regional zones, so this battalion 

owns this area and this battalion owns this area, and then 

the battalion breaks down their area for their companies 

and their platoons, so that we are out there in an enduring 

presence, rather than basing out of Bagram and Kandahar 

going out and doing a raid or doing an operation and 

then withdrawing back to Bagram or Kandahar. Let’s 

go out there and stick around,” and that was a big—oh, 

that was the other thing, expansion of PRTs [provincial 

reconstruction teams]. There is the other one, expansion 

of provincial reconstruction teams. I will talk about that 

one. And then the fifth pillar was engagement with—

initially, it was an engagement with Pakistan, but then it 

actually sort of morphed into a regional engagement. So, 

the idea of being—really, I think, a lot like what we hear 

about Iraq now, we were trying to get out and do good in 

the countryside and be there and not withdraw out of that, 

part of that by giving battalions an area of responsibility; 

part of it by establishing these provincial reconstruction 

teams in significant areas; and then, supporting them and 

supplying them and bringing some stability and extending 

the regional, the national government in Kabul out there. 

Sort of the marching orders for most PRTs are “You are 

doing this on behalf of the government, on behalf of the 

Afghan government, not the U.S. government.” So, that 

was the single biggest issue I think that we did—coming 

up with that plan and then implementing it.

But then, other things—we had the constitution loya jirga

while we were there, which was a huge deal, and then we 

had at least some preliminary elections while I was there 

that people said we couldn’t pull off. I can’t remember 

what that was. I wasn’t there for the presidential elections, 

but we had to register voters for it, and nobody thought 

we could do it. I talked about tripartite. That was sort of 

a big issue, and then I think sort of the establishment of 

the command was a big issue—just getting the command 

going and establishing what our terms of reference were, 

not only with the U.S. forces inside and the Coalition forces 

inside Afghanistan, but also in the area of responsibility 

because there hadn’t been a lot of engagement necessarily 

with Uzbekistan and Pakistan and stuff like that. So, it 

was a fascinating time to be there.
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DR. HUGHES: There were some issues that you have probably addressed 

elsewhere, but what would your comments be on the 

collocation of the diplomatic leaders and the military?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, I think that was really essential to making stuff happen. 

Before, as I said, the senior military leader was in Bagram. 

The senior civilian leader was in Kabul, and even if it’s only 

sixty miles or something like that, that is a long way for them 

to interact, and it is a long way for their staffs to interact. And 

so, I think that just puts you all together. You can walk down 

the hall, knock on their door. The staffs can walk down the 

hall and knock on the door. It makes you feel much more of 

one team when you are doing that, and I think that was very 

wise. We had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs come through 

at one point, and they had pointed out in Iraq, at least at that 

time, that was not necessarily the case, and they thought that 

this was a good idea to put them together in that regard. And 

it is not just the individuals, but also the staffs that go with 

them.

DR. HUGHES: What about consensus building?

COL. MANSAGER: Well, that was—you know, I talked a little bit about that with 

like the General Staff and MOD. Reform, that was in OMC; 

but with our [Security] Strategy South and East, we did the 

exact same thing. We took it around inside the interagency 

in the embassy first and said, “Hey, what do you think?” 

These guys are very smart guys, particularly when it comes 

to things we’re not expert in—you know, the politics and 

the economics and implications. So, we sort of farmed it 

around inside the interagency first inside the embassy; and 

then we went to the deputy chief of mission, got his buy-in; 

then we went to Ambassador Khalilzad, got his buy-in; then 

we sort of worked our circles around. We worked with the 

international community, UNAMA, like I mentioned before, 

and the major embassies that were out there in the EU. Then 

we went out and we started working it with the—we didn’t 

do the same drill. You know, General Eikenberry, we visited 

every minister there was to talk about this General Staff 

and MOD thing. General Barno basically worked with the 

established MOD, chief of the General Staff, and President 

Karzai to say “Hey, this is what we’d like to do. We think this 

would be a good idea” kind of thing, and that got everybody’s 

buy-in. If they had a little comment, we incorporated it. I 

think it was a pretty sound plan to begin with. It was hard to 

object to much of it. So, everybody has some ownership of it, 

and so I think that worked real well.

DR. HUGHES: Okay, good. I gather there was the embassy staff. The 

ambassador got planning support from the military?

COL. MANSAGER: Right. You know, the State Department doesn’t really have a 

J-5 kind of organization, a plans and policy, long-term kind 

of organization, certainly not in an embassy. Maybe in main 
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172

State they do, but I have been in a couple of embassies, and 

they don’t have anything like that, and maybe that is part of 

their mindset with the cultural differences. We think, “We 

have operations and we have plans.” They are sort of always 

in the operations business. So, I think General Eikenberry 

started the idea, and General Barno followed through. 

We called it the EIPG [pronounced “e-pig”], the Embassy 

Interagency Planning Group. Yeah, it didn’t spell “EPIG,” but 

that is what we called it anyway. Basically, General Barno 

took the CJ-2 [staff officer for intelligence] out of -180, who 

was going to be the CJ-2. They got somebody else. Col. 

John Ritchey, I think, was his name. He was the head of the 

EIPG, and they gave him four or five captains and majors, 

and, basically, “Here you go, Ambassador Khalilzad. This is 

your planning staff.” That helped in many ways because they 

didn’t have—first, the embassy was very small, very small 

for—you know, we compared it to the embassy in Saigon. 

We were drawing a lot of analogies to General Abrams in 

Vietnam. Oh, gosh, we were like a tenth of the size of a 

wartime embassy, so they didn’t have many extra folks 

to begin with, so this helped in that regard. It showed our 

commitment to working as one team. It showed “We are not 

separate. We are one team working towards one objective 

here,” and it helped us out because it would help them think 

through problems rather than sort of asking for information 

or changings and things like that. These guys, we could relate 

to them, even if they are inside the embassy, according to the 

military decision-making process and things like that. So, I 

think that made a huge difference not only in their physical 

planning, but in the perception of our commitment to one 

team, one fight, to that concept. And it also, of course, gave 

us insight into what people inside the embassy were thinking 

that we might not have otherwise had because they were still 

going to share information with us and ideas and what the 

ambassador is thinking so we can stay on the same track.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. I only have about three more questions, but I know 

you need to go. 

[Interruption to proceedings.] 

Continuing an interview with Colonel Mansager, 20 

April 2007. Sir, we were talking about your time with 

the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, and the 

next question I had was, given all the different agencies 

you talked about working with, what were the cultural 

differences? I will phrase it that way.

COL. MANSAGER: Well, I think that the—of course, the biggest agency that we 

worked with was the Department of State, and there’s a great 

paper that was actually written by my predecessor several 

times removed up at the Hoover Institution who I think now 

is a—I think he is a general, a guy named [Brig. Gen. Rickey 

L.] Rife, and he cowrote this paper with the Department of 
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Building the Command

State up at the Hoover Institution, which is a [Army] War 

College fellowship. They have got one from every service 

and a State Department rep. And so, he cowrote a paper on 

the differences between the Department of State and the 

Department of Defense called “Defense Is from Mars, State 

Is from Venus,” and it talked about the differences between 

them, and there really are—the types of people that migrate 

to those kind of jobs, and they do the Myers-Briggs analysis 

on people and things like that. But, you know, there is just 

a big cultural difference between DoD folks, you know, 

uniformed officers, and State Department officers. I think 

some of the things that I would highlight would be there is 

a lot of individual work at the State Department, and folks 

are generally recognized and promoted because they do 

great individual work. They write cables and do individual 

stuff, whereas, in the military, we are taught from a very 

early age that it is the team concept. While you get promoted 

individually, you oftentimes get promoted because of the 

team that you were on, that you had a good cooperation and 

stuff like that. And it is not that they weren’t cooperative, 

but they just had a different mindset towards working with 

things. There were a lot of folks working individual issues 

there.

I mentioned earlier that there was—they don’t do a whole 

lot of long-term planning of any concrete nature. I mean, the 

concept of world peace, I’m sure, is a long-term plan in some 

regard, but how do you get to those, and what are the phases 

of that operation, and what are the intermediate steps, and 

what are the shaping functions and things that we have to 

do? So, I don’t think that that’s part of them. So, when you 

bring a military structure into it, then, of course, there is just 

sort of a—rightly or wrongly—there are preconceptions that 

one side always has about the other. In many ways, I think 

the State Department sort of looks at the military guys as 

sort of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals; and, for better or 

worse, a lot of military guys, particularly if you are the Army 

infantry kind of guys, you look at State Department as sort 

of Princeton, bow tie–wearing, pipe-smoking intellectuals 

kind of thing, and there’s certain aspects of both of those. 

But I think the good news about working in Kabul with the 

embassy was that I think we both learned a lot about each 

other to find out that, in fact, we have more in common 

than we do have differences, and once you learn about the 

differences with the other agencies, oftentimes you can work 

better together because of that diversity that you have there. I 

am a big fan of the interagency process. It was a little bit easier 

to work with guys in the OGA [other governmental agency]. 

They seemed to have a similar outlook as we military did.

I would say one of the differences, you know, that we were 

talking about, they were having a tough time getting folks 

to come to the embassy. Department of State was having a 

tough time getting people to come to the embassy, and, of 
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174

course, we were told to come, and we were there for—you 

know, generally speaking, Army guys were there for at least 

six months. State Department guys rotated out a lot. So, 

there is a big cultural difference there. Again, that made the 

embassy almost always very new. There was always a fresh 

staff, even fresher than our staff was. So, those are some of 

those differences there. Then we had other folks that weren’t 

even in the Department of State. They were Department of 

Justice guys, things like that, working the legal issues, and 

they were yet another, I guess. I used this in one of my papers. 

We said, “State is from Venus; and DoD is from Mars; and 

those NGOs and PVOs, nongovernmental organizations and 

private volunteer organizations, those guys are from that bar 

in Star Wars.” They’re a totally different group of folks. Even 

if they are Americans, they are very—you know, I worked 

with the International Rescue Committee. I think that was 

one of the nongovernmental organizations working there, 

and their attitude towards what is going on was just totally 

different—even their perspective from what we were doing, 

whether it was not even wanting us to drive white SUVs, you 

know, civilian vehicles, the white Toyota Land Cruisers. That 

is what they drove, and they didn’t want to be associated with 

us in uniform driving those, but that is sort of how we went 

around, in civilian vehicles, because we didn’t have Humvees 

over there and things like that. And, sort of wanting to 

operate under the protection of the security that uniformed 

folks brought, but not too close and not wanting to associate 

themselves with it, but more than willing to take advantage 

of it. So, that takes a little bit of getting used to, if you are not 

used to dealing with folks like that.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. How did the different agencies interact? Can you 

give me some examples as you were building the [Security] 

Strategy South and East? Obviously, different agencies 

had different ownerships of that.

COL. MANSAGER: Well, as I mentioned earlier, one way that we helped with 

that was we didn’t just hatch the plan in secrecy. The military 

guys didn’t just hatch the plan in secrecy and say, “Here it 

is.” We went out and got buy-in from folks, first inside the 

embassy, and then the individual office level, whether it was 

the political officer or the narcotics and law enforcement guy 

or any of the different folks inside the embassy, so that they 

could look at it and give us their opinion of it and tweaks if 

they had any for it and thereby getting buy-in. So now, they 

have got some ownership to it. So, if the plan fails, then that is 

part of theirs, too; and if the plan succeeds, it is part of theirs, 

too. That is really, I think, how we set the groundwork.

Then, after we got going through everybody else and getting 

final approval to move forward with some of the things, 

probably the biggest one that required a lot of interagency 

cooperation was this regional development zone [RDZ] 

down in Kandahar because that required us to make sure 
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Building the Command

we started working, standing up a provincial reconstruction 

team. We had to surge sort of military around Kandahar to 

make sure it was secure. The police guys needed to work 

faster to get a police training center down there, and those 

were at that time—I think now the Ministry of Interior and 

the police training is actually under military control, but at 

the time it was not. The Germans were doing some police 

training, and then we had a guy inside the embassy that was 

working with contractors to train police. So, we had to get 

him to work on that. Then we had to get the USAID director, 

the [U.S.] Agency for International Development, to focus 

more of the USAID effort in Kandahar as well. I am trying 

to think of some of the other examples. We had to get the 

UN to support that, but because of the way we built the plan 

and got people in sort of on the ground floor and got some 

buy-in, by the time it came time to do those things, there 

wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about whether we were going 

to do it. It was just exactly how to make that happen, and I 

think that made it fairly successful. It was always the RDZ, 

the regional development zone, was always sort of designed 

as an experiment. We wanted to see if it would work, and 

then if it worked, we were going to pick up that same model 

and move it, probably move it north, because we wanted 

to make sure we kept balance between the Pashtuns in the 

south and sort of the Tajik north. We wanted to make sure 

that they didn’t think the Pashtuns were getting something 

that they weren’t getting. But the problem is, with something 

like that, it is a longer-term experiment. You can’t do all of 

these. First, it takes a while to get all the stars lined up, and 

then it takes even longer to see the results—how quickly do 

you see results economically? And security is a little bit easier 

to observe, but particularly economically, which is what we 

were really trying to work at—you don’t see those results in 

a month or two or three. You talk about six months or a year 

or two years. So, that was still going on when I left, and I 

don’t know how it turned out.

DR. HUGHES: Earlier, you mentioned that you wanted to talk on the 

subject of the PRTs, the provincial reconstruction teams. 

I would be very interested in what your observations were 

there.

COL. MANSAGER: Well, you know, they were just—provincial reconstruction 

teams, as I was coming, getting my briefings in CENTCOM, 

they had just sort of gotten the approval for that concept, 

and it just stood up the first maybe two or three, I think, in 

Afghanistan. As I recall, I think Konduz was one up in the 

north, and there were a couple other ones floating around, but 

then when I got on board for that first couple, three, months, 

they were trying to stand more of them up. The idea was to 

make them sort of an interagency team, but as I mentioned 

before, we couldn’t get anybody to go over. We wanted 

agricultural guys in them, USDA guys, Department of State 

guys, some military guys, civil affairs, some security guys, 
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176

that kind of stuff, but the only guys that the U.S. government 

was compelling to go to Afghanistan were the military guys, 

so they were, by and large, military organizations.

When I first got there, there was a big push to get NATO to 

expand and sort of take over more PRT and stand them up 

on their own, as well as take over more of the overall mission 

going on in Afghanistan, and for a while there, going to 

General Eikenberry, we seemed to think that that was 

actually going to come to pass fairly quickly, but it just got 

sort of stagnant there in that September-October time frame 

and really sort of ground to a halt. General Barno came in, 

and we might have had five or six PRTs in September 2003, 

almost the majority of them in the southeast portion of the 

country. One was up in Mazar-e Sharif. The Brits actually 

ran that one, and then Konduz, and then I think there 

were a couple in the southeast around Ghazni, but I can’t 

recall off the top of my head. But General Barno made this 

expansion, NATO and PRT expansion, one of his pillars of 

this [Security] Strategy South and East, which was to get 

more PRTs out there, so that we could expand security. We 

could expand the reach of the central government so we can 

get the money and the help where it needs to be from people 

that are sort of living in that area, and he pushed very hard to 

get interagency representation on those teams. By the time 

I left, we were starting to get a couple of State Department 

guys, I think, maybe one or two agriculture guys there, but 

that was a long swag to get them to do that. But we also 

happened—I went up to participate in the handover of the 

first PRT to NATO, and I think that was the Konduz PRT, 

as I recall, and that was a really big deal. This was like the 

start of things, and I recall that being in December, maybe, 

of 2003, something like that, and nothing happened for a 

while after that. But I know as I was starting to leave in the 

June-July of 2004 time frame, there started to be more plans. 

We were talking about the Italians going out to Herat, and 

we stood up a PRT there. They might take that one over, and 

I think the Brits stood up a couple more up around Mazar-e 

Sharif, and we got the one going in Kandahar. We figured 

we would probably hold on to that one since it was sort of 

in a contentious area. We were more than willing to have 

command of PRTs—the U.S. was—that were in less stable 

areas, I guess, down in that southeast corner, and then let the 

NATO guys handle the ones that were in more stable areas 

like Herat or Mazar.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. When you were getting ready to leave, you have 

already said that you were replaced by Colonel Fontes, who 

had briefed you going in. What sort of advice or guidance 

did you give her? When you passed the baton, how did you 

describe it?

COL. MANSAGER: You know, I was thinking about that. She knew more about 

this area. I think she had been a defense attaché in Tajikistan 
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Building the Command

before, so she had a lot of background. There wasn’t a whole 

lot, and she was monitoring it from CENTCOM. In fact, I 

had been corresponding with her, not only knowing that 

she was going to be my successor, but she was effectively the 

CENTCOM desk officer for Afghanistan, so she was pretty 

spun up. I think mostly what I talked to her about was the 

dynamics inside the organization and the dynamics with the 

embassy and things like that. I tried to share with her whom 

she could turn to in the embassy to be a straight shooter and 

get good information from. The world that she was going to 

take over was going to be different because, in many ways, 

I was probably in the position I was because of my previous 

relationship with General Barno, but then that had sort of 

become institutionalized. The POL-MIL guy is sort of in the 

inner circle there, whereas in another command, you might 

not be. She might not be. I worked with Tom Snukis, and I 

think General Barno was very welcoming and did not allow 

her to be squeezed out of that just because it was a different 

person; and that was probably the biggest thing, is that the 

POL-MIL person there—and I think she did do this, because 

she ended up going; she got out of CFC and went down to 

command a PRT—but I know she stayed inside the circle 

there, which is important, you know. I think that was the 

biggest advice I gave her was “Don’t let folks squeeze you out 

of this. The job that you are in requires that you have close 

and regular contact with the senior leadership, and don’t let 

them, just because you’re a woman or you are new or you 

don’t know the boss from years back, don’t let that affect you, 

because the position is too well established now,” and that 

is really, I think, what I tried because she knew more about 

Afghanistan than I would ever know, I think.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Looking then over your entire tour there, what 

would you consider your greatest challenges?

COL. MANSAGER: I think the biggest ones were—well, the single biggest one, 

I think—was always trying to stand up an organization, 

whether it was standing up a POL-MIL kind of organization 

within OMC-A when I first got there or helping to stand up all 

of CFC-A later on. There is a certain amount of organizational 

energy that goes into building the organization. We used to 

liken it to a “We are building the aircraft carrier while we are 

sailing to the Persian Gulf ” kind of thing. So, that was one 

of them. My personal biggest challenge was staying ahead 

of General Barno, because he was such a smart guy. He 

was operating with a Pentium chip, and we were all sort of 

with 486SXs. He was just a smart guy with a lot of ideas and 

energy, so that was a challenge. And then I think, personally, 

there was a challenge of making sure that you felt you were 

contributing, that you were actually doing something. We 

were very busy. I have been reading through my journals 

that I kept here, and I was working long hours, doing lots of 

stuff, and even a couple of times in my journals, I said, “Are 

we making progress?” So, the frustration there is, how do 
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you know? And the secretary was beating us up. Secretary 

Rumsfeld was always asking, “Where are your measures of 

effectiveness? How can you make progress?” In some ways, 

you can apply measures of effectiveness to some things—

how many ANA battalions have you trained, right? But you 

get into that numbers game. It is sort of like the body count 

game. Well, they are trained. Are they equipped? What 

level are they trained to? Are they manned full strength? 

So, when you are dealing with sort of intangible stuff like 

political-military affairs, you kind of wonder every once in a 

while, “Am I making any progress?” I think that was sort of 

a challenge.

Accomplishments-wise, I think my—there is a foreign 

area officer journal, and I wrote an article called “FAOs 

Unbound,” because I had been trying to get—as an FAO, I 

have been trying to do something out of my area just for fun, 

for mind stretching for a while, and the FAO guys always 

write back and say, “No. You’re a European FAO. You’re 

going to Europe.” “Well, listen. I speak Russian.” “It doesn’t 

matter. You’re a European FAO. You’re staying in Europe,” 

until they needed me, and then they sent me completely 

out of my area to Afghanistan. So, I took the opportunity at 

Hoover to write an article that says, “Listen, FAOs come with 

a set of skills by virtue of their master’s degree in a language 

and international relations. They have worked in foreign 

language.” Even if I didn’t speak a word of Dari when I got 

there, I had worked in a foreign language and understood 

the complexities of translation and interpretation and 

working through a translator. Even though I had not been in 

the embassy in Kabul, I had been in an embassy in Warsaw, 

and I knew the difference between a general services officer 

[GSO], who is an admin guy who runs the structure that you 

are in, and the regional services officer, a regional security 

officer [RSO], who is the security guy to make sure the 

ambassador doesn’t get killed, and knowing the difference 

between a GSO and an RSO was a big deal there. So, back 

to significant accomplishments, there were no other FAOs 

there when I got there that had this skill set. So, I think my 

most significant accomplishment was being able to sort of 

stitch this—be almost a liaison between the organizations in 

the beginning, to be able to speak military to the military 

guys and be able to speak sort of State to the State guys, and 

be able to set that organization up. That is something I am 

fairly proud of, and I wasn’t the only one, but I could work 

the relationships there and then get the right people to talk 

about the right topics and things like that, and I think that was 

probably one of the biggest accomplishments. The other one 

was our MOD reform and General Staff reform. I think that 

went pretty well back when I was in OMC. It got stabilized. 

We continued to work at it, and that was one where I helped 

design it to some degree, but what I really helped do was sell 

it and get people to buy into it, and that was quite a sales job, 

you know, to different ethnic group ministers and different 
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countries and international organizations and stuff. So, I 

would probably count those two among my most significant 

accomplishments.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Is there anything else I should have asked you?

COL. MANSAGER: I’m trying to think. Things finally started kicking off. We 

talked about NATO expansion a little bit and how it did start 

to sort of move as we were going on, and then I went off to the 

[Army] War College and didn’t keep following up on it. You 

know, no, I don’t think so. General Eikenberry played a real 

key role in sort of setting the stage for the POL-MIL side of 

things. He had had this experience and saw what needed to 

be done, and General Vines gave him the room to maneuver 

because I think General Vines was focused more on the 

kinetic aspects of the war. So, I think General Eikenberry 

really set the stage for it, and then General Barno, who is not 

an FAO at all—General Barno had no foreign area officer 

experience; I wrote about this in my Joint Forces Quarterly

article—but what he did have was a broader understanding 

of things and a willingness to not merely approach things 

from a strictly military perspective that allowed him to deal 

with the embassy in a more open way and in a more collegial 

and unified way. I think that is the beauty of what General 

[David H.] Petraeus ought to be able to do in Iraq. He has 

just got a broader perspective on things like that, for getting 

along with folks like that. I guess that is probably about it, off 

the top of my head. 

DR. HUGHES: I greatly appreciate that. Well, I want to thank you very 

much. This concludes the interview.

Col. Thomas J. Snukis deployed to Afghanistan in July 2003 as Chief of Staff, Office of 

Military Cooperation-Afghanistan. Three months later, he became the first Chief of Staff, 

Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, and served in that position until July 2004. He 

was interviewed in Norfolk, Virginia, by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military History on 1 March 2007. Colonel Snukis received a short-notice assignment as Chief 

of Staff, Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, and recounts his hurried preparation 

and training before deployment. He discusses the office’s expanding organization and growing capability to train the soldiers and leaders of the Afghan National Army, as well as its 

command relationships with U.S. Central Command, Combined Joint Task Force-180, and 

Task Force Phoenix. After his reassignment to the nascent Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan, Colonel Snukis oversaw the expansion of the command from its original sixman staff to a staff of several hundred, and he comments on the challenges posed by building 

the command staff, which included shortages of trained personnel, logistical resources, and 

communications. He also discusses the leadership of Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and the establishment of his strategic priorities, including the “Five Pillars” strategy to rebuild Afghan 

politics and society. After outlining the command’s organizational linkages to the Afghan 

National Government, the U.S. Embassy, and its subordinate military task forces, Colonel 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

180

Snukis concludes the interview with his transition out of the position and an assessment of 

the command’s successes during its first months of operation.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the first of March 2007. 

I’m in Norfolk, Virginia, at the Joint Forces Staff College, 

and I’m interviewing Col. Thomas J. Snukis, who is an 

instructor in the Joint Advanced Warfighting School. I’m 

interviewing Colonel Snukis about his experience as the 

chief of staff of both the Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan [OMC-A] and Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan [CFC-A]. First of all, sir, are you sitting for 

this interview voluntarily?

COL. SNUKIS: Yes, absolutely.

DR. KOONTZ: And do you have any objections with Army or public 

researchers using this material as long as you’re cited 

correctly?

COL. SNUKIS: No, not at all.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Thank you, sir. To start off, what in your 

professional experience prepared you, or perhaps got you 

on the list, to take the job of chief of staff of OMC-A? 

COL. SNUKIS: Well, I mean, the preparations obviously started back from 

the day that you sign up and join the Army. Went to the 

United States Military Academy, and my role as a cadet in 

the training and the education received there, and then my 

infantry training as infantry platoon leader, staff officer, 

company commander, up through battalion commander as 

an infantryman, more than prepared me for my job over in 

Afghanistan. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. When did you find out that you were going to get 

that position?

COL. SNUKIS: We saw—let’s see. July is when I left. I found out in June.

DR. KOONTZ: What were you doing at that time?

COL. SNUKIS: At that time, I worked at the [U.S.] Army Training and 

Doctrine Command [TRADOC]. I was the director of Army 

experimentation. 

DR. KOONTZ: What did you do in those few weeks that you had to 

transition from your job at TRADOC before you left for 

Afghanistan? Did you do any kind of— 

COL. SNUKIS: You know, actually, that was inaccurate. I was the director 

of Army experimentation, and I then went to Fort Eustis, 
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Building the Command

Virginia. Was in the Army Training and Modernization 

Directorate, and I was the Army—I’m Army training 

and modernization director within the Army Training 

and Support Command at Fort Eustis. I had gone from 

TRADOC to do that. I got notified from TRADOC as an 

individual augmentee that I was going to go and be the 

Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan chief of staff. 

What did I do is, about a three-week period before, I went 

to Fort Benning to do my initial training. I didn’t really do 

anything different. I prepared my affairs back here. I read 

some things, some articles on Afghanistan; got a statement 

of the problem, what was going on; did research on the Office 

of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan; started and sustained 

e-mail coordination with the guy that was the current chief 

of staff over there that I replaced, spoke to him on the phone 

two or three different times; and that was about it. I didn’t 

really have a whole lot of time to think about it.

DR. KOONTZ: At the time that you left the United States and went over 

to Afghanistan, what was running through your mind as 

to what you were going to do when you hit the ground 

there? How did you conceive of the job, and how did you 

want to approach it personally?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, I knew what a chief of staff did. I knew that I would be 

in charge of a staff. The mission of OMC-A at that time was 

the training of the Afghan National Army [ANA], which 

entailed training from the Ministry of Defense all the way 

to the boots on the ground. So, I knew that I would be in 

charge of an organization and a staff that—or, in charge of a 

staff for that organization—that would operate and conduct 

operations within those parameters. So, I mean, the thought 

process was “Hey, what’s Afghanistan like? What’s going on? 

What’s the terrain look like? What’s the mission entail? How 

are the guys that I’m going to be working with? How’s my 

boss?” I knew who he was. I hadn’t met him before. General 

[Maj. Gen. Karl W.] Eikenberry was going to be my initial 

boss. Those kinds of things were kind of what went through 

my head. Nothing, no real apprehension about it. I was more 

than ready to go. I was happy to go. As a matter of fact, the 

way my career had been going, I was almost—not in fear, but 

kind of worried that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to 

contribute directly to the war in any effort, in any individual 

way, and it was, like, I took it with no hesitation. 

DR. KOONTZ: Do you have any idea why you were selected for this 

position?

COL. SNUKIS: I think it was a—it was not a by-name request. I know that 

for a fact. It was a tasking that came down through TRADOC 

headquarters. I think they looked around at the available 

colonels that they could use for that tasking, and my skills 

and background matched up better than some others, plus 

availability, plus the fact that I was volunteering. I didn’t 
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182

mind going. I had a family. I mean, I still have a family, my 

wife and two children, and it was tough on them; but they 

knew that it was something that I needed to do. So, I don’t 

think there were any special considerations. It was kind of 

“Hey, we need to fill this, and he’s one of the available guys,” 

and I think everything else just kind of married up on the 

best for it. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right, let’s get you to Afghanistan. Tell me about the 

deployment process.

COL. SNUKIS: Well, pretty straightforward. Went down to the CRC 

[Continental U.S. Replacement Center] down at Fort 

Benning. I did basic training there. I mean, it was nothing to 

prepare me specifically to be a chief of staff, which, I would 

say, folks need to work on, I think, and they have been 

correcting over the years. I mean, I was issued equipment; 

qualified on my weapon; went through health screen; got my 

shots. Had very minimal cultural training. We had about a 

half a day’s worth over at Building 4 at the Infantry School. 

Got a protective mask and protective equipment, fit that. 

Went to the gas chamber to test the fit of the mask, and ... 

just the basic, really basic employment-type of tasks. It wasn’t 

anything specific to go to be the chief of staff or own a highlevel staff job like that, but it was sufficient. You know, the 

training at Fort Benning was tailored for the lowest common 

denominator, so a lot of stuff, I mean, I’d done many, many 

times before. 

[Interruption in proceedings.] 

But from there, then, I was going to be the OMC-A chief 

of staff. They diverted me down to Tampa, and I had a 

week’s worth of meetings with the CENTCOM [U.S. Central 

Command] staff and the guys that I would be working with 

directly at CENTCOM. So, I got a detailed country brief. Got 

to meet my J-5 [staff section for plans] counterparts, guys in 

the J-2, J-4, J-6 [staff sections for intelligence, logistics, and 

communications]. So, it was a tailored, week-long process 

that set me up then to go to be the chief of staff, which I 

thought was very, very effective.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, I’ve got two questions on your train-up. You said at 

Benning you got some very minimal cultural training. Do 

you remember any specifics from that?

COL. SNUKIS: No, they gave us a cultural—one of the books that they 

have. I don’t know if I have it sitting here. I think it’s 

sitting right there on that shelf over there. But there was 

nothing that really—I mean, it was a real—that was what 

they gave us.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, they basically just kind of walk you through the 

Country Handbook?
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Building the Command

COL. SNUKIS: Country Handbook, and that was it. And really, I mean, 

there was nothing that jumped out. Was there anything that 

I applied that they taught me? No. Maybe that’s just because 

I was a bad student, but there was nothing that really jumped 

out at me that I needed. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then tell me a little bit more about this trainup that you had with CENTCOM and getting hooked up 

with your J-staff. 

COL. SNUKIS: Essentially, there was—they assigned me—there was a 

captain, an individual augmentee at CENTCOM, that was 

working out of J-5 shop. Essentially, he was kind of my 

handler or whatever, and he put together the schedule, got 

me set up, you know, with all the admin type of things. But 

I went in and actually got to talk to the folks running the 

Afghan desk, the J-5 guys focused on Afghanistan, what was 

going on in Afghanistan. The security assistants, security 

cooperation guys that had been working Afghanistan gave 

me several briefs, talked to me about the personalities 

involved, both U.S. and Afghan. I got a good general J-2 

overview of Afghanistan and the region. J-4 side, we talked 

about the donor nations some, the work that we were doing 

with the nations donating equipment and supplies and things 

to help build the Afghan National Army, how some of that 

stuff worked. It was generally just a good overview of the 

current situation of what was going on in Afghanistan, and, 

like I said, normal days, probably eight-hour days, with the 

opportunity then to kind of study and reflect on my own on 

some of that stuff. So, overall, it was a good little program, I 

thought.

DR. KOONTZ: It’s probably jumping ahead a little bit, but what was the 

connection between CENTCOM and OMC-A? How did 

that tie-in work in theater?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, I mean, CENTCOM, obviously, ran the operations 

in Afghanistan. OMC-A ... you know, if you look at the 

relationship, really, OMC-A was a State Department deal that 

OMC-A itself—but Task Force Phoenix, that actually did 

the training of the Afghan National Army, and they worked 

for CENTCOM up through Combined Joint Task Force-180 

[CJTF-180]. The command relationships weren’t necessarily 

that clear, but they were more working with CENTCOM, 

and OMC-A working with the State Department, but 

with CENTCOM as well, although it wasn’t a straightline OPCON [operational control] as you would see it in 

the command relationship slide. And then, also, OMC-A, 

not subordinate to Combined Joint Task Force-180, but 

obviously ... General Eikenberry, at the time a two-star, and 

General [Lt. Gen. John R.] Vines, who was running -180 at 

the time, they talked and communicated fairly frequently. 

So, the CENTCOM tie was that CENTCOM had the overall 

C2 [command and control] of everything. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let’s get you from Tampa to Afghanistan. How 

did that happen?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, it was pretty straightforward. I mean, it was a 

civilian flight from Tampa to Baltimore; and then the 

Patriot Express from Baltimore to Germany; and then 

Germany to Manas Air Base, and that was contract air; 

and then at Manas, we picked up a C–130 and took it 

into Bagram. From Bagram, I was met by some guys 

from OMC-A, and then did a deuce-and-a-half ride 

down to—or, a five-ton truck ride down to Kabul. 

DR. KOONTZ: How long did the air legs take?

COL. SNUKIS: I guess, overall, it was about a three-day process.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, you get to Kabul, and you’re now part 

of OMC-A. What were the missions and kind of the 

scope of operations? What were they doing at that 

particular time when you arrived?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, I mean, OMC-A was summer of 2003 now, July 

2003, end of July 2003. The headquarters itself was 

expanding. It was growing into its expanded role. 

Obviously, it had initially been—it had started off as an 

eleven-man element that was chartered with this whole 

security cooperation piece and security assistance. But, 

obviously, to build an army from scratch generated a 

requirement for a larger staff. We were in the process 

of growing so there was overhead, things that had to 

be done, infrastructure, updates—you know, places for 

people to live, places for people to work, computers. An 

operation center had to be stood up. So, kind of in the 

midst of all that. At the same time, we had recruiting 

teams out recruiting, showing the Afghans how to 

recruit for the army. You had Task Force Phoenix, was in place, which was training the Afghan National 

Army, what they called kandaks at the time, essentially 

equivalent to a battalion-level force. So, they were 

standing those up, and we were also in the process of 

starting to develop a mentor program for the Ministry 

of Defense and the General Staff. So, not only were we 

building combat battalions, but we were also looking at 

putting together a Ministry of Defense General Staff, and 

also the infrastructure attendant with that—you know, 

bases, training areas, military academics, or academy, 

in this case, preliminary work on what an Afghan air 

force would look like, and all the problems and issues 

and challenges attendant with that. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. About how big was the staff when you arrived?

COL. SNUKIS: OMC-A staff was less than a hundred, and I don’t know, 

I can look. I think OMC-Alpha was less than a hundred 
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Building the Command

at that point in time, and the majority of those were—

majority?—all of those were individual augmentees.

DR. KOONTZ: And this is a joint operation, correct?

COL. SNUKIS: It was joint, yes. 

DR. KOONTZ: Could you just kind of give me a guesstimate as to how 

much was Army and how much was other sources?

COL. SNUKIS: The predominance was Army. There was a handful of 

Air Force, handful of Navy, handful of Marines. But the 

predominance was Army.

DR. KOONTZ: And was the OMC-A staff all uniformed, or did you have 

civilian contractors in there as well?

COL. SNUKIS: OMC staff was all uniformed. Contracts were—we had KBR, 

Kellogg, Brown & Root, that ran the food, infrastructure, 

repair, and things of that nature for our compound, at the 

time called Kabul Compound. It’s now Camp Eggers. But 

as far as—but then we did have contractors that came in. 

They weren’t part of staff, as it were. I guess they called 

them trainers, but they were MPRI [Military Professional 

Resources, Inc.]—were mentors. A handful—six to ten—

were mentors for the Ministry of Defense and General 

Staff. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, at this point in time, you don’t have, say, MPRI or 

DynCorp or something? They’re not working with the 

Afghan troops or anything like that at this time?

COL. SNUKIS: No. The Afghan troops—Task Force Phoenix—now, see, I 

didn’t have as clear a view on the full-up Task Force Phoenix 

composition, but the guys that I dealt with were all military 

out of Task Force Phoenix, and I don’t remember ever 

seeing any, at that point and time in 2003, contract trainers. 

DR. KOONTZ: And was there any international participation in OMC-A 

at this time? Other than the Afghans, obviously.

COL. SNUKIS: Yes. French, Romanian. There may have been a handful of 

others, but you know, they were kind of out on the fringe. 

French and Romanians were the ones that jumped out, and 

just a handful of those guys as well. 

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about taking over the staff at OMC-A. How did 

you transition into taking your position?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, initially, I arrived—the chief of staff that was there, 

essentially, I mean, we had a face-to-face session together. 

Lasted maybe two hours or so. I went and linked up with 

the staff primaries. Those guys walked me through their 

areas. Worked with the guys running the compound. We 
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186

had an outfit from the Pennsylvania National Guard. It was 

our garrison commander, and it was about twenty-someodd guys that ran the garrison, had an in-brief with them. 

Went out with the engineers to look at some of the key 

training sites and the planned infrastructure builds in the 

Kabul area. I went out to Pol-e-Charki, which is where Task 

Force Phoenix was, had an in-brief from those guys. And 

that all maybe lasted about two or three days, and the chief 

of staff that was there departed, and I took over. 

DR. KOONTZ: Do you remember who your predecessor was?

COL. SNUKIS: Don Bridge. Col. Don Bridge, Army aviator. 

DR. KOONTZ: And my next question is, after you go through and you 

meet your staff primaries, you view the compound, you 

view some of the subordinate units, what’s your estimation 

of OMC-A? What’s going through your head as things 

that are working well, things that need to be improved, 

something like that?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, as I told the staff—this is just a paraphrase, now—what 

I tried to tell was, one, that what they had done to that point 

was, in my view, very, very good. I could see that because they 

essentially started from scratch, zero. Built the compounds 

so that they were operating on the go while they’re trying 

to put together a joint manning document [JMD], while 

they’re trying to put together a compound, while they were 

still working to build the Afghan National Army and do the 

liaison required. But at that stage of the game, I saw that 

we could then take them to the next level, and we needed 

to go to the next level, and that was just a little bit more 

focus on how we were training the Afghans; the equipment 

that was coming in, how that was distributed out from the 

different nations, the donor nations that were bringing in 

artillery pieces, rifles, all the different things that we were 

outfitting the Army with; uniforms, how we were going 

to develop uniforms, boots. All the things that probably 

Washington back in the day had to worry about with the 

Revolutionary Army, we were dealing with the Afghan 

army, and what we wanted to do was get Afghan solutions 

for them. So, instead of contracting out and bringing boots 

from the United States or having boots made in the United 

States or in some other country: “Hey, let’s see where, first 

of all, can we find an Afghan manufacturer that can make 

boots to a standard that’s worthy of the Afghan National 

Army?” Just insignia—I mean, what kind of rank insignia 

did these guys wear? They went to a distinctive green beret 

to separate the Afghan National Army from some of the 

militia units that were still up and operational. Those types 

of things kind of dominated each and every day. And then, 

obviously, the acceleration—the sense that the quicker we’re 

able to generate trained, equipped, and professional security 

forces within Afghanistan would give us, obviously, the 
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Building the Command

ability to do some other things with our force and our—the 

capabilities that were on the ground as the United States, 

whether we kept them there or supplemented or did other 

things, as we got the Afghans combat ready and prepared to 

go out and accept the responsibility for their own security. 

So, those were the kind of things that dominated each and 

every day. So, we run the gamut of trying to supply ourselves 

and get infrastructure for us to be able to do our jobs, and 

people working with the Afghans, and laying that out for 

their armies, as well. 

DR. KOONTZ: I’m curious about this idea of mentoring the guys from 

the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. What 

kind of efforts was OMC-A doing to sort of build up the 

leadership echelon, I guess, for lack of a better— 

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, I mean, I think it was—first of all, there was a whole 

process, and it was mostly completed by the time I arrived, 

but General Eikenberry had developed this process, one, to 

vet leaders who should be, first of all, what was the makeup, 

the tribal makeup of the leadership; who should be vetted; 

where would they command; what positions would they 

take—and there was a huge process that went into working 

with the Afghans and their U.S. counterparts to determine 

a list, and then from that list designate who would fill these 

new positions as they were coming up. So, that was one of 

the first steps. There was an interim group, and then there 

was a group that they said, “Okay, here’s what we really want 

it to look like.” So, there was a lot of effort involved with that, 

and mostly General Eikenberry handled that personally, 

along with the Afghan leadership, and then from there, 

the mentorship kind of developed, where we brought these 

contractors in, and active duty.

Col. Rick Schmidt, Marine colonel Rick Schmidt, I know 

for a fact, was the senior mentor for the minister of defense 

at the time, General [Abdul Rahim] Wardak. Rick Schmidt 

was his counterpart, was his right-hand man, and not that 

he would—General Wardak was U.S.-trained, had been to 

Command and General Staff College, had spent some time in 

the United States. I think even some of his family lived in the 

United States. But Rick, then, would go to work with him in 

the morning, would be there, would sit next to him. As issues 

came up, he would counsel, mentor, give solutions, offer 

suggestions, recommendations, and vice versa. In General 

Wardak’s case, he was a top-notch professional, continued 

in the army. Actually, he was a chief of staff for the army at 

the time, and then he became the minister of defense. He’s 

the minister of defense now. But, essentially, would go into 

work with him, would also socialize with him, the mentors 

would. And then we also had—Rick was the one active duty 

guy that comes to mind—MPRI contractors, then, married 

down in the General Staff as far as the personnel level, the -1 

[staff section for personnel] level; the -2 level, the intel guys; 
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188

-3 level, the ops guys. Essentially, same kind of deal, a guy at 

the top, the G-1 of the Afghan army, as it were. You know, we 

had a mentor: “Today, here’s the things that a G-1 would do,” 

boom boom boom boom, and they would go through each 

and every day with their counterparts in essentially standing 

up the Afghan army. 

DR. KOONTZ: How did OMC-A interface with Task Force Phoenix? 

How did that organizational relationship work?

COL. SNUKIS: I mean, essentially ... I don’t know. It’s very difficult to 

explain. I mean, Task Force Phoenix had its charter. 

Task Force Phoenix initially was run by a brigade-minus 

element of the 10th Mountain Division. Col. Mark Milley 

also had an active duty—Brig. Gen. [F.] Joseph Prasek was 

the commander, Task Force Phoenix commander. And I 

wouldn’t say it was a loose command and control relationship, 

but Task Force Phoenix was subordinate to OMC-A, but 

OMC-A didn’t direct the day-to-day operations of Task 

Force Phoenix. General Prasek did that. He was the trainer. 

I think his background—I think he was a Joint Readiness 

Training Center commander at one point—and they ran the 

training of the Afghan National Army. There was friction 

there, and I didn’t really—in my time as the OMC chief, one, 

trying to learn the job and trying to gain a handle on the 

staff ... the advice, the friction level between OMC-Alpha 

commander and the Task Force Phoenix ... I didn’t have a 

good opportunity to get a good understanding of that during 

my time there. Task Force Phoenix always sent a rep. We 

had a liaison assigned to us from Task Force Phoenix who 

always knew what they were doing and when they were 

doing it. Our -3 capability, operations-level capability, the 

tracking, or what I would say an operations center, really 

wasn’t fully developed. It was immature, so our ability to 

track and command and control what they were doing was 

virtually nonexistent at the OMC-A level, at least during 

my time with them. And I mean, they essentially had their 

charter. We had to schedule—we knew how the battalions 

were going to be built, when they were going to be built, the 

timeline that that fell under, how the basic training worked, 

how the advanced training worked, how the platoon leader, 

the officer training was going, and the schedules of those 

and the graduation pieces of that, but essentially almost in a 

monitoring mode, not a directed mode, as it were. 

DR. KOONTZ: Given your limited interface with Task Force Phoenix 

and the Afghans that they were training, what was your 

impression of the Afghan troops that were being trained 

at that point in time and formed into kandaks?

COL. SNUKIS: I just had discussions with Mark Milley on several occasions, 

and he was right there. I mean, he was with them day in 

and day out. Let me say, they’re kind of like the American 

Indians. They could fight. They understood how to fight. 
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They fought in their own way. They had been doing it for 

many years, in different forms, obviously, and then bringing 

them together, though, to put them into units was a new 

task, now, too. So, some of the cultural issues that they 

had—they were good soldiers. The fitness level—they were 

hard overall, I guess. As an infantry perspective, I would say 

because their life was hard to that point, they weren’t fit hard 

like our infantrymen were as far as the ability to carry heavy 

loads and move long distances and the stamina required, 

but they started developing that way. They seemed to be 

motivated. The esprit de corps seemed good from the times 

that I was able to get out and about and visit folks.

There were issues. I mean, obviously, the recruiting of the 

army from the different sectors of the country, bringing 

different tribes together and things of that nature. So, 

there was some of that there, the residual issues, but they 

all seemed pretty proud, and when you talked to the guys 

at the end of the day, they said, “Hey, these guys are pretty 

much...”; they stand and fight when required, and that was 

proven out when I went to CFC-A, then, to see the Afghans 

in battle. I mean, for the most part, the reviews from the guys 

that were out there with them were generally favorable. So, 

a pretty good group to start with, but they obviously lacked 

some—like on payday, no check to the bank kind of deal or 

anything like that, so to get payment to their families they 

would go home. So, if they lived in Herat, which is all the 

way across the—you know, it would take X number of days 

by bus to get to Herat, X number of days to get back, and plus 

they would spend some time there, so around the payday, 

you’d lose a guy for ten, eleven days. The accounting aspects? 

Their leadership said, “Hey, no worries. He’ll be back.” We 

tried to then account for these guys on an AWOL basis, or in 

some cases, a desertion basis, dependent upon how long he 

was gone, and then all of a sudden he would show up again. 

Their leadership wasn’t all concerned about it, but because 

it didn’t marry up with the way we did business, we ended 

up having to struggle with that. You also had guys that you 

would lose—I mean, guys would come in, you’d train ‘em, 

and then they’d go away, get their first paycheck and you’d 

never see ‘em again. A lot of guys who weren’t used to the 

aspect of being away from home—you know, if they came 

from the western part of Afghanistan and were in Kabul 

training, it wasn’t—I mean, and not unlike our soldiers, a 

guy that comes from Georgia and is out in Texas training or 

something like that, the homesick aspect of it played pretty 

hard for those guys. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. We talked earlier about that mentorship program 

that you had with the Afghan Ministry of Defense. What 

other kind of organizational or job-based relations did 

OMC-A have with the Ministry of Defense? Did they send 

representatives to come in and observe things or anything 

like that?
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COL. SNUKIS: No, there was—it was kind of a one-way flow. I mean, it was 

us observing them. We started—we got—this is more my 

transition to CFC-A. We finally got an Afghan LNO [liaison 

officer], but it was—he came and worked in our headquarters, 

but he was kind of—they weren’t accepted into the fold as of 

that point in time, and maybe that’s changed. I’m hoping it’s 

changed. We were trying to work them into that, and then 

the sensitivity of operations, the free share of information 

and all that, really didn’t take place. Where that took place 

more so is at the higher levels. So, there was, like, General 

Eikenberry and Wardak and [Lt. Gen. Sher Muhammad] 

Karimi and some of the other generals that were running 

the program at the time. That’s where the exchange of 

information came, but actually having the guys come over 

and watch us—actually, I’m not sure we would’ve given a 

great picture, based upon the individual augmentees. The 

ad hoc way that we put our organization together probably 

wasn’t a good model for him at that point in time. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And you leave OMC-A in October, correct?

COL. SNUKIS: No. Actually, I was just kind of looking back over that. 

I didn’t really officially leave OMC-A until November. I 

was like dual-hatted as the OMC-A chief of staff and what 

consisted of the CFC-A staff at that point in time, which was 

only six strong until about November, at which time then 

General [Lt. Gen. David W.] Barno said, “Hey, I need you to 

focus full-time on CFC-A,” and essentially, I gave [up] my 

OMC-A duties—they went away.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, there’s a period of maybe almost two months 

where you’re doing both functions?

COL. SNUKIS: Pretty much dual-hat, yeah. 

DR. KOONTZ: That must have made your job harder.

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, it was fun. I mean, it was a challenge, and it was really—

and it’s one of the things I try to teach our students here—is 

they want everything clean, and everything’s not clean. It’s 

just a way things—I mean, if you want to go into that, May 

of 2003, the secretary of defense stated, “Hey, we’re in Phase 

IV operations in Afghanistan.” You can go back, look at 

the Early Bird and all that. Essentially, there was no written 

order, there was nothing else that came out about it, but in 

the press he said, “Hey, we’re in Phase IV of the operation.” 

Well, if you looked at what was taking place with Combined 

Joint Task Force-180, other than what the work OMC-A 

was doing, -180 was still pretty much heavily engaged with 

the Taliban, al Qaeda, and any other—HIG [Hezb i Islami 

Gulbuddin]—or who else the threat was at that time. There 

was still a lot of combat action going on, and in our lexicon, 

Phase III being, you know, the decisive combat, dominate, 

combat action–type tasks, but SecDef said, in May 2003, said, 
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Building the Command

“Hey, we want to go, and we want to get the reconstruction 

stabilization movement within Afghanistan,” and rightfully 

so. The way to do that—then, the general, the senior Army 

commander in Afghanistan, was located at Bagram Air Force 

Base at that time. That was Lt. Gen. Vines. So, essentially, 

the SecDef probably communicated through General [John 

P.] Abizaid at CENTCOM, who communicated through 

General Vines, and said, “Hey, we need to start becoming 

tighter and more in tune with what’s going on with the 

stabilization and reconstruction, so I need you to tie in with 

...”—for instance, okay, Country Team Kabul, the embassy 

of Kabul, which at the time did not have an ambassador, 

which was being run by the DCM [deputy chief of mission], 

David Sedney. Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad had still 

not showed up at that point in time. The United Nations 

Assistance Mission-Afghanistan, which at this point in time 

was a—Lakhdar Brahimi was the special representative to 

the secretary-general, and then he was followed up by Jean 

Arnault. But you’ve got to tie in to those guys, tie in to the 

nongovernmental organizations throughout Afghanistan, 

tie in with the other countries—and the countries involved 

in Afghanistan and reconstruction of Afghanistan at that 

point in time were Germany, who was working police 

reform; Japan, who was working the disarmament, what 

they call disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration 

piece; you had the Italians, who were working rule of law, 

or judicial reform; you had the Brits, who were doing [the] 

counternarcotics piece; and you had the U.S., who was 

building the Afghan National Army. So, those were the 

pillars of what they called security sector reform.

So, at that point in time, then—this was about September 

time frame—General Vines turns to his staff up there at 

Bagram and says, “Hey, what I want you to do is develop 

a pocket staff with reach-back capability with me as the 

commander, and I’m going to move my center of operations 

from Bagram”—still leave his deputy back there at Bagram 

to run the task force operations, the combat operations, 

as it were—“and I’m going to move my center, this pocket 

staff, down to Kabul, so I’m closer to the embassy, so I’m 

closer to the UN, government of Afghanistan,” etc., etc. This 

is September time frame. About that point in time—and I 

think I wrote it down here—I think about—General Barno, I 

think, was being looked at to run something in Afghanistan, 

and they still didn’t know if it was going to be CFC. CFC 

wasn’t even a name at that point in time. I think that was 

around—General Barno was scheduled to visit some time in 

September. Yeah, fifth through fourteenth [of] September, 

he was coming to visit, and I’m not sure at that—and I 

never really did talk to General Barno, what the whole 

dynamics and all that was, but I knew he was coming over 

to do something. I don’t know if he was going to take over 

from General Vines or what. The third of October, General 

Vines got sick, or he had had something that popped up on a 
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192

physical. He needed emergency surgery. He left Afghanistan 

to return to the United States, never to come back, at least 

as the role of some sort of Phase IV–type commander, and 

then in October, that’s when General Abizaid then turned 

to General Barno and said, “Hey, you’re a candidate to be 

a combined force commander or whatever in Afghanistan, 

and here’s the charter,” and he kind of laid out: “I want you 

to be the link to the embassy. I want you to jump-start the 

Phase IV stuff,” etc., etc., and that was around the October 

time frame.

So, General Barno came over and visited, fifth through 

fourteenth [of] September, went back to D.C. I’m not sure how 

all that worked, but we were in constant communications. 

Again, I’m still the OMC-A chief of staff. We don’t even 

have a staff, as it were. We had some of the guys coming 

down from the task force at Bagram—his pocket staff, as it 

were, about twenty guys. They were starting to trickle in, 

and then about the October time frame, General Barno said, 

“Hey, here’s what we’re going to do.” He had a VTC [video 

teleconference] direct up with General Abizaid. General 

Abizaid laid out his guidance for what the command should 

look like, and we got started to build Combined Forces 

Command-Central Asia, at first, was the first name that we 

came up with, and then it just went to Afghanistan. But still, 

we did—even our combined joint operating area actually 

had a regional focus. We reached out into some of the -stans 

and into Pakistan, not including the Kashmir region. All this 

was happening very rapidly, and that was about the October 

time frame.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Before we build up CFC-Charlie Alpha, I guess, at 

that point in time, I have one last question about OMC-A. 

You’re only there for a few months, and then as you said, 

the last couple months, you’ve really dual-hatted.

COL. SNUKIS: My focus was more on trying to get this whole phase—I 

mean, still we don’t, because OMC really was the only—

plus then, I was able to tap into them, because General 

Eikenberry—there was a gap, and then General Eikenberry 

left in August, I think, and General Prasek was supposed to 

move over to be the OMC-A commander, or chief—it wasn’t 

a command—but he was spending the majority of his time 

with Task Force Phoenix, because that’s, you know, he had 

been with Phoenix, that’s where he had invested most of 

his time. So, there was really a gap. So, I mean, if you looked 

who was in charge, I mean, really, other than—I mean, I was 

like senior guy then at that point in time, because General 

Eikenberry was gone. General Prasek was there but relied 

on me to keep OMC-A running because he was focused 

more on Task Force Phoenix. So, we were trying to do all 

of that, and then this whole churn about this headquarters 

in Kabul came out, but really only thinking it was going 

to be General Vines, who at that point in time had sixteen 
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Building the Command

months in Afghanistan—I mean, who knew Afghanistan 

better than probably anybody out there other than Afghans 

themselves. He was—the plan was—he was going to stay, I 

think, but because he got sick and had to do this emergency 

surgery, that’s how all that—and from my perspective, and I 

don’t know, and I never asked him and never really had the 

opportunity to go back and ask him if that’s what happened. 

But, yes, we’re still doing—I think I got off track here with 

your question, but OMC-A is still going, and there’s still 

churn, but they’re continuing to do what we stated they were 

doing up front. 

DR. KOONTZ: What I wanted to ask was, given your short time there 

as chief of staff and the diversion of more and more of 

your focus and time over to CFC-A, is there anything that, 

looking back at OMC-A, anything that you wished you 

could’ve done if you had more time?

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, if you had more time, there’s more that you’d like to 

do. I felt pretty happy with what we did in the short period 

of time that we had. The key thing that we were able to do 

is we started institutionalizing some of the things, some of 

the processes, some of the actions that they were doing. For 

instance, recruiting visits. Well, to go out and recruit across 

Afghanistan, you need transportation assets. The task force 

assets were fairly limited, and they were using those for Phase 

III–type activities—you know, going out and conducting 

raids and ambushes and moving troops and equipment and 

doing those types of things. For the OMC-A recruiting team 

to get out, they contracted an Mi–24 that had been left over 

from the Soviet days and would fly them around. Well, the 

way they did that was they would say, “Hey, I want to fly from 

here to Kandahar on such-and-such a date” and contract, 

and the Mi–24 would show up, and—I don’t know; we paid 

a certain fee for this for every month—they’d hop on the 

helicopter and fly down to Kandahar.

Well, the struggle with that was there was no coordination, no 

synchronization with any of the activities that the joint task 

force was doing because we didn’t have a mature operations 

cell to be able to make that coordination. So, where I’m going 

with that is that was one of the things that we put into place 

to say “Hey, there’s no independent or unilateral operations 

going on here that aren’t coordinated” because what we don’t 

want to have is a friendly force, friendly fire–type incident 

and/or a requirement for combat search and rescue if this 

helicopter goes down and Bagram joint operations center 

isn’t even tracking the fact that we have Americans on an exSoviet helicopter flying around Afghanistan. So, those were 

some of the things that we started to put in place, and really 

where I came in and said, “Hey, there’s a need to get this stuff 

institutionalized and written down as a way”—essentially, 

our standard operation procedure for OMC-A. So, if I had 

more time, I would continue to have refined that and worked 
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that and get out and about and actually see these things in 

action and continue to refine that. I guess I would’ve been—

at that point in time, I felt, “Well, hey, I don’t really want to 

leave that, but this CFC-A thing seems to be bigger than that 

at this point in time, so I think it’s better to move on.” But 

that’s—really, if I’d had more time—that’s probably what we 

would’ve done, to continue in the same way. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You mentioned earlier that when you were selected 

as the chief of staff for OMC-A, you were not a by-name 

request.

COL. SNUKIS: Right.

DR. KOONTZ: You had some professional and personal experience with 

General Barno beforehand.

COL. SNUKIS: I did.

DR. KOONTZ: Were you a name request this time?

COL. SNUKIS: No. Well, I was there. I mean, the bottom line was (and I’m 

not sure at that point)—I know later in his tour, we put in 

names for six different by-name requests for chief of staff, 

and he didn’t get any of them—but at that point in time, I 

was there. I was in place. I don’t know if he asked for another 

chief of staff or not at that point in time, and initially he 

didn’t say, “Hey, do you want to be the Combined Forces?” 

It was just kind of like “You’re now the Combined Forces. 

You’re now the chief of staff for my organization.” Now, 

whether he had asked for someone else before me or not, 

I don’t know. I had been his operations officer back in 3d 

of 505th in the 82d Airborne Division, based in 1992—‘91, 

‘92—time frame, when he was a battalion commander. 

He liked the way I operated there. I mean, we had a good 

relationship there. We did our National Training Center 

[NTC] rotation together. But I never got—it wasn’t like 

“Hey, I want to”—and, oh, by the way, since he was in charge 

now in Afghanistan, he kind of just said, “Hey, you’re now 

the....” I never had orders. I never had a piece of paper that 

said I was—you know, I was still over there as the OMC-A 

chief of staff. I just wasn’t doing that job, and as a matter of 

fact, there was never, other than my award that I got, there 

is really no paperwork that says that I was the chief of staff, 

and the fact that people know pictures and things of that 

nature, but there’s no official orders that said that was the 

case. So, whether I was a by-name request or not, he knew 

me. He was comfortable with working with me, I think, and 

if he had asked for someone else, they obviously denied him, 

and I ended up staying there then. I was only supposed to 

be—I actually went over as the OMC-A chief, who was a sixmonth individual augmentee at that point in time, so I was 

supposed to—and I just ended up staying close to a year. I 

didn’t do quite a calendar year, because—and that was when 
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Building the Command

he started, already started leaning forward and looking for 

a chief of staff to replace me, and the way the system was set 

up, it just wasn’t supporting him at that point in time. 

DR. KOONTZ: You kind of touched on this a little bit, just a few moments 

ago, but tell me about your—how would you characterize 

your relationship with General Barno beforehand?

COL. SNUKIS: I mean, it was a professional relationship. We weren’t—it 

wasn’t like he was a mentor for me. I worked for him. 

I communicated with him over the years. When I was 

a battalion commander in the 82d, he commanded the 

brigade down at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I was down there for 

a precommand course and some things, and I went by to see 

him and talk to him. I’d get a Christmas card every now and 

then, get a letter from him every now and then. I’d send him 

a letter every now and then. But it wasn’t like—he wasn’t a 

mentor. It wasn’t like I was riding his coattails or anything 

like that throughout the years, but when we worked together, 

especially back in the 82d Airborne Division, I think our 

philosophies were pretty similar. He had been in the Rangers. 

You know, I had been a Ranger company commander and a 

Ranger staff officer, so, I mean, our backgrounds were very 

similar to that point. He liked the way I operate. I liked 

working for him. I learned immensely from him, and we 

had a real good professional—he understood my strengths, 

I think, pretty well. He understood my weaknesses, and he 

was able to work with those, and I think overall he felt pretty 

good about it. He might tell you something different, but I 

think he felt pretty good about having me there and working 

with him at that stage of the game, and I, him.

I mean, you know, he was very thoughtful—great intellect, 

was able to see the big picture; and also was sensitive; and, 

because of his tactical background, he understood clearly 

what the soldier and the joint war fighter on the ground 

was going through. He clearly understood the special 

operations aspect of things. He had a great relationship 

with General Abizaid. I think he had been a platoon 

leader for General Abizaid at some point in the Rangers. 

General Abizaid was his company commander. So, there 

were things, you know, he could do with a phone call to 

General Abizaid that potentially could take weeks of staff 

work to make happen. So, I think we had a good, solid 

professional relationship. I went to his retirement dinner 

that [Ali] Jalali, Minister of Interior Jalali, put together 

for him, along with a couple guys from the embassy staff, 

what, last year? Was invited to that, invited up to his 

retirement and things of that nature. So, we had a good 

professional working relationship. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let’s go ahead and stand up CFC-A. Again, you’d 

sort of touched on this a little bit earlier. You’re dualhatted, and you’re doing both of these things. What are 
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the big problems that you have to tackle to get this new 

command stood up, other than “all of them”?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, let’s look at the key ones. One, manning. No, there 

was no joint manning document for Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan. We built it. 

DR. KOONTZ: And you started with six people?

COL. SNUKIS: We started with—yeah, I saw six. If you started, it was General 

Barno, his aide. He had—what do you call them, now? I 

can’t even remember—a personal security guy. There was a 

sergeant over at the embassy that we kind of rolled up into 

the CFC piece that worked out embassy stuff for us. That’s 

four. Myself was five; and then a guy named Mark Stammer, 

a lieutenant colonel. He had worked for General [Brig. Gen. 

Stanley A.] McChrystal on the Joint Staff. He was in between 

assignments, was going to be a battalion commander, had 

been selected for battalion command and came over as an 

individual augmentee, and he was essentially the exec, the 

EA [executive assistant] kind of deal for General Barno 

initially. And that was what we started the command with.

So, we started, and General Barno would always like to say, 

“Hey, we had this staff, and from Day 1, we had the mission.” 

It was like “Hey, here’s the mission. Go out and do it.“ So, 

there were six guys, so, I mean, obviously, we had to man 

the organization. We had equipped the organization, and 

some of that was we ended up—we just—we took over 

the top floor of the OMC-A building, and General Barno 

came over and said, “Hey, this is my office. This is where I’m 

going. I’m taking this,” and it had to be. So, the computers, 

the staff—additionally, then, we started adding some guys. 

The political-military guy from OMC-A, Col. Tucker [B.] 

Mansager, who was Lt. Col. Mansager at the time, had been 

a company commander for General Barno in the same 

battalion when I was the ops officer, so I knew him. He 

had been working at OMC-A. He essentially did the same 

thing. He now became CFC-A’s political-military guy. Then, 

Stammer, as well, was actually the S-4 for General Barno, 

and I think may have commanded a bit after I had left them. 

So, Stammer had come in, but it was kind of luck. Stammer 

wasn’t a by-name request. It was a luck of the draw. He was 

coming to Afghanistan, anyway, to work for General [Maj. 

Gen. Lloyd J.] Austin, who came in and backfilled—General 

Austin was the commander of the 10th Mountain Division. 

They backfilled the XVIII Airborne Corps staff in as the 

Combined Joint Task Force-180. So, Stammer was going to 

come in and work for him; it turned out where Stammer 

ended up working for General Barno, then. So, that was the 

initial part of staff. We then assumed this pocket staff that 

General Vines had already put into motion, and most of 

those guys again thinking, General Vines thinking, most of 

the war fighting was going to be done up at Bagram, whereas 
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Building the Command

Phase IV, the stability and reconstruction stuff, would be 

down at Kabul. So, he sent part of his J-5 staff down, the 

plans staff and some civil-military guys, and, like, one J-2 

kind of guy and one J-3 kind of guy. So, it was a very slim, 

Major Timmons, Rich Timmons, was the J-3. Capt. Steve 

Davis, Marine Corps Reserve, was our J-2 at the time, just 

initially to stand up, and one warrant. He had a warrant with 

him, as well. But that was the initial piece.

We then started looking at—and General Abizaid wanted 

to keep the staff down, because, obviously, the stress and 

strain on the force, you know, headquarters were starting 

to proliferate. He said, “Hey, General Barno, can you keep 

the staff down?” And General Barno said, “Hey, take a 

look. See what we can do with less than a hundred guys.” 

So, we put together then a joint manning document that 

reflected about a hundred-man staff. That was vetted 

through—actually, and we had to vet it up through 

Bagram. We actually vetted it through the joint task force. 

It got into the Joint Staff and CENTCOM hands, and, 

yeah, they said, “Okay, yeah, all right, great. We recognize 

these as requirements, and we’ll start to fill them for you,” 

and some of them, a lot of them, were built. Then we built 

Coalition, too. There were Coalition officers in some of 

the jobs as well. Like, the J-5 then was going to be a Brit. 

What do we have? We have a Frenchman on the J-3 staff. 

We had a New Zealander who was going to be the J-2, 

which were all attendant with all the security problems 

at that point in time. It still wasn’t—that stuff hadn’t been 

sorted out. So that was built, and this was going into the—

this is now November or December time frame, and then 

10th Mountain started sending us some guys. You know, 

General Barno was working with General Austin saying, 

“Hey, look. For us to do what we have to do....” So, we 

started getting some guys from 10th Mountain.

I then took Stammer. He came out of position as the EA, 

and the general’s aide was working. I took Stammer and 

another major off the staff, which at the time now had 

grown probably about forty or fifty, and put them in charge 

of building the joint manning document and said, “Your 

number one position is to build a joint manning document 

so we can fill this headquarters.” At that point, then, we got 

different guidance, or additional guidance, from General 

Barno, who said, “Hey, to do this right and to do the things 

that we’ve been chartered to do, we’ve got to build a fullup three-star–type headquarters staff,” so that I think the 

initial JMD we came up with is about 293, and that was 

to cover down LNOs for the UN, LNOs for the embassy 

team, LNOs for the government of Afghanistan. There was 

a whole laundry list of things then that became Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan, trying to synchronize and 

coordinate the Phase IV–type tasks that we saw that were 

going to be on our plate. 
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DR. KOONTZ: During this point in time when you’ve got a pretty small 

staff—as you said, you’re on the first floor of the OMC-A 

building.

COL. SNUKIS: Actually, second floor, but to be specific, I don’t, you 

know ...

DR. KOONTZ: What’s a normal day for you like during this period of 

time, if normal’s a ...

COL. SNUKIS: That’s a fair question. Normal day for me? I always—as a 

chief of staff, I used to like to tell everybody my job was 

everything short of real work. It was directing everyone else 

to get things done and to meet requirements for the general, 

and then as things matured a little bit, for the ambassador and 

for all the other folks, for the requirements for information 

and things of that nature. But, generally, my day out, I would 

wake up at four-thirty. We were living at the time on the 

embassy compound. I didn’t have a—I initially was in a safe 

house, and then I ended up moving into a little trailer in 

the embassy compound. A four-thirty wake-up. I was in the 

office by five. From five to eight was my time to do—it was 

my e-mail time, was my time. I would eat breakfast normally, 

a good little breakfast opened up, but it was my quiet time 

where I didn’t have a lot of guys. And then eight is when the 

full-up battle rhythm started. I mean, our meetings would 

start. I had a short staff huddle every morning from eight 

to eight-thirty. Most of the time, I would run that, initially. 

Actually, initially, I would always run that. Sometimes I had 

to go out and attend a country team meeting, but essentially 

from eight until about 2000 is when we officially shut down 

our staff battle rhythm, as it were, other than the ops guys. 

And then from 20 to 2200 would be my time again with the 

computer and doing all the bits and pieces as far as finishing 

up the e-mails and getting prepped for the next day. And 

then by 2300, we had to be back into the embassy compound, 

because they shut the compound down. So, by 2200 we tried 

to shut down. Normally, we were leaving the compound by 

about 2230, 2245, heading back to the embassy. So, it was 

about at 05 to 2245 hours.

Within that ... I mean, the days, there really wasn’t a standard 

day, other than the initial staff meeting in the morning, 

initially to set the direction, and then the battle rhythm kind 

of evolved from there as tasks emerged and things matured. 

But each and every day was different. Some days, I would 

be with General Barno, with the embassy staff. Some days, 

we went with him on several of his trips—initially up to 

Konduz for a DDR ceremony, the disarmament, demob, 

reintegration ceremony up in Konduz, and up to Bagram 

on several occasions to meet with the joint task force staff, 

work with them. We also had special operators in there, so 

there were other things going on, meetings that had to take 

place, our other governmental agencies that we work with. 
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So, throughout—and especially when it was just General 

Barno, I, and a small staff that was—it was pretty much 

react to contact each and every day, although we were, like 

I said, trying to lay the foundation for the organization with 

the JMD infrastructure stuff. I’d meet with the garrison 

commander because we obviously knew if we were 

going to grow the staff, we had to grow the compound. 

Should we grow the compound where we were? Should 

we build a new compound somewhere? What was the 

cost? Did staff studies on that, the analysis, saying how 

much would it cost to have a new compound, how much 

it would cost? What other equipment do we need? What 

are communications—one of the big things up front were 

the communications requirements. How can General 

Barno—you know, does he have a red phone that he can 

talk to the CENTCOM commander? Communications 

that he can take with him out to the hinter regions of 

Afghanistan? How does he communicate back and forth 

to Bagram—all the different communications nets, to 

include the computer nets to do that. So ... what was the 

term General Barno used to call it? Essentially, we were 

standing up a unit and doing the mission all at the same 

time in a combat zone. It was pretty crazy. 

DR. KOONTZ: This isn’t a fair question to ask, but how do you function 

as a chief of staff without a staff?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, you become the staff, essentially. And then the other 

thing that I did, and what I was able to do—and it was 

tough at first, because the authorities really didn’t translate 

well—but we collaborated with the [Combined] Joint Task 

Force-180 staff. General [Brig. Gen. Byron S.] Bagby was 

actually the deputy commander at the time, so I worked 

with him. Colonel Bartell came in, was the chief of staff. Art 

Bartell, now Brig. Gen. Art Bartell, was the chief of staff. 

Daily multiple conversations, e-mails with him, face-to-face 

meetings. Either I’d go up to him, or he’d come down to me. 

Numerous conversations with [Brig.] Gen. Tony [A.] Cucolo, 

who was the ADC [assistant division commander] at the 

time and place, and then when those guys changed out, 25th 

Infantry Division came in—this was several months down 

the road—there was still that collaboration that took place 

with the chief of staff and the ADCs and the CG from the 

25th Infantry Division, which was [Combined] Joint Task 

Force-76.

But that’s really, I mean, what I had to do. So, I would 

feed—General Barno would generate taskings and generate 

requests for information, so I’d run what staff I had, which 

was minimal at the time, trying to feed those, and then 

collaborate back to [Combined] Joint Task Force-180, back 

to CENTCOM sometimes, back to the Joint Staff sometimes, 

depending upon where things were and questions were 

originating. So, really, at that point in time, if I wasn’t 
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running the staff, because the staff was very small, I was 

running myself and collaborating and reaching back to the 

[Combined Joint] Task Force-180 staff, which frustrated 

them, because they had all their tasks and things to do on 

any given day as well, and we started putting in additional 

requirements on top of them, and initially caused some 

friction and some frustration.

DR. KOONTZ: Can you give me an example of that?

COL. SNUKIS: There was a series—Thanksgiving, okay, because that’s 

November. We went out and we did a visit. Myself, General 

Barno, his aide got on a helicopter and flew out, just about, 

to a bunch of the different sites and visited with the soldiers 

and had Thanksgiving dinner. It was a long day, early start, 

like an 0600 start. We didn’t get back to Kabul until, I don’t 

know, 21, 20. It was past dark. It was 2100. In the course 

of that visit, several concerns, challenges, issues, insights, 

observations developed, and it was a laundry list of things 

that General Barno had seen, I had taken notes on, that 

needed action—either requests for information: “Hey, why 

do we have a certain type of equipment here, but we don’t have 

it in this location?” “Where are the up-armored Humvees 

for this site?” “Why are we located here?” Different things. 

“Why are these troops outfitted a certain way,” or why are 

they organized a certain way, or who they’re dealing with. 

What about the Afghan militia and how that—the pay scale 

for the forces, you know—how Special Operations Forces fit 

into that, and the Special Forces. Anyway, it was a laundry list 

of things that I then had to go back and transmit to Colonel 

Bartell and say, “Hey, I need answers to these things,” boom 

boom boom boom, so, which caused them—in the end 

run, they saw the value of it, but in some cases they already 

knew the answers, so it was a duplication of effort because 

they felt that General Barno was maybe stepping into their 

business; but, in reality, from my perspective, because I was 

looking at it a little bit higher than they, was he was just 

trying to gain a situational awareness and an understanding 

and needed that information to flesh out in his mind so he 

had a good grasp of what was going on—not only Phase 

IV, but obviously, Phase III plays heavily into how Phase IV 

takes place. So, that’s really an example of that frustration 

that occurred.

Now, the utmost professionals always got the information. 

Maybe between colonels we talked or whatever, but always 

produced, always focused in on what needed to be done, and 

essentially at the end of the day, we were all trying to get to 

the ball in the same end zone. Pretty impressive, when you 

look at all the complexities and the amount of moving parts 

on any given day and any snapshot of time. I thought it was 

pretty impressive, and by the way, the fact that they were the 

big dogs—now, when you layer in a headquarters on top of 

someone, there’s always that natural lower-to-higher friction 
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that occurs at all levels, in peacetime and war. I don’t know if 

that—does that help? 

DR. KOONTZ: Yes, sir. That gives me kind of a—that’s a good example. I 

should have asked this a while ago. What kind of guidance 

did you get from General Barno when you’re standing up 

CFC-Alpha? Did you sit everybody down and say, “This is 

what we’re going to do”?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, again, there really wasn’t anybody else to sit down. 

[Referring to notes.] We received a brief, and I don’t know 

if I’ve got the date—yeah, eleventh of October, looks like. 

General Abizaid had a VTC with General Barno, and he laid 

out some specific guidance. Then General Barno transmitted 

that to me, and essentially, that was then the guidance for 

staff. I don’t know if you want to go through any of this stuff 

or not, but here’s essentially the guidance General Barno 

put out, and General Abizaid told him, said, “Hey, within 

the next. ...” Essentially, he laid out a series of guidance 

to General Barno, and then he said, “Hey, within the next 

two weeks, how about laying out a road ahead for how you 

see CFC,” or seeing a command—and again, it wasn’t even 

Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, hadn’t even been 

established as a name yet—but he said, “Operation-wise, 

how do you see Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan 

will do business?” General Abizaid to General Barno, and 

it’d come back to me in a couple weeks.

Well, General Barno kind of looked at it and said, “Okay, 

let’s identify resource issues, people, the staff, coordination 

issues. How do we collaborate with the embassy team? How 

do we collaborate. ...” There was the Afghan Reconstruction 

Group that came in that was layered on top of the embassy 

team. “How do we coordinate with them? How do we 

synchronize our activities, military,” and if you want to use 

the trite DIME [diplomatic, information, military, economic] 

example, “Within DIME, how do we do that? What are we 

trying to achieve? And that’s where I see CFC Headquarters 

making their money.” So, he started laying out. He said, 

“Hey, we’ve got to set the conditions, okay? Before we can set 

conditions, let’s identify what the conditions need to be.” So, 

that was a guidance. He said, “Hey, we’ve got to do that.” He 

said, “We’ve got to build a good relationship with the other 

governmental agencies.”

There’s a lot of distrust right now, and at that point in time 

there was, between the Afghans and the Pakistanis. He goes, 

“I see that as a key task”—an essential task as it were—is 

“building, establishing the trust across both sides of the 

borders.” And essentially, what occurred out of that was a 

tripartite Afghan-Pakistan-U.S. tripartite discussions, talks, 

training that really helped solidify that and got going. That’s 

how that was translated and that guidance. He said, “I need 

to develop a good relationship with the ambassador.” He 
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goes, “I need a media plan”—essentially, the STRATCOM 

[strategic communications] piece, you know, how am I 

going to, because one of his, General Abizaid told him, he 

goes, “I want you to bring some of the stuff in Afghanistan 

to the forefront.” Essentially ... let me see if I can find the 

exact—raise the public posture, because it’s—essentially, 

Afghanistan was an economy of force. Really still is, and at 

the time it had kind of fallen off the screen a bit after the 

initial toppling of the Taliban, etc. General Abizaid told 

General Barno, said, “Hey, I want you to raise the public 

posture.” Then General Barno turns to the staff guy and said, 

“Hey, I need to develop a media plan.” He goes, “Increase 

the staff, “obviously. Different skill sets. Add additional 

civil-military operators. Essentially saying, “Hey, figure 

out what is working around us right now.” He said take a 

look at, analyze, General Abizaid to General Barno, and 

then to us. He nested it down, said, “Hey, what if we extend 

the battle space into the -stans? What would be the impact 

and the benefits of doing that—and, obviously the pitfalls. 

Do an analysis of what if we extended our battle space and 

started including the -stans.” He said as far as taking a look 

at the counternarc piece—essentially woven into the fabric 

of Afghanistan—“By different accounts, about 70 percent 

of GNP comes out of counternarcotics. How can we impact 

it? When should we? Where’s the timing and the tempo, 

should we impact it? If we can impact, how do we impact 

it? Where should it go? In some sort of coherent strategy for 

Afghanistan, if we need to put that together?” The list was 

pretty extensive.

Now, again, we didn’t have—so, essentially, what I started 

was a running tally, a task list, as a chief of staff, and as we 

started getting capacity—because we didn’t have full-up 

capacity, because a lot of it I passed off to the task force, 

which was the only thing I could do if we wanted immediate 

impact. And then a lot of it we started listing down on the 

to-do list, as it were, and as we started getting capacity and 

gaining capacity, we were able to start checking some of 

these things off. First order of business, he said—and what 

was developed was what they called [Security] Strategy 

South and East, and that was a look at synchronizing the 

military power with the other elements, the national power, 

to include Afghan and international power, to focus on 

the border regions south and east, which was where the 

majority of the conflict at the time and the violence was 

occurring—to say, “Hey, how can we leverage USAID [U.S. 

Agency for International Development] projects?” The focus 

then, “Do regional development zones in conjunction with 

combat zones, security zones, so that we can enhance this 

whole thing called stability,” and the slide that he used in 

the guidance piece was essentially two words on it, and it 

was security and reconstruction, and then an arrow from 

security to reconstruction and an arrow from reconstruction 

to security, essentially saying, “Hey, if I enhance the security 
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I’m going to be able to, in Afghanistan’s case, construct and 

not necessarily reconstruct; and then if I can reconstruct 

or construct, that’s going to enhance the security because 

guys are going to be carrying shovels and spades instead of 

AK47s and RPGs [rocket propelled grenades]”; and that’s 

what he tried to put into place. Vetted that with the UN, and 

at that point in time, we had about a twenty-man staff. That 

generated from the J-5 shop with Col. Ian Lyles, who’s now a 

brigadier general, Brig. [Gen.] Ian Lyles of the British Army, 

who is kind of the guy who fronted that with General Barno. 

I mean, essentially, in conjunction with General Barno, they 

sat down and crafted that strategy. But that’s the guidance he 

gave us up front, and it just continued to grow from there. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. We’ve talked a great deal about getting CFC-A 

stood up. Is there an event or a point in time that you can 

point to where you could say “Okay, now it’s working” or 

“Now it’s mature. Now we actually have an operational 

command”?

COL. SNUKIS: I don’t think I ever could. By the time ... I mean, I felt we 

were operational from Day 1, but I knew our limitations. 

So, as we continued to—I mean, I never felt—I knew it 

wasn’t like any organization I ever belonged to, that I ever 

was a part of, but I felt that we were operational and making 

an impact from Day 1, and a lot of that was on General 

Barno’s shoulders. I mean, the fact that he was there and 

the things that he did ... he was able to see some things, 

and based off of his background and experience and things 

that other people weren’t able to see, he was able to start 

connecting the dots. And even with the limited staff, as we 

were able to put some of those things into practice, I felt we 

were making an impact.

I never felt that I was ever anywhere near what my battalion 

was as a battalion commander or what my battalion staff 

or what our battalion staff was when General Barno was a 

battalion commander. I never felt that we hit that because, 

again, we were all individual augmentees. On any given 

day—and this was still in the days of the ninety-day rotations 

for the Air Force. From month to month, even when we 

started filling billets, it was different guys with different 

levels of experience. We never built around a core element. 

It was broken to start with. It was not the right way to do it. 

I understand why it occurred like it did, but you should’ve 

had a trained core headquarters, kind of like this whole 

standing joint force headquarters concept, that came in, and 

then you could have glommed and added on and built onto 

that with the individual augmentees. General Barno and 

I, even though we had history together, that was over ten 

years ago. Well, shoot, yeah. It was eleven years since the 

last time I’d actually worked with him. We should’ve trained 

together, worked together, kind of understood—to go into, 

to truly be a functional team—instead of “Hey, okay, here’s 
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another group of guys coming in. Let’s integrate them into 

the headquarters.” I never felt, leaving in July, end of July, 

beginning of August 2004, that we hit. Maybe others felt that 

way, but that we looked like what we should look like, or 

what I would expect the staff to look like. 

DR. KOONTZ: You described the command as being operational with 

limitations. Other than the limitations of personnel and 

the uncertain JMD and all that kind of stuff, were there 

other limitations you could point to?

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, sure. Communications. We went for a time to whereas 

General Barno couldn’t even communicate to the embassy. 

The embassy was about less than two miles away from our 

compound. We had to go through Germany, the way the 

comm system was set up, to talk to the embassy. So, there 

were all kinds of delays within it. There was frequent loss of 

communications. He didn’t have, again, the requisite secure 

communications that he required. He didn’t have the red 

phone. We ended up getting those, and there’s a technical term 

for it. I’m not a commo guy. I can’t remember what it’s called, 

but there’s essentially—you know, we had to run different 

lines. So, communications issues. We had transportation 

issues, as far as moving General Barno from point A to 

point B. The task force always had to send a helicopter down 

for them, which they ended up dedicating them, and they 

worked that very well, but really not the ideal. To move him 

from point A outside the country of Afghanistan, which 

he had to do on several occasions to go work in a donor 

conference and some other key conferences, commanders’ 

conference and things of that nature, was very, very difficult 

because we didn’t have the mechanisms in place. We didn’t 

have the dedicated transportation to get him from point A 

to point B. So, those limited us.

Our knowledge—and not just the personnel numberswise, but the skill sets of folks coming in. I mean, you had 

individual augmentees. You had the Individual Ready 

Reserve folks. Some folks hadn’t had uniforms on in six, 

seven years. Guys that came in with an incomplete knowledge 

and understanding of the staff planning process, putting 

together the plans and doing operations, so it was a trainas-you-go kind of deal as well. Again, no complaints. I don’t 

want to sound like—the Brits would say whinging about 

it—but it was the reality. It was just that was what we had. 

And I think folks understood that, and in a lot of cases, they 

made concessions for us as well, as far as someone reporting. 

Good example of a limitation: VTC. First VTC we operated 

with was some backpack kind of screen that my TV at home 

has a larger screen—and I don’t have one of these big-screen 

things. I just have a regular 26-inch TV that has a bigger 

screen than the VTC. Took us several months that we were 

able to get a trailer in and better ability to do VTCs back to—I 

mean, I can remember the first three or four VTCs we did 
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with the SecDef were done on this very small screen in the 

back of this, what had been an interpreter’s living quarters. 

So, those kinds of things just made everyday life a little bit 

more difficult. I’m trying to think what other limitations 

there would be in the comms piece, in the people piece, 

the skill piece. The organization—I mean, the organization 

wasn’t staffed. We were building the JMD as we were trying 

to do plans and operations and things of that nature. At a 

minimum, someone could’ve said, “Hey, here’s your JMD. 

Let’s go ahead and fill it and go from there.” And so that, 

while it caused frustrations and challenges, it kind of also 

made every day interesting. 

DR. KOONTZ: What was the origin of the “Five Pillars” strategy that 

General Barno implemented?

COL. SNUKIS: What was the origin of that? I’ll tell you the origin. General 

Barno used to initially—and that was one of the beautiful 

things when you had a small group of guys. It’s easier 

to generate things and get things done. I mean, there’s 

limitations that come with it, but there’s also positive 

aspects to those kinds of things, and one of those was the 

fact that every Friday, he’d bring in just a handful of guys 

and have what he called a strategy session. The origin of 

the Five Pillars essentially emerged from—he used to get 

a butcher chart up there, and he’d put a problem set up, 

and something he was thinking about, and he’d draw the 

old cloud charts, put different things in there and put a 

cloud around it and this, that, and the other thing. And it 

kind of emerged out of one of those sessions, combined 

with a paper that Jean Arnault had done on, essentially, 

the strategy that the UN saw that would be effective for the 

Afghans; which then the Five Pillars kind of turned into 

[Security] Strategy South and East, but the pillars were the 

graphic representation of it. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Then what steps did the staff have to perform to get 

that strategy implemented and get the various components 

running with it?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, what steps did we have to take with them? First of 

all, you’ve got to communicate. We had to change the way 

that we were doing business in Afghanistan at that point 

in time. If you look at how things evolved ... I say the 

strategy, but the operational construct, the operational 

design on the ground, really was the fact that we would 

go in and identify targets; we’d hit those targets; we’d do 

what we needed to do. Maybe that was a week, two weeks 

or whatever, and then we’d pull the force out. Because the 

country of Afghanistan’s the size of Texas, twenty-someodd million people, the geographical limitations—and 

we’re only running about sixteen thousand troops at the 

time—it’s tough to cover down on the whole country. So, 

we would go in; something would bubble up, something 
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would pop up; we’d go in; we’d identify it; we’d hit it; we’d 

stay for a while; and then, we’d come back.

General Barno kind of saw the facts and said, “First of all, 

I need to change the command and control of this thing. 

I need to go to a regional and ownership-type strategy, 

regional commands, and you’ll go in, and your command 

headquarters might be in Kandahar, but you own this region, 

which is drawn on the map according to these boundaries. 

And, within that, I expect you to understand who the leaders 

are, what the problems are, what are the governmental 

resources that are being put into this region,” and what we 

tried to do was synchronize all the elements—again, with the 

national power, to make sure that what USAID was doing 

was in concert with what we were doing militarily; which is 

in concert with what the OGA [other governmental agency] 

was doing; which was in concert with what the political, the 

econ section of the embassy was doing; which was in concert 

with the Brits, who were running counternarcotics. You 

know, to do that, you had to bring a lot of different people 

together. So, first of all, the first order of business, and what 

the staff was really designed to do was, one, to get it into 

U.S. channels. So, we had to go and reorganize the command 

and control, and then also additionally, we needed to get it 

into the UN, the embassy, the government of Afghanistan. 

And essentially, it was about a four-month process to vet 

this whole [Security] Strategy South and East and get buy-in 

from across all the key players in Afghanistan, and that was 

a lot of what the staff did as far as setting that up, setting 

the tempo, getting General Barno prepared to go and meet 

with Jean Arnault to get him prepared to go meet with the 

Canadian ambassador, to get him prepared to go meet with 

the British ambassador, to develop—we developed a PRT 

working group, provincial reconstruction teams, which that 

was another part of the strategy, was to enhance and increase 

the reach of the central government, and that was by putting 

additional PRTs out in some of these rougher areas.

So, I mean, the staff work all revolved in and around 

understanding the situation and then operationalizing this 

whole Five Pillar piece and actually getting it in and into 

practice on the ground, and across not only the joint task 

force, but then all the other players—we used to call them 

IBUs—all the itty-bitty units that were out there that you 

needed to get control of and at least understand what they 

were doing and how their goals were converging with our 

goals. I mean, everybody kind of had the same vision, I 

think. It was just the paths, in a lot of cases, were either 

parallel or divergent instead of everyone converging on the 

same goal. And that—and right away, in the middle of that, 

you were still building the headquarters and the medical 

facilities and food and infrastructure and building a JOC 

[joint operations center] and those type of things. You’re 

operating out of the back of a closet, and you’re trying to 
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get into something that’s much more functional. So, all 

those challenges still existed. 

DR. KOONTZ: How did CFC-A interact with the Afghan National 

Government there in Kabul? How did that relationship 

develop?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, it was at a bunch of different levels. I mean, General 

Barno’s relationship—I mean, he developed a relationship 

with [President Hamid] Karzai, was in many meetings with 

Ambassador Khalilzad and Karzai. Now, not every meeting 

that Khalilzad was in with Karzai with Barno there, but 

first of all, General Barno developed a real close working 

relationship with Ambassador Khalilzad. He had an office 

in the embassy. He started his day in the embassy. He did 

the country team meeting every day in the embassy. Then 

he did what they call the core group meeting, which was 

a select few of the key—CIA station chief, General Barno, 

OMC-A chief, Ambassador Khalilzad, normally the DCM, 

USAID director, and maybe a note taker or two. So, that 

followed the country team meeting.... So, he had his office 

there, developed that relationship with Khalilzad, and then 

from there did things with Karzai, did things. Then, would 

go to Task Force Phoenix, would work with the Afghan 

national leadership. Did a lot of stuff with Wardak at the 

Ministry of Defense level, then.

So, I mean, a lot of it was personal engagement from 

General Barno’s position, but then, also, the J-5, Colonel 

Lyles at the time, Brigadier General Lyles now, would get 

out and about. Our political-military had connections. 

We had our UN LNO, and then we also had—and it was 

starting to form. It was getting to what they called the 

CJCMOTF, the Combined Joint Civil-Military Operations 

Task Force. CJCMOTF had a handful of guys, about thirty 

reserve colonels, civil affairs–type guys who had—there 

was a bunch of ministries in the Afghan government, 

but kind of covered down—were almost like the mentors 

to these guys, but from the military perspective, if you 

catch my drift. And then they were tied in also with 

the Afghan Reconstruction Group, so the connections 

were there. Were they as strong as they could be? Was 

the synchronization as powerful as it could be? I don’t 

think so, but those ties were developing, and probably if 

I went back and looked at it now, are much stronger and 

have continued to develop from that time forward. So, I 

think it was a multidimensional approach to tying into 

the Afghan government. 

DR. KOONTZ: From your experiences in dealing with representatives 

from the Afghan National Government at that time, how 

would you characterize its effectiveness?

COL. SNUKIS: The government itself?
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DR. KOONTZ: Yes, sir.

COL. SNUKIS: Not very. That’s just Snukis’ opinion, and I have a limited 

perspective, but most folks would tell you they were 

one deep. If you looked at the minister of the interior, 

he was a top-notch guy who could’ve been a minister 

of the interior for anyone. If you looked at the minister 

of rural rehabilitation and development, top-notch guy, 

could’ve been a minister or a cabinet official somewhere 

in any government. But when you started looking at 

the government itself, and understanding the history of 

Afghanistan, they just didn’t know what right looked like. 

Their education—you look at their literacy rates. They’re 

low. They didn’t have a functioning central government. 

They were, I mean, they were standing up from scratch. 

So, the guys that were there were good guys—although 

there were agendas there, as well, so you had the tribe, 

but the centrifugal forces as it were, you know, the ethnic 

tribalism, the Pashtuns and the Tajiks and the Hazarans, 

and so you had all this. You had the warlord issues, still, 

within the central government, and then guys taking 

power away from the central government, as it were.

So, a lot of issues that they were struggling to get through 

at that point in time, but, I mean, the guys that I dealt 

with were good guys, were patriots, loved Afghanistan. 

I mean, a lot of them had been ex-pats, had some good 

positions in the United States of America and elsewhere 

throughout the world, but came back to Afghanistan to 

jump-start this country and get it moving, and at great 

personal sacrifice and danger and security and this, that, 

and the other thing. So, while on one hand, I’d say already 

as good as the guys in the U.S. government, no. But is the 

potential there? Absolutely. Or, wasn’t there when I saw 

it, and again, there’re a lot of forces that are pulling away 

from—we’re still seeing it today. 

DR. KOONTZ: And you were only there for a matter of months, but 

did you notice any kind of improvement in the Afghan 

National Government during your tour?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, yeah. I think so. And there were visible signs, too. 

I mean, Kabul itself, you know? Kabul, from Day 1 to 

Day 360, whatever it was when I left, there was visible 

evidence each and every day that things were growing, 

things were being built, things were being cleaned up, 

you know? And there was a buzz of activity that you 

could kind of see increase each and every day. I mean, I’d 

love to go back and take a look at it now, see what it looks 

like, because I bet it’s even changed more. But I mean, 

definitely you could see that they were—and I mean, it 

was embryonic. They were just standing up. But I saw in 

a year’s time, I saw evidence of change. Good evidence—I 

mean, positive evidence. 
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Building the Command

And the struggle is you always have these other forces that 

were—you know, you go two steps forward, and things 

that were trying to suck it and make it go three steps back. 

Something would occur—you know, an explosion or 

deaths or an attack here. There’s something always trying 

to undermine the central government, you know? While I 

was there, they got—the constitutional loya jirga took place 

in December 2003. They got a constitution approved. Most 

figured they’d never do that. We established [the] voter 

registration piece while I was there, got the election plan 

going. The election went down then in September 2004, 

which was delayed a bit, but they got that piece, then they 

had the—and that was the national election. They were able 

to get through that, and then they ended up doing the lowerlevel elections then after that, as well. So, not an easy thing to 

do when they hadn’t done it before in the past. So, definitely 

progress being made.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Whenever you get any kind of command relationship, 

personalities are always going to be important, and you 

mentioned the strong working relationship that General 

Barno had with Ambassador Khalilzad. How did CFC-A, 

other than that, operate in conjunction with the U.S. 

Embassy?

COL. SNUKIS: We were enmeshed. I mean, our battle rhythm in a lot of 

cases dependent upon the staff section was coincided with 

what the embassy was doing. We had folks, actually, what we 

called the Embassy Interagency Planning Group, the EIPG 

[pronounced “e-pig”], which was led by an Army colonel. 

Is there any other—I think it was all Army. What the heck 

was his name, now? He was a military intelligence guy, came 

over and had been working as the joint task force J-2 in the 

J-2 shop, came down to us as a quality guy because they got 

a new J-2 in, and he ran the EPIG and they essentially put 

together a mission performance plan for Embassy Kabul. 

That was one of their charters and then the other one was 

the kind—essentially, General Barno to say, “Hey. Here, 

look. I’m supporting, I’m giving you these guys to go in 

their staff.” On the POL-MIL side, those guys met daily with 

the embassy. General Barno, if General Barno wasn’t there, 

General [British Army Maj. Gen. John] Cooper, who came 

in later in the time as our deputy commander—and/or if 

General Cooper wasn’t there, someone, key senior member 

of CFC-A staff attended every country team meeting and 

core group meeting when they were in town, so there was 

all kinds of efforts made. We had folks that did coordination 

with USAID for security. We established essentially a—not a 

1-800 number but a hotline number that the embassy could 

call to coordinate embassy movements and embassy activities 

out and about in the hinterland through our J-3, once we got 

that up and operational, and then up to the joint task force 

J-3. So, just about at every given level. As a result, General 

Barno said, “Hey, we’re going to create a culture here for 
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210

cooperation with the embassy and these other governmental 

agencies,” and he worked very, very hard to cultivate that 

relationship. It started at the top with him and Ambassador 

Khalilzad. We had monthly embassy updates, ambassador 

updates for the military situation. I mean, obviously the 

daily stuff, but, I mean, on a monthly basis, we’d come in 

and give a two- to three-hour overview brief of trends and 

activities and things that occurred. General Barno treated 

RFIs [requests for information] from Ambassador Khalilzad 

just like they were an RFI from either General Abizaid or the 

SecDef or Chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General 

(USAF) Richard B.] Meyers, or any. So, it was on the same 

priority level, so we had to answer it, same timeline, same 

priority level, as any of those other key leaders, so those were 

always—and it permeated, and it was understood that we 

were part of a team, and, again, it started at the top. 

DR. KOONTZ: Were there any difficulties in coordinating with the 

embassy, either in terms of differing priorities or, you 

know, civilian function with military function trying 

to sync?

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, every day, and it got better. We actually—the cultures 

are different. Afghanistan at the time wasn’t necessarily 

getting—and this may be a stretch, but folks would say—

here, this is anecdotal from hearing other State Department 

guys come in, sit in at the country team meeting in 

Afghanistan. Top players, good guys, but the overall, 

the other embassy players initially maybe weren’t what I 

would call varsity players. Maybe not the same quality. You 

have your country team in Japan or your country team in 

Germany or things of that nature. But, anyway, so what I’m 

saying is, many issues resulted from that because I think 

there was some inexperience, some misunderstandings 

between how the military did operations, and just the 

cultural—things that they thought were important versus 

what we thought were important.

Quick example was the Ring Road ceremony, which they 

had completed a segment of the Ring Road from Kabul to 

Kandahar, and President Karzai—and actually President 

[George W.] Bush. It was a big thing for him at the strategic 

level, as well, and they wanted to have a big ceremony to 

mark the completion of the Ring Road—the segment from 

Kabul to Kandahar because it’s not totally complete yet. Well, 

USAID was the lead government agency for the ceremony. 

Well, they went through, and we were tracking it again. This 

was very small. This was December of 2003. Again, CFC 

was still a small staff, but USAID was the lead government 

agency because they were in charge of the contract and 

this, that, and the other thing. Well, they put the ceremony 

together. It was parking, the agenda, the speeches, the finger 

foods, and all this kind of stuff. Hey, it was all squared away, 

and bottom line was there was no security for this event. 
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Building the Command

I mean, clearly a strategy-level-type event, but USAID had 

done no coordination for security. We essentially went into 

a crisis action mode several days before the ceremony. We 

had been tracking it and been working it, but never—they 

said, “Hey, we’ve got it squared away, we’ve got it squared 

away.” Bottom line was they didn’t have it squared away, 

and we ended up doing some things and had to adjust some 

missions to cover down on the security for this, even though 

it was kind of at a distance. So, it wasn’t overbearing, but it 

was just—that was a frustration that emerged and showed 

the differences between what they thought was important 

and was important, but unable to sometimes make the 

connections and, hey, there’re other things that have to go to 

make this a successful event.

So, I thought we did a pretty good job, or tried to do a pretty 

good job, of balancing each other. I mean, there were many 

occasions where they came in and gave us counsel and 

guidance on some things that we had just done to purely 

military; it would not have been as effective as with their 

input and their guidance and their focus. Different focus, as 

it were, so there’s constant friction. 

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of changes took place with the change of the 

task force, when CJTF-180 disestablishes and CJTF-76 is 

stood up?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, initially, there was none because that whole thing 

changes. 10th Mountain was still there, and then 25th came, 

I think, if the timing’s right. I might be off. The big change 

came with the transition from 10th Mountain to the 25th, 

I guess, would be the—but on one hand, we were in place 

now. It was an easier transition than it was when we went in 

and 10th Mountain and -180 were in place, and we weren’t. 

So, there was still—because at the end of the day, when you 

went down to Bagram, you could tell the differences, and 

there was still a difference in the staff. 25th Infantry Division, 

when they came in with General [Maj. Gen. Eric T.] Olson, 

they trained together. They rehearsed together. They did 

mission rehearsal exercises. They prepared together to come 

to Afghanistan. They were a team, whereas we were still a 

collection of individual augmentees. You’re striving to be 

a team, working hard to be a team, but every—actually, 

every week—guys rotating in and out of Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan because of the way the policy was 

set. And again, the skill levels of guys coming and guys who 

hadn’t worn uniforms in eight years versus the guys from 

the 25th Infantry Division [ID] or 10th Mountain Division, 

who had been wearing a uniform and had been trained 

for X number of years prior to coming here. So, the only 

change we saw was the change in leadership, the ability for 

them to learn some things that 10th Mountain already knew 

from being there, and to get used to and to settle into the 

operational environment—which any of those transitions, 
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212

there are some bumps in the road, but overall that went 

fairly smoothly, I thought, at least from the chief of staff 

perspective.

DR. KOONTZ: Were there different priorities or different expectations for 

the 25th ID that weren’t in place for the 10th Mountain?

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, I think so, because of the way the operation—because 

now we were in Phase IV, it was stated. The 10th Mountain 

had obviously tracked things and done things differently 

based upon the operational environment and the context 

that they came into. The environment had changed when 

the 25th Infantry Division had arrived, and so there were 

different expectations; and there were different expectations 

for the way things should be done with the 25th Infantry 

Division. I think they struggled maybe a little bit to 

understand that, but, I mean, once they were on the ground 

and up and operational, I think they quickly grasped that 

the environment—and some of their kids had been there, I 

guess, in the past, but the environment was different upon 

their arrival than it was upon 10th Mountain’s arrival. 

So, there was a different—you see, that environment had 

already changed, whereas 10th Mountain was kind of on 

the—they were on the cusp. They were there when it was 

changing, especially with the C2 structure and everything 

else, whereas 25th came in and that structure had already 

been established and up and running. So, in my personal 

opinion and professional opinion, I think it was easier for 

the 25th to come in and assume it at that point in time than 

it was for the 10th Mountain. 

DR. KOONTZ: That change of command, the TOA [transfer of authority] 

of the subordinate task force of CJTF-76, happens in April. 

Then you leave in July?

COL. SNUKIS: I leave in July.

DR. KOONTZ: July. Tell me about the transition, your personal transition, 

when you left as chief of staff. 

COL. SNUKIS: Wow. Really, a guy named Dave [W.] Lamm, Col. Dave 

Lamm, came in and replaced me. Dave had been an 

instructor at the National Defense University, professional 

Army infantryman. Was not on General Barno’s list, and 

not because he wasn’t a quality guy, but General Barno just 

didn’t know him. Several other individuals were on General 

Barno’s list. He had forwarded that list, and essentially those 

guys were tasked and doing other things within the Army, so 

they did not release those guys to be—which still to this day 

boggles my mind, but that’s for other people to determine. 

That wasn’t for me to determine. But General Barno had 

gotten several names. He had interviewed one or two guys. 

They didn’t fit, and then he interviewed Colonel Lamm and 

felt that it would be a good fit, and then he came. Essentially, 
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Building the Command

the transition was similar. He was a little bit better, I think, 

because as a National Defense University instructor, he 

was kind of tracking the strategic aspects of Afghanistan, 

was teaching a lot of that stuff, was immersed in it. Several 

phone calls, several e-mails, he’d say, “Hey, here’s what’s 

going on. Here’s what’s happening.” General Barno actually 

had the opportunity to sit down with him, talk him through, 

say, “Here’s where we’re at. Here’s what we’re doing.” I don’t 

know the details of that conversation, but General Barno 

had met with him prior to his coming to Afghanistan. And 

he came—I don’t think he went to CENTCOM. I don’t 

think—I can’t remember now. But then Colonel Lamm 

came over, and we had about a week: “Hey, here’s the staff. 

Get out and do some things, go see some stuff.” Took him 

up to Bagram, Kandahar: “Here’s what’s going on.” He got 

a chance to go around a little bit, and then essentially we 

had about another week together to whereas we’re going to 

transition and it’s kind of like “Hey, it’s time. Let me just take 

it,” and it was right. It was time for him to take it. And then 

General Barno ended up sending me around, and essentially 

I did a whirlwind tour of the entire country of Afghanistan, 

all our units, all the different fire bases, and gave him kind 

of a little update on my way out of the country. So, from my 

perspective, a smooth transition. I don’t know, Dave Lamm 

might say something a little bit different.

But again, the staff still wasn’t matured to the state I would’ve 

liked it to have been at. We were still experiencing turnover, 

massive turnover. I think if you looked at it, I think General 

Barno ... we ran some numbers at some point in time, and 

over the course of a two-month period, essentially in two 

months, was 100 percent rotation. It was about 100 percent 

turnover of people. You know, I mean, the percentages 

worked out. You might as well just call it a full-up 100 percent 

turnover. 

DR. KOONTZ: What would you point to as the significant accomplish- ments of CFC-A during your tour?

COL. SNUKIS: Well, I think the significant accomplishments of CFC-A 

during my tour—well, one, standing up the organization to 

synchronize all of these other activities, the other elements in 

national power, synchronize what combat actions we’re doing 

with where we needed to go with the country of Afghanistan. 

The elections were obviously key. And then putting together 

a plan and a foundation that folks could then work off of 

and guide daily operations through the course of the coming 

years, as it were. I think that was probably—and taking it 

then to a—the Five Pillars, as it were, to the area ownership 

and the regional development zones; and some of those 

haven’t even fully reached the full impact and power of that 

increase in the PRTs, the reach of the central government. 

I would say that was the key piece, and the ability to bring 

all of those other key players, to include the government of 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

214

Afghanistan, Embassy Kabul, UN, NGOs [nongovernmental 

organizations], other nations together with the U.S. plan. 

The other key organization that we dealt with on any given 

day was the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF], 

as well, which had the security piece for Kabul, and then we 

actually transitioned up when I was here to the north piece, 

Konduz and some of the upper reaches of Afghanistan. ISAF 

took over, as well, and then subsequently the plan was, and 

which they’ve enacted now, counterclockwise fashion took 

over the remaining pieces of the country from the Coalition. 

So, I mean, right now, as you know, ISAF controls, or is 

in charge of, Afghanistan, or operations in Afghanistan. 

Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan doesn’t even—I 

don’t think it exists now. 

DR. KOONTZ: If it does, I mean, it’s a rump. I’m not sure if it’s actually 

been formally disestablished.

COL. SNUKIS: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s formally been disestablished. I 

haven’t seen any papers on that, but, yeah. So, General [Lt. 

Gen. Dan K.] McNeill and ISAF have it now, so, I mean, 

there’s probably a whole laundry list of things that we could 

say, but getting the elections going and getting a coherent 

strategy—or, at least from my perspective—a coherent 

strategy put together for the south and the southeast, and I 

guess if you look back, 2003, 2004, most of 2005 are pretty 

good. There were some other transitions that took place, 

and then some blips occurred, and I don’t know if that’s an 

anomaly and things are going to settle back down, or if in 

fact some of the work that had been done is being undone 

today. I don’t know. I’d have to get over there and take a 

better look at it and get some better intel versus just the stuff 

that I’m reading in the newspapers and seeing on the Early 

Bird, so. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I’ve monopolized two hours and five minutes 

of your time. I’ll let you have the last say. During your 

time in Afghanistan, is there one event or one story that 

sticks out in your mind either as really important, really 

emotional, something really funny, something that you’re 

going to tell your grandkids when you’re bouncing them 

on your knees one day? What’s the one thing that sticks 

out in your mind?

COL. SNUKIS: What’s the one thing that sticks out in my mind? There’s 

really no one story, I guess. There’re multiple stories that I’ve 

told throughout the course, you know? I would say the thing 

that sticks out in my mind is the fact of the resilience and 

the persistence and the will of the Afghan people. It’s kind 

of funny. The guys ... I mean, the one guy that I kind of 

struck up a friendship with worked in the chow hall, and 

folks always talk about the culture and the language and 

trying to speak their language. I never had time to learn. 

I wasn’t out. I dealt with them in the chow hall. I saw these 
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Building the Command

guys, you know, but I was focused on getting our job done. 

But with this guy here, it was kind of like I was trying to 

teach him English. So, different slang words and things of 

that nature—not the obscene ones, but just different sayings, 

like “All right!” or things that someone in the U.S. would say, 

and just to see this guy on any given day and “Hey, how you 

doing? What’s going on, man?” and stuff like that, and him 

coming back with the same response. Then, as I’m getting 

ready to leave—obviously a hard worker, doesn’t have much 

to his name, but he had a pair of sunglasses, and he heard 

that I—he just comes over and he gave me his. I said, “I don’t 

want your sunglasses.” He said, “No.” He goes, “I want to 

give them to you.” And it was like, that just kind of stuck 

out. Like, he didn’t need to do that, and it was like, if you 

look at it, a pair of sunglasses, for a year of your life away 

from your family and everything else ... but the guy was 

sincere in doing it, and it was just one of those things that 

kind of jumped out at you and said “Hey, we can make an 

impact here,” and we are making an impact. And it may not 

be the right—I don’t know if everyone likes our methods or 

the way we’re doing it, but this is a good people, and there’s 

some positive that can happen within the world community 

if we bring these guys along and get them to the point 

where they’re contributing members, as it were. So, I don’t 

know, that’s kind of a—I guess if I had thought about it a 

little bit more, there are some other funny ones, but that, I 

think, probably captured it more than any—it was more of 

a year-long deal than just any one incident, you know? That 

definitely would be one.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir. On behalf of the Center of Military History, 

I want to thank you for taking the time to do this. You told 

us some important things, and you did some important 

things, so we’re glad we got on record.

COL. SNUKIS: Well, thank you.

DR. KOONTZ: Thanks, sir.

COL. SNUKIS: All right.

Waging War

Maj. Gen. Jason K. Kamiya served as Commanding General, U.S. Army Southern European Task Force (Airborne), with duty from March 2005 to February 2006 as Commanding 

General, Combined Joint Task Force-76. He was interviewed on 23 January 2007 in Suffolk, 

Virginia, while serving as Commander, Joint Warfighting Center/Director, Joint Training, 

U.S. Joint Forces Command, by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military 

History. General Kamiya discusses his training background before his transition into command of the Southern European Task Force. He mentions his predeployment site survey to 

Afghanistan and the implementation of lessons learned from it into the task force’s training before deploying to Afghanistan. After the task force assumed command of Combined 

Joint Task Force-76 from the 25th Infantry Division (Light), it emphasized a full spectrum 

of operations. General Kamiya describes the joint nature of Combined Joint Task Force-76 

and the task force’s interactions with Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, Office of 

Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, as well as with local 

Afghan governors and officials. He comments on the role of provincial reconstruction teams 

in rebuilding and developing Afghanistan, as well as his appraisal of the basic concept of the 

teams. The interview concludes with a discussion of the enemy forces in Afghanistan and 

General Kamiya’s thoughts on waging a counterinsurgency. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the twenty-third of 

January 2007. I’m interviewing Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, 

who is currently the commander of the U.S. Joint Forces 

Command Joint Warfighting Center and director of 

training, and I’m interviewing about his tour of duty as 

commanding general of Combined Joint Task Force-76 

[CJTF-76]. All right, first of all, sir, are you sitting for 

this interview voluntarily?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Yes, I am.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And do you have any objections with Army 

or public researchers using this information as long as 

you’re cited correctly?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: No.

4
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Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Thank you, sir. How and when did you find that 

the Southern European Task Force was going to deploy 

to Afghanistan? 

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Probably in the January ‘04 time frame. When I was still the 

commanding general of the Joint Readiness Training Center, 

I began to hear rumblings about this potential deployment. 

I was alerted for assignment to be the commander of SETAF 

[Southern European Task Force] in the March ‘04 time 

frame, while at JRTC [Joint Readiness Training Center] in 

Fort Polk. I assumed command of SETAF on the thirtieth 

of April of ‘04.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, there’s a period of a few months in between 

when you first heard that SETAF was probably going to 

get that rotation for the CJTF?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Yes, that’s correct. It was only in the background noise of 

what you typically hear in terms of the sourcing of forces. 

DR. KOONTZ: Did you devote any kind of sort of mental energy towards 

preparation or anything at that time?

General Kamiya
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Waging War

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: First, on a general level I thought that the kinds of training 

that we do at JRTC was very complementary to preparing 

for what may come. Of course, in January ‘04 I had no idea 

that I was going to be the commander of SETAF and, in 

fact, I didn’t have any idea where I was going to go after 

JRTC. However, given the demands around the world, I 

put my heart and soul and energy into making the training 

environment at JRTC the most realistic as possible given 

the operational environments in Afghanistan and in Iraq, 

and by that time most units that we were training were all 

headed towards those two AORs [areas of responsibility]. 

DR. KOONTZ: Was there any kind of process of folding in lessons 

learned from the theater into the JRTC routine at that 

time?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Yes. We had our observer/trainers periodically going to 

Iraq and Afghanistan. We got the help of the incumbent 

unit overseas that the unit in training was supposed to 

replace. We were working with the higher headquarters 

to make sure that the scenarios represented the most 

recent aspects of the operational environment as possible. 

We worked with TRADOC’s [U.S. Army Training and 

Doctrine Command’s] Center for Army Lessons Learned 

[CALL], since we had a CALL element there at JRTC. We 

were able to keep the training scenario and environment 

refreshed continually. Of course, the specific training 

objectives for exercises were determined by the division 

commander that the brigade combat team was assigned to, 

so training objectives and everything that comes with those 

objectives were all negotiated, if you will, with the division 

commander. So, JRTC was very much the supporting effort 

for the division commander’s training effort.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let’s get you out of Louisiana and take you over to 

Italy. Tell me about that process. 

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Well, soon after I took command in April ‘04, General 

[Burwell B.] Bell, the commanding general of USAREUR 

[U.S. Army, Europe] at the time, invited me to his 

headquarters for a staff update on where SETAF was in 

forming and training for the next mission. I think, by April, 

it was formally announced that SETAF was going to be the 

next CJTF headquarters. I recall the state of ... probably 

too strong of a word, but shock when General Bell showed 

me a template of the JTF [joint task force] and its units 

and the number of units that were not, in fact, sourced 

yet [laughs]. It was a typical task organization chart. Red 

reflected unsourced units, and black reflected sourced 

units, and I’d say at least two-thirds of that chart was red. 

For me, serving as a SETAF commander was my very first 

experience in Europe. I’d never been stationed there before, 

so besides understanding the complexity of forming the 

JTF, I also had to find out what relevant training resources 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

220

were readily available to the team. Within a month or 

two months, I went on a tour of the Graf-Hohenfels 

Multinational Training Center. I saw their capability to 

replicate the Afghan environment, actually participated 

and drove the scenario for the 173d Brigade Combat Team’s 

rotation there that took place in October. So, while General 

Bell’s initial briefing gave me a good feel on where we stood 

on the forming of SETAF, my immediate thoughts were on 

“As this thing forms, how do we train it?” 

I went to Afghanistan for my own, on what we call a PDSS, 

a predeployment site survey. I think that took place in the 

June or July time frame. I can’t quite remember right now, 

but I went there for a couple reasons. One was to validate 

that the kinds of forces that my task organization reflected 

were in fact consistent with the operational requirements 

of the mission. The second goal was to more thoroughly 

understand the environment. So, I spent about a week there 

with my planners. We went not only to the JTF headquarters, 

but also to RC [Regional Command] East and RC South. I 

had office calls with Lt. Gen. [David W.] Barno at the time, 

and just simply began to learn about the mission. I came 

back and was able to formalize my training based upon 

what we saw. We then published a training plan and moved 

on after that.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Can I back you up and ask you some questions 

about that, sir?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Sure.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. First of all, you said you had two reasons behind 

the PDSS: to validate the forces and the task organization, 

and then to sort of get your arms, I guess, around the 

environment. What did you learn about those forces, and 

then what did you learn about the operating environment 

from this PDSS?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I learned that the task organization was about right. First 

of all, this wasn’t a contingency JTF, where you were 

building from scratch. This was a rotational JTF, so you had 

a template from which to operate, and the template was 

about right. There are a couple of questions about whether 

or not you needed command and control consoles in Black 

Hawk helicopters, for example. But I came back, and I told 

my boss, General Bell, how I felt about that, and the trade 

space, the limitations of the added weight to the aircraft, 

and the operational limitations it would impose, and we 

came to a solution regarding that particular question.

Overall, what I grasped ... what struck me, really, was this 

whole interaction of kinetics and nonkinetics, and how we 

have moved so dramatically beyond the Anaconda days 

where it was primarily a kinetic, traditional military force-
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on-force fight into an environment that demanded much 

more sophisticated methods of getting at your mission. 

That then led to the promulgation within the JTF of the 

importance of the balance of nonkinetic and connectives, 

which, of course, helped shape your training program. I 

felt as though we needed a training program that was very 

balanced, that did not weigh too heavily on the force-onforce aspects, which arguably is a core competency and in 

the comfort zone of most military forces. I wanted to push 

my leaders and organizations into uncomfortable zones 

where they were forced to deal with this whole yin and 

yang of interdependencies, interoperability, of the kinetic 

and nonkinetics. As we went through the JFCOM [U.S. 

Joint Forces Command] training process with the MRX 

[mission rehearsal exercise], you know, they captured 

the dichotomy in terms of the diplomatic, information, 

military, and economic elements of national power and 

how a JTF commander has to learn to orchestrate and try to 

harness the energy as much as possible to apply to a specific 

problem.

DR. KOONTZ: Can you give me a specific example of one of the kind 

of the nonkinetic effects that you observed and that you 

tried to implement into the training?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: On one hand, it was the essentiality of the relationships 

that we’re building with Afghan National Security Forces, 

with the Afghan National Army [ANA]. Frankly, I consider 

that nonkinetic. It was interoperating with them on a daily 

basis. Another vital aspect of our work was with PRTs 

[provincial reconstruction teams]. This work involved 

looking toward more strategic and long-term approaches 

to change involving the interagency representation inside 

the PRTs, and how they all work with the local governor 

or local Afghan leadership to bring reconstruction and 

development to the population.

To help visualize the idea, General Barno used a chart 

that had reconstruction and development in one oval 

and security in another oval. He used to say, and I firmly 

agree, that people sometimes simply look at problems in 

terms of reconstruction and development or security. That 

is, some people believe you can’t have security without 

reconstruction and development, and vice versa, you can’t 

have reconstruction and development without security. 

In fact, in the environment in Afghanistan, there is an 

inherent interaction between the two and where those two 

circles overlap is what I call the “operational sweet spot.” 

How a reconstruction and development project or how a 

traditional military activity can complement both security 

and reconstruction development is where the highest payoff 

is. Going back to your original question about nonkinetics, 

one aspect was the development of the Afghan National 

Army and Afghan National Security Forces; and on the 
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222

other hand, from a more traditional way of thinking, we 

looked at how a CJTF’s reconstruction and development 

activities could bring infrastructure to the Afghan people 

and, at the same time, enable the government’s processes, 

enable the Afghan ministries of how to think through 

developmental needs for different areas, and the list goes 

on and on and on. At the heart of all this, I would ask my 

troops: “How do you obtain the most effects with a single 

muscle movement?” Looking back, it’s really the heart of 

the effects-based approach to thinking. It’s the same kind 

of thought process that if you’re moving into the house 

for the first time, and you’ve got all these boxes, and your 

daughter walks up the stairs going to the bathroom or 

something without a box in her hand. You say “Hey, how 

about the next time you go upstairs, take a couple boxes 

with you so that the energy used to going up the stairs 

to use the bathroom or whatever can also be applied to 

helping us move in at the same time?” It’s that kind of 

way of thinking. How can a nonkinetic activity enable a 

multiplicity of strategic-level, campaign-level effects that 

the commander was trying to achieve? It’s really a great 

question you asked, and I always come at it from a ... you 

just can’t get at it with an overly simplistic answer. The 

opportunities are immense. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And then you also mentioned General Barno’s 

chart, and you also mentioned that you met him during 

your PDSS. Tell me about that meeting.

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: It was a great time for him to lay out how he saw the 

campaign and gave me the opportunity to describe the 

predeployment plan as we knew it back then. So, again, it 

was just another piece that helped. The whole interaction 

with General Barno and others a critical element that 

helped shape in my mind the operational environment in 

which we would have to operate.

DR. KOONTZ: Did he pass on any guidance at that time to you?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: He relayed the importance of the nonkinetic/kinetic 

approach. It was important to remember that it wasn’t 

always about breaking down doors. He described for me 

some of the negative effects that could result if you defaulted 

all the time to the kinetic ways of going about your business. 

Again, just as a means to emphasize the complexity of the 

environment.

DR. KOONTZ: And did you interact with anybody from the 25th ID 

[Infantry Division] at that time?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Yes. I had what I call normal briefings from across their 

J-staff, and I had a session with [Maj. Gen.] Rick Olson, the 

commanding general, at the beginning part of the visit and 

at the end of it. 
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DR. KOONTZ: So, you go to Afghanistan, and you get your sort of feet on 

the ground, you get a sense of the operating environment. 

What happened after he went back to Italy? 

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Again, we solidified the task organization, which was 

continually being developed and sourced. By the way, U.S. 

Army, Europe, sourced about half or slightly over half of the 

units that comprised the CJTF, so that made it a whole lot 

easier, I think, for me as the inbound commander. Again, 

there’s confirmation of the task organization, and then 

there’s the formulation of the training plan—not only the 

training plan for the maneuver units, but also for the CJTF 

staff. Our first staff academic training session was in July. 

We hosted it there in Italy. So, I was able to do the PDSS 

prior to the series of training events we had to train the JTF 

staff. The timing was very important. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me about training up the CJTF staff. What was 

involved in that?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: The SETAF is a standing headquarters of about 200 people, 

primarily Army. So, we had to transition from a 200-man 

staff into a JTF, and I believe our numbers in terms of our 

headquarters in Afghanistan was about 730. These staff 

folks come from hither and yon across the Army and the 

joint force. In July, when we had our first training event, 

we probably had just the SETAF members. There was a 

sprinkling of joint experience on the team. As you well 

know, the SETAF had gone to Liberia not too long before 

this, so there still was some residual experience of how a 

JTF staff operates. By far the majority of folks there were 

relatively new, like myself. My chief of staff was [Col.] Bill 

Mayville. He just relinquished command of the 173d, which 

meant going from a maneuver BCT commander to a chief 

of a JTF, which is a big leap in terms of requirements. 

We had a series of training opportunities in order to 

address the ramp-up in manning over time. Because all 

of the staff was not physically there in July, we adapted 

our training methodology to reflect more of a continual 

training experience. We had the academic phase in July. 

We had our first MRX-like experience in November, which 

was supported by BCTP at Graf-Hohenfels in November, 

and then we had our final MRX in January, right before 

deployment. We were about 60 percent filled in November 

during our first train-up, or first collective train-up, and it 

was about 80 percent filled the following January. A part of 

that delta was already in country because of the different 

service rotational policies, but we still did not have all of 

our individual augmentees physically present with us even 

as late as January. Understanding this, we knew that there 

had to be some type of sustainment training for these late 

deployers. This was not a simple matter of forming and 

training a JTF, deploying it into theater, being there for an 
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entire year together, and then coming out. It wasn’t like that 

at all. The service rotational policies significantly impacted 

how we trained. For example, the Air Force rotation is four 

months, the Marines are seven months, the Army is twelve 

months. When you assume the mission in Afghanistan, 

you have a continual training requirement as new people 

come and go. And every week, we had a hail-and-farewell 

as part of our normal battle rhythm, and it amazed me to 

see the amount of people leaving and coming every week. 

My point here is that the training went beyond the normal 

paradigm of academics, Mission Rehearsal Exercise 1, 

Mission Rehearsal Exercise 2, and then deployment.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned the complexity of having all of the joint 

elements in your staff, and you said that staff was mostly 

Army. Can you give me a rough percentage on ...?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Of the JTF staff, I’d say about 70 percent was Army. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then, secondly, you described this sort of 

developmental process with the BCTP [Battle Command 

Training Program] in November, MRX, etc. What kind 

of things did you notice as the training progressed and as 

the CJTF headquarters continued this training regimen? 

Were there any kind of patterns that you could discern?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: The biggest thing was in the J-staff learning how to 

interoperate. You’ll find that a JTF may be organized 

vertically in terms of a commander, deputy commander, 

etc., but it operates through boards, centers, cells—an 

information operations cell, an effects coordination cell, 

etc. So, you operate horizontally. You come together across 

J-staff functions to focus on one aspect of the mission—

effects, civil-military ops, etc. It wasn’t until the second 

exercise, the final one in January, that the staff really began 

to gel in terms of understanding their interrelationships 

towards a common end. The chief of staff, Bill Mayville, 

began to understand the complexity and nature of his job. 

And, frankly, while I knew how to command a division given 

the experiences I’d had before this, but commanding a JTF 

in the environment like Afghanistan required new learning 

for me, as well. I realized that you have to be inwardly 

focused; but more importantly, you have to be outwardly 

focused as you try to interconnect JTF activities with outside 

organizations and with interagency partners: USAID [U.S. 

Agency for International Development], Department of 

State, U.S. Embassy, etc. So, I began to take a hard look at that 

and learn as much as possible. It was during this time that I 

published two pamphlets. One was based upon our read of 

the book The Four Factors of Prosperity. It talked about the 

importance of development of systems in the context of a 

counterinsurgency. It discussed the importance of roads as 

a means to enable economic systems, and other education 

systems, etc. This pamphlet, I think, helped shape where 
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our reconstruction and development priorities would be 

once we were in country. We shared this pamphlet with our 

USAID and Department of State counterparts once we got 

into country. The other pamphlet was, again, just thoughts 

based on professional reading of the complexity of the 

environment. It was somewhat considered commander’s 

intent, a pamphlet sharing some of what’s going on in 

my commander’s mind. It was required reading for my 

subordinate commanders, and it served as the basis for a 

lot of discussion we had in terms of how to approach the 

mission. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You’ve mentioned the training of the JTF 

headquarters. What about the training of the maneuver 

units?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: The 173d Airborne Brigade during peacetime is the only 

brigade combat team that is really assigned to SETAF. So, 

of course, I shaped the development of their individual and 

collective training that culminated, I think, in their exercise 

at Graf-Hohenfels in the October time frame. After that, 

they became a response cell as we trained the JTF staff 

during the November and January MRXs.

The other units, maneuver and otherwise, prior to our 

deployment all fell under the command and control 

over in V Corps, which is in Germany, and division 

commanders elsewhere. Because of this construct, we 

made sure that these commanders to whom these units 

were assigned to in peacetime and predeployment 

understood the intent, the guidance, etc., that I was giving 

them as a JTF commander. It’s a little bit of a clumsy 

time where you’re not quite deployed yet and you know 

Unit X, who will be subordinate to the JTF in country, is 

still responsive to the division commander or V Corps 

commander in Germany or elsewhere. It worked, and we 

didn’t skip a beat.

Our two ADCs [assistant division commanders] also visited 

units in CONUS [continental United States]—an engineer 

brigade forming our subordinate engineering units, or 

other units—so that they could see the JTF headquarters 

leader being involved, and we could also see firsthand how 

they were being trained. Some of these units came from 

the reserve component, and it was very important to me, 

particularly when the unit was a maintenance company one 

day, reflagged to an MP [military police] guard company, 

and all the MOS [military occupational specialty] training 

before that—I wanted to make sure I had a good feel for 

when I was getting a unit and exactly what I was getting. I 

didn’t quite understand and appreciate how units which are 

formed on relatively short timelines in a relatively ad hoc 

way can present potential vulnerabilities for the commander 

in that environment. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Could you give me an example of one of those 

vulnerabilities?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I don’t want to name specific units, but we had a unit 

where it was involved in allegations of detainee abuse. 

When we decomposed the problem, that unit was formed 

at a relatively hasty basis, to a different type of MOS. Its 

leaders were added to the unit relatively late in the process. 

It was dramatically different from a homogenous unit that’s 

trained, formed, and equipped in CONUS and spent years 

together and then deploys together. Typically, whenever we 

had a problem like that, in most cases the unit was formed, 

trained, and deployed in that ad hoc or rushed way. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Well, we’ve spoken at great length about the 

training. On the eve of deployment to theater, how 

would you overall assess the training that had gone on to 

prepare for Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I felt that given the time we had, we prepared as best as we 

could. We had about ten months to get ready and, of course, 

in the ten months of this training, we were also rearming 

and refitting. As you may recall, the 173d had just gotten 

back from Iraq the year before. We were still trying to get 

vehicles, communications systems, all the move-shootcommunicate stuff and get rearmed, refinished, refurbished, 

on the ship, and deployed. You’re familiar with all of that 

process. There’s a lot going on besides just the training and 

the forming. There’s a whole bunch of activity. I felt that 

given the time we had, given the resources we had that were 

within my control, we had done everything possible. The 

rest was up to just on-the-job training or relying upon the 

25th Infantry Division, whom we were replacing. We had 

about a two-week transition period to fill the gaps as our 

staff flowed in and their staff flowed out. That’s relatively 

normal in a change of responsibility.

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about the deployment to Afghanistan. How did 

that process work?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: It went relatively smoothly. The only glitch, and that may be 

too strong a word, was one of our infantry battalions who 

was on the original task organization was made to hold as a 

PTDO [prepare to deploy order] battalion and not deploy 

with us. That caused us to change the flow of our forces 

relatively quickly. For example, the 25th ID had a battalion 

task force in the Oruzgan Province, and when the PTDO 

battalion was taken away from us, we had to make some 

adjustments, so there was no one-for-one replacement of 

that battalion at Oruzgan Province. At the same time, we 

anticipated a buildup of enemy activity in the northeast 

corner of the country, in the Nangahar-Konar area. As the 

forces originally were designed to flow into RC South, we 

shifted in the midst of deployment forces and had them 
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deployed instead to the northeast of Afghanistan. Again, it 

was a direct reflection of an operational adjustment that was 

required because of the enemy activity that we anticipated. 

That was the only adjustment. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You mentioned that the transition of the 25th 

ID took about two weeks. Discuss that process.

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Sure. It’s commonly referred to as left- and right-seat rides. 

The incoming headquarters sits in the figurative left seat, 

while the incumbent headquarters still drives and does the 

normal day-to-day business in the right seat. After about 

a week, or whenever the incoming staff is comfortable, 

they then change seats. SETAF became the right seat with 

the 25th ID staff in the left seat. This process occurs at 

different times and intervals inside the headquarters, so 

it’s not like one day you’re in the right seat and the next day 

everybody changes to the left seat. It doesn’t happen that 

way, because inside the redeployment and flow of forces, 

the JTF staffs are echeloned in on purpose so you don’t 

have everybody leaving at the same time and everyone on 

their staff section is new. For Rick Olson and myself, I tried 

not to make myself intrusive. Rick had already moved out 

of his sleeping area extended on his office. So, I moved in 

there. I was able to participate and listen to his normal 

battle updates, get an update for my own staff in terms of 

how the transition was going, and then Rick and I had a 

couple of one-on-one meetings. Rick was very gracious in 

terms of one of those meetings was introducing me to his 

POLAD [political adviser], to his USAID adviser, and his 

cultural expert. 

DR. KOONTZ: In the echeloning process of getting the SETAF people 

into that command, about how many of them preceded 

you, about how many filled in after?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I came into Afghanistan about five days before the 

actual transfer of authority date. The ADC-S [assistant 

division commander for support] went in first, in terms 

of watching over the logistics and outflow of 25th ID 

equipment and inflow of SETAF equipment, followed by 

the chief and our ADC for operations, and the sergeant 

major. They preceded me by about a week, I think. By 

the time I got there, the staff was within a few days of 

being in the right seat. I would say that the battle update 

briefings that I listened to within two days after I got 

there were all being led by SETAF staff elements. As 

incoming commander, you don’t want to get there too 

early because it’s too easy to become a distraction. You 

find a balance between getting there in just enough time 

to get a quick update of what’s going on, get into your 

normal battle rhythm, so that when the old commander 

leaves it’s a seamless transition. If you get there any 

earlier than that, it’s too awkward. 
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DR. KOONTZ: What did you and General Olson talk about during your 

left-seat/right-seat process?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: We talked a lot about his relationships with the higher 

headquarters, his view of current operations, and how he had 

anticipated the environment and its associated requirements 

of the JTF changing in the next two or three months, and 

also the normal evaluation of staff capabilities—not people, 

necessarily, but “Hey, if I was you, I would take a look at this 

staff function because I’ve learned that it’s really important, 

and it was a weakness for us.” It was that kind of discussion. 

Our discussions helped me determine priorities in the first 

week to thirty days.

DR. KOONTZ: After the transfer of authority, did you make any changes 

in the way the task force headquarters ran?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: No. The processes of boards, centers, and cells all were 

working fine. The only thing that I changed within, I’d say, 

sixty days of getting there was the way we assessed effects, 

or outcomes. The JFCOM model and staff process has an 

effects campaign objective assessments board, a COAB, 

we call it, during which you’re supposed to take your five, 

six, seven campaign objectives and assess them in terms 

of where you believe you are: green, amber, red, etc. We 

did this during the train-up in November and January, but 

the results of the first COAB conducted in the first thirty 

days demonstrated to me that we had not yet developed 

the competency where the process would lead to output or 

generate action. I asked the chief “Rather than have the staff 

take on all five or six campaign objectives, just take two 

of them and run the next thirty-day COAB cycle.” It was 

a laborious process and entailed discussions about what 

things to measure. We inherited assessment information 

from the 25th ID, but, of course, the staff made adjustments 

to enhance granularity, sources of input, validity of input, 

etc. The bottom line is that at the end of the second COAB 

cycle, even looking at only two of five or six campaign 

objectives, the results of that process did not justify the 

amount of time and energy the staff were putting into it.

So, rather than focusing on the process, we instead 

focused on a way of thinking. It’s not mechanical in terms 

of a process driving it. Every element of the staff had to 

continually think about outcomes on a bigger-picture scale. 

I guess I’d summarize it by saying that it was important to 

look at the four elements of national power—diplomatic, 

information, military, and economic—we in the M, the 

military, have got to recognize opportunities that our 

activities are creating for the D, I, and the E. We also have 

to work with the D, I, and the E stakeholders to make sure 

that they help identify what activities they are generating 

in their respective areas for the military. I began to teach 

and emphasize the importance of this way of thinking, 
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to teach and emphasize that problems that we face in 

Afghanistan are not solvable by purely military means, nor 

could assessment be conducted by purely scientific and 

quantifiable means. In order for the JTF to be successful, 

we had to rely upon other stakeholders outside of the JTF. 

We had to rely upon nontraditional means, like partnering 

with the Afghan National Army, etc., in order to accelerate 

this capability gap that General Barno, and then General 

[Lt. Gen. Karl W.] Eikenberry, acknowledged as they 

themselves transitioned into command.

So, while we did away with the prescribed COAB process, 

we developed our own way of assessment that was based 

heavily on a commander’s intuition of what was going 

on in the operational environment. This really took off 

and particularly enriched our nightly updates between 

commanders and staff. In my mind, looking back, we 

generated the kinds of input and output that the COAB 

process was designed to deliver in a way that was more 

comfortable and more meaningful to our own CJTF. When 

General [Gary E.] Luck came in with USJFCOM to do a 

follow-on staff assistance visit with us in the July time frame, 

I told him of the adjustments that we had done, and I think 

that our input triggered an adjustment in USJFCOM’s own 

approach in that the COAB was not something that should 

be prescriptive. Instead, it could be thrown out there as a 

process to be evaluated, to be templated against. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. One of the things I wanted to ask you was your 

definition of effects-based operations [EBO], and you’ve 

just given that to me. But we’ve spoken to people who 

were in CJTF-180 and then we’ve spoken to other people 

in other incarnations of CJTF-76, and it seems that the 

definition of effects-based operations can change with 

time or individuals.

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Now that I’m a trainer and being a veteran of the training 

audience, I think, first of all, the idea of effects-based 

operations has always been there. I told my folks that we 

were treating it like some innovative, new thing, that our 

subordinates were kind of intimidated by it. It seemed 

like something that’s scientific, requiring facts, figures, 

etc.—and I think that’s the wrong approach. In fact, you 

still see, you still hear about, some emotional baggage 

about EBO from different pockets within the services. I do 

not believe that EBO was prescriptive. Rather, as General 

Luck says, it’s more descriptive for a way of thinking. It is 

an acknowledgement that the joint force has to operate 

at multiple echelons against problem sets where pure 

kinetic operations that have governed our training, have 

driven our training experience over many, many decades, 

are not adequate and not sophisticated enough. It’s the 

DIME [diplomatic, information, military, economic] and 

the environment that has political, military, economic, 
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230

social, infrastructure, information. The important thing 

to emphasize is how the military commander has to think 

through desired outcomes, operational processes, and 

figure out how to apply the four elements of national power 

against the problem set. That’s essentially what it is.

Let me give you another more scaled down example. When 

I walked into a psychological operations element inside the 

JTF, I looked at the trinkets being used to help promulgate 

the message “peace and unity.” There were pens and other 

items that had the Afghan national flag on it, “peace and 

unity” on it, etc. One of the popular items was a soccer ball 

with an Afghan flag on it, and then a Dari or Pashto “peace 

and unity” on it. So, I took a couple of these soccer balls 

and other things with me. One day I’m in Paktika Province, 

in the midst of a crowd. We’re there for a shura with the 

governor and his people. I pulled the soccer ball from my 

Humvee when the kids gathered around, and they grabbed 

it, and they began playing with it right away, and I thought 

to myself, “They didn’t even bother to read what it said.” 

So, then I went back to the detachment and said, “How 

long have we been using soccer balls?” And, “Oh, sir, it’s 

very, very popular. It’s the most requested item from our 

commanders, and we’ve been using it for about three or 

four years.” I said, “Look, guys. Our job in Afghanistan is 

not to train the next Afghan Olympic soccer team, okay? 

The soccer ball is a means to convey the message. It is not 

the message.” I said, “How would you like it if. ...” I said, 

“Are you married?” “Yes, I’m married.” “How long have you 

been married?” “Seven years.” “Okay. How would your wife 

like it if you gave her the same present for her birthday, 

Christmas, and anniversary for seven straight years?” The 

present would initially be novel. She would look at the 

directions, and examine it, etc., but after the first couple 

times she looks at it, it becomes meaningless in terms of the 

message—love, affection, etc.—it was a means to convey.

Effects-based thinking would have opened up the aperture 

of thinking for these service members regarding what 

kinds of products and things we needed to develop to make 

the Afghan people curious, and yet would be something 

that they would read the message and assimilate it in their 

psyche. We were measuring the wrong things. We had 

been measuring “Sir, we’ve given out a thousand soccer 

balls.” Or, it’s like when you go to a PRT and are told: “Sir, 

we’ve spent $10 million, and we have a hundred projects.” I 

would ask them, “What systems are you building?” That is 

“What’s your analysis that says in this area of the province 

you require a Volkswagen vice a Cadillac? Tell me how you 

came up with it. Based on the needs of the province, based 

upon the strengths of the province, what do you need, a 

Volkswagen or a Cadillac? And then tell me how, what the 

components of the car you’re trying to build are: steering 

wheel, tires, engines, etc., are, and show me how each of 
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you...you and your stakeholders, USAID, USDA [U.S. 

Department of Agriculture], the military ... while you may 

be building separate components, in the end they all lead to 

a Cadillac or a Volkswagen and not something where you 

have a steering wheel that belongs to a Ford F–250 pickup 

truck and tires that belong to a MINI Cooper. So, don’t talk 

to me about dollars and don’t talk to me about numbers of 

products. Tell me about the systems and the components 

of those systems, and how each component is going to be 

made by perhaps—even if it’s made by or produced by a 

different organization or source, in the end you end up with 

what you want.”

I understand and acknowledge the criticisms that USJFCOM 

has received in the past on being too prescriptive in terms 

of the effects-based notion, but we have now adopted it to 

say: “There are a variety of tools out there. Effects-based 

thinking is yet one additional tool the commander has. 

And, oh, by the way, those that use it appear to be having 

success.” It’s hard, taking a military organization that’s 

primarily kinetic-oriented and changing the culture so 

everyone on the staff, along with subordinate commanders, 

are naturally thinking about outcomes on a broader and 

more sophisticated scale. I could sense this sophisticated 

level of thinking when I talked to my commanders. 

For example, it was clear that they demonstrated an 

understanding of the important relationships between the 

military and intergovernmental operations when there was 

a shura with the Afghan governor and inviting his Afghan 

National Police commander, district chief, and other 

Afghan leaders together to discuss a problem. And, through 

my headquarters, letting General Eikenberry know that 

this activity was going to take place, so potentially we could 

bring the appropriate Afghan minister from Kabul down 

to participate in the shura. That’s the kinds of things that 

you wanted to generate. It was a classic example of how an 

activity that’s sponsored by the M can provide opportunities 

for the D, I, and the E. 

DR. KOONTZ: If we can change tracks here for a moment, I wanted to 

ask about how your task force headquarters operated on 

sort of a kind of daily or quotidian basis. The first thing 

I wanted to ask is, take me on a tour, I guess, of your 

DMAIN [division main command post] or whatever 

you would call the task force headquarters. What does it 

physically look like, or what’s it physically composed of? 

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: It was built based upon containers. I don’t know where 

they came from, but in [C]JTF-180 days, in fact, I saw the 

remnants of what it used to be. It used to be composed of 

tentlike structures, very primitive. My predecessors had the 

forethought of “It needs to be more. It’s going to be a relatively 

enduring headquarters. It’s going to need to operate in a 

better environment.” So, when the 25th ID moved in there 
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a year before we got there, they actually moved into a new 

JOC, a joint operations center. It’s basically MILVANs 

[military van containers], customized MILVANs, with 

floors, air conditioning, etc., that now is inside an old 

hangar. They built the JOC inside a hangar, so you have 

a roof over the container itself, and it has all the plugs, 

the comms, etc., to actually operate as a JOC. Then you 

have all of your staff sections. They are all collocated 

inside the JOC. You do have some appendages, some 

like the PSYOPS [psychological operations] folks I 

told you about. Their office was located somewhere 

else in Bagram, but relatively close in terms of the 

JOC itself.

The JOC itself is a multitiered, multielevated facility 

where you have a series of desks with computer screens, 

and in the front of the JOC you have larger computer 

screens where you show the common operational picture 

up front. You can pick whatever you want to show them 

on big screen, but typically it’s the common operational 

picture with icons showing what people are moving to, 

etc. The other screen is typically internet relay chatting 

typically mIRC-chat or IM-ing [instant messaging] 

that’s going on in the tactical bases between different 

stakeholders. And, of course, you have your flat screen 

TV up there showing, typically, CNN and news. 

DR. KOONTZ: What I wanted to ask is what are the processes that 

your headquarters used with ... or, I guess ... I’m 

trying to think of a way to formulate this. How did you 

interact with higher headquarters, Afghan National 

Government, etc., etc.?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: The general model was that CFC-A [Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan]—General Eikenberry, General 

Barno before him—would handle the operational 

linkages to the strategic. In other words, they would 

be the conduit to the embassy, into NATO [North 

Atlantic Treaty Organization], into Afghan ministries, 

etc., while -76 would be characterized as a tacticallevel headquarters. I found this to be an extremely 

oversimplistic view and approach to what needed to 

be accomplished. My means of communicating with 

General Barno and Eikenberry—and again, I was there 

only for about month before General Barno left and 

General Eikenberry came in—was through Tandberg, 

which is used on a desktop PC for secure and regular 

phone calls and other things. I had a Tandberg on my 

desk, as well as in my room. We would experience 

tactical-level things that would have operational and 

strategic implications, and I’d always try to call to 

give my boss a context in which an incident may have 

happened to ground troops, if you will. So, we had a 

very, very good working relationship.
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An example of how a broader view of our interaction can 

be seen with our work with OSC-A [Office of Security 

Cooperation-Afghanistan] at the time. OSC-A is a 

subordinate organization to CFC-A which deals primarily 

with forming and training the Afghan National Army. 

They’re the ones that orchestrate training with the ministries, 

the mentors, etc. I had an LNO [liaison officer] with them. 

Also, I was a member of the Provincial Reconstruction 

Team Executive Steering Committee along with the 

international ambassadors, General Eikenberry or his rep, 

CFC-A, as well as NATO ISAF [International Security 

Assistance Force] as the mission transitioned to them. I also 

had a personal relationship with the DCM [deputy chief of 

mission], Dick Norland, at the U.S. Embassy. I invited him 

and the ambassador down for orientation to the CJTF, and 

we’d actually bounce ideas off the ambassador directly. It 

wasn’t routine in the sense that, you know, it was everyday 

and we got to be on a first-name basis, but I did get to be on 

a first-name basis with the DCM.

In that environment and the way we operated in my time 

there, it became flatter. In other words, given the kinds of 

activities that my JTF was doing and the opportunities it 

created for the D, I, and the E, the interaction naturally 

occurred. It was a more personal interaction between 

elements in the D, I, and the E. One of the first things I did 

when I took command there was to take my staff down to 

meet Patrick Fine, the USAID director based in Kabul, and 

his staff. We talked about reconstruction and development 

in Afghanistan—approaches, priorities, how we’re going to 

work together, etc. That personal touch made a difference 

in the long run.

I asked Rick Olson during our transition, “Rick, how 

important is it to personally engage with these groups and 

people at the various levels? During your watch, looking 

back, how important was it for you to have relationships 

with the Afghan governors that you have in your battle 

space?” For the 25th ID, at that time it did not seem to be 

of critical importance. However, by the time we arrived, the 

environment was changing so that I thought that personal 

relationships with the governors of the provinces that had 

U.S. military forces there were very important. Over my year 

there, I began to develop at least professional relationships 

with Governor Bahlul in the Panjshir, Governor Taniwal 

in Paktia Province—who was killed several months ago—

Governor Asadullah in Kandahar, Governor Mangal in 

Paktika Province, and Governor Arman in Zabol Province, 

and Governor Sher Alam in Helmand Province. People were 

sort of amazed when I could list the twelve or so governors 

that were governors in the areas in which we were operating 

because there had not been that emphasis in the past for 

direct contact. I found it extremely important. When a 

crisis happened, like when the allegations of the burning of 
234

Taliban remains happened, I could fly down the very next 

day, engage with Governor Asadullah, give him the ground 

truth about what we think happened, tell him about the 

U.S. investigation that we’re going to hold, tell him that 

we will share the results with him, etc. And you know, my 

PRT commanders, my maneuver brigade commanders, all 

had multiple engagement opportunities even beyond my 

own with the Afghan governors and their leaders. I got to 

know every Afghan corps commander in our AO [area of 

operations], to the 203d Corps commander in RC East, to 

the 205th Corps commander in RC South.

Going back to your question about how we were able to 

liaise, it helped us give the tools to try to coordinate the 

interaction of D, I, and then the E. This is how it happened, 

and it happened at my level, it happened at the brigade 

combat team level, it happened at the battalion level, and etc. 

It was important to me that since I was delving into the D, I, 

and the E, I would have to communicate and coordinate my 

actions with General Eikenberry so he could help me and 

be a facilitator at his level, etc. So, General Eikenberry, in 

my mind—and you’ll have to speak to him, of course—was 

supportive of the opportunities that we were teeing up for 

him and others as a way to start developing linkages between 

the central government and the provincial government and 

a whole variety of other areas. 

DR. KOONTZ: I’m curious about this interaction with the provincial 

governors. I’m just wondering—you know, here you are, 

you’re a two-star general of a large, sizable military task 

force. You’ve got these governors who are members of a, 

you know, young, standing-up government, I guess. Is 

there a protocol? Is there a ritual? I mean, how do these 

meetings take place?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Typically, if I wanted to meet with a governor, I’d work the 

appointment through my maneuver brigade commander. 

So, if I wanted to meet with Governor Asadullah in 

Kandahar, or Arman in Zabol Province—because those 

two provinces fell under the jurisdiction of my RC South 

commander, I worked with then-Col. Kevin [C.] Owens 

to coordinate the meeting. So, Kevin would get with the 

governor, would agree upon a date and time and location, 

and then I’d fly down and engage with the governor. Kevin 

and I would get together ahead of time and determine 

what kind of key points to make and what the governor 

will be asking me for. With this direct outreach, every 

once in a while there would be opportunities at a meeting 

or a shura where the government will be there, along with 

other elected officials, or with elements of his population. 

There, you would work with the governor himself the 

terms of what his expectations were, desired outcomes, the 

kinds of things that he’d like me to say, etc. So, that’s how 

it would work. And, of course, I’d come back and report in 

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Waging War

an EXSUM [executive summary] of some type to General 

Eikenberry what happened, and if I thought that he needed 

to know ahead of time, I would let him know in advance of 

the engagement.

Some of these meetings were also opportunities for me to 

begin developing linkages in an indirect way with the Afghan 

governor and his associated military ANA leadership. I’d go 

visit the Afghan National Army corps commander. We talk 

about an upcoming meeting with the governor. We either 

go together or develop something that would register in the 

governor’s mind that the ANA was a tool for him to use in 

the area. Again, just the activity of going to see a governor 

for whatever purpose can lead to increase of the military 

activity. In many cases, it was basically opening doors for 

my maneuver commanders or PRTs.

Another example is when we built what we call the 

Kandahar-TK [Tarin Kowt] road, and that was a road 

that was started by USAID. The project lost energy for a 

multitude of reasons; however, because the completed 

road could cut down travel time from twelve hours to 

three hours between the provincial capital of Kandahar, 

going through northern Kandahar, linking up with the 

Oruzgan Province, Tarin Kowt in the north, we saw some 

system-building opportunities by completing the road. We 

had military engineers operating flat loaders and scrapers 

and stuff, building this road, and at the same time we 

learned about how the Afghan National Army, while they 

have engineering companies assigned to corps, have no 

engineering equipment to operate and did not have the 

skills to operate.

So, what do I do? I went to see Governor Asadullah in 

Kandahar. I link him up with the 205th Corps commander, 

whose base, by the way, was close to the governor’s 

compound. I said, “We have a military engineer unit and a 

corps engineering unit building the road for you on behalf 

of your government. General, you have an engineering 

company which, I understand, has at least one Caterpillar 

dozer. Why don’t you allow us to bring your dozer out to 

the worksite and give your soldiers an opportunity of how 

to operate the dozer, because we have soldiers that know 

how to operate Caterpillar dozers. And, oh, by the way, 

while your soldiers are out there, why don’t you allow us 

to familiarize them on other pieces of equipment that we 

have operating at the same time?” So, in about two or three 

weeks, this engineering company was much more capable 

than they were sitting in garrison, looking at their one 

dozer.

The situation gave us, in a strategic communications aspect, 

the reality that the Afghan National Army element had 

participated in building that road, and when it was finally 
General Kamiya confers with Jan Muhammad, governor of Oruzgan Province, 20 March 2005.

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236

completed, we could celebrate it as a credit to the ANA, the 

government of Kandahar. It was a credit for the political 

aspects of the time, as well as a U.S.-Coalition success. In 

working with Governor Jan Muhammad in Tarin Kowt, 

the Oruzgan provincial governor, it could be viewed as his

success as well, too. So, you have a cross-provincial/U.S.-

Coalition and ANA success.

Anyway, I can go on and on and on about activities that 

if you only look at in terms of what your forces are doing, 

without looking at it in terms of what that activity could 

do for other aspects of your mission, building governance, 

wherever it was, you’re missing opportunities. 

DR. KOONTZ: How effective do you believe the PRT model worked 

while you were in Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I think the PRT model is working, although the thought 

process of building systems, the Cadillac or the Volkswagen 

that we discussed earlier, hasn’t quite been culturally 

assimilated into our formation of new PRTs. I went back 

to Afghanistan last October, and as I got ready to train 
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the 82d Airborne Division to go to be the next CJTF after 

10th Mountain, I talked to PRT commanders—who are 

now, by the way, Air Force and Navy; there’re no Army 

PRT commanders in Afghanistan—and I could tell by 

our discussions that we were gravitating more towards 

dollars and numbers of projects again. If the PRT model 

provides the conditions for success, it is provided that the 

State Department, USAID, USDA, and other outside DoD 

[Department of Defense] stakeholders participate, because 

the kinds of questions that a PRT must decide upon, like 

what kind of wheat would be a better crop—these kinds of 

things are way beyond the core competencies of a military 

commander, so you rely very much on the competencies of 

[US]AID and other organizations. We did not have a PRT 

in the Panjshir Province, and we were asked by General 

[John P.] Abizaid and General Eikenberry to think through 

putting a PRT there. It’s important to note that the Panjshir 

area is not affected by insurgents to the same level of degree 

of other provinces. It is the home of Ahmad Shah Masood, 

the Tajik Northern Alliance, etc. You have a Pashtundominated government with President [Hamid] Karzai 

who is viewed by the Afghans, I think, as being Pashtuncentric, yet you have a province in the northern part of 

Afghanistan, the Panjshir, that is Tajik in nature. 

For a lot of reasons, political as well as developmental, we 

were asked to think through “How would we put a PRT 

into Panjshir?” What we thought about it, and what is there 

today, is something I characterize as skipping a generation 

of PRT development. PRTs in Afghanistan today are kind 

of Beau Geste fortresses [referring to an early twentiethcentury novel and film portraying the siege of a small French 

Foreign Legion fortress in the Sahara], if you will. They have 

walls. There are bases. But what we were able to achieve in 

the Panjshir is a way to focus instead on the capabilities and 

functions of the PRT so that it became embedded into the 

provincial governmental system instead of being focused 

on a building. So, when a U.S. developmental worker 

comes to work, he or she doesn’t go to work in the PRT. 

Instead, they go to work in the Panjshir governor’s ministry 

of development. So, in the Panjshir today, you don’t find a 

Beau Geste–type infrastructure sitting there in the middle 

of the Panjshir Valley. There are two places where the PRT 

members sleep. In the early days, they went to work in 

these containerized buildings with ... I think we put two 

of them together as a temporary facility, but I think now, 

as the governor’s building, his ministry building, is finally 

built, the PRT now could just move and disappear into the 

governmental structure. That’s what I think the future is. 

But again, it was only doable in Panjshir because of the 

unique conditions there, and, again, it didn’t happen by 

circumstance. It began with a meeting I had with Governor 

Bahlul. To put it bluntly, Governor Bahlul sat like this the 

entire time [folds his arms across his chest and frowns]. He 
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did the majority of the talking. The premise was “Ahmad 

Shah Masood did so much for the U.S. Coalition. Why have 

you forgotten us?” Through three or four engagements, we 

were able to discuss with the governor ideas on how to best 

develop a PRT-like capability into the province, and there 

it is today. It is led, by the way, by a U.S. State Department 

individual, and his assistant is military—I think an Air 

Force lieutenant colonel. It is the one PRT that is led by a 

DOS [Department of State] individual.

DR. KOONTZ: Working within the CJTF—it’s obviously a military 

structure. Did the civilian—you know, State Department, 

USAID, etc.—aspects of PRT, did that cause any problems 

with you in terms of command and control?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I don’t think so. In terms of command and control, no. We 

were asked by Ambassador [Ronald E.] Neumann to give 

SIPR [Secure Internet Protocol Router] access down to 

the PRTs so that each State representative could have SIPR 

communication. That was done. We had isolated cases of 

e-mail messages from DOS or some outside, nonmilitary 

organization or entity going to the embassy or somewhere 

that would cause some questioning about what we were 

doing at the PRT, but that was easily overcome. 

[Interruption to proceedings.] 

 I’m sorry, what was your question again, now?

DR. KOONTZ: We were talking about ...

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Oh, command and control. First of all, the civilian entities 

in a PRT were considered by my PRT commanders as part 

of a team, so they had complete access. Command and 

control–wise, each PRT—and there was typically one in 

every province—was directly under the maneuver brigade 

commander who oversaw those series of provinces, so there 

was a clear reporting and command and control structure 

over the PRTs. They weren’t orphans sitting out there. The 

hardest part about PRTs or other things is in thinking about 

how reconstruction and development and security overlap, 

and the activities that represent the highest value are inside 

where those circuits overlap. For instance, in the beginning 

you would have some civilian entity say, “Well, you have 

to escort me to visit this project.” We needed to rethink 

that question and how we approached the requirement. 

We had to move from that early mindset to sitting down 

and developing a mission and say, “In the context of my 

military operations today, tell me where we’d find interest 

in it, or how can we include a variety of projects into the 

maneuver part for the day or for the month or so? How can 

we find points of intersect between R&D [reconstruction 

and development] and security operations?” So, then you 

began to slowly, albeit, start to converge the circles and 
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have both the military and the civilian entities recognize 

the overlap in requirements and opportunities. It would be 

unfair to say, “The U.S. Army won’t escort me, the USAID 

member, to look at Project X, Y, and Z.” That’s really not the 

way we ought to be asking questions. The initial question 

would become “How can you get me there? How can I 

achieve this while you were also achieving some benefit to 

your military operations?” 

DR. KOONTZ: So, sort of striking a balance, I guess, between aims and 

needs? Is that a fair way to characterize that?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Aims and needs? I’ll default again to effects-based 

thinking. Let’s say that I’m going on a military patrol in 

an operational area, and besides the enemy and besides 

insurgents, I think about what else I can be doing, 

looking at, sensing, etc., that addresses facets of the 

DIME dynamic. Then, all of a sudden, in the context 

of a military plan, inside the route of advance or the 

control route, there are a bunch of areas that I and the 

USAID person have an interest in. So, I would tell the 

USAID person, “I’d like to accompany you, and we can 

adjust the patrol route minutely so we can get at this.” 

So, here you have the ground integration with security 

and it’s not security out here minus the R&D. Rather, 

it’s a homogenous team, and that is something that as a 

commander, a JTF commander, I had to repeatedly talk 

about and discuss and emphasize.

Every time a U.S. State Department or USAID individual 

changes out of a PRT and moves somewhere else, there 

would be a different dynamic. You have to start all over 

again, because it very much—like the majority of things—it 

depends upon the personal relationships. When everything 

is working right, it’s magical what happens on a PRT. It really 

is. In fact, our PRT up in Nangahar Province, commanded 

by a female civil affairs officer, Army, with a very ambitious, 

very astute USAID director, with a USDA individual, was 

truly, truly magical when you watched it.

I’ve got to talk to these guys for about fifteen minutes. Can 

we interrupt here for a second? 

[Interruption to proceedings. Recording stops.]

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir. When we left off, we were discussing 

various and sundry effects—kinetic, nonkinetic, the 

use of military force, use of PRTs, etc., etc. The enemy 

in Afghanistan is sort of politically amorphous, in that 

you’ve got several different factions. You’ve got HIG 

[Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin], Taliban, al Qaeda, sort of 

generic Afghan criminality. How would you define, or 

how would you describe, your conception of the antiCoalition forces in Afghanistan?
240

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MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: I think it’s too narrow a focus to describe the insurgent 

purely in terms of their combatants and all the groupings: 

HIG, al Qaeda, Taliban, etc. I think if all we do is focus 

on the insurgents, we are not getting at the root causes of 

an insurgency. In the south, it’s becoming more and more 

difficult to discern the difference between criminal/drug 

people and traditional Taliban. I think there’s a mix. Thus, 

when people ask me about the insurgency, I tell them that 

there’s more to the insurgency than what most people tend 

to think about. It’s more than the combatants and criminal 

element. It’s the sense of hopelessness that the people 

may feel that their government now, with their elected 

president, parliament, etc., is still not being able to provide 

a future and a difference from the way things were with 

the Taliban. It’s a perceived failure that their police, the 

rule of law, is still not there. So, as the police are training, 

as you’re arresting criminals or whatever else, there’s still 

no judiciary systems or jails in which to incarcerate those 

individuals. It’s the lack of infrastructure. It’s the lack of 

jobs to provide for legitimate means to feed families. It’s all 

of that, and General Eikenberry and I used to characterize 

it as the military is fighting a delaying action, or what could 

be described as a delaying action, to keep the insurgent at 

bay, buying time for nonmilitary actors and stakeholders 

to get in there and develop some of these systems that can 

get at the real causes of the insurgency. I’m not sure that 

answered that question or not.

DR. KOONTZ: Yes, sir. It does.

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: With that understanding, it emphasizes that the fight in 

Afghanistan is not winnable with purely military means. 

Every road you go down in these discussions, it’s all leading 

to an integrated DIME approach to the problem set. 

DR. KOONTZ: If you could—this is sort of an abstract, theoretical 

question—make one change to the Army, either 

doctrinally, structurally, organizationally, etc., to get at 

counterinsurgency and nonconventional-type campaigns 

such as Afghanistan, what would that change be?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: Speaking from a joint perspective versus a purely Army 

one, because you’re asking me about a CJTF experience, 

I think we need to examine this whole notion of the 

global context in which we’re conducting operations. I 

hear commanders—and I live this day after day—that 

sometimes, you begin to think that in these COIN 

[counterinsurgency] environments, the whole paradigm 

has shifted on us. In the past, we fought military campaigns 

that were supported by information operations. Now, in 

many respects, we’re fighting an information campaign 

that’s supported by military operations. The message and 

how it’s communicated—through various prisms, cultural 

and other actions that send messages—are the dominant, 
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are the decisive weapons. Looking at my JTF, we are still 

structured to fight military campaigns, and I just get a gut 

feeling that the way our JTFs are structured right now is 

not geared to fight, is not organized organically, and we’re 

looking at the staff now to fight in a DIME environment. 

Going back to the thinking about information operations, 

it’s multifaceted and we organize in terms of our comfort 

zone—that is current ops, future ops, and future plans—in 

how we look at information operations. But maybe we 

ought to be organizing in a different way where maybe the 

information operations enterprise plays a more robust role 

in driving operations. Maybe sometimes there are times 

where you do a military operation for an informationspecific objective. What I learned through the Afghanistan 

experience is that in an information campaign, it’s not good 

enough to think only about what you want to say. I think 

we’re structured now to come up with what we want to say, 

but it’s more important that we focus more on what we want 

people to hear. There’s a subtle difference there, and we’re 

not set up organizationally in a structure that recognizes 

the target audiences. Take Afghanistan, as an example. You 

have a local Afghan audience; a NATO audience; an internal 

command audience; and, a global, international community 

audience. The art is in how we focus on what we want people 

to hear and our willingness to make adjustments to how we 

say it or what we say. Understanding the subtle difference 

between what we want to say and what we want to hear is 

very important.

Case in point: early on in our rotation, we had some 

kinetic fights, and we killed or captured a couple hundred 

combatants. So, we celebrated this, and we promulgated 

the victory: “The tactical victory of Operation X resulted 

in the killing of a couple hundred combatants.” From a 

military perspective, some of the audiences would share 

the view that that is a success. But I failed to recognize at 

the time that there were other communities, other target 

audiences, that would interpret that message in a way that 

was opposite from what you anticipated. We focused too 

much on what we want to say—we killed a hundred-plus 

insurgents. We wanted the people to hear that because of 

our interaction with the Afghan National Army, we were 

able to get to areas of enemy sanctuary where we were 

unable to reach before, and therefore, as expected, the 

number of contacts with the insurgents were increasing 

because we had more operational reach with a gradually 

enabled Afghan National Army partnership. What we 

wanted people to hear was that the environment was 

becoming more and more secure. Instead, what some heard 

was that it was getting more and more dangerous. There’s 

a subtle difference in this whole aspect of concentrating 

on what you want people to hear vice what you want to 

say, but it’s very, very important.
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I was surprised when people said, “Well, you said a hundred 

people were killed. Well, that means the environment 

is awfully unstable down there.” In my focus on what I 

wanted to say, I failed to provide the context in which those 

insurgents were killed or captured: the increased operational 

reach, the increased capability, and how many of them were 

turned in by their own people. I failed to do that; however, 

I would have had greater success in sharing the intended 

message, had I thought about it in what I wanted them to 

hear. I believe this idea is tied to a number of areas where 

we need to look that could potentially drive organizations 

and change to the way that we train for the mission.

Another area is in the training environment, where 

we currently utilize role players. I believe we should 

focus more on interaction, negotiations, role-playing 

negotiations with an interagency partner, as well as with 

host nation government officials such as ambassadors and 

governors. We need to increase the interaction with the 

role players who represent USAID, DOS [Department of 

State], embassy, or other organizations across the DIME 

spectrum. The commander, through the given scenario of 

a common problem, would then need to expand his or her 

thinking and negotiation to more closely link to the DIME 

environment.

DR. KOONTZ: Looking back at your experience as the commander 

of Combined Joint Task Force-76, what would you 

characterize as the greatest success the task force had?

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: It’s funny. You know, Stars and Stripes and others have 

asked me that same question, too. I think the greatest 

success is that we were able to say, when we left after our 

twelve months there, that we left the place different, and 

improved, than when it was handed off to us. And I don’t 

say that in a negative sense to 25th ID. I’m just telling you 

that given what the environment was when we assumed 

the mission, I believe that the environment was better. 

We started a partnership program with the Afghan 

National Army. They were more fully integrated with 

our operations. We had interaction across the DIME. As 

I explained further, we had matured our ability to think 

effects-based 110 percent. We had increased confidence 

and increased relationships with Afghan elected officials. 

We had successfully supported the Afghan government’s 

parliamentary elections in the fall of 2005. So, that was, 

to me, the greatest success. It was no success in terms 

of a tactical victory or Operation Whatever-the-NameIs. It’s an environment where tactical victories mean 

nothing. You know what I mean? Tactical victories mean 

nothing.

DR. KOONTZ: There’s a whole raft of people waiting outside your door 

to talk to you. Is there anything that you’d like to add? 
MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: No. Just that I’m in a very fortunate position now to take 

these kinds of thoughts and roll them into the way we train 

future JTFs. I’m also given opportunities to go back to the 

operational environment—Iraq, Afghanistan, Horn of 

Africa—to learn more about the operational environment 

and to see what emerging requirements JTFs have now. So, 

I’m really fortunate. It was great. The year in Afghanistan, 

for me, was a life-changing experience. There’s not a day that 

goes by that I don’t somehow think about something we did 

in Afghanistan that either I would have done differently, 

had I known what I know now, or is something good or bad 

that can reinforce a point that I’m trying to make as I train 

the next generation of JTF commanders.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Sir, that’s a good place to stop. I want to thank you 

for taking the time to do this and for squeezing me in. 

MAJ. GEN. KAMIYA: This is really an executive summary of my year [laughs].

Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson (USA, Ret.) served as Commanding General, 25th Infantry Division (Light), during its rotation as the headquarters element of Combined Joint Task Force-76 

from April 2004 to March 2005. He was interviewed by telephone by J. Patrick Hughes of the 

U.S. Army Center of Military History on 23 July 2007. General Olson discusses the division’s 

training before deployment and the headquarters staff’s preparedness to conduct joint operations. After transitioning with the headquarters of the 10th Mountain Division (Light) in 

theater, 25th Infantry Division elements conducted counterinsurgency operations and operated under the regional command structure put into place by Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan. General Olson comments on the command structure in theater and Combined 

Joint Task Force-76’s interactions with U.S., Coalition, and civilian entities operating in Afghanistan, as well as with the fledgling institutions of the Afghan government. After discussing the presidential election of 2004, the work of provincial reconstruction teams, and dealing 

with the unstable Afghanistan-Pakistan border, General Olson concludes the interview with 

his thoughts on the successes and shortcomings of the division’s experience in Afghanistan.

DR. HUGHES: Recording. This is the twenty-third of July 2007. I am 

interviewing General Eric Olson over the phone from his 

residence in Hawaii. Dr. J. Patrick Hughes, interviewing. 

Sir, you’re giving this interview voluntarily? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes, I am. 

DR. HUGHES: You don’t mind it being used for an Army study?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: No, I don’t.

DR. HUGHES: Okay. How did you get word that units from the 25th 

were going to deploy to Afghanistan?

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MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I would say that it was about six to eight months before 

the actual deployment. General [Lt. Gen. James L.] 

Campbell, who was the USARPAC [U.S. Army, Pacific] 

commander at the time, told us that we were going to 

deploy. Initially, it was unclear whether we were going 

to all go to Iraq, to Afghanistan, or kind of split up. In 

the event, we actually had the division headquarters, 

one brigade combat team [BCT], plus the division base, 

that went to Afghanistan. One brigade combat team 

went to Iraq. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What steps did you take to prepare the units 

before deployment?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: We had kind of a standard ramp-up to the deployment. 

At that time, it wasn’t particularly standard, but we had 

the opportunity to send one of the brigade combat teams 

that was going with us to JRTC [Joint Readiness Training 

Center]. We had a division war fighter exercise, which they 

turned into something, I guess, that would resemble an 

MRX [mission rehearsal exercise] today, but the scenario 

that was used—it wasn’t particularly appropriate for the 

type of mission we ended up conducting in Afghanistan. 

But I would say that the primary means that we used to 

prepare was the—you know—we did seminars. We also 

did professional development. We went to Leavenworth 

for a week and heard a little bit about Afghanistan. Then 

we did division command post exercises as a sort of 

mission rehearsal exercise. That’s how we prepared. 

DR. HUGHES: I read an article where they quoted you as saying that 

you felt the division was particularly well prepared to 

deal in the joint arena from your experiences in the 

Pacific. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right. 

DR. HUGHES: Could you elaborate on that?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Sure. The location of the division at Schofield Barracks 

puts us right in the middle of a joint community. You 

know, there’s Pearl Harbor for the Navy; there’s Hickam 

[Air Force Base] for the Air Force; the Coast Guard has 

got considerable presence here; then, at Kaneohe we’ve 

got the Marines. So, my soldiers, at the time, had had 

an opportunity to work with men and women from 

all the different services. We had a chance, for example—

we were on the Big Island, the island of Hawaii, at 

Pohakuloa Training Area. We had an opportunity to 

work with the Air Force and control close air and this 

type of thing. So, we are very well positioned here in 

Hawaii to work together jointly. It was just because 

there’s the presence of all different services right here, in 

fairly significant numbers. 
General Olson (center front) joins troops of Combined Task Force Bobcat on a patrol in Cahar 

Cineh, Oruzgan Province, 26 October 2004.

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DR. HUGHES: Okay. What guidance were you given concerning your 

mission, and whom from? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: General [Lt. Gen. David W.] Barno came and visited 

with us and gave us preliminary guidance on the 

specific mission in Afghanistan. There were really very 

few people who were here who were able to—there just 

wasn’t a whole lot of experience in Afghanistan here. 

So, I would say that General Barno was probably the 

guy who gave us our initial guidance. Plus, we did the 

predeployment site surveys, the PDSSs. When we were 

over there, we had a chance to talk to General Barno and 

some of the other senior military and civilian leaders 

who were in Afghanistan, so we had a pretty fair idea of 

what we were going to do when we hit the ground. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. How did you prepare your soldiers and, one would 

assume, their families for the deployment? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. Well, we’ll start with the families because we had a pretty 

well structured set of family support groups that my wife, 

Vicki, and I had made a priority since we took command. 

We always felt that there was the possibility, given the Global 

War on Terror[ism] and other contingencies in the Pacific, 
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246

that we might have some type of short-notice deployment. 

So, our family readiness groups were in pretty good shape. 

I had a chance to talk to the senior commanders and their 

wives about the importance of family readiness groups. 

I think the commanders kind of understood my intent 

there and caught the spirit. I think you’d have to say that 

the community was pretty well prepared. Plus, we had an 

excellent community commander in Col. Howard Killian, 

who made support of the families a top priority. The post 

really bent over backwards to make sure that the families 

were as well taken care of as possible while we were gone. In 

terms of the soldiers, we pretty much just prepared them in 

small-unit tactics. I wouldn’t say that we had any expansive 

or extensive acclimatization process. You know, this is before 

the time where there were exercises with role-players and 

things like that, so we really didn’t get into that too much. 

Our feeling was that if they were pretty well grounded in 

small-unit tactics, we’d be able to get over there and shape 

anything—in terms of the operations, shape anything that 

we needed to fine-tune once we got there. 

DR. HUGHES: How did you configure your headquarters, since you 

were going over to become a joint task force?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right, we actually became a combined joint task force 

[CJTF]. There, you know, we had—that was probably 

one of the more difficult transitions, because, really, 

the combined joint task force was really a very different 

configuration than the division headquarters. We did 

not train and we did not practice battle command in 

a CJTF configuration, so when we went over there, 

we kind of had to rely on the left-seat/right-seat ride 

methodology. The unit that was there ahead of us was 

the 10th Mountain Division, commanded by [Maj. Gen.] 

Lloyd [J.] Austin, who’s a buddy of mine. So, we went 

in there, and we pretty much fell in on what they were 

doing. I’d say the biggest difference between the CJTF 

configuration and the normal division headquarters was 

that there are a whole lot more people in each one of 

the staff sections; also, there are some staff sections that 

you don’t normally man when you’re at home station 

as a division headquarters. So, we fell in, and we had 

a lot of augmentees that arrived and allowed us to fill 

out some of the positions in the normal staff sections. 

Then, we had men and women from other units and 

other services who actually came and actually filled in 

the staff sections that we didn’t normally man. It was an 

adjustment. Thank goodness for the left-seat/right-seat 

ride methodology because I think we learned most of 

what we were doing from that. Then, we just shaped our 

organization as the operation went on. 

DR. HUGHES: What roles did you have for your deputy commanding 

generals?
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MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. I had two deputy commanding generals. One was 

General [Brig. Gen. Bernard S.] Champoux, and the other 

was General [Brig. Gen. Charles H.] Jacoby. General 

Champoux came into the unit to be the ADC-O [assistant 

division commander for operations]. So, he pretty much 

naturally fell into the role of the deputy commanding general 

for ops. Then, General Jacoby did the deputy commanding 

general for support types of things. Since we didn’t run 

CJTF operations per se—you know, battle command for 

brigades and that type of thing—what General Champoux 

basically focused on were operations within the brigade 

areas of responsibility [AOR]. He was kind of monitoring 

how those were going and making sure that the brigade 

commanders, who were running their different AORs, had 

what they needed. Then, General Jacoby took care of the 

larger support issues that we had, both theaterwide and in 

and around that our logistics task force was handling. So, 

that’s how I divided up those responsibilities. 

DR. HUGHES: What was your awareness of the situation in Afghanistan 

before you got there? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Well, I think where we went into Afghanistan pretty 

much focused on the Taliban insurgency. I was initially a 

little reluctant to call it an insurgency because from afar it 

didn’t have some of the classic characteristics or traits of 

insurgency. But when we got over there, I think we made a 

fairly quick adjustment because it became pretty apparent 

that we needed to treat this fight like it was an insurgency, 

but with the understanding the insurgency wasn’t the only 

source of violence in Afghanistan. Also, we needed to have 

the understanding that the purpose of our mission over 

there was to establish a stable security environment, which 

I think was certainly a big part of it. We were also going to 

have to deal with other sources of violence. So, I’d say our 

understanding was imperfect, at best. Coming in, we made 

some initial assessments and got it close to right. Then, 

about halfway through, I think we made some adjustments 

based on a fuller and richer understanding of what was 

really causing the instability there. 

DR. HUGHES: Yes. You mentioned your predeployment site survey. 

What did you learn from that? Did it change any of the 

way you got ready to go?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I think what the PDSS, predeployment site survey, did for 

us was it really just got us familiar with the different areas 

of operation. I am not certain that it drove too many big 

changes. You know, personally, what I did is I used that 

time to get around and visit some fire bases to understand 

what those are like and what kind of operations they were 

running from there and some of the main camps that we 

had—you know, we had them in Kandahar and [Forward 

Operating Base] Salerno out in the Khowst area. It really 
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248

was more familiarization. I’m not sure it really drove too 

many big changes in our approach to preparation or, in the 

event, our approach to execution. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. You’ve already mentioned some of the methodology. 

But, how did the transition go between the 10th Mountain 

and your division?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I think it was an excellent transition. General Austin, 

basically, opened all of the doors. There were no secrets. 

You know, the good, the bad, and the ugly were laid out. He 

gave us plenty of time and plenty of access on the left-seat 

and right-seat rides. So, transition of the headquarters was 

very smooth, and I didn’t see any issues at all at the brigade 

combat team level. I watched some of the battalions go in 

and out fairly closely. There were no issues at all. You know, 

in transition like that, it’s more a function of attitude than 

it is any set of procedures. So, I was very satisfied with the 

way that went. 

DR. HUGHES: Did the people of the 10th Mountain give any guidance 

or advice as they left?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I think there was plenty of advice. There was not so much 

guidance. But, you know, if you were to ask me for a specific 

bit of guidance that General Austin gave me, I’d say it was 

basically to be out and around and on the ground and see 

what was going on for yourself, as opposed to staying in 

Bagram and trying to understand the fight from there. I 

think that was great advice. I walked the walk on that one. 

DR. HUGHES: Could you describe how the combined joint task force 

was configured? Was there a subordinate task force?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Okay. Yes, I’ll give you kind of the relationships there. 

The combined joint task force—you know, we took our 

guidance and direction from Combined Forces Command[-

Afghanistan]. That was General Barno’s headquarters. 

The CJTF headquarters itself was configured—the 

large organizations, the large structures in the CJTF 

headquarters, wouldn’t surprise anybody. I don’t think so. 

There was a very small personnel section because we didn’t 

do too much there except bring folks in. So, you know there 

was the accountability function, but the personnel section 

wasn’t as robust. The intel functions were incredible for two 

reasons. First of all, because it was an intelligence-driven 

operation; secondly, it was because there were so many 

intelligence agencies of various shapes and flavors that were 

there that we had to make sure we had interfaces with all 

of them. So, the intelligence section itself, the CJ-2, would 

have been unrecognizable compared to what we had back 

in Schofield Barracks. You know, it was pretty much your 

normal operations section that we filled out, whereas when 

you talk about an Air Force element inside of a division 
headquarters, you know, you clearly have a much—in an 

operational environment—you have a much more robust 

section there, but all the functions were pretty much the 

same. In the logistics arena, we really ran most of our 

logistics planning and operations out of the logistics 

task force. We had a joint logistics task force. So, the 

commander of that was really my primary adviser when 

it came to combat service support. Then, going on down, 

we had a civil affairs section, which is something you 

don’t normally have, or you don’t have a robust one back 

at home station. That was a big part of what we were 

doing. We had an information operations section. Again, 

that’s—I’m not sure that even when we got in theater we 

knew exactly what to do with information operations. 

If I had it to do all over again, I’d say that was an area 

where we could have done a lot of improvement. We had 

an engineer section, you know, separate and apart from 

the CJ-3 [staff section for operations]. So, I would say 

that’s how the headquarters was structured. The sections 

themselves were pretty dramatically different than what 

we had back at Schofield, but the actual functions were 

fairly similar.

Then, the last thing I would say is, the relationship 

between the BCTs and the commanders that were 

running areas of responsibility in our headquarters. 

It was a much more decentralized operation. I mean, 

we gave broad guidance to the BCT commanders, and 

they pretty much ran their own areas of responsibility. 

As long as they stayed within my intent—I had pretty 

good ways of checking on that—as long as they didn’t 

need help from us, we pretty much let them run their 

operations, and I was very pleased with the way they did 

that. That was general officer stuff, to see the way those 

guys functioned. There was no question about it. They 

rose to the occasion. 

DR. HUGHES: Was the regional command structure in place when 

you arrived, or was that an innovation while you were 

there?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: It was in place when I arrived. We actually owned all 

of Afghanistan, initially. We had the north, which 

about a month after we got there we transferred over to 

NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization]. We ended 

up with three Regional Commands: West, South, and 

East. Right before we left, we handed West over to ISAF 

[International Security Assistance Force], as well. When 

we left, it was just South and East. That was something 

that was in place. General Barno, I believe, is the one 

who kind of structured that, working with ISAF and with 

the political leadership there, too. Ambassador [Zalmay] 

Khalilzad, I’m sure, played in that. But we inherited that, 

and I was pleased with the way that worked for us. 

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DR. HUGHES: They must have had dramatically differing missions, 

given the different parts of Afghanistan. How would you 

characterize that?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Well, in the west, the mission was pretty much concentrated 

on the reconstruction piece because the security 

environment there was okay. Now, I will tell you that we 

had a couple of flare-ups there. But again, this goes back to 

the point about sources of instability that had nothing at 

all to do with the Taliban. It was a guy named Amanullah 

Khan. His militia was fighting Ismail Khan, who technically 

didn’t have a militia, but, in fact, he did. Ismail Khan was 

the governor of Herat. They went at it. My cavalry squadron 

sent a pretty big group out there, plus a Special Forces 

detachment. But, the mission out there, I guess you would 

say, would be to separate warring factions. In the south, it 

was interesting. In the south, I think we had some Taliban 

there, but the biggest threat, I believe, were—they were 

certainly armed groups. I’m not sure they were Taliban. 

You know, that’s kind of the conclusion we came to. I think 

they were basically antigovernment bands, if you will, that 

lived in some of the smaller towns and villages in the south. 

I don’t think there was a huge Taliban presence. But, you 

know, very clearly, these guys in the south didn’t want us in 

there because we represented the extension of the reach of 

the central government. Most of the operations we did in 

there were with the Afghan National Army [ANA]. These 

people had spent their whole lives, I think, opposing the 

central government and protecting their turf.

So, you know, we got in several fights there, but I don’t 

think it was about a Taliban insurgency, whereas in the 

east, I think it was. There was Taliban in Afghanistan. Then 

there was a lot of running the border between Pakistan and 

Afghanistan—Taliban groups, plus other armed insurgent 

groups. There was a Hekmatyar [Gulbuddin], who was 

one of the rebel leaders there. He had a group called HIG 

[Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin]. So, there was an armed group 

there. They were clearly insurgents—not fundamentalists, 

necessarily, but insurgents. Then, we had al Qaeda in that 

area, but that was somebody else’s mission. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. What was your relationship with the Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. I think General Barno and I worked out an arrangement 

which proved—you know, you’d have to ask him if he 

shares this opinion—but I think it proved very useful the 

construct that we hit upon. It was him on the strategic-level 

stuff. I did not do a whole lot of interaction or interface with 

the political leadership of Afghanistan, with Headquarters, 

CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command]. General Barno did 

some work directly back with the National Command 

Authority. So, that was all his baby. You know, if he 
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needed something from me, he let me know. But I had no 

particular aspirations. I didn’t think it was useful for me 

to get involved. The tactical-level stuff belonged to me 

and to the brigade combat team commanders. That was 

the day-to-day operations and what kind of campaign we 

were going to run and where. All that was mine. There 

were no issues there. Then, the operational arena was in 

the middle. We kind of shared responsibility for that—you 

know, how the regional commands were divided up. The 

shifting of forces between regional commands—I said that 

we didn’t direct campaigns, but if there was something that 

we’d want to consider truly a campaign as opposed to a 

separate operation, General Barno would want to check off 

on that. It was like when we brought the 22d MEU [marine 

expeditionary unit] into Afghanistan. He gave me some 

guidance on how he thought we should be using it. Then, I 

went ahead and put— 

DR. HUGHES: What was that?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: OK. The 22d MEU is the 22d Marine Expeditionary Unit. 

It’s a Marine combat formation. It is self-contained. It’s 

got everything. It’s got a ground force; it’s got both fixedand rotary-wing support. It’s a very capable force package. 

Normally, they’re offshore, but General [John P.] Abizaid 

decided that, given the operations we were conducting, he 

was going to allow us to use it because those were forces for 

the CENTCOM commander. He was going to allow us to 

use them. So, that’s an operational decision, how those are 

going to be used. Very clearly, General Barno was interested 

in that. He gave us some initial guidance. Then, you know, 

we briefed the plan back to him. But most of the operational 

decisions that affected what we did on the ground he left to 

me. So, you know, if you go strategic, operational, tactical, 

the band in the middle, there was the line, somewhere in 

there. It shifted up and down a little bit. But that divided 

his responsibilities and what he thought was his lane from 

mine. If I were to be honest, there were times where he and 

I had to sit down together and say, “Okay, who’s going to be 

doing what to whom here on these operational decisions?” 

But he’s a very bright and a very flexible commander, so we 

got along very well in that arena. 

DR. HUGHES: Did you have any interaction with the Office of Military 

Cooperation-Afghanistan [OMC-A]?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Very little. That was really General Barno’s baby. You know, 

obviously, we were interested in what they were doing, 

especially as we moved more and more in the direction 

of getting Afghan National Army units to come over and 

operate with us. But in terms of what they did and how 

they did it and what the training regimen was, not so much. 

Where we did get into some interaction with them was kind 

of in the equipment arena, the ANA, that we were working 
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252

with. Often times we’d find that they weren’t particularly 

well equipped. The things that they were supposed to have 

had they didn’t. The OMC-A helped us with that, but it 

wasn’t something day to day where I’d pick up the phone 

and call the CG [commanding general] of OMC. 

DR. HUGHES: You were a band of a combined and joint task force. Can 

you describe some of the combined and joint nature 

of that? What was it like working with the different 

elements?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I would say that the first service that comes to mind is the 

Marine Corps. We had the marine expeditionary unit for 

about eight to ten weeks. When I came in, we had a Marine 

brigade headquarters. The commander there commanded 

one of the regional commands. He had the east working 

out of Salerno. The Marines, I found, were very easy to 

work with. They look at things like we do. They’re very 

flexible. It’s a disciplined outfit. There were virtually no 

issues whatsoever between the Marine elements that were 

there and the Army elements. I think we’re just so used to 

working with each other. We look at things so similarly 

that there were no points of friction there at all. The Air 

Force—you know, most of our interaction there was air 

that was pushed into theater. The CAOC, the Combined 

Air Operations Center, pretty much controlled that air, but 

I never had a problem with them saying “Hey, we know you 

want that, but we’re not going to do it” or “We’re not going to 

drop there.” There was nothing like that. They were actually 

very user friendly. The fact that we were somewhat distant 

from the CAOC, sometimes, could have caused problems, 

except for the fact that we had an excellent air coordination 

element and there was a brigadier general in charge of that, 

which was really kind of a sacrifice by the Air Force to put 

a one-star there, but he worked out great. So, any issues 

we had with air support or anything going on with the air, 

we just took to him. Then, the Navy had some individual 

augmentees there. There were not a whole lot. You know, 

Afghanistan is kind of far away from any water, but, we 

had some individual augmentees. Plus, we had naval air. 

We had an Orion squadron that came in and supported us 

from time to time. Plus, from time to time, we’d have close 

air aircraft that were naval close air aircraft. So, the Navy, I 

wouldn’t say ... they were part of the team, no doubt about 

it, but it wasn’t the same kind of integration that we had 

with the other services. Just to sum up, I think the joint 

nature of the CJTF was really—this is my impression, so 

you’d have to talk to others—but it was fairly seamless.

The combined piece was a little more challenging. You 

had differences in the skill level and how accomplished 

the different national contingents were and what their 

experience had been, what kind of caveats they came to the 

CJTF with. For example, the Koreans weren’t allowed to go 
General Kamiya (left front) speaks to marines of the 3d Battalion, 3d Marines, on 10 March 2005, before 

taking command of Combined Joint Task Force-76.

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253

outside the wire. You know, others were there on peaceenforcement or peacekeeping rules of engagement. That 

was especially true with some of the ISAF forces that were 

there that we were operating with side by side, as opposed to 

part of the CJTF. But that was still a factor, even some of the 

national contingencies inside the CJTF. They had different 

rules of engagement [ROE], or at least they interpreted the 

ROE differently. So, you know, what we found ourselves 

having to do in most cases there was give missions to our 

Coalition partners that were more about strengthening the 

Coalition than about specific military objectives associated 

with operations that we were conducting. There were some 

exceptions to that. The French had special forces there 

that were top-notch. They ran some great operations. The 

Romanians had a battalion there. They were really pretty 

good. They had some caveats, but they were pretty good. 

They were a professional force and very proud of what they 

were doing. So, you know, the bottom line there is the C 

in the CJTF. It was about what I expected, and about what 

others are experiencing now in Coalition task forces. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned the ISAF. What was the relationship with 

them while you were there? 
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MAJ. GEN. OLSON: When I first got there, they didn’t come out of Kabul. Their 

whole mission was focused on security inside Kabul. They 

didn’t really run any missions outside of there. From time 

to time, they did, but it wasn’t their battle space. It was 

mine. So, if they were going to come out of Kabul into my 

battle space, they had to coordinate with us. We never ran 

combined operations with ISAF, but when they were in an 

area of operations that I cut to them, you know, we at least 

had to monitor what they were doing. They had had different 

rules of engagement. Some of the things that they could or 

couldn’t do did have impact on the areas around their AO 

[area of operations]. ISAF took the north. When we first 

went there, they didn’t really run military operations there. 

They had a PRT, provincial reconstruction team, in Mazar-e 

Sharif, but, again, they were there. We knew about it. We 

kind of monitored what they were doing. But ISAF did not 

play the kind of role that they are playing now. There was 

no operational headquarters that we had to work with or 

for. I didn’t have any ISAF commands working within the 

CJTF. So, you know, some of these CJTF commanders that 

have come after me, I think, would have better perspective 

on what it’s like to work with ISAF. 

DR. HUGHES: Did you have a, for lack of a better term, battle rhythm or 

a weekly routine?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. Yes. We had a very good battle rhythm there. The CJ-3 

and my chief set it up so that we had battle update reviews. 

There was one in the morning and one in the evening. I 

generally didn’t go to the morning ones, but the evening 

ones I tried to make if I was in Bagram. I tried to spend a lot 

of time out and around, but if I was in Bagram, I’d go to the 

evening updates. We had a commander’s update. We ran 

that by—what do they call that thing? It was Voice over IP 

[Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP]. You know, it was a 

bunch of computers hooked up. That was really slick. When 

we got there, what Lloyd had been doing is the commander’s 

plugged into the battle update. Then, at the end, he’d go 

around and see if they had anything. They generally did 

not. So, I said, “What I’m going to do is I’m going to pull 

the commanders out of this thing. The commanders and I 

are going to have a separate update.” We did that daily, too. 

That was kind of a pain for them, but I would understand. 

If there’s a commander out doing battlefield circulation or 

something, I would take his deputy in a heartbeat. So, that 

was part of the battle rhythm.

We had a weekly, I guess you’d call it, an intel update, 

which is probably the most important meeting that we 

had. It brought in leadership from all of the agencies and 

organizations that had any intelligence capabilities. We’d 

all sit around the table. This was done at the Top Secret/

SCI [sensitive compartmented information] level. We all 

sit around at the table and say, “Okay. What are you guys 
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seeing? We’ll show you ours if you show us yours.” It was 

that kind of thing. So, that was a very important meeting. 

I think we had staff meetings too, but I didn’t take those. 

The chiefs generally did that. That was about our battle 

rhythm. Once a month, we did kind of an assessment. We 

got better there, but I don’t know if we ever got to where I 

was comfortable that we really understood the effects that 

we were actually having on the ground of all our different 

efforts, but, yes, that was once a month. I forget what we 

called it. But, my planners really came up with something. 

They broke it down into five categories and established 

criteria; then, we gauged ourselves against those criteria. 

So, we did that once a month. Then, I plugged into General 

Barno’s battle rhythm. He only asked me to be up there 

about once a week—I mean, down there, down in Kabul. 

So, that became part of mine. I think that’s about it. 

DR. HUGHES: Were there people or agencies that you tended to deal 

with regularly, outside your own task force? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. Well, there was a task force there that was focused on 

the counterterrorism mission. We obviously interacted 

with them on a daily basis, because they were running 

operations inside of my battle space. It was very important 

that we knew what they were doing and they knew what we 

were doing. So, we had regular interaction with them. There 

were a number of intelligence agencies there. You know, we 

had what they called the OGA, other governmental agency. 

We interacted with them. They came to my intelligence 

meetings. They had a representative in my joint operations 

center. They came to the task force’s meetings. So, there was 

regular interaction there. Are we just talking intelligence, 

or are we talking other—? 

DR. HUGHES: Did you deal with the various different nongovernmental 

agencies?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. 

DR. HUGHES: What about those sorts of guys?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes, right. We dealt with State Department. Most of the 

time, it was through General Barno’s headquarters, but 

there were several times when Ambassador Khalilzad and I 

did things together. They were not part of our battle rhythm. 

But, you know, I’d say we were up there once or twice a 

month, just chatting with the embassy people and seeing 

what was going on there. Nongovernmental organizations, 

especially in the run-up to the elections, the national 

elections and presidential elections, which occurred on 

our watch there ... I want to say it was like November or 

December. We dealt with UNAMA, the United Nations 

Assistance Mission-Afghanistan, because they were the 

ones, actually, who were hosting the elections and verifying 
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that they were in fact fair and free. So, we dealt with them a 

lot. There were other nongovernmental organizations in the 

battle space. We reached out to them with varying degrees 

of success, you know, Médicins Sans Frontières [Doctors 

Without Borders], the Red Crescent, and the Red Cross. So, 

we dealt with them. There was no structured set number of 

meetings or times to meet, but we did stay in touch with 

what they were doing. We stayed in touch with USAID 

[U.S. Agency for International Development] regularly. I 

guess through the provincial reconstruction teams, we built 

very good relationships with the agencies that provided 

representatives through our provincial reconstruction 

teams. That was the Department of State, USAID, and the 

Department of Agriculture had some people in there. So, 

we worked with them a little bit. It was truly an interagency 

effort. I think all of us who were in the leadership of the 

CJTF really got an education in terms of what interagency 

interaction was.

Also, dealing with the Afghan government, General 

Barno did most of that, but at the provincial level, we did. 

So, the national-level stuff was up to General Barno. The 

provincial-level stuff fell to us. We did that through our 

provincial reconstruction teams. Also, our brigade combat 

team commanders interacted with the governors of the 

provinces that were inside of their battle space, you know, 

their AORs. So, it was a multivariate experience, from the 

standpoint of the agencies that we worked with. 

DR. HUGHES: How did you balance the different roles of combat and 

reconstruction? Did you think it was effectively managed 

for a counterinsurgency-type environment? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right. I think that General Barno set the tone for that. He 

had what I think was a simple, but brilliant, formulation for 

the relationship. He may have sketched it out for you. It’s 

kind of a circular diagram that shows one arrow that says 

“Reconstruction” and another arrow that says “Security” 

on the hemispheres of a circle. Then, there is an arrow that 

runs right through the center and it says “Extending the 

reach of the Afghan Government.” To me, that was the thing 

that kind of set the tone for how we went about business. 

The theory there was that you can’t have security without 

a reconstruction effort in a place like Afghanistan because 

the essential services weren’t even there. In some of these 

buildings, they didn’t have running water. They didn’t have 

sewage. They didn’t have electricity. You know, they didn’t 

have banks. There was nothing like that. There were just 

these little villages stuck up in the mountains. So, it was no 

wonder that the people were a little bit discontented. But, 

if you could bring them some of the essentials, raise their 

level of satisfaction, and then put an Afghan face on it; or 

make it, in actuality, an Afghan government that’s providing 
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that, it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of some of the 

insurgent groups that were there. It also lowers discontent.

You know, these guys that I was talking about to you before 

that were just used to fighting anything from outside 

their—you know, they were xenophobes. They would just 

fight anything from outside their little village or their little 

district. Those guys, if they see progress going on in the 

neighboring town and it’s the central government that’s 

providing it, they’re going to have a tendency to come out 

of the hills, too. They will say, “Hey, we want some of this, 

too.” So, I think there was a very important link between 

the two. Now, gauging where it is you want to go, operate 

in, kill, or capture, and where it is that what you want to do 

is go there and ensure the protection of the force, but not 

conduct offensive combat operations ... instead, you want 

to do what some people have called armed peacekeeping, 

which I think is a good term. That’s a fine art. Again, it 

goes back to what’s your intelligence like? We had a very 

powerful intelligence organization there who would look 

at a district and say, “You know what? There is no Taliban 

here, but if you go in there with guns, they’re going to shoot 

at you. You need to engage these people first and find out 

what they need. Then, go build it for them.” So, that’s how 

we approached it. It was purely based on intelligence.

The interesting thing is that intelligence in an operation 

goes beyond just SIGINT, HUMINT [signals intelligence, 

human intelligence], and all that. It’s also—you know, there’s 

fine line between information and intelligence in these 

kinds of operations. It’s cultural awareness. It’s somebody 

who knows that the people in this district belong to this 

tribe and they have historically disliked that tribe. So, if 

you go in there with ANA, Afghan National Army, soldiers 

who are from this tribe, you’re going to get a fight. If you 

go in—so, really—this is rocket science when it comes to 

figuring out where you’re going to make reconstruction the 

primary effort and support it with security operations, and 

where it is that you’re going to make security operations 

the primary dimension and support it with reconstruction. 

Then, it was all about extending the reach of the central 

government. We tried every change we could to make 

whatever we did, security operations or reconstruction, we 

tried to put an Afghan face on it, because ultimately, we 

could care less what they thought about the Coalition. The 

principal concern was what they thought about their own 

government and the Afghan security forces. So, I thought 

Barno’s formulation there was brilliant. It really guided our 

operations the whole time we were there. 

DR. HUGHES: When dealing with hostile armed forces, what kind of 

tactics did you find they used? What sort of counterefforts 

did you have?
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MAJ. GEN. OLSON: I would say that they used no tactics at all. While we were 

there, it was very rare to see an armed formation of insurgents 

in groups of any more than ten. I mean, they were at best 

capable of a stationary ambush. But they did not conduct 

anything that resembled offensive operations, defense, or 

anything like that. It was a very disorganized ... I’m not 

saying it wasn’t violent, but it was a very disorganized type 

of force. Their operations showed that. That, in some ways, 

made it difficult for us, because we were used to fighting—

all of us, at that time, anyway, had come up in an Army 

where we were fighting at the CTCs, the combat training 

centers. We fought an opposing force that fought by norms, 

and they had these kinds of formations. So, you know, if 

you hit the advance guard of a motorized rifle regiment, 

you pretty much knew what was behind it and how they 

stacked up. With these guys, that was not the case at all. 

So, you know, you could be going along down a valley. All 

of the sudden, you get gunfire from both sides. It was hard 

to tell how to react, because we just weren’t familiar with 

their tactics. Now, I understand that has changed a little bit 

recently. I think they’ve got a larger formation that they’re 

attacking in, and they are using something that resembles 

tactics. So, I guess if there was—we could still use good 

small-unit tactics. But, I would say that it was a company 

commander’s fight. There is no doubt about it. But, when 

company commanders fought, they did so essentially by, 

say, let’s say, moving platoons to the right positions. Then, it 

was the platoon leaders and the squad leaders who actually 

did the fire and maneuver. In most cases, we fought being 

very discriminating about the use of firepower. Very, very 

rarely did we get into a situation where we would follow 

the doctrine of overwhelming force. We didn’t do that. The 

reason we didn’t do it is because many times the application 

of overwhelming force resulted in civilian casualties 

and collateral damage. That kind of worked against our 

purposes, in my view. 

DR. HUGHES: How effective was the whole disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration [DDR] effort?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. You know, I think we DDRed some of the more well 

known militias who had leaders that were predisposed 

to work with the Afghan government, because they had 

something to gain. [Abdul] Rashid Dostum was up in the 

north and had a fairly sizable militia. He DDRed because 

he knew he was going to end up getting a position in the 

government. He became a special adviser in the Ministry of 

Defense or something like that. So, the larger militias who 

pretty much fought side by side against the Russians with 

[President Hamid] Karzai and with the Pashtun majority, 

they were pretty easy to DDR. There were some other 

groups that took some persuading. In some cases, I don’t 

think they ever did demobilize. Amanullah Kahn was one 

who maintained his militia. So, with the people who were 
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the outliers, they were kind of disaffected, anyway. They 

didn’t DDR. It goes back to when you talk about disarm 

and demobilize, you can’t do that unless you have offered 

a pretty compelling incentive or the leadership has made 

the determination that continuation of the violence is 

not going to pay as much as whatever it is they can gain 

by DDR. So, you pretty much have to have a pretty good 

political process and a pretty good economic incentive 

in place anyway before you can DDR. You can’t do it the 

other way around. I mean, if you’re in a violent conflict, you 

can’t say, “Okay, we’re going to DDR and then work on our 

political problems.” So, I would say it was successful—not 

wildly successful, but it was probably better than marginally 

successful. That’s because—at that time, anyway—Karzai 

was reaching political accommodations with the leadership 

of the groups, or these armed militias, anyway. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned the presidential elections, and you had—

what was it—Operation Lightning Resolve. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right. 

DR. HUGHES: How did that go? How did the elections play out? What 

was the role of the CJTF? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right. We decided that what we were going to do, through 

the offensive operations prior to the election that were 

designed to disrupt any type of planning or preparation 

that the armed insurgents planned, be they Taliban or 

somebody else, was to disarm them and rock them back 

on their heels. This way, they wouldn’t be set to disrupt the 

elections. So, that was kind of the first phase of the thing. 

Then, to conduct the elections, we worked very closely 

with the ANA. We tried to get the ANA in the lead when 

it came to securing polling sites and that type of thing. 

We were making sure we didn’t have bombings or attacks. 

So, that was security operations. It was not a full-blown 

defense, but security operations were in place. We had 

lots of surveillance going on in the run-up to and during 

the elections to see if we could see anybody in any kind of 

number that was mobilizing to disrupt the elections. There 

was a tremendous intelligence effort to go out there and see 

if anybody knew of anybody who was planning anything. 

So, that was part of the whole deal. You know, we had 

information operations that emphasized the importance 

of the elections to the future of Afghanistan and the safe 

and effect conduct of the elections was patriotic and it was 

what Afghanistan needed. So, that was a piece of it. Then, 

we had just purely administrative support. We worked with 

UNAMA. During the registration, we got their people out 

there to get people registered. Then, during elections we 

carried ballots out. We’d fly them out in helicopters and 

fly them back. So, it was a very extensive mission on the 

day of execution there, the immediate run-up to and then 
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the actual execution of the elections. So, it was, again, a 

multifaceted operation.

Now, in terms of the success—I mean, the objective was to 

have elections, have a good voter turnout, and have those 

elections judged by the international community as being 

free and fair. I think, by all measures, those were successful 

elections. It really was the capstone of our mission over 

there. It became the centerpiece of the main effort. It’s 

probably something that those who participated in it were 

proud of.

DR. HUGHES: You undertook a couple of—unusual, for Afghanistan—

winter operations.

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right.

DR. HUGHES: There was Lightning Freedom and Thunder 

Freedom. What was involved there? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: You know, it was just ... you know, I’m not sure how unique 

they were. I just don’t know. But, the idea there was the 

traditional spring offensive. Again, it was the notion that if 

we could go up into their winter sanctuaries and disrupt, 

kill, or capture leaders, fragment or disaggregate some of 

the groups that would otherwise be sitting there fat, dumb, 

happy and preparing for their spring offensive, that the 

spring offensive would go better for us than it had in years 

past.

To be frank, we didn’t make a whole lot of contact during 

those operations. This really comes to one of my bottom 

lines. I am not so sure that we didn’t have the Taliban all 

but defeated. My intel guys were telling me that the Taliban 

doesn’t really exist anymore as any kind of effective force. 

You know, you can’t cover the whole country, but the areas 

where we went, we just didn’t make a whole lot of contact 

or see a whole lot of armed resistance. You know, you could 

say, “Well, they were looking in the wrong places. They 

didn’t go to areas were the enemy was. Blah, blah, blah.” I’ve 

heard all that before. My answer to that is “Right. Helmand, 

Oruzgan, Northern Kandahar,” and areas where at that 

time it really wasn’t so much about the Taliban. It was about 

these guys I was mentioning before, the armed groups like 

hillbillies. My theory is why fight these guys? Why not just 

fix the rest of the country, or at least show improvement, 

and persuade them to come out of hills and put down their 

arms? It’s better to join us than it is to fight us. So, the winter 

offensive was when we went to areas where we thought we 

might find Taliban or al Qaeda. But, we didn’t mess with 

the hillbillies so much. 

DR. HUGHES: Okay. Division artillery performs an unusual role for 

artillery in Afghanistan. Could you comment on that?
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MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes, the headquarters division artillery [DIVARTY] became 

a battle space owner. He ran RC East out of Salerno. His 

staff augmented, but his staff did basically what a maneuver 

BCT was doing over there in Afghanistan. You know, he 

interacted with my staff just like a normal brigade combat 

team would. They ran operations, just like the 3d Brigade 

Combat Team in the south did. So, they acted as a maneuver 

brigade headquarters, or as maneuver brigades, operated in 

Afghanistan. Again, we very rarely ran anything that looked 

like a brigade-level operation. It just didn’t pay. You know, 

they weren’t out there in the force that we required. Though, 

when marine expeditionary units were in there, that was 

a brigade-level operation. So, that’s how the DIVARTY 

headquarters were.

We brought over one FA [field artillery] battalion, 3/7 Field 

Artillery. Those guys, again, were battle space owners. They 

worked down south with the 3d Brigade Combat Team. 

Col. Dick Pedersen, who was the BCT commander, used 

them. They owned Kandahar. So, they ran patrols, just like 

infantry guys did. They did small-scale operations, just like 

the infantry did. So, the artillery really was functioning 

in a nontraditional way during our piece of Operation 

Enduring Freedom [OEF]. 

DR. HUGHES: Just on the more, I won’t say trivial, level, but I gather you 

made a creative use of commander’s coins for improvised 

explosive devices [IEDs]. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. If we had anybody—I hasten to preface this by saying 

that the extent of the IED problem was not anywhere 

near what we’re seeing now. We had one IED attack, a 

particularly horrific one, that stands out in my mind. But, 

yes, if guys had an opportunity, or if they detected an IED 

before it went off, you know, I’d go down and present a 

coin or something similar to that. So, there was a lot of 

incentive to finding that, beyond just protecting the force. 

Again, the IEDs were the weapon of choice there, at that 

time, like they are now.

DR. HUGHES: What sort of relationship did you have with the PRTs? 

You’ve mentioned them several times. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Right. The provincial reconstruction teams in OEF, when 

we were there, and I think to this day, were part of the 

military organization. The PRT commanders were military 

guys. They reported through military channels, just like a 

battalion did. I considered those guys, in terms of the effect 

that they could bring and in terms of the responsibilities 

that we placed on them—I considered the PRTs to be 

battalion equivalent because of the importance of the 

reconstruction mission. The PRTs, while we were there, 

were growing. I think when we got there, there were about 

eleven. We ended up with sixteen. If I recall correctly, they 
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were predominantly military when we arrived. We put a 

lot of pressure on some of the civilian agencies to kick in 

officers from State, from USAID, and some of the other 

civilian agencies. The provincial reconstruction teams in 

Afghanistan were very much focused on support of the 

counterinsurgency missions. Now, the ones, for example in 

Iraq, right now—I just got back from Iraq. I was running 

those PRTs. The ones in Iraq right now are more focused 

on institution building and capacity development. They are 

getting provincial governments to learn how to govern and 

to understand what it is that good governments provide. 

Then, we help them to get to the point where they are 

providing it. In Afghanistan, we were a little less concerned 

about that, you know, rightly or wrongly. We were more 

interested in making an impression on the population that 

it was more to their advantage to join us than it was to fight 

us, because there were benefits associated with joining us. 

In some ways, that was a little short sighted, if you consider, 

and I think we all do, that the ultimate goal is to hand off 

all of the functions to the Afghan government and security 

forces. If you do that and you haven’t built some kind of 

capability to govern at the local level, you’re going to have 

some problems. But, on the whole, I’d say that PRTs are 

very successful. I think they made a valuable contribution. 

We had some good guys running them, too. 

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that increasingly during the time you 

were there, there was the presence of the Afghan National 

Army. How much interaction did you have with them?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Regular. The way that would work is they would cut units 

to us. It was a platoon- or company- or battalion-sized unit 

that we would take under our operational control and then 

work with them. At the time that we were there, they could 

function up to the battalion level, but it was within one of 

my formations. So, it was an Afghan battalion attached to 

one of my infantry battalions. The Afghan commander 

was taking guidance and direction from either the 

infantry battalion commander, the U.S. infantry battalion 

commander, or the brigade commander. They had no ability 

to sustain themselves. They had poor command and control 

equipment and that kind of thing. We had good—I’d say a 

positive—relationship with the ANA, but they were clearly 

dependent on us for their effectiveness.

Then, the ANP, Afghan National Police ... it’s almost like 

Iraq, without the sectarianism. They were really poorly 

equipped and poorly trained. I suspect that sometimes they 

were out there for their own good, and not for the common 

good. So, the ANP, I think, lagged the ANA in terms of 

their level of development. That was an area where there 

were a lot of guys trying hard. The Afghan National Army, 

it wasn’t like they had units that were prepared to go out 

there and conduct independent operations. 
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DR. HUGHES: Obviously, the situation on the border with Pakistan was 

critical. Could you describe what operations were like 

there? What kind of cross-border things were we dealing 

with there?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. Yes, the Pakistani border is a very controversial topic. 

It was then. It is now. There are two schools of thought. One 

was that all problems in Afghanistan are linked to Pakistan 

and their inability to control the frontier provinces. The 

other is that all the problems in Pakistan originate with 

the Taliban that we allowed to get out of Afghanistan, who 

are now marching on Islamabad. You see a little evidence 

that that school of thought may not be totally whacked out, 

based on some of the things that are happening in Pakistan 

now. But, back when we were there, we tried to approach 

this at several levels. This is when it was a strategic and 

policy level initiative that General Barno let us conduct. 

Jacoby did a lot of work with this. We made approaches 

to the embassy in Islamabad, our embassy in Islamabad, 

and to very senior Pakistani military leaders, asking for 

their cooperation on the border. It was cooperation in 

a couple senses. One was to get the Pakistani army to 

run operations in and around there to attack staging 

areas such as schools, madrassas, assembly areas were 

we felt the Taliban was coming out of and moving into 

Afghanistan. It was Taliban and al Qaeda. The other 

thing we worked with them on was our operations in 

and around the border. That was a little dicey, because 

rules of engagement said that we had the inherent right 

to self-defense. If we’re getting shot at, we can return 

fire. Sometimes, we got shot at across the border. It 

was, and is, very, very touchy. I remember one very 

heated conversation I had with a Pakistani general who 

worked in their DGMO [Directorate General of Military 

Operations]. He kept saying to me, “You do not fire into 

Pakistan!” But, we were getting shot at from Pakistan, 

so we tried to work with them on that. If we were going 

to conduct something near the border, many times we 

would let them know we were going to do that. There 

were some OPSEC [operations security] considerations 

there, and I’ll go into that in just a second. Then, if there 

was a border incident, I was on the phone right away, 

calling the DGMO and letting them know, “Hey, this 

happened. Here’s why it happened. We’re going to sort 

all this out, but you just need to know.”

There were times where I’m certain we were in a firefight 

with Pakistani forces. That takes me to the point that, you 

know, the Pakistani defense force, in some ways, is a foreign 

army in the Northwest Frontier provinces. When they come 

in there, you know, there’s huge Pashtun tribes and groups 

living in the provinces. They’re xenophobes, and they don’t 

like the army. They don’t like the central government. When 

the Pakistani army comes in there, they are opposed—not 
264

to mention the Taliban, who oppose them in there, too. 

There’s also an army unit known as the Frontier Corps 

that mans the checkpoints and the border posts between 

Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their allegiance is suspect. The 

Frontier Corps is notorious for being sympathetic to, let’s 

say, Pashtun insurgents, be they Taliban or whatever else. 

So, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Frontier Corps not 

only harbored, but protected, some of the guys that were 

going back and forth across the border and fighting our 

soldiers over there.

So, we tried to make it work with the Pakistanis. It was 

very complex, as you could tell from the description I 

just gave you. Interestingly enough, during our stay there, 

they ordered a fairly significant offensive operation in 

Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier provinces, Shikai 

and some of the places there. Looking back on it, they 

killed a bunch of guys in there. Looking back on it, I 

wonder if the way they ran that operation, because they 

were fairly heavy handed, didn’t create more enemies than 

it eliminated in that area. But, again, that was the Pakistani 

sovereignty issue. There wasn’t much we could do about 

that, except dialogue with them about our views and what 

was going on with our side of the border and that kind of 

thing. So, we worked it hard, and Chuck Jacoby’s a good 

guy to talk to about that. 

DR. HUGHES: When your division left and you turned it over to the 

Southern European Task Force [SETAF], what was the 

transition like then?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: It was good. These guys came in. They did not have as robust 

of a headquarters coming in as we did because [Maj. Gen.] 

Jason [K.] Kamiya commanded SETAF—they did not have 

the same kind of structure as we had when we came in, so 

they had to do a lot more plug-and-play than we did. We 

did the standard left-seat/right-seat ride. Their chief of staff, 

[Col.] Billy Mayville, took over the joint operations center 

before the actual change of command. So, Billy actually 

worked for me for five or six days, so he got used to doing 

that. Then, Jason Kamiya came in a few days beforehand. 

You know, he didn’t want an extensive handover, which was 

fine with me. We had a chance to chat about some things. 

But, he’s a smart guy, and he picked up on it very, very well. 

So, I think it was a smooth transition.

DR. HUGHES: What would you consider the most significant 

accomplishments during the time you were there?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: National elections. I think that was a strategic turning 

point for the Afghan government. It opened a window of 

opportunity. Now, whether or not we—the big “we”—took 

advantage of the opening of that window of opportunity 

is another matter. I’ll leave that for historians like you to 

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decide. But, the national elections—there was a moment 

there where I honestly believe we had the Taliban on the 

ropes. We kind of had a unifying effect that brought in 

some of the armed militias. We had opportunity to do 

reconciliation. You know, we said, “Hey, look. This is 

moving in the right direction. You guys need to join us.” 

We had an opportunity to reinforce our reconstruction 

effort, if we’d had the resources to do that. We really 

had an opportunity to close the door on the enemy and 

put Karzai in the driver’s seat. I also think that another 

accomplishment that stemmed from that was that, as a 

coherent fighting force, we whittled the Taliban down—

this is in Afghanistan, now—to the point where they 

could not conduct effective combat operations. 

DR. HUGHES: Yes. Were there major challenges that your task force 

faced?

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. I think we failed in the area of information operations, 

as I was mentioning to you before. I don’t think we ever 

understood how they should be used and what kind of 

effects can be gained. I think that’s an area, just as an 

aside, where our armed forces need to take a hard look.

DR. HUGHES: You mentioned that isn’t something you normally deal 

with in that environment. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: It’s hard to practice at a CTC, to be honest with you. It’s a 

sustained effort. It has to be very carefully tailored to the 

culture in which you are operating. It’s hard to replicate 

the conditions that allow you to train information 

operations effectively in our CTCs or, for that matter, 

anywhere else. I think the other area where we probably—I 

guess it was a challenge; we didn’t take advantage of an 

opportunity—that was the reconciliation effort. Again, 

I think we had some opportunities there. We never 

figured out, I don’t think, how to use military forces to 

support the reconciliation effort with the Taliban. In 

the end, that’s got to be the national government who 

actually does it. These guys don’t want to reconcile with 

us. But, the way that the Coalition could have supported 

a reconciliation effort—I don’t ever think we gave the 

Karzai government either the lead that they needed, or 

the support that they needed, to make reconciliation go. 

I think in Afghanistan—and, by way in Iraq, in terms of 

solving long-term problems that are there—reconciliation 

is absolutely essential. I don’t think in either place we 

have cracked the code on that and, specifically, how a 

coalition contributes to that. 

DR. HUGHES: Well, that sort of leads to one of my last questions, which 

is did you get the feeling when you were in Afghanistan 

that the focus was on Iraq? How did the respective 

priorities play out? 
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266

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Yes. You know, of course, I had a brigade in Iraq. 

I had the opportunity to go over there and visit that 

brigade twice from Afghanistan. I never felt like we 

were either the red-headed stepchild of CENTCOM or 

the national effort for the Global War on Terrorism. 

I never felt like that. There were distinct differences, 

as you know—obviously—that were there in how the 

two operations were resourced and focused, but I think 

they were justifiable. I mean, you know, Iraq is proving 

to be a very intractable problem. In Afghanistan, at that 

point in time, anyway, the level of ops was manageable. 

We seemed to be moving forward in terms of national 

programs, economic and political programs. So, I never 

felt like we needed more and didn’t get it because of 

Iraq, if that’s what you’re getting at.

DR. HUGHES: Is there anything else I should have asked you? 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: That was a good inventory of questions. Let me think 

for a second. No, I think—the only other thing that 

you might—I don’t know if this is part of your mandate 

or not, but it’s the issue of technology, weapons systems, command and control equipment, and that kind 

of stuff. 

DR. HUGHES: I’m definitely interested in it. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Okay. You know, if you were going to ask me if we needed 

anything that we didn’t have, I would say—one of the 

things I would say that we didn’t need that people were 

trying to force on us was the heavily armored vehicles. 

That, to me—they came down with this thing about “all 

wheeled vehicles will be armored” while I was there. To 

me, that was a disaster, because we had areas where it 

was absolutely stupid to armor our wheeled vehicles. 

There was zero threat. I mean, there was no chance that 

we were going to get hit with an IED or whatever. They 

should have left to the commander the choice of which 

vehicles needed to be armored and to what degree and 

all that—you know, the push for MRAP [Mine Resistant 

Ambush Protected armored vehicle] and some of the 

anti-IED systems that are out there—was something 

that I am glad we didn’t have too much of a push. The 

guys that came after me, I think, were burdened with 

that. I would say that probably the one thing I would 

have liked to have more of was surveillance stuff—the 

Predator and the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. We 

could have used more of that, especially the ones that 

were available at the company level. We had a few UAVs 

at the company level, but not enough really to satisfy the 

commanders who were there and who would have liked 

to have seen more of that. So, that would probably be 

the one technological add that I would have liked to 

have seen. 
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DR. HUGHES: Well, thank you very much, sir. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Well, It’s my pleasure. Good luck as you continue with this 

effort. If you need anything else, give me a shout. 

DR. HUGHES: Well, again, thank you very much, sir. 

MAJ. GEN. OLSON: Okay, Pat. Good. Take care. Bye. 

Brig. Gen. Bernard S. Champoux served as Assistant Division Commander (Operations), 

25th Infantry Division (Light), including duty as Deputy Commanding General, Combined 

Joint Task Force-76, from October 2003 to June 2005. He was interviewed in the Pentagon 

while serving as Deputy Chief, Legislative Liaison, by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History on 9 January and 20 February 2007. General Champoux discusses 

his arrival to the 25th Infantry Division as its assistant division commander for operations 

and comments on the division’s training and preparation for a counterinsurgency conflict before deployment to Afghanistan. He describes the transition between the 10th Mountain Division (Light) and the 25th Infantry Division and the establishment of Combined Joint Task 

Force-76, which replaced Combined Joint Task Force-180. Combined Joint Task Force-76 

performed well in combat, and General Champoux describes the successes of the Afghan 

National Army and Afghan National Police. The election of 2004 was a critical moment and 

served as an “information operation” on behalf of the fledgling democratic government in 

Kabul. Provincial reconstruction teams played an important role in working toward a stable 

Afghanistan and provided unique challenges and benefits to operations. General Champoux 

concludes the first session of the interview with his optimistic hopes for the future of Afghanistan and favorable assessment of Combined Joint Task Force-76’s tactical performance in 

theater. In a second session, General Champoux discusses the strategic and operation transition from conventional combat to counterinsurgency, the integration of Special Operations 

Forces with Combined Joint Task Force-76 efforts, the development of the regional command 

system, and the 25th Infantry Division’s transition with the Southern European Task Force 

in April 2005.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. 

Army Center of Military History. Today is the ninth 

of January 2007, and I’m interviewing Brig. Gen. 

Bernard Champoux about his tour of duty as the deputy 

commanding general of Combined Joint Task Force-76 

[CJTF-76] in Afghanistan. I’m interviewing him in his 

office in the Pentagon. First of all, sir, are you sitting for 

this interview voluntarily?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I am.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And do you have any reservation with Army 

researchers using this material, as long as you’re cited 

correctly? 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: None.
General Champoux 

(left) shakes hands 

with a soldier after a 

memorial ceremony for 

six members of the 3d 

Battalion, 4th Cavalry, 

who lost their lives in 

a plane crash on 27 

November 2004.

Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

268

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You were stationed with the 25th Infantry 

Division [25th ID] in Hawaii before it deployed to 

Afghanistan. How and when did you find out that the 

division was going to go over to theater?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I was, at the time, working as the EA [executive assistant] 

for the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General 

[USMC] Pete Pace, the current chairman. Because it was a 

joint assignment, I had to complete my tour there, and so I 

couldn’t show up in Hawaii until October of 2003. All the 

preparation—a lot of the preparation occurred before that. 

They did their exercise at BCTP [Battle Command Training 

Program] in July, and I was able to go down for a couple, 

three, days of that. I arrived in October. Five days after I 

got there, we did the actual BCTP exercise. So, in terms of 

preparation, I had very little kind of preparation. I got there, 

and we did the exercise. At the time that we did the BCTP 

exercise at the end of October of 2003, the 25th Infantry 

Division was going to assume CJTF-180. Of course, it got 

renamed to CJTF-76, but we were going to have two brigade 

rotations. Soon after the end of that exercise, within thirty 

days, there was a change. One brigade was going to go to 

Iraq. One brigade, plus some other division battalions—
269

Waging War

attack aviation battalion and an engineer battalion—was 

going to go to Iraq for a year, and we were going to take 

another infantry brigade, and they were going to do a oneyear rotation. So, things kind of changed after that.

DR. KOONTZ: If I could ask you, did you notice anything during that 

BCTP that told you anything how the division would 

perform?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I think there were indications. The interesting part ... 

you know, I ended up writing a note to my boss, who sent 

it to then–Lt. Gen. [William S.] Wallace, who ran CAC 

[Combined Arms Center]—he’s the commander of CAC 

at Fort Leavenworth. The BCTP was specifically designed 

... these are old algorithms, and it was the old BCTP 

fighting against a world-class OPFOR [opposing force]. 

We essentially ... our preparation exercise was done in 

the Caspian Sea purposely so they couldn’t introduce a 

blue-water Navy, and so it couldn’t really be a fully joint 

exercise. They tried to do some Air Force integration, but 

the simulation software and hardware didn’t allow for 

total integration. It was classic. There was a line on the 

map. We were on one side, and they were on the other 

side. We fought a Soviet surrogate with rags and bags—a 

very kind of linear thing, and the way they tried to make 

it asymmetrical is they allowed the world-class OPFOR to 

fight in a way that it was unpredictable. So, in terms of—

and you’ve got to understand, I know, in talking to General 

[Lt. Gen. David W.] Barno—General Barno came in that 

October, also, about the time we were getting ready. The 

efforts in Afghanistan up to that date were fairly kinetic 

and fairly conventional, although there was a very heavy 

SOF [Special Operations Forces] effort to do some man 

hunting on al Qaeda leadership and Taliban leadership. 

But essentially, the effort up to that point was—although 

[Afghan President Hamid] Karzai had been installed and 

they had done all the interim government stuff, it really 

had been—the military effort had been, you know, big 

M and the rest of the DIME [diplomatic, information, 

military, economic] had been, you know, small d, small i, 

small e. So, all our preparation was very conventional, and 

it was interesting.

What we were getting from the field, what we were 

getting from CFC-Alpha [Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan] as General Barno was trying to stand this 

thing up, was “Hey, listen. We’re fighting an insurgency.” We 

had not discussed any kind of insurgency or how we would 

fight an insurgency. We had put together plans, though. We 

were well manned. We were well led. We were well trained 

in a classic sense, but the environment was different than 

what anyone had provided us in terms of their ability to 

prepare us. So, the BCTP was a good exercise only in terms 

of allowing us to work internal processes, the military 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

270

decision-making process. We were classically organized 

for a very linear battlefield. I was in the DTAC [division 

tactical command post]; we had a DMAIN [division main 

command post]; we had a DREAR [division rear command 

post]; and everything was very, very linear. The battle 

rhythm, which, hopefully, we’ll talk about a little bit later, 

was a classic division battle rhythm under a corps. It was all 

based on resourcing and just very different than what we 

were going to see, what we did see, in Afghanistan.

So, from that exercise—after that, because we were on this 

kind of compressed timeline, when we had to deploy, you 

can imagine! We were approaching Thanksgiving and the 

holidays, and we now had to get a brigade that had been 

ready to go to Afghanistan, we had to now get them ready 

to go to Iraq. A brigade that thought it had another eight 

or nine months before it deployed—eight months—we had 

to now get them ready in a short amount of time, and then 

we had to go through the deployment of the division to two 

different areas. I mean, it was a pretty large task. So, Joint 

Forces Command would do the Unified Endeavor [UE] 

exercise, and once they found out this all changed, they 

tried to schedule that. We really couldn’t do it. We had kind 

of a seminar internally that we had organized to bring in as 

many different folks as we could to kind of expand how we 

were viewing the battle space, and Joint Forces Command 

had kind of taken that over. They didn’t do a full-scale, you 

know, UE exercise, but they did kind of moderate it and 

helped bring in different folks to help us look at the battle 

space. But, you know, it was really—it was just interesting, 

especially as a guy that had just fought the war from the 

Pentagon with a Marine four-star. And, you know, we got 

here 1 October 2001. So, for two years of war fighting up 

here, from a very joint perspective, to go and to see how the 

Army was preparing itself, it was very Army-centric, and it 

really was that the whole doctrine and the preparation had 

not caught up with what was happening on the ground.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned your experience in the building before 

you went to the 25th ID. Did you bring any of that kind 

of experience or any of that kind of knowledge to—?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: You know, I did, and I look back on it now, and I think, 

probably, 70 to 80 percent of it was probably good [laughs]. 

About 20 to 30 percent of it was probably at a level that 

people just got tired of hearing about it—you know, “Why 

don’t we. ...” So, at the senior-leader level, with the chief 

of staff and General [Brig. Gen. Charles H.] Jacoby and 

General [Maj. Gen. Eric T.] Olson, it was helpful, because 

it really—I was just another thought on the political impact, you know, kind of the larger view of things, how that 

would play. But, at a point—I mean, this is geopolitical and 

geostrategic, and we really had to get to operational- and 

theater-strategic level. Some of it probably helped. Now, it 
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Waging War

helped me personally tremendously, because I really felt 

very unconstrained in how I viewed things, and the influence of then-Secretary [of Defense Donald H.] Rumsfeld 

and how he was causing, really, the military to think differently about things, to me, was very helpful. I mean, it 

really was liberating. I didn’t feel compelled. I mean, I’d 

been away from the Army. If you look at what I’d done up 

to that point, I’d never served above brigade until I left brigade command, and then I went at a very high level. So, 

the tactical piece? I’d always remained in my comfort zone. 

I’d been an S-3 [operations officer] three times, an XO [executive officer] three times, commanded a couple of companies, had been a battalion, brigade commander—you 

know, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back in 

ops, all ops jobs. So, it was really helpful for me to step outside of the Army and look back at it from a really different 

perspective and challenge things. So, I think it was helpful. 

I think some people would probably tell you, “Yes, some of 

it was probably helpful,” and some would be “Champoux 

was a huge pain in the ass” [laughs]. A lot of these things 

were probably not germane, sometimes.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, you’re in Hawaii. The division is largely 

prepared, gone through its BCTP. What happens between 

that— 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: They called it the war fighter exercise.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, after you go through that exercise process, what 

happens between that and the deployment?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, in earnest, we were getting ready to deploy the division 

to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

DR. KOONTZ: Minus a brigade-plus?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: No, these, both brigades now are deploying virtually 

simultaneously, although the 2d Brigade was going first, to 

Iraq. 3d Brigade was then going to go to Afghanistan. We 

started the deployment of 2d Brigade after Christmas and 

around the first part of January. We started the deployment 

of 3d Brigade and the division headquarters in February, 

end of February into March. Our ADVON [advanced 

echelon] went out, and then we were told, right as we were 

doing that, that we needed to mobilize quite a few units. 

So, the main effort, for the division, was to deploy. Because 

we controlled when the division staff was going to go over 

and we knew we were going, we had—our planners and 

our intel folks were really not sequestered, but they really 

were allowed to concentrate on getting ready to go to 

Afghanistan. So, they had established contact with CFCAlpha, with CJTF-180, which was 10th Mountain Division, 

with SIPR [Secure Internet Protocol Router] and some 

other things. In fact, we even got Blue Force Tracker there. 
272Enduring Voic

es: Oral Histories oftheU.S. Army Experience inAfghanistan, 2003–2005

You know, we were daily doing kind of situational updates, 

and weekly going through these kind of sessions with the 

commanding general on different topics. 

But, Christopher, up until when General Jacoby went on 

his predeployment site survey [PDSS], and then General 

Olson, we were not talking about fighting an insurgency. 

We finally got to the point where—in fact, General Olson 

said, “Don’t use that word,” and the reason was that the 

brigade commander had pulled some things up, and we 

were kind of misapplying the insurgency in a way that I 

don’t think he felt that everyone was at the same start point. 

So, he once made the comment, you know, “Don’t use 

that term anymore.” I had made the comment, “Well, we 

will call it what we want, but it’s something between what 

the Army’s done in the Balkans and something between 

what the Army did in Desert Storm. So, we can call it 

what we want, but there is no line. This is not going to be 

a linear battlefield, and it’s going to be very distributive, 

noncontiguous, with other elements.” And very quickly ... 

you know, at times I think Army leaders are ill prepared to 

fight in a very unrestricted, unconventional environment, 

but once they get in there and fight, it’s surprising how very 

well prepared they are to do that. But a lot of the things 

that we’re taught—and if you can imagine how a guy like 

Champoux was raised, through all these, as I told you, 

through all my troop and tactical experiences over a couple 

decades, the defining kind of measure of how I would 

do as either an operations officer or an executive officer 

or commander was how my organization performed at 

JRTC [Joint Readiness Training Center] or NTC [National 

Training Center]. Eleven-day battle? It’s extremely difficult 

to determine a unit’s success in an eleven-day effort. So, you 

know, you’re looked at. People take exception to my use of 

the term “evaluated,” but your performance is evaluated 

based on how well you—you know, how effective you are in 

establishing these processes to allow you to efficiently, not 

necessarily effectively, but efficiently get through the military 

decision-making process and do all these things. Not only 

that, but the CTCs [combat training centers]—because 

there are lessons learned, it’s an incremental improvement. 

So, every time I went, all I had to do was go back to see 

what worked for the last person and show some kind of 

incremental improvement. And it was always linear, so all 

the things that were an improvement and a modification 

of what we learned in Cold War tactics resided in the 

CTCs and morphed into different environments, affected 

by our other operations in Panama and Grenada and, to 

a certain extent, Desert Storm and some of these other 

things—and some of the other stabilization operations, but 

not heavily influenced by that. So, we just made this old 

military decision-making process fit into these different 

conditions, so if you did a direct application of that in this 

environment, you were not going to be successful.
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But, surprisingly, I think it has to do as much with 

education as it does with training. Our leaders are well 

prepared to do well if they can think differently about it, 

and the catalyst to think differently about it was Lt. Gen. 

Dave Barno. The first thing he did was tell people, “Read 

Lewis Sorley’s book, A Better War, and start thinking about 

it that way.” The whole world wasn’t a nail, you know, so 

we weren’t going to be a hammer. This was a new way to 

think about it. I mean, there were great leaders that were 

there before Dave Barno, but he was the first guy to say, 

“Okay.” We talked through some of this. I mean, he really 

caused us to think differently about it. He caused 10th 

Mountain to think differently about it. 10th Mountain 

had been extended for three months to allow us to come 

in, and they were forced to straddle an old way of thinking 

about it and a new way of thinking about it, and there was 

some resistance—and General Barno started, I think, with 

eighteen people, so he had to pull some of the people from 

10th Mountain staff to augment his staff. I mean, it was 

just a difficult thing. The three-star command used to be 

in Bagram. Now it’s in Kabul. But anyway, as the division 

deployed, we’re now starting to think totally differently 

about it. Then the division gets over there, and they get 

the 10th Mountain view of it. I think CFC-Alpha saw this 

as an opportunity with the new guys: “Listen, we’re going 

to really cause these guys to think differently about it.” 

And so, we did. I don’t know if what I just said made sense 

or not. I got on this CTC rant. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let me ask you a question here, sir. Within your 

division’s headquarters, at the time that you’re deploying, 

how would you characterize the division command’s 

understanding of the insurgency in Afghanistan?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I think, initially, we didn’t understand. I think we thought 

we were going to go kill/capture and defeat the Taliban and 

al Qaeda and Hekmatyar. In a short window of about sixty 

days, we really started rethinking all of those things, and we 

kind of—this kind of ink-spot idea, you know—separating 

the population from the guerrilla and the idea that this is 

an insurgency. Some of the other components to the effort 

that we’ll eventually talk about ... really, what we were 

confronted with was voter registration and this election, 

and then the inauguration and the constitution. Those are 

the things that became measures of success, not how many 

Taliban we killed and captured, or al Qaeda—al Qaeda’s a 

different story. But that really became a measure, the true 

measure, of success. 

So, we had this very kinetic force getting put in this 

environment that had to start to think very differently 

about it. So, security was going to allow for things to 

happen, but we were being asked to think differently about 

security in standing up the Afghan National Army and 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

274

bringing legitimacy to that. It was to put an Afghan face 

on the security and then, through the PRTs [provincial 

reconstruction teams] and some other things, start to show 

the Afghan people that they can have a representative 

government that can secure itself, that can elect a president, 

that can elect a parliament, that can do all those things. So, 

you know, once you start looking at it that way, there are a 

lot of other players in the battle space that we had to learn 

to work with—not de-conflict, but to synchronize. So, we 

went off and did this effects-based operation, and that really 

kind of took over some of the kind of traditional military 

planning. We kind of dabbled with that and set things up 

that really allowed us to—it gave us a framework to kind 

of think differently about the battle space and to start to 

bring in and integrate these other actors that were in the 

battle space. We called them “leaf eaters,” but it wasn’t just 

the nonkinetic NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], 

IOs [international organizations], UN [United Nations], 

the indigenous security forces, police and army; but it was 

also the Special Operations Forces, both vanilla and black; 

it was also the OGAs [other governmental agencies] and 

DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. There were a lot of 

other—FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation]—there were 

a lot of other folks that were operating in the battle space.

You know, if you look at a traditional organization of a 

brigade combat team, which is what we went in there with, 

we had the 22d MEU [22d Marine Expeditionary Unit 

(Special Operations Capable)] that we put in one area; 

and then we eventually, where we had a battalion in one 

area, we stood up kind of a provisional brigade under our 

DIVARTY [division artillery] headquarters and formed, 

really, two brigades; and eventually formed a third brigade 

out of Herat. But, you know, it was just the realization 

that killing and capturing every Taliban out there was not 

going to get Afghanistan where it needed to be. And, you 

know, part of it had to be—first of all, there had to be this 

election. When we got there, there were 2 million people 

registered to vote. We eventually established a goal of about 

6.5 million, and I think we ended up registering between 8 

and 10 million. We then had the successful election, which 

was pretty remarkable, when you think about it. So, part 

of having this election was to get all the people to vote and 

to make sure that the Pashtuns didn’t feel disenfranchised, 

which is kind of the core of the Taliban. So, you know, it 

got to be a fairly sophisticated thing. You’re really trying to 

bring the Pashtuns and the Taliban, to a certain level, into 

the legitimate government, and you have infantry platoon 

leaders who have to start thinking about this stuff. It was 

pretty interesting.

DR. KOONTZ: You touched on several things that I want to come back 

to. You’ve described pretty well the sort of changing 

mentality of the division headquarters as you move 
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Waging War

into theater. Tell me about the handoff between 10th 

Mountain and the 25th. 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: It went well. We had VTCs [video teleconferences]. 

Essentially, in our preparation, they had kind of opened up 

their headquarters. There was very good personal relations 

with that entire division, but they were fighting the war 

differently than the way we were going to fight it.

DR. KOONTZ: How so? Could you explain that?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, they were operating out of—for lack of a better 

term—they were primarily operating out of cantonment 

areas: Kandahar, Bagram, and eventually up in Khowst, 

and they were doing, you know, operations to go out and 

find and kill or capture the Taliban, and then they were 

working with other Special Operations Forces to kill and 

capture al Qaeda. So, they would operate out of these 

large cantonment areas and go do things. There were only, 

when we got there, I think, four PRTs, and when we left, 

there were nineteen PRTs. So, you know, even before we 

got there, we decided that we needed to push ourselves out 

into these areas. If we were going to do some of the things 

that CFC-Alpha was asking us to do, then we needed to 

work with the provincial governors. We needed to work 

with local police, and we needed to be in areas that the U.S. 

presence was going to deny sanctuary, and we needed to 

be integrated with everybody that was in that battle space. 

So, did we take a kinetic—yeah, we still took a kinetic 

approach—but we were also trying to work on other 

things, like reconstruction. We had CERP [Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program] dollars, and we were trying 

to put an Afghan face on almost everything we were doing, 

but we were trying to operate in a way that was really more 

classically counterinsurgency and, to a certain extent ... not 

FID [foreign internal defense]-like, but somewhere between 

UW [unconventional warfare] and FID, which was kind 

of different. We were really trying to operate—you know, 

push ourselves into these different areas and operate in a 

way that, like I said, denied sanctuary and tried to separate 

the Taliban from the people, and in doing that, accepted 

risk in some areas, concentrated on other areas. Of course, 

the wild card was the border, but that’s a whole different 

subject. We’ll talk about that, too. 

But just to answer your question, that really caused us to 

task organize differently and to look at the classic command 

relationships a little bit differently. We really tried to 

integrate, kind of, more of a cross-functional approach 

to things, rather than the classic operational—you know, 

OPCON/TACON/ADCON [operational control, tactical 

control, administrative control] relationship. It took us a 

while to do that, but we—at times very effectively, and at 

times less effectively, we really tried to take a very cross-
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276

functional approach, rather than a similarly focused 

approach to go and kill/capture. We always did have that 

capability, but we got it to the point at times where every 

stakeholder, when we developed targets, would be in this 

room, and it became fully integrated. Although we wouldn’t 

sometimes know what some of the other operations were 

going to be, they would at least know what we were going to 

do, and so they could measure the effects of what we were 

going to do on their operation and then could tell us if that 

effect was going to be helpful or harmful.

They also had kind of a say in how and when we did things, 

so that we could get an additional effect from our operations 

beyond just what we wanted to do. Let’s use an example: 

If an organization wanted to go capture somebody, kill or 

capture somebody, the timing of when they did that, how 

they did it, and what we did before and after in terms of 

Afghan involvement before, and then Afghan involvement 

afterwards ... or, you know, building a school or properly 

placing reconstruction dollars—actually, construction 

dollars—that could also be tied to somebody else’s effort 

in that area, an NGO or the UN that was trying to register 

voters. If everybody that was involved in that knew what 

was going to happen—they were all going to do what they 

were going to do anyway, but if it was done in a way that 

was integrated, then it could be a lot more effective.

DR. KOONTZ: So, did you inherit the CJTF structure that they left? 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: We did.

DR. KOONTZ: So, that stays the same?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: There’s a JMD [joint manning document], so we took it 

as—the core of the JMD was the division headquarters. 

Then there were individual augmentees that filled out the 

JMD, and then, of course, we picked up other organizations, 

too—engineers that became both combined and joint that 

filled out the headquarters and the structure of CJTF-76.

DR. KOONTZ: What was the task force’s relationship with CFC-Alpha?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: We were a subordinate, operational command. We were 

responsible for conducting operations inside the joint 

operation area.

DR. KOONTZ: Let me re-ask that question. How did that command 

system work? What kind of contacts would you have with 

CFC-Alpha?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, initially—again, you know, General Barno’s trying 

to stand this command up. We didn’t deploy our entire 
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headquarters, and we actually contributed about, I think, 

nearly fifty people to this headquarters. Initially, the 

relationship was—again, you go back. I think General Barno 

thought that we needed to evolve beyond this very kinetic 

approach to things, and we did take more of a holistic, 

diplomatic, and economic and military and information 

operations approach to the battle space. I think it got to the 

point—now, you’d have to ask him—I think it got to the point 

that 10th Mountain was going to get so far, and I think he 

was concerned that we would see Afghanistan the way they 

saw it. So, initially, there was a lot of, probably, involvement 

at a level that was below the strategic/operational level. 

But when you looked at the size of his headquarters and 

what their capacity was, and the size of our headquarters 

and what our capacity was, it was difficult for them to keep 

up with us. It really was, until he got his JMD fleshed out, 

and then he really became better resourced. I think he got 

comfortably reoriented, and there was less of—there was 

never a relationship similar to a corps and a division where 

we had a daily battle rhythm and we had to brief him every 

day. I mean, he was intellectually more mature than that. He 

understood that was not what he needed to do. His interest 

in tactical operations was primarily his concern over the 

operational and strategic impact of the tactical operations. 

So, you know, he wanted to expand these PRTs. He looked 

at centers of gravity and made sure we understood where he 

felt the centers of gravity were to do the things that needed 

to occur. 

We worked so very closely, collectively, at his level and at 

our level to register these voters. Now, this is through this 

big spring offensive. We had 22d MEU, and that was—you 

know, because of the weather and historically what happens 

here, they go to ground during the winter, for the most part, 

because you’re in the Hindu Kush. Of course, Afghanistan 

is a pretty rugged country. So, once everything thaws out, 

they kind of come out of their caves and they decide it’s 

time to go whip some ass. So, in spring and summer, they 

start this and there’s this kind of flow. We had an operation 

that we assumed from 10th Mountain—I forget what it was 

called—to kind of deal with the spring offensive. As soon as 

we kind of started that thing, we realized that the real main 

effort needed to be to registering these voters. By the time 

we came out of that spring offensive, with the influence of 

General Barno, our familiarity with the battle space, our 

comfort with where we needed to go, understanding that 

the objective was to register voters, we really started to 

move in that direction. I think CFC-Alpha—really, I think 

General Barno thought, “Okay, these guys get it enough to 

where I don’t have to. ...” And so, I think all those things 

kind of worked together. 

But when you talk to the relationship—and again, 

historically, or however you thought—the battle rhythm 
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is usually resource driven. Say there’s an ATO [air tasking 

order]. There’s an Air Force ATO, and you’re looking at a 

classic three-star/two-star headquarters, even in a joint 

environment. In a conventional linear battlefield, it’s all 

resource driven, because the corps may have multiple 

divisions. It has to compete with resources throughout the 

theater. Everything’s driven on this targeting cycle to get 

inside the ATO cycle, to get inside this resourcing cycle. 

In Afghanistan, we learned—and we got there kind of 

ready to do that—we realized there’s no requirement for 

that, thankfully: one, because he probably didn’t have the 

headquarters to do it; but also, I think, probably because of 

General Barno’s vision and General Olson’s comfort with 

that, we went into, really, a battle rhythm that was driven 

based on events. So, we controlled our own resources inside 

CJTF-76, and we didn’t have to go to CFC-Alpha to get air 

and those kind of things. We had our own air component 

element. Now, there were certain things we had to have 

that went through him, but we really were the ADCON 

for Army operations, too. So, even resourcing, when you 

do it, it went from us to CFLCC [Coalition Forces Land 

Component Command], not CFC-Alpha.

And so, the battle rhythm was driven on these events, 

which is really, I think, kind of brilliant. So, the way we 

briefed CFC-Alpha on things and the way we planned was 

for voter registration; then it was the election; then it was 

the inauguration; then it was the parliament. Those became 

kind of the campaign objectives, and not how many Taliban 

we killed or captured or HIG [Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin] 

we killed or captured or how effective we were in killing 

and capturing al Qaeda or assisting the Special Operations 

Forces in doing that. It was really very good. So, that further 

kind of matured the relationship between CFC-Alpha and 

CJTF-76.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Your duty position changes in May of 2004. You 

were the ADC [assistant division commander] for ops. 

You then became the deputy commanding general— 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: For operations. Now, the 10th Mountain had—CJTF-180 

had only two general officers. When General Olson 

and General Jacoby went over on the PDSS, they said it 

wasn’t—and, see, the plan before we went was I would stay 

as the rear detachment commanding general, and General 

Jacoby and I would flip-flop. After six months, he would 

come back and I would go forward. Once they got there, 

they realized, “Well, you know, it probably makes sense that 

we have a deputy commanding general for support and a 

deputy commanding general for operations.” Then they 

talked to the graybeards, and they said, “Really, a JTF [joint 

task force] should have a deputy commanding general.” So, 

this is kind of what we did. Now, as soon as General Olson 

got back, he said, “How soon can you deploy?” I said, “I can 
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deploy tomorrow.” He said, “Okay, what I’d like you to do 

is continue to push the rest of the division in theater.” So, 

that’s what I did. So, General Jacoby went over. The chief 

of staff went first with the ADVON ... or maybe not the 

ADVON, but General Jacoby and the chief of staff, Col. 

Chuck Cardinal, went to the front end and started to do the 

relief in place with 10th Mountain. General Olson came in 

about two or three weeks after that. Two weeks after that, 

he kind of took over, and then that put him, I think, into 

April. Then on 15 May, I got on a plane and flew over. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, did your duties change, or how did they, I 

guess, is the question, with this new responsibility?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, you know, we didn’t operate—there was some 

discussion before I got there of setting up a separate division 

command post in Kandahar. When I got there, General 

Olson said, “Listen, take two weeks and just go learn.” So, 

I had carte blanche. I went all over the country. I went 

to every forward operating base. I spent time with every 

organization. Also, because of my time with the Rangers, 

I was asked to do the SOF integration piece, so I spent 

time with CJSOTF, which was our Combined Joint Special 

Operations Task Force, part of CJTF-76, and Task Force 

Omaha, which was the black organization. I knew all the 

people over there. So, anyway, in two weeks’ time, I kind of 

was allowed to go and see things. Then I came back, and 

General Olson said, “Okay, I want you and General Jacoby 

to sit down with the chief of staff to kind of sort through 

roles and responsibilities,” and so we did that. Now, we had 

done that. The dynamic was that General Jacoby had been 

the ADC for two years before I got there. He was extended 

a third year. He had been the ADC-O for, I guess, it was 

about eighteen months by the time I got there. So, I replaced 

him as the -O, and he became the -S. If you go back to when 

I was deploying, when I got there, it didn’t make sense 

because I was going to stay in the rear to really organize 

the ADC-O and the ADC-S along traditional lines. So, we 

went into General Olson and said, “There are certain things 

that General Jacoby ought to remain responsible for.” And 

so, we had different roles and responsibilities—“terms of 

reference” is what we called it—and they were somewhat 

nontraditional. Some of the independent battalions he took 

and remained in control of. Because the aviation brigade 

was being deployed, he kind of had that, initially.

So, we went all the way into this deployment and into this 

new structure. Then, when I got there, after two weeks 

I sat down with Chuck, and we talked through terms of 

reference. We sat down with Colonel Cardinal, and then 

we went in and sat down with General Olson. We really did 

take a very functional alignment in what our duties and 

responsibilities were. So, I had operations and intelligence. 

He had the engineering and logistics, but he was also the 
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deputy commanding general, so in the absence of General 

Olson, he took over command of the CJTF. Now, General 

Olson spent a lot of time on the road. He spent a lot of time 

out in the field, and so General Jacoby and I were constantly 

... you know, really, I’d work for him, and sometimes 

General Olson would make decisions on what we would 

come up with operationally, and sometimes General 

Jacoby would. But, you know, with the commo, almost any 

time, wherever General Olson was, we could still do our 

nightly meetings. I guess that’s kind of one of these classic 

things—the difference between command and control. You 

command wherever you are. The CJTF was the controlling 

headquarters, but General Olson could command wherever 

he was; and when he couldn’t command, General Jacoby 

would take command. If for some reason he wasn’t at a 

platform or at a location that he could command, then 

General Jacoby would assume command. But control 

always resided in Bagram at CJTF-76, and from that all our 

reports to higher, our coordination, kind of emanated from 

there.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. We talked about the situation on the ground and 

the nature of the insurgency. One of the features of the 

conflict in Afghanistan is that you’ve got a lot of antiCoalition forces. You mentioned, there’s al Qaeda, the 

Taliban, HIG, and we also have a level of just, sort of, 

for lack of a better word, just generic criminality and 

brigandage, which is part of the Afghan culture. How 

did you adapt? Can you identify whom you’re fighting at 

any given time, or what your problem spots are? 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: You know, dependent on where you were, I think it was easy 

to determine. Based on what the mission was, it was easy 

to determine who the enemy was, and if you’re operating 

out in these forward operating bases and you’re trying to 

assist with establishing legitimate governance with either 

governors or police chiefs, then anyone that got in the way 

of that was someone that you could target. Now, whether 

there was a kinetic response to that, depending on the 

circumstances and who it was ... sometimes it was just 

the Afghans learning how to deal with dissent internally. 

Sometimes, if it was a cell that we knew that was al Qaeda, 

well, then it was targeted that way, and it took probably the 

fusion of that information at a level to determine who and 

why that was the enemy and who was best positioned to 

kill, capture, or defeat it.

So, what we talked about before, this kind of crossfunctional approach ... you had areas of responsibility that 

were not necessarily—they weren’t hierarchical or tiered, 

you know? They were areas of responsibility that were 

very decentralized, and there could be different objectives 

inside a larger area of responsibility that weren’t necessarily 

hierarchical in terms of which we would normally see in 
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the battle space where we were fusing information of the 

CJTF, or the division headquarters, and then controlling 

operations in a way that we had to tell subordinate commands 

who the enemy was. You know, we gave objectives. Now, at 

a level, we still had to do that because of who the enemy 

was. If it was the Taliban leadership operating in an area 

that maybe the brigade or battalion or company command 

were focused on—I’m trying to think of the right word for 

it—you know, elements that were leading to instability in 

the area, they may not be taking a kinetic approach to it. 

But, like I said, resident in that area may be a target that 

we were developing that we had to take care of. So, they 

were doing their intelligence preparation of the battlefield 

and fusing their intelligence based on what their objectives 

were, and they needed the capability to do that because 

there may not have been an al Qaeda cell operating in their 

area that they knew about, or even Taliban. But it could 

be just, like you were talking about, you know, warlords, 

narcotics-related criminality, or tribal. The thing about 

Afghanistan, there are parts where there could be a road 

with two tribes. You know, one side is one tribe and the 

other side is the other tribe, and they may not want this 

local authority to be successful for whatever reason. So, 

we’re trying to sort through that. You know—you have to 

go back to the history of Afghanistan and understand how 

fractured it was in terms of the ethnic tribes.

So, there had to be—well, I think I mentioned it earlier. We 

still had to maintain the capability to go kill and capture 

whom we needed to go kill and capture, and we needed the 

capability for our subordinate elements to operate in a way 

that was going to kind of put an Afghan face on what was 

occurring to bring the security and to accomplish some of 

the objectives that we talked about. I mean, part of it was 

the way we were going to do it, not just what had to be 

accomplished, and the difficulty, at times, was making sure 

that everyone that had a stake in how we were going to do 

these operations—it didn’t mean that we were not going to 

go kill and capture HIG, Taliban, al Qaeda that needed to 

be killed or captured, but everyone needed to understand 

how and when we were going to do that and what the effect 

was going to be on some of these other operations. And, 

don’t forget, there are all these other things going on, like 

the DDR—you know, the demilitarization [disarmament], 

demobilization, and reintegration of these ... [sighs]. We 

weren’t allowed to call them warlords. I forget what the 

euphemism was. Originally, it was “tribal leaders.” We 

weren’t allowed to call them warlords anymore because we 

were trying to—like Ismail Khan out in the west, or some 

of these other cats that were mujaheddin. And, really, if you 

go back, the Northern Alliance, although that wasn’t really 

in our area, that had influence, you know? That was part of 

Karzai’s legitimacy. So, everyone had to operate in a way 

that allowed each other to know how we were operating 
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and what the effects were going to be. I think that approach 

was different than what any of us had experienced in the 

past. And the better we got at this kind of cross-functional 

approach, I think, the more we accomplished, and the better 

we isolated the people that needed to be killed and captured 

and dealt with in a way, from a timing perspective, that was 

most effective. 

I talked a little bit about effects-based operation. That was 

kind of the genesis for this thing. Our sense of effects-based 

operations—and, again, this was fairly new. We wanted it to 

result in something—you know, an action, in a frag order 

[fragmentary order]—and we had created this process, this 

mechanism, that allowed us to get a lot of folks involved. 

Our objectives were linked to CFC-Alpha, and then they 

were linked to the objectives of our subordinate units. We 

had input, and we populated this thing, and we came up with 

metrics. We really struggled with that. I mean, we fought 

hard. We brought in different people to give us different 

views of it—you know, the NGOs, the UN, different folks 

that we would normally not expect to be involved in any 

kind of planning process—and it was very good because 

it caused us to concern ourselves with how the effect of 

our operations would be viewed from other folks. It made 

a lot of people uncomfortable because it didn’t turn into 

concrete actions sometimes. We got it to the point where 

we had said, “Well, we’re on track.” Or, if it was “Well, if 

we’re not on track, what do we need to do to get on track?” 

But it wasn’t something that you would see similar to a 

targeting meeting, which they tried to turn it into. And, 

you know, the people that were kind of available because 

we didn’t have—we weren’t using the artillery, necessarily, 

the way we’d use it in a classic linear sense. We had our 

artillerymen that we kind of put in charge of effects-based 

operations, and what was the process that they were most 

comfortable with? Targeting meetings. So, the way it got 

organized, we had to be careful it didn’t turn into another 

targeting meeting—at least, in our organization.

DR. KOONTZ: You’ve alluded to the elections several times, and 

obviously that’s one of the big, important things, so I 

would certainly want to get that on record. Tell me how 

the election that took place in 2004 affected CJTF-76’s 

operations.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, it became the primary objective, really. We learned so 

much in trying to register the voters—and, of course, they 

extended that—and what it took to determine why people 

weren’t registering. I mean, there were myriad reasons, as 

you can imagine. Depending on your view of it—you know, 

eleven blind people touching the elephant. If you were down 

at a governor’s level, he may be telling you, “Well, people 

aren’t registering because they don’t think that the posture 

that Karzai can bring can stabilize the country. You can’t 
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trust him,” although that’s probably not a governor. That’s 

probably a poor analogy because Karzai appointed all the 

governors. But, you know, they kind of had a different view 

of it. If you were a company commander down in an area 

and talking to mayors and all, it could be a lot of different 

reasons. It could be a strong Taliban presence that they were 

concerned about, so you had to go deal with that. It could 

be that just the logistics of getting the UN—don’t forget, 

for it to be a legitimate election it had to be observed, and 

the process had to be observed, and the ballots. You know, 

we’re talking about a country that had about a 10 percent 

literacy rate—10 percent to 20 percent literacy rate—but 

almost all the literate people were in Kabul, so when you 

get out into the hinterlands ... so, just the pure logistics, 

and then the security of the ballots and all those things. 

But, anyway, to get to the point where we could register 

the voters, we learned a lot. We learned that not everyone 

was opposed to registering women. We learned, in some 

areas, it was courageous for women to come forward, and 

in other areas they were encouraged to do it. We learned 

a lot about who the players were going to be, both on the 

Afghan side and on the U.S. and Coalition side. And then 

we also learned what the issues were going to be to have 

this election.

So, the election, from an information-operations 

perspective, what a powerful thing to, first, say, “Well, we 

registered 10 million voters.” And then we had a legitimate 

election—a country stable enough, with enough security, 

and all this was done with an Afghan face. So, here was 

an Afghan security force—not perfect—that was able 

to stabilize the country enough to have this election, 

observed by the UN to be legitimate, and to duly elect 

this government. You know, the first election in the 5,000-

year history—pretty powerful, and what a death knell to 

the Taliban! What a concern to HIG! What a concern to al 

Qaeda that the sanctuary that they’ve operated in, now the 

people were standing up and saying, “Enough is enough!” 

You know, they’re the same people that defeated the Soviet 

Union. They’re not going to tolerate the Taliban without 

saying, “Hey, listen. We want something better.” It was 

pretty powerful. And then after that, the objective became 

the inauguration, and the reason is, when you look at how 

the parliament was going to be formed, Karzai was going to 

have to appoint certain people, and we’re going to have this 

other huge election throughout the country that we worked 

on. Of course, it became SETAF’s [Southern European Task 

Force’s] responsibility to do that, but it was huge. It was just 

remarkable.

DR. KOONTZ: One of the things you keep coming back to is “putting an 

Afghan face on operation.” What kind of work did the 

task force have with the Afghan National Army or the 

[Afghan] National Police?
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BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, OMC-Alpha [Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan] trained the Afghan National Army. While 

we were there, they were actually starting to deploy 

the battalions, and we finally got up to corps that 

deployed, and we eventually got to the point where we 

did combined operations. Most of the time we did kind 

of combined operations, but, really, they were attached 

to Coalition forces, U.S. forces, and operated with us. 

Eventually, they got to the point where they were kind 

of conducting their own operations. We learned early 

on how powerful the ANA was in terms of—there was a 

huge sense of national pride to see an ethnically, tribally 

integrated army, you know? And at times, we wouldn’t 

believe it, to have a Hazaran right next to a Pashtun 

right next to—I mean, and the people would ask, “Well,” 

you know, “you’re X,” and they’d say, “Yeah.” “And you’re 

living, you’re with X?” I mean, they just really identified. 

It was the first kind of federal, national, legitimate 

indication of an Afghan government, and they were 

really well received.

The police was a little bit of a different challenge because 

you had local police, and the Germans had the task of 

training the police. They had regional police training 

areas, but you had other police that really were—what 

the Germans were doing they were training them to be 

beat cops, and what they were up against, once they got 

out to these areas, they were fighting paramilitaries. So, 

they had batons and deflective vests, and these guys had 

AK47s. As you’re operating, depending on what level 

you’re operating at, you were trying to stand these up 

because, again, you wanted the Afghans to see that they 

can secure themselves, that that was their future. So, we 

were—through CERP dollars, with the restrictions that 

were imposed in terms of what we could and couldn’t do 

with CERP dollars—we were trying to buy uniforms or 

buy police cars or buy motorcycles, and we were trying 

to get them to operate with our forces in a way, or at 

least talk to our forces so that if there was something 

that they couldn’t deal with, we could help them. Almost 

every operation where we did any kind of raid in a 

village or town or area, we tried to—you couldn’t involve 

the Afghans too early locally sometimes because they 

would compromise it, but as you’re going to the target, 

you would grab them; or, in the final stages, you would 

grab the local police, and you would try to involve the 

Afghan army, and they would have a piece to it, so when 

they saw something, it didn’t appear as the Americans 

who were in there crashing doors in the middle of the 

night and grabbing Afghan women and children and 

wrenching husbands away from families and that kind 

of stuff—you know, that whole thing. And I’m not doing 

a good job describing them, but it was very thoughtfully 

done and it was extremely important.
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The PRTs were also important. I haven’t talked much 

about those, but that was a huge effort, and through CFCAlpha’s help and, really, General Olson’s commitment to 

it—in fact, he’s the guy who runs the PRTs in Iraq right 

now. We’ve got him resourced with USAID [U.S. Agency 

for International Development]. We’ve got him resourced 

with the State Department people. This became kind of 

a coordinating cell in these areas to nominate projects 

that would go up and compete for dollars at the national 

level, would nominate projects that could compete for 

local dollars in terms of what the commanders had for 

CERP dollars. I mean, they were pretty powerful. And 

when we talk about reconstruction, really, you know, a 

dollar gets you a lot in Afghanistan because it’s really 

not reconstruction. It’s construction. In Iraq, a dollar 

can’t buy what it can in Afghanistan. So, when you view 

it that way, these were kind of viewed as the source of 

funding and services and the ability for the governor 

to have kind of a reinforced voice back up to the State 

Department into the federal Afghan government. To 

have this and know that he’s got kind of parallel lines 

of communication—both him talking to the president, 

and his priorities through the PRTs—it became pretty 

powerful. You know, they were a strong indication of 

progress, and an outpost, a presence, and an opportunity 

to deny sanctuary, to separate the population from the 

guerrilla.

And, really, even the way we operated outside the large 

garrisons and these forward operating bases essentially 

did the same thing, and what that does is it allowed us at 

different levels to know where the threat that was going to 

try to overthrow the government, or overthrow an area, was. 

We kind of knew where they were, and then you determine 

risk. If there was a legitimate reason to go up there, you’d 

go up there and whack ‘em; if not, you know, if it was just 

isolated areas that they’re going to be up there, they’re no 

different than any other area where ... we’re not going to 

change who they are. Time will change, the country will 

change who they are. They’ll see the Taliban party. There’ll 

have to be some kind of reconciliation that brings them 

back in.

DR. KOONTZ: What I was wondering is how did the PRT efforts—how 

does that filter up to your level at CJTF-76?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, they were subordinate to us. We had a J-9 [staff 

section for civil-military affairs] who was kind of the PRT 

coordinator. At one time, we had an O-6 command that 

kind of had operational control of PRTs, and we absorbed 

that into the staff. The regional commanders, whether they 

were a brigade commander—and we had two of them—or 

battalion commanders, there was a command relationship 

between the PRT and that commander. For lack of a better 
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term, they were a subordinate maneuver element, and the 

command relationship depended on what had to occur 

regionally and who was responsible regionally. So, if it was 

a brigade commander, they had a region, and, actually, 

the brigade commanders had the regions, but they would 

subdivide them to the battalion task force commander. 

So, we sometimes kind of subdivided with company 

commanders, sometimes operating in forward operating 

bases, sometimes going out and operating for certain times. 

So, you know, these guys would go on—these were infantry 

formations that were doing, you know, the work of the PRT 

to assess water, services, schools; you know, get the governor 

down there, figure out how they want to go do these things; 

determine who else was operating in the battle space. Was 

it NGOs? How could we help? Or, sometimes, how could 

we stay away from them, if that’s what they wanted us to 

do? And construction projects, roads, you know, access. 

You know, wells were a huge issue, digging wells and doing 

that kind of stuff. 

And, to see that all of that has—initially, less of an Afghan 

face. More of an Afghan face over time with the—what 

we were hoping is that the Afghan citizen would see 

progress and would say, “Okay, I can register. I can vote. 

I see organization. I see indigenous security forces. I see 

the Americans helping that but not occupying,” you know, 

which was a big Taliban information operation. So, the PRTs 

were pretty, pretty important. And don’t forget, you had the 

State Department. You had USAID reps in there. You had 

sometimes USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] reps in 

there. I mean, they were multifunctional and pretty good.

DR. KOONTZ: By the time of the end of your tour, how would you gauge 

your task force’s contribution to that sense of progress in 

Afghanistan?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, you know, it’s always interesting to go through 

transition, and in the Army, every job from command to 

whatever it might be, you look back at your time and you 

say, “Okay, yeah, we kind of accomplished these things,” 

and then as someone’s coming in to say, “Okay, this is kind 

of what I learned,” and you offer it to him. And then you 

see how they’re going to look at it differently, and you kind 

of think, “Man, how come I never thought of that?” Let’s 

talk personally. It was the first time in my military career 

where our efforts—there was some kind of measurable, 

positive progress. You know, we got there where they 

couldn’t register voters, for myriad reasons. We registered 

voters. We had an election that everyone said, the UN 

said, couldn’t happen. Everyone said, “It’s not going to 

happen. It can’t happen. It’s fraught with problems.” We 

had that. We installed the president. I mean, it was very 

important to have Karzai alive, to be the president. I 
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mean, they elected this cat. And then, putting the country 

in a position where Karzai was forming his cabinet and 

getting ready for the parliamentary elections. It was the 

promise of the jirga that initially brought Karzai as the 

interim president to hit each one of the gates and, at the 

end of it, turn it over to somebody.

We thought the Taliban’s capability was greatly reduced. 

We had some people—and I, at times, was in that camp—

that didn’t agree with it and said, “Well, the Taliban 

weren’t defeated.” I caused a lot of people to think very 

hard about it. Had we defeated the Taliban? It depended 

how you defined it. The Taliban’s ability to conduct 

operations was nonexistent. I mean, there was nothing 

that was there. There was no formation large enough 

to defeat a platoon, that ever amassed large enough to 

defeat a platoon. We were operating out—now, we were 

losing soldiers. We were still frightened in certain areas, 

but, you know, to feel as though you had diminished the 

influence of the Taliban and accomplished the things 

you had accomplished, and a legitimate government 

had promised a legitimate parliamentary election—not 

a legitimate government, but a legitimate presidential 

election that was the best advertised one that you could 

possibly have for the Afghan people, and they were 

going to have a legitimate parliamentary election—

was huge.

DR. KOONTZ: I’ll tell you what, sir. I’ve got, I think, forty-five seconds 

left on my appointment. Would you be willing to do a 

second session on—

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Yeah. I’d love to. What I need to do is get my notebooks, 

find those things and go back through the stuff and if you’d 

like, go through the stuff that I’m really confused or not 

clear on, and we can backtrack. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I’ve got some other questions I wanted to ask you, 

and you’ve given me some things that we can go back and 

revisit and get more details on that. So, I’ll use the last of 

my four seconds to thank you for Part 1, and I’ll let you 

get back on to your important work.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: All right. 

[End of first session. Beginning of second session.]

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the twentieth of 

February 2007, and this is our second session with 

Brig. Gen. Bernard S. Champoux, former deputy 

commanding general, CJTF-76. You mentioned the 

anti–al Qaeda efforts that went on. Was that primarily 

Special Operations Forces doing that? 
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BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Yes. Now, there was an epiphany—not really an epiphany—

but what happened in the past is you would have the 

Special Operations Forces not necessarily subordinate to 

CJTF-76. We had a Combined Joint Special Operations 

Task Force [CJSOTF]. They were Army Green Berets and 

Navy SEALs, and we had other governments. We had 

Jordanians. We had New Zealanders and Aussies. We had 

French, but we eventually moved them up underneath 

that. So, we had combined. Then you had an entire other 

classified effort under Task Force Omaha, and they were 

essentially man hunting. What happened in the past is, 

before we got there, is when that organization wanted to 

operate inside our battle space, they would create what 

they call a JSOA. So, they would create a Joint Special 

Operations Area of operations. So, they would come in, 

and they’d say, “Okay.” They’d draw a circle on the map, 

a goose egg, whatever, a trapezoid, and they would say, 

“Okay, we’re operating inside that space. We own that 

terrain, so anyone that’s going to operate inside that needs 

to check with us.”

Now, that’s really dysfunctional. What we did is we 

established area ownership. We established regional 

commands that had responsibility for regions. In the 

past, they operated out of large garrisons. They went and 

they did operations, and that’s how they de-conflicted. 

What we did is we said, “Okay. This region Vermont is 

this brigade’s, and Rhode Island is this brigade’s, and 

Connecticut is this brigade’s,” and then inside that, they 

further subdivided the areas into kind of battalion areas 

of operations, or areas that they’d assume risk on; and then 

inside that, you had the provincial reconstruction teams 

that we would stand up; and then inside that, you had 

the CJSOTF that was operating, sometimes with different 

command relationships—sometimes directly to CJTF-76, 

sometimes subordinate to the brigade command; and then 

inside that, you also had these other Special Operations 

Forces; oh, and, by the way, you also had a fledgling Afghan 

National Army. You had other Afghan security forces, 

and they could run the gamut from former warlords and 

militias to people that we contracted to help guard our 

small garrisons and our FOBs—forward operating bases. 

Then you had, like we talked about before, you had NGOs 

and the UN and all that kind of stuff.

My job was, one of the hats I wore, was to be the SOF 

integrator. Because of my background in the Rangers, I 

knew a lot of the players that were there, and so we really 

in earnest started to work towards this. At a level, everyone 

had common goals and objectives—at a level, you know? At 

the strategic level, it was “This office is nuts on a bulldog.” 

Once you get down to the tactical level, it took somebody 

a level above that to say, “Hey, listen. There’s commonality 

in what you’re trying to do.” And so, the old command 
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relationships that we used in the past—OPCON, operational 

control; ADCON, administrative control; TACON, tactical 

control—those became less important. We used strategic 

terms—“subordinate” and “supported”—and we formed 

cross-functional efforts and cross-functional teams to do 

certain things, sometimes for a specified duration and 

density, sometimes for a longer period; and if they became 

a longer period, then we’d sometimes maybe change that 

relationship to be more conventional. How did we get off 

on this tangent [laughs]? Reel me in, Chris.

DR. KOONTZ: Establishing this cross-functional approach, which 

I’m reading as trying to establish that commonality of 

purpose and get units different— 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Yeah, I think the best way to describe this probably, in 

the past, everyone worked to de-conflict how they were 

operating, right? So, we were de-conflicting things by either 

time or by space or by whatever. The insurgency required us 

to synchronize these things, so that regardless of who you 

were and what you needed to operate, either I knew what 

you were doing so that I could benefit from that, or I would 

operate in a way that wouldn’t hurt what you’re trying to do. 

So, at a level, there had to be some “ad-hockery” in terms 

of establishing a capability to fuse intelligence and to target 

things in a way that allowed everyone to understand: “Okay, 

my approach is to do this for these reasons. My approach is 

to do this for these reasons.” We really got to the point where 

it was pretty remarkable. This guy, [Col.] Walt Piatt, would, 

at times, in the area he was in, would command maybe a 

Ranger company—unheard of. Or, there were times when 

we would chop an infantry company to the Rangers, and a 

Ranger major would have a Ranger platoon and an infantry 

company. And, you could have CJSOTF in there. You just 

had a hodge—hodge-podge doesn’t sound right—but you 

had people operating in a way that, you know, we’d rather 

de-conflict things. We were really working together.

Now, you had to explain to someone at times what the 

common purpose was. It wasn’t obvious. But if you could 

say, “Listen. It doesn’t do you any good, every time you 

operate in that city, village, town, to piss ‘em off, and the 

way you’re operating pisses ‘em off. So, there’s ways we can 

help you. Because we have an established presence in there 

we can co-opt people. We can do things in a way that allows 

you to do what you need to do at a time where you’re going 

to be able to accomplish what you want and not piss off the 

Afghan people.” We worked very closely. The Rangers got 

very good at it. I mean, they once raided a wedding party 

because they suspected two insurgents were there. What 

did they do? You know, they appealed to the Afghan elders 

on this thing. They brought wedding gifts, which were a 

couple of generators, and they said, “Hey, listen. We’re going 

to come in here.” They brought the local police chief, which 
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had never been done before because we had a relationship 

with him. Now, they didn’t tell them far enough in advance 

where he could prevent anything. They said, “We’re only 

interested in these people. If they’re here, then we need to 

talk to them.” So, they allowed the Afghans to segregate 

the people, and then they said, “Hey, this is disruptive. We 

know this is disruptive on the day of your wedding. We’d 

like to present these gifts to you.” They passed by the folks, 

and they ended up getting what they needed, and they had 

the wedding, and everyone was happy. And at the end of 

it, the Afghans learned our lesson: “If you work with the 

Americans on some of these things, the bad people that are 

amongst us don’t have the power to do something. We’ve 

got the local police chief. With the help of the Americans, 

he can help us with that stuff.”

DR. KOONTZ: What would you point to as the biggest obstacle in trying 

to get that synchronization above de-confliction?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: You know, I call it the “mine, mine.” You know, we’re 

used to being given a task and a purpose and resources 

to get a job done in the military. On a linear battlefield, 

there’s a task organization and certain things in that task 

organization that you train with so that you can operate on 

the linear battlefield. This environment required you to be 

very, very flexible. It wasn’t linear. It was very distributed 

and noncontiguous, so you had to think. You had to 

understand that the old way of thinking in terms of getting 

a task organization to accomplish a task and purpose wasn’t 

necessarily going to be there. You still need to accomplish 

that task for that purpose, and so you need to figure it 

out, and you need to be unconventional in your thinking 

about it. So, people that took a very conventional view of 

it, that wanted to do purely kinetic things, that either saw 

no merit in doing nonkinetic things or thought that they 

couldn’t accomplish things unless they had everything that 

they should have had to do what they needed to do—that 

was the biggest obstacle. But leaders that quickly got to the 

point where they were comfortable and understanding, 

taking a very long view on it, they kind of understood there 

were certain metrics that they needed to—and these were 

not things that you’re going to accomplish in twenty-four 

or forty-eight hours, or even a week, but over time, and 

that there need to be steady incremental changes in certain 

areas. The only way you’re going to do that is by—even 

though you’re often viewed as the 800-pound gorilla—you 

had to operate in a way that you’re bringing these people on 

with you. It would be easy to operate without them. It was 

difficult, but much more productive, to operate with them.

Oftentimes, people want to work to a lower standard, 

which is consensus, and really what you’re trying to do 

is move them towards an objective. Like we talked about 

earlier, this kind of commonality is kind of important. You 
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know, it’s a poor analogy, but it’s like the eleven blind men 

with the elephant. If someone said, “Hey, listen. It’s still an 

elephant. You’ve got the ear. It’s important that you got the 

ear, but together, we’re going to get, move this elephant.” 

That’s even with people that thought they had a very, very 

narrow lane. Let’s just say the man hunters, the people that 

are looking for very specific people. First of all, we had to 

decide in our intelligence that there were still al Qaeda in 

Afghanistan. Everyone had to come to that appreciation 

and understanding. Then, if they were operating inside of 

Afghanistan, how were they operating, or their surrogates? 

And then, once you start building all that from an intel 

fusion perspective, you realize there are a lot of people 

operating out there that are touching these things: “They 

can help me get to this very narrow lane that I have, which 

is this man hunting. You know, they can be part of the 

solution there. They can help me.” Obviously, if you’re 

removing an influence that is threatened by a legitimate 

Afghan government, then you’re taking care of your own 

goals—not your own goals, but you’re taking care of the 

larger operational-strategic common goal. You could work 

it all the way back up that if Afghanistan was a sovereign, 

strong country where the people trust the government, 

then there would be no need for them to support al Qaeda. 

There’d be no need for them to go back to the Taliban. And 

so, that helps everybody.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned trying to develop this unconventional, as 

you said, ad hoc kind of way of operating to get people 

to synchronize their efforts. And you also mentioned 

metrics. What kind of metrics do you use to see 

progress?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, you have to go back in time, too. Effects-based 

operations were just—that was en vogue. I mean, it was 

new. Really, Joint Forces Command was kind of the keeper 

of the thinking on that. We had a more conventional 

approach called a targeting meeting. So, we kind of started 

these effects-based—I forget what we called them—but we 

essentially took CFC-Alpha’s goals and objectives, and we 

kind of broke them down into our supporting goals and 

objectives that we had. And then, in concert with everybody 

in the battle space, we started to develop metrics that we 

could measure that said—and some of these were tough. 

You’ve got a room full of people. You could have a battalion 

commander whose piece of it is working with a newly 

appointed governor, Afghan National Army, and provincial 

police, and so his view of putting an Afghan face on things 

would be to operate in a way that the appearance for the 

Afghan people was that it was the governor who had the 

authority, not the U.S. military. It was the Afghan National 

Army that was conducting operations, even though they 

may be combined operations with the U.S. forces, and the 

local police had the authority to do certain things, even 
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though we’re providing them motorcycles, cars, training 

them, trying to get them ammunition, those kinds of 

things. So, in terms of putting an Afghan face on things, I 

mean, you would come up with some kind of metric, like 

“I had X more police. I had X more governor billets with 

local leaders”—that kind of metrics. And in almost every 

area, we took a strategic goal or objective. We came up with 

kind of operational things, and then we had tactical and 

operational feeders for that, these metrics. What we learned 

is, just like targeting meetings, we always want to turn—you 

know, our initial effort was that all the stuff would turn into 

action, so you would review all these effects you’re trying 

to accomplish, and then you’d have these metrics. We spent 

a lot of time so that everyone understood that that really 

was the metric that we were going to measure. You know, 

an insurgency can take time. So, we had these—initially, 

we had them weekly. Then we did them biweekly with the 

commanding general.

There was some kind of desire to turn that session into 

orders that would change the course of—oftentimes, it was 

“We’re kind of on track. It didn’t have to turn into action. It 

could just be that we’re either getting the desired effect, or 

we’re not getting the desired effect. Here are the reasons why 

we’re not getting the desired effect. Maybe we need to shift 

some things.” But we always want it to turn into immediate 

action. Sometimes, the best thing we did was give everyone 

a common view of where we were. You weren’t going to 

dramatically change a task organization. You weren’t going 

to dramatically change a brigade’s because you gave them 

an area, a region to work out for the year. You weren’t going 

to necessarily change the size of that region or change 

things. It had a little different outcome than these targeting 

meetings that we were used to in the past.

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of preparation and what kind of effort goes 

into one of those targeting meetings? Take me on kind 

of a typical targeting meeting: Who’s there? What gets 

done?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I was very careful not to call them “targeting meetings.” 

I’ve got to remember what we call this group, but there was 

a work group of every BOS, battlefield operating system, 

and then we eventually got to where we pulled in anyone 

that had a stake—any stakeholder. We ended up kind of 

doing two of them—one on the reconstruction side, which 

was a lot of your what we call “leaf eaters,” NGOs, IOs, 

USAID, and we actually pulled in a USAID rep inside the 

CJTF headquarters—and then we had one with all the ... 

not conventional, but the military battlefield operating 

system, and that occurred on account of the lead person, 

that was the CJ-3. So, one was the CJ-9, and the other 

one a CJ-3. So, the CJ-9 did the nonkinetic, although the 

CJ-3 was nonkinetic, too. So, you had these effects that 
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you were trying to accomplish, and you had these metrics. 

They would get together and they would determine where 

they were. They’d have specific examples of each, and that 

happened on a Tuesday. By about Thursday—and there 

was a set time; I think a Thursday was the right day—they 

would out-brief me, the DCG-O [deputy commanding 

general-operations]; and then, on Saturday, we’d out-brief 

the commanding general. I would take a look at it and say, 

“Okay.” You know, it would cause me to go back through 

this thing, and I think they were very, very effective, but 

there had to be an understanding of where they were going 

to lead you. We didn’t do targeting meetings in terms of 

getting kinetic assets because we really owned the kinetic 

assets. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. A while ago, you’d mentioned effects-based 

operations. I’m trying to think of an articulate way 

to phrase this. What would be sort of your personal 

definition of effects-based operations, and do you think 

that CJTF-76 was accomplishing them effectively?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I’ll answer the second part first. I think we were. I mean, we 

were breaking new ground. And General [USA (Ret.) Gary 

E.] Luck came over a couple of times when we were over 

there, and he said, “Hey, listen. This is a model.” Now, this 

was the first time for a lot of organizations. I think the most 

important thing about it was not what it produced per se, 

but how it allowed people to think—the simple nuance that 

everybody operating in the battle space can affect things, 

and if you can get to the graduate level where you find 

ways to get their input and ways to either agree or agree to 

disagree on certain things and then operate in a way that 

instead of moving in cross-tangents, people are moving 

in kind of in parallel tangents, almost everyone can get to 

a certain strategic level and decide there’s commonality. 

The problem is to get everybody that’s operating in the 

battle space to understand that we’re all ultimately trying 

to accomplish the same thing. Now, there’s a different 

duration of intensity for what we’re trying to accomplish, 

and sometimes things are more measurable than other 

things. So, I constantly forced people together so that 

wasn’t just this de-confliction. It wasn’t just where you went 

in there and you guarded things because “I can’t trust you. 

You’re going to compromise what I’m trying to do,” to the 

point where “Yeah, there are certain things that you want 

them to know what you’re doing, so they know what the 

effect’s going to be, what the probable effect’s going to be, 

and you want them to work in a way that they’re going to 

facilitate that effect and not cause an effect that’s going to 

work against it.” So, as I’m talking to you, it sounds really 

simple, but it goes against everybody’s culture. You know, it 

goes against “Give me a task and purpose.” It goes against 

all those things, and it really opens it up in a way that—you 

know, sometimes the most powerful weapon you had in 
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your arsenal was USAID or someone that was working 

on a reconstruction project; or a State Department person 

who’s working on the PRT that had great credibility; or a 

governor; or something other than knocking on doors and 

going in there and lining everybody up sorting through 

folks and capturing the person you need to, and if they 

resist, killing them—all those things. Not only that, but to 

understand that, at certain times, how you did your kinetic 

operations were extremely important. Going in at the dead 

of night, rounding up women and children, making the 

Afghan patriarch feel, powerless, neutered—you know, all 

you do is build resentment. You could have done the same 

thing during the day [laughs]. You could have started it 

with an Afghan police chief [raps on table] knocking on 

the doors, saying, “Now, me and my buddies are going to 

come in here. We’re looking for these things, and we’d like 

you to put your women and children in one area.” It’s just a 

different way of doing it, and at the end of the day, everyone 

moved the ball a hell of a lot farther than a lot of disparate 

activity in a same area.

DR. KOONTZ: To just kind of change tacks a little bit, a while ago, you’d 

mentioned the regional command system. Was that an 

innovation while you were there? 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: It was. There were some areas of operations that people 

had, but to have a brigade headquarters that essentially 

was responsible for regions was different. I think it was 

consensus, although I think, what came first, the chicken 

or egg? You know, did we tell CFC-Alpha they ought to tell 

us to do that, or did they tell us that that was the structure 

we’re coming into? I think we were told that that’s what they 

were going to do, and so we embraced it with open arms.

DR. KOONTZ: I was going to ask you what the genesis of that idea was.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, it’s this ink-spot thing, you know. You’re trying to 

separate the insurgent, the guerrilla, from the population. 

So, do you do that in a big garrison and go out and do these 

kinetic operations and come back in; or, now that you’ve 

built an indigenous capability with the Afghan National 

Army, do you operate in a way that facilitates the legitimacy 

of that national institution, which was very powerful over 

there? Do you operate in spite of them, or do you help 

them grow? And then, once you realize this is a pretty big 

country—you know, things in Herat are going to be totally 

different than things in Kandahar; things in Khowst and 

on the Pakistan border are going to be different than things 

in Bagram. So, there are regional nuances, and why have a 

two-star headquarters in Bagram try to direct everything 

that’s going to happen, especially if you’re going to take 

the long view on this thing? Our view was to get out of 

these large garrisons, to push out into the areas to help 

establish the legitimate Afghan authority, and in doing so, 
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creating some space between the insurgency, the guerrillas, 

and the population. So, the idea is, you have these ink 

spots, lily pads, that you’re operating from, and that they 

would expand; and eventually, over time, these ink spots 

would all connect, and we’d have good governance, and “It 

wasn’t just the Americans doing that.” In fact, it worked so 

effectively, I think, that when we had issues out in Herat, 

we established an ad hoc brigade out there and sourced it, 

and we had another regional area. Initially, we went in on 

two regional areas, RC South and the East, and it had two 

brigade commanders, and then the brigade commanders 

further kind of subdivided. It was a different approach.

DR. KOONTZ: Once you’d assigned a brigade to that regional command, 

was it then up to the brigade commander to assign his 

units to those ink spots or lily pads as needed?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Yeah, and it’s all based on where you thought the threat 

was, where you needed to put effort. Who else was out in 

the battle space? I mean, there was a whole thing. They 

briefed the division commander back. He gave them task 

and purpose, and they briefed him back, and that point, 

in terms of the military decision-making process, it was 

very conventional. I mean, we used established, existing 

processes to do that, and the same with controlling current 

operations. That was all very conventional. It had reports 

and that kind of stuff, with nightly updates and morning 

staff updates. A lot of times, the issue became how did you 

get the senior leadership out of the tactical and into the 

operational? We had to keep the connective tissue between 

operational goals and objectives and the strategic goals 

and objectives. And in the operational, we shared that with 

CFC-Alpha, and we were hooked. We were connected. 

That was kind of our role. So now, if you’re regional, then 

it has a little different. Rather than operating out of these 

big garrisons and doing kinetic operations and coming 

back, now that you’re out in these regional areas ... the 

regional commanders had all the PRTs, which in the past 

were assigned directly to CJTF-76, and even before that, to 

CFC-Alpha. So, they chopped them to CJTF-76. We created 

more of them, and they became under the purview of the 

regional commander, the brigade commander.

DR. KOONTZ: The Army piece of CJTF-76 is pretty broad when you’ve 

got a big chunk of a light infantry division there. You’ve 

got SOF elements. You’ve got higher echelons that—you 

know, CFC-Alpha, for example. Did you notice any 

difference between the Army slice of things and then 22d 

MEU?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, don’t forget that 22d MEU went in for a duration, for a 

stated purpose, and we also brought in some augmentation 

during the time of the election. At that time, the 82d came 

in to help us out. And, again, everybody that operated there 
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at that point, every thinking leader at that point, understood 

that you couldn’t operate just one way and be successful 

and that it wasn’t all about just doing kinetic operations. 

And it wasn’t all just, everything wasn’t moving to contact, 

even though you wanted it to be that way. You just couldn’t 

get there. First of all, Chris, they’re not going to mass just 

so you can go whip their ass, you know? They’re not that 

stupid. They’re not going to, at all. They understood that 

we had on-call airpower. We had a lot of things—a lot—to 

extend our reach. So, you know, to the point, the MEU, we 

put them in an area where there are a lot of bad guys, and 

they got in there and they, through their presence, allowed 

a governor to stand up on his own two feet. They pushed 

away, or they killed and captured, the bad influences, and 

they created an ink spot. Up in a very bad area, they went 

in, and they did very well. Now, they also worked with the 

PRT. They also did reconstruction. Even though they were 

there to really establish a strong presence in the Oruzgan 

border area, they understood for there to be a lasting effect, 

they had to do things that would allow whoever was left 

there when they left to be effective. So, they couldn’t deny 

reconstruction projects, you know? They built wells; they 

built schools; they listened to mullahs and leaders when 

they said, “Here are my issues.” And a lot of times, they 

weren’t Taliban. They listened: “We’ve been in a drought. 

We have no means. We have no water. The reason we sent 

our kids to madrassas in Pakistan is because we have no 

schools”—you know, things like ”How am I supposed to 

stand up to this guy if I don’t have a security force, if I 

don’t have any police? How am I supposed to do all these 

things?” And so, they couldn’t deny that.

Col. Frank Mackenzie was very effective. And what we 

did—as soon as he left, guess what we did? We changed 

our task organization. We pulled a battalion out of another 

brigade, and we stuck it—well, actually, it was the battalion 

that was initially chopped to the other brigade from the 

original, but we sent it back there, and it operated there. 

And so, the bad guys, the Taliban or al Qaeda, were going 

to hold their breath until they left, which would happen 

in the past. You’d go in there, very intense operations for 

eleven, twenty-one days, thirty days, and then leave. Guess 

what? When they left, another element came in—and not 

only that, but they continued to push out. Then, guess 

what? They brought in the Afghan army. You know, they 

did all these things that showed progress. They built a 

road between that area and Kandahar. It was one of those 

things: “Hey, listen. We can’t get our ...”—someone said 

their drugs—but, I mean, they couldn’t get their stuff to 

market. There was no road. We built a road to Tarin Kowt 

and Kandahar. 

DR. KOONTZ: While we were down in RC South and the Oruzgan 

area and getting pretty close to the Pakistani border 
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down there, I’d like to get your comments on the border 

situation and how that affected operations.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Now, see, a little bit different south. Off of Kandahar, we 

had the French SOF, which was initially chopped to RC 

South, and then we moved them up underneath CJSOTF. 

There was movement that we probably didn’t appreciate. 

You know, it’s like if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one 

there to hear it because we weren’t a strong presence except 

in one or two areas down in the south. Who knows how 

much cross-border activity there was? We knew there were 

large Pashtun refugee camps in Pakistan. We knew south 

of Kandahar—I mean, this is desert, down in Helmand 

Province. We knew that certain times of the day, there’s 

a lot of drug traffic, but that was way down south, and it 

wasn’t until we really had the SOF that was down there kind 

of reoriented and operated along the border that I think 

we got an idea what ratlines are coming across. We could 

talk for hours just about the Afghan-Pakistan border—you 

know, the Durand Line—and don’t forget they straddled 

the old trade routes, I mean, smuggling. There are these 

routes that get passed down generation to generation, how 

to get through certain areas. It’s a little flatter down there, 

but in short order you’re back up in the Hindu Kush and 

it’s ... but anyway, to answer your question, we decided 

that that the folks that were probably the best prepared 

to build an indigenous capability, an indigenous security 

capability, were probably the SOF guys, CJSOTF, and so we 

gave them the mission to start working the border to build 

an indigenous capability, and to also—I’m kind of between 

the conventional force, although they’re operating in the 

conventional forces region, and the black forces to create 

a capability, a kind of handoff intelligence when things are 

happening in a way that made sense; and at the same time, 

trying to figure out, get a handle, on who’s transiting the 

border; and to build an Afghan border security capability. 

And, again, it gets back to kind of the strategic level. If they’re 

going to be a sovereign country, they need to have border 

control, and they need to levy taxes and create revenue. A 

big thing to do is to build things in Pakistan, but then to 

export them through Afghanistan, so they kind of lose the 

trail and they don’t have to pay all the export duties—you 

know, the black market and stuff.

So, we tried in earnest. We kind of turned it over to CJSOTF 

to start working at force. We started—originally, we came up 

with a plan where, you know, some of the—if the presence 

was just your routine kind of cross-border smuggling and 

stuff, but not nefarious, all the way to areas where we knew 

there was a lot of cross-border movement, and it was al 

Qaeda or it was Taliban, we had different forces focused 

on that. We still wanted to build an indigenous capability 

that was eventually going to take that over all the way to 

the north—well, “north” in our area, all the way down RC 
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South. We also started to move our OH–58s that we had 

moved out to RC West back over there so they could help 

do some recon and surveillance and try to figure out really 

what we had. But, yeah, we appreciated that the border 

was an issue.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have any contact with the Pakistani border 

forces or ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] or anybody on 

the southern side?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: We had a thing called the tripartite, which you probably 

heard about, that General Jacoby did, and that was 

really the Pakistani military, the Afghan military, and 

the U.S. military. We’d have monthly meetings and 

quarterly meetings, depending on what level—it was 

either General Barno, or it was General Olson, or it was 

General Jacoby, and they’re very rank conscious. So, we 

had these things where they would eventually interact. 

We had an effort there. Restate your question again.

DR. KOONTZ: I just wanted to know what Pakistani authorities CJTF76 was working with or tried to work with.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: We gave them radios. We wanted the means to be able to 

talk to them when there was a national incident, so that 

if we were receiving mortar fire—now, again, one man’s 

understanding of where the border was, you know, that 

whole FATA [Federally Administrated Tribal Areas] 

area in the ... you know, there was a British engineer, 

a guy by the name of Durand, that came up with that 

border. But, I mean, there’s a two-mile difference 

between maps oftentimes. You got two maps. If it’s a 

Pakistan map, the border’s here; if it’s the one we had, 

it was here. So, wherever there were friction spots, we 

had a huge capability. The conventional forces did it 

for a while, and the SOF kind of picked up on it. We 

would meet with their border police and their army 

that was operating there, and we would try to operate 

in a way that—and we had a one-mile exclusionary 

zone that we imposed on ourselves that you had to get 

permission to operate inside or fire anything inside 

that. But, yeah, there was a huge, huge effort there. 

The long-term thing was what we talked about. If you 

could have two sovereign bordering countries, then 

you’d respect each other’s border and control their 

own people inside that and prevent people that would 

want to take advantage of that border. That was the 

long-term strategic goal. So, the operational capability 

was to build it in. The operational goal was to build 

this indigenous capability.

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of progress was made on that indigenous 

capability during your tour?
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BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: It always got back to money. So, the border police were 

part of the Ministry of Interior. Training the police was the 

Germans’ responsibility. There was an American contract 

with DynCorp that did some of that, and we hooked up 

with that. The Germans would turn out beat cops in a vest, 

and what they were dealing with was paramilitary stuff. 

They were outgunned, you know? You can’t put a beat 

cop out in some village where they’re up against people 

with AKs and that kind of stuff. So, in between what the 

Germans were teaching them at a very slow rate and what 

we signed up to—it depended, again, on the regional 

commander and where he needed the help. We had 

certain prohibitions on how we could equip them. There 

were certain things that we could do to help them and 

it was always turned over to this legitimizing the Afghan 

authority there. So, the first thing we had to straddle was 

the difference between the minister of defense and what 

he needed and the minister of interior, who was really 

responsible. And then there were also indigenous security 

forces that were under the OGA that were up in these 

checkpoints that they put up after they figured out the 

Taliban were in certain areas around Waziristan where 

there was a lot of cross-border movement. They trained 

and equipped their own indigenous force that they stuck 

up there and around Khowst and all. So, you had that, 

and they were getting paid by the OGA, and then you 

had conventional U.S. forces and then Special Operations 

Forces all operating up in there. So, the first thing we had 

to do is we had to come up with a framework on how 

could it work.

There are certain border checkpoints, border-crossing 

points and border checkpoints, and I think we built two 

border—the existing border-crossing points—we tried to 

start there with building a capability of just monitoring 

what was coming across and, eventually, to attack them. 

And then in between that, it ran the gamut, but the plan 

was to have all this kind of indigenous capability that 

was kind of monitoring things and then stopping it that 

was a more lethal capability to deal with things. And that 

was probably still going to be combined, not just Afghan. 

So, we made a little progress. I remember the first plan 

that came in. CJTF came in, you know, they needed a 

thousand gabazillion dollars—you know, millions and 

millions of dollars to build this capability, and it was just 

before its time, and it wasn’t the priority. So, we made do 

with what we had, and we kind of time phased it, and in 

certain areas it was more of an issue, depending on what 

the challenge of that border was. That’s the capability 

we had.

DR. KOONTZ: From your perspective as a DCG of CJTF-76 ... 

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: That’s a lot of letters!
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DR. KOONTZ: How would you describe the way that CJTF-76’s 

headquarters interacted with CJSOTF?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: They were subordinate headquarters. The CJSOTF answered 

to the commanding general of CJTF-76.

DR. KOONTZ: That wasn’t always the case, was it?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Under CJTF-180, I think it was. I think at one time they 

were separate, and then I think they—the three-star 

headquarters was not in Kabul. General [Dan K.] McNeill 

left, and then they established General Barno. They had a 

two-star headquarters, and then the three-star billet went to 

Kabul. That was always at Bagram. So, during that window 

between, when they had a CJTF-76, it might have been the 

CJSOTF for a short amount of time that answered to CFCAlpha. But I don’t think so. In the early days, they operated 

directly under CENTCOM. There was a move afoot when 

we were there to have them as kind of a theater reserve, 

to have them working for SOCCENT [Special Operations 

Component, U.S. Central Command] and then kind of 

tasked us based on what we needed, and we had to come 

up with kind of a quick reaction capability that could be 

kind of theaterwide. But they wanted, in earnest, to change 

the command relationship, and our view was to say, “It’s 

not broken. What are you trying to fix?” There’s always 

the petty, parochial things, you know? “You’re not given 

enough helicopters. You don’t know how to use this to best 

advantage.” Quite candidly, the environment matured the 

conventional force to the point where it can operate in a way 

that was very complementary. There were a lot of blurred 

lines. There were a lot of the conventional forces doing 

FID, so that really left kind of the UW, the unconventional 

warfare stuff, for the CJSOTF, and a lot of times, they were 

more interested in doing direct-action stuff than doing UW 

or FID. I think you had to appreciate all that stuff. You had 

to get beyond “mine, mine, mine, mine, mine,” like we’re 

raised to be. You know, I was a BCT commander. I had a 

BCT. It was “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. Where’s my 

slice? You can’t take my slice from me.” So, I think that 

really effective leaders got well beyond that, and I’m talking 

conventional and unconventional leaders that got beyond 

it—the very best. 

DR. KOONTZ: Comparing the Iraqi theater of operations to the Afghan 

theater of operations, did you ever get the impression 

that OEF was of secondary importance or secondary 

urgency?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: No. You know, we didn’t compare ourselves to that. We 

had resources. We had what we needed to accomplish 

the mission. When we didn’t, CENTCOM was very, very 

good. General [John P.] Abizaid came in frequently, at 

least once a month. We had VTCs with General [USMC 
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Lt. Gen. John F.] Sattler, the J-3. We had weekly VTCs 

with the Army Staff. About the time, on the verge of 

the presidential election, I thought there was a missed 

opportunity in terms of information operations in that, 

if you remember, that was the year of our presidential 

election, and obviously, al Qaeda was paying attention to 

that. AMZ [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] was raising hell in 

Iraq, and here we were, the first election in the 5,000-year 

history of Afghanistan, I thought it could have played 

more. It was a huge success. No, I never—I mean, we got 

what we needed. Could we have got more? I guess so, but 

our shortcomings were never the result of not getting the 

resources we asked for and needed or attention from the 

senior leadership.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You go over; you do your year’s tour; and you 

then get replaced by SETAF to take over CJTF-76. Tell 

me about the transition period between the headquarters 

elements.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I think it was very thoughtful. You know, they had—

EUCOM [U.S. European Command] decided they want 

to do an exercise before. This is SETAF. They had never 

done anything like this, and so there was some concern. 

They had to build a headquarters—a pretty huge task. 

It wasn’t a division headquarters, you know, to start, 

so they had to build their headquarters to have the 

capability, and then they had to get the JMD on top of 

that. So, there were two phases. There’s a joint manning 

document for CJTF-76, but the base elements was a 

division headquarters at that time. It was us, the 82d, 

10th Mountain, 101st. Those are the base units. So, you 

know, you had a certain team put together. They had 

to put a team together to get up there. So, EUCOM did 

an exercise and then—they actually did two. They did 

kind of a pre-MRX, and then they did an MRX. My view 

of it is they came in; they were thoughtfully organized; 

the commander had thought pretty hard about it; they 

had published a monograph on insurgencies. You know, 

I thought the transition was pretty good. I think there 

was an appreciation for what we were trying to do. I 

think there were different challenges. They came in right 

before the spring offensive, so here you go again, you 

know? But they had the parliamentary elections, and 

they had set the conditions for successful parliamentary 

elections. General Barno straddled that transition, 

which I think was important, so there couldn’t be any 

lapses in how a new unit came in. Now, you know, they 

took a different approach to it on some things than 

we did. It’s unfair of me to look back on what they did 

and be pejorative about it, but they operated a little bit 

differently. I think they learned some things. I think 

they made some progress. But the actual transition, I 

thought, went well.
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DR. KOONTZ: Did you pass on any kind of advice or guidance or 

anything like that on to their commanders as you guys 

transitioned through?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Yeah, absolutely—what worked for us, what didn’t work. 

A lot of it was so new to us. We learned these lessons, and 

we thought they were just really important, and we passed 

them on. There was a forum for that, all the way from how 

we operated; what we did in terms of our battle rhythm; 

and the way the battle space was organized; all the way 

down to different tactics, techniques, and procedures, 

both at the tactical and at the operational level—you 

know, how you interacted with CFC-Alpha and those 

kinds of things. And we had an advantage. We had fortysome-odd—I think it started at forty-one; it might have 

been more—25th ID soldiers up in CFC-Alpha. I mean, 

General Barno was trying to stand that organization up. 

He came early on. We didn’t fully deploy our division, 

so we pulled forty-two people and offered them to be 

part of their initial JMD. I think that helped in terms of 

communication. But, you know, in terms of going over 

everything, you know, we gave them—I don’t know if we 

have time for that; I have to go back to all my notes to give 

you the specifics. There’s also the personal connection, 

too. We knew a lot of the guys coming in, and we had 

served with them on previous assignments.

DR. KOONTZ: Looking back on your tour, sir, what would you point 

to as the greatest challenge that you faced; and then, 

alternately, what was the greatest success of the task 

force?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: I think the greatest challenge we faced was understanding 

and appreciating the environment. And I think our 

greatest success was understanding and appreciating the 

environment and operating in a way that allowed for the 

election and the inauguration of a president. Because of my 

age, a lot of things have dulled over time, although it looks 

like I’m probably going back in May, I still, I remember 

telling people, “In my twenty-eight years of military 

service, rarely do you get the opportunity to see kind of 

the fruits of your labor as a soldier and as an organization,” 

and, you know, we were able to see progress. We were able 

to see our efforts turn into things that were good for the 

Afghan people, that helped them to stabilize the region—

geopolitical, all the way down. I mean, we saw our efforts 

to improve relationships between Afghanistan and 

Pakistan, as fragile as those are. You could see measurable 

improvements in all those areas, and rarely do you get the 

opportunity to say that. I mean, even now, with all the 

baying about, right around the spring offensive and the 

concern over there—and it’s probably legitimate—we’re 

still well beyond, I think, where a lot of people would have 

ever suspected we would have been. So, that’s probably the 
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biggest thing. And I think there’re a lot of really powerful 

things that are going to help the Army in the long term. 

That’s a very unstructured, unconventional, demanding 

environment in every way you look at it, whether it’s the 

terrain, the people, the resources. The challenges that—

you know, we have thinking leaders that are unafraid to 

go into that thing to try to figure it out, and they’re not 

willing to just be satisfied with movement to contacts. 

They really have an appreciation for the battle space and 

how all these things—you know, the DIME—and how it 

all works.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I think I have something like two minutes left on 

my appointment. How do you want to end this, sir?

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about it. 

Chris, I really think this is a great program, and I’m glad 

you take the time to do it.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir. On behalf of the Center, I want to thank 

you for taking the time to do this.

BRIG. GEN. CHAMPOUX: Okay.

Col. Phillip Bookert (USAR, Ret.) served as the director of the civil-military affairs section 

(CJ-9) of Combined Joint Task Force-76 before assuming command of Combined Task Force 

Longhorn in Regional Command West. Colonel Bookert describes his notification for callup to active duty and preparations for deployment at Fort Sill and Fort Benning. He explains 

how he became the chief of the CJ-9 section at Combined Joint Task Force-76 headquarters in 

Bagram, how he integrated civil-military operations into combat planning, and how he overcame the tension of being a Reserve officer in an active Army unit. Colonel Bookert discusses 

civil-military affairs and projects, morale, the employment of provincial reconstruction teams, 

and the conflict between Ismail Khan and Amanullah Khan around Shindand in western 

Afghanistan. He describes the creation of Combined Task Force Longhorn, working with 

the Afghan National Army, and preparations for the transfer of Regional Command West to 

NATO control as well as the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program, the 

effects of narcotics in western Afghanistan, the press, and humanitarian assistance. 

DR. KOONTZ: This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of 

Military History. Today is the ninth of May 2007. Dr. Lisa 

Mundey is also present, and we are interviewing Col. 

Phillip Bookert about his tour of duty as the commanding 

officer of Combined Task Force Longhorn in Regional 

Command West in Afghanistan. First of all, sir, are you 

sitting for this interview voluntarily?

COL. BOOKERT: Yes.
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DR. KOONTZ: And do you have any reservations with Army or public 

researchers using this material, as long as you’re cited 

correctly?

COL. BOOKERT: No.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, thank you, sir. What I’d like to do to start off is 

to have you briefly discuss your civilian life. What were 

you doing before you got called up to Afghanistan?

COL. BOOKERT: I worked at that time for the University of Texas, the Center 

for Agile Technology, which is an applied research center. 

I was an assistant director there. Let’s see ... I received 

notification in February 2004 that I was being activated for 

OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom], with no indication 

of final assignment.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. How did you get into the Army Reserve? I should 

have asked that one first.

COL. BOOKERT: I was active duty for eleven years and left active duty and 

went to grad school. I joined the Army Reserve after I 

completed my degree.

DR. KOONTZ: And your eleven years in the active force—what was your 

branch, and what did you do?

COL. BOOKERT: Field artillery. I was a fire direction officer; battery executive 

officer; nuclear weapons officer—and all of this was in an 

8-inch battalion, a 203-mm. battalion—and I was a battery 

commander, as well. Those four assignments all were in 

Augsburg, Germany. The first three were in 1st Battalion, 

30th Field Artillery. The last one was in A Battery, 1st 

Battalion, 36th Field Artillery. They were part of the 17th 

Field Artillery Brigade, and that was 1978 to 1981.

DR. KOONTZ: You got called up in February of 2004.

COL. BOOKERT: Actually, I received orders in February. I received notification and actually went on active duty in April of 2004.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Active duty in April and, as you said, you basically 

had orders pending. You didn’t have a direct assignment 

at that time?

COL. BOOKERT: Right. I actually got a mailgram. It looks like junk mail, and 

you open it, and it really is just a synopsis of the orders that 

you get in the mail a couple of days later, but it said: “Report 

to Fort Sill no later than ...”—I don’t remember the date, 

but it was some time in May—“for further assignment to 

OEF.”

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. All right, take us to Fort Sill. What happens to you 

when you get there?
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COL. BOOKERT: First, they didn’t know an O-6 [colonel] was coming on 

post. So I arrived, and the plan at that time was to give 

me a refresher of the field artillery advanced course, 

which I quickly informed them that they were not going 

to do that. And I took their curriculum, gave them some 

suggestions of what I wanted to know, which was “What 

are the latest advancements in field artillery over the last 

ten years?” I also requested some joint staff information, 

which they could not provide. So, we spent—because I 

was there, and a lieutenant colonel in field artillery, as well 

as a major—all three of us were out there at the same time, 

so we basically reviewed advancements in weapons and 

ammunition for the last ten years in field artillery.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, you’re expecting at this point in time that 

you’re going to be activated and do field artillery 

duties?

COL. BOOKERT: I didn’t think I would be doing field artillery duties because, at the O-6 level, field artillerymen are division artillery commanders, so I knew it would be some type of 

staff job. I didn’t know what kind of staff job, and I figured 

it would be a Joint Staff.

DR. KOONTZ: Other than your refresher courses, what kind of training 

or what kind of preparations did you do at Fort Sill?

COL. BOOKERT: Additional basic training types of things—weapons 

training, nuclear/biological/chemical training. That’s 

pretty much it. I mean, it was just really the basic kinds 

of training that soldiers need. No formal PT [physical 

training], but I did a lot of that, as well.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you take any kind of preparation to acclimate 

yourself with Afghanistan or current operations there?

COL. BOOKERT: Actually, I did. I was really lucky, because I was talking to a 

neighbor who is a member of our church. He and his wife 

spent three years in Pakistan, and when I told him where I 

was going, when I told him I was going to Afghanistan, he 

gave me homework. He gave me five books to read on the 

culture and religion, and I would say that’s probably the 

best preparation I could have done, knowing, in hindsight, 

the job I ended up doing.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. When do you find out—or, let me ask this question: 

What happens to you after Fort Sill? Where did you go 

after you finished your basic and refresher training?

COL. BOOKERT: Well, I actually found out where I was going before I left 

Fort Sill. I don’t often use my rank to find things out, but I 

had to. I ended up calling DA [Department of the Army], 

an assignments officer, and pretty much raised Cain and let 

her know that “You know, we’ve got people being deployed, 
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and we need to know what’s going on so we can let family 

know where we’re going,” because there were other folks 

there, quite a few military intelligence folks, and their 

orders said “OEF or OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom],” 

and there’s a great deal of apprehension among the families 

about where you go and what you’re doing. So, I called and 

was able to get my assignment to—all they could tell me 

was Afghanistan and Kabul.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Do you remember approximately when that was?

COL. BOOKERT: That would have been approximately June first to June fifth, 

somewhere in that time frame because I left Fort Sill and 

went to Fort Benning. At Fort Benning, you get to do the 

same thing again, and take whatever shots you missed. 

Again, you go through, you know, your nuclear/chemical/

biological training; and again, through your weapons 

training, not because we needed it but, as I understand 

it, the commander at Fort Benning thought that if he was 

going to certify soldiers that are ready to go, ready to be 

deployed to wherever, he wanted to be sure that they were, 

and he wanted them trained on his post. So, it wasn’t just 

me. It was everybody who went there that received the 

same training again. Nothing new happened. I had already 

done it all at Fort Sill.

DR. KOONTZ: So, you know that you’re going to Afghanistan, and you 

know you’re going to Kabul. Had they given you any kind 

of notification as to what organization you were going to 

be serving in there?

COL. BOOKERT: Well, before I left I did because you actually get orders at 

that point, which had a line number which I couldn’t interpret. I still knew I was going to somewhere in Afghanistan 

and Kabul. Actually, all three of us had orders to the same 

location. Actually, I did figure it out. I was supposed to be 

the operations officer in Kabul, and I don’t know why I can’t 

remember the command, but it was the higher command 

than CJTF-76 [Combined Joint Task Force-76].

DR. KOONTZ: And evidently, that changes somewhere along the way?

COL. BOOKERT: [Laughs.] Oh, it changed all right! You probably know how 

you get there, but you fly from Atlanta to Frankfurt, and 

then a direct flight into Bagram. At Bagram, there is a CW-4 

[chief warrant officer 4] who worked in the personnel shop, 

who actually met all incoming folks, and he would see you 

to your different units. At that time, CJTF-76 was short one 

O-6 and I was an O-6, and he said, “You two are going to 

Kabul. Sir, come with me.” And that’s how it happened. So, 

I was stolen by the S-1 [staff officer for personnel] from the 

25th [Infantry] Division.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Take us to Kabul. What happens there?
Colonel Bookert at his command post in Herat

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COL. BOOKERT: I never get to Kabul. That’s the point [laughs]. I get to 

go about, you know, quarter of a mile down the road to 

Headquarters, CJTF-76, and the position for which they 

wanted me had been reorganized out of existence while 

I was in the air. The position he wanted me to fill was 

in the operations shop. Of course, the CJ-3 [staff officer 

for operations] was a lieutenant colonel, and there was 

absolutely no way he would want a colonel in his shop, 

and there was a position in the CJ-9, which was a civilmilitary officer’s slot. The incumbent was a major, and 

he was PCSing [making a permanent change of station 

transfer], and I was put in that slot. And I’ll tell you, I 

had absolutely no background in civil-military operations 

[CMO] at all.

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of activities were you doing as the CJ-9?

COL. BOOKERT: A CJ-9? Primary responsibility was advising the commander, 

Maj. Gen. [Eric T.] Olson, and his brigade commanders 

and all of his O-6 commanders on how to use civil-military 

operations to attain tactical and strategic objectives. That 

might sound a little funny coming from someone who 

didn’t know what that was, but a lot of it’s just common 
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sense. You don’t have to kill people all the time to get them 

to do what you want to do. That’s really what it’s about, and 

that required, other than, you know, those five books I read 

to get a lot of background on that, just a lot of common 

sense and a lot of reading about civil-military operations. 

There was already a section there. They had a great deal of 

documentation about civil-military operations, and I read 

them all that week. So, I spent a lot of time to try to figure 

out what it was I should be doing, and then talking to, at 

least, my direct report, which was at that time Brig. Gen. 

(Promotable) [Charles H.] Jacoby, and he sort of gave me, 

really, the objectives of what the commander wanted. So, 

from that point, I was able to at least develop programs that 

would help the division achieve his objectives.

DR. KOONTZ: Can you give us some specific examples of the kinds of 

things that General Jacoby was telling you, insofar as the 

commander’s intent for CJTF-76?

COL. BOOKERT: Sure. They used a term which I don’t like—and you can say 

that, and I still don’t like it, but—“win the hearts and minds 

of the Afghans,” and my opinion, and I stated this, was “I 

don’t care about their hearts and minds. I want them to trust 

me, and I want them to understand that if we say we’re going 

to do something, we do it.” I think that was more important 

than winning their hearts and minds, but that was number 

one. Number two was how do we win over the population 

locally? And then, how do we build that up to provincial 

level, and then from provincial level to national? Another 

one was how do we involve the education system, meaning 

the colleges, in helping us achieve those objectives? And 

then, to prepare for contingencies, humanitarian assistance 

contingencies.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You step into this job. As you say, it’s a great 

deal of it’s common sense, and you’ve done all your 

homework. How was it that you tried to craft policies or 

procedures that would enable the commander’s intent?

COL. BOOKERT: Okay. Thank goodness I had a good staff. I had folks who 

had been doing this, and I had some NCOs who had been 

doing this for five to ten years. I had really one good captain 

who had been doing it for about five years. So, I had some 

good talent to draw on. So, let’s skip up to trust. There are 

several resources we had, and one is I was never short of 

funds. One thing we would always do—one of the things I 

implemented was whenever we went through an area with 

a combat operation, you follow it up with either a medical 

team or—we created what we called these humanitarian 

(that’s not the word I want to use, but I’ll use it for now, and 

I’ll describe what that means, but) package of humanitarian 

aid or assistance, and that could be, depending on where 

you were and the time of year, clothing. It could be pioneer 

tools, shovels—you know, that kind of stuff, to build things. 
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As well as some clothing, pioneer tools, sometimes small 

stoves that you could burn wood, wood-burning stoves. So, 

as you can imagine, we’re very good at destroying things 

and we are very bad at rebuilding things, but they are very 

good at that, and they really appreciate being given things 

that they can use. They really don’t—yes, you can give them 

food. That lasts as long as the food lasts. But, when you give 

them these other kinds of things, that has more of a lasting 

effect and reminds them that you were there. So, we would 

follow the combat operation or the civil-military operation 

with a medical operation, and sometimes we would go into 

areas and just do that before combat operations occurred.

We got the University of Kabul involved. Actually, I just 

visited—we contacted the dean of students, and I proposed 

to him a collaboration between our JAG [judge advocate 

general] and some of their prelaw students, and the intent 

was to get them to learn the law and learn how to practice 

law operating with our JAGs. And, really, it was sort of 

dual: to educate our JAG on Afghan law, and educate them 

somewhat on how our judicial system works, because the 

judicial system is—was, probably still is—in shambles, so 

it was really try to educate them on what one should look 

like.

As simple as this sounds, a lot of this was just participating 

in staff meetings. Now, you can imagine when there’s a twostar general, two one-star generals, and four or five O-6s, two 

of which are combat brigade commanders, majors just don’t 

speak. Colonels don’t listen to majors, but they’ll listen to 

colonels. A lot of that was just getting these commanders to 

think about using civil-military ops to achieve an objective 

because, like I said, what we do well is we do combat 

operations very well. We don’t do civil-military operations 

very well. So, just by participating in these meetings and 

speaking up and telling them the resources that we had 

available, the resources that the provincial reconstruction 

teams [PRTs] had available, it changed the thought process 

of commanders from just sending in an infantry platoon to 

maybe sending in a PRT that’s available to them, or “Let’s 

do a medical action.”

Oh, I forgot one other key point. Another one is assessments. 

Any time any unit goes through a new area, they would 

do what is called an area assessment, for several reasons. 

One is to determine whether or not that area or village 

supported enemy operations. So, you go through a village, 

and if you see a lack of fighting-age men—there’s a problem 

there if they’re not in the fields. If they disappear, then that’s 

an indicator. You look for, you know, the normal things you 

would expect in any neighborhood. You look for the kids 

out, look for the women out working, and if that’s missing, 

then there are some problems there. So, they do a village 

assessment, as well. Part of that is also assessing the needs 
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of that community. Do they have fresh drinking water? 

What’s the medical situation there? That can drive, or did 

drive, what civil-military operations we would do in an 

area. So, one of the major problems was unclean drinking 

water. Wells are cheap, and we probably—I think in my 

tenure, in just the two and a half or three months I was 

the CMO or CJ-9, we probably dug over five hundred wells 

because they’re cheap and it’s easy to do that. That would 

also key us—if it was a friendly village and they looked like 

they were going to support us—that would key us to send 

other resources there, like a MEDCAP [medical civil action 

program], or have a PRT visit, as well. 

DR. KOONTZ: You said you were only there for about three months. 

How effective was CJTF-76, during your three months 

as the CJ-9, in winning over the hearts and minds or 

winning the trust of the Afghan people?

COL. BOOKERT: Wow! That’s a tough question [laughs]. We got better at it, 

and the way I can assess that is the first month I was there, 

when I spoke up in the staff call, you could hear a pin drop. It 

was like “Who is he, and why is he talking about something 

that’s not combat operations?” There’s some other thing I 

need to talk about, too. At the end of the three months, when 

brigade commanders would brief their operations, part of 

that briefing was civil-military operations. That was never 

the fact before, and the fact that it was directly integrated 

into the operations led me to think that we were on the 

road to success at the CJ-9 in integrating civil-military 

operations more effectively in the combat operations. And 

that actually became a requirement later on, that whenever 

a commander briefed at the monthly commanders’ 

conference, you had to brief that. And it was an integral 

part of their operations, so it wasn’t—you know—Month 

2 was “Here’s what my combat guys are doing. Here’s what 

we’re doing in civil-military operations,” and then it was 

“Here’s how we integrated that, and here’s the way we do 

that.” So, the commanders actually started thinking about 

it and using those PRTs more effectively. 

One of the things that—another thing we did that I think 

was very critical to CJTF-76’s success, and not just -76’s but, 

you know, the entire command in Afghanistan—was when 

the 25th arrived, and when I arrived, we had many different 

organizations trying to do reconstruction and development 

activities all over Afghanistan, and there was a lot of overlap 

among these organizations. We had ... you know, of course, 

the UN was there; and then we had Germany; you know, 

just tons of folks that were there trying to do different 

things. We established a group. We actually brought them 

all together, and once a week they would come to Bagram, 

and we would meet. We put, really, some structure and 

discipline in who was doing what, when, and where, to 

the point where we would assign—you know, the group 
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collectively would assign priorities to areas of the country 

and projects within those areas, and then the organizations, 

these civil organizations, could select what they wanted to 

do based on their national priorities. That was huge, and it 

saved a great deal of money among the organizations. I say 

“saved money.” It saved money by eliminating a lot of the 

duplication.

The first thing—and one of the reasons we came up with 

that is, we found out that Japan and the U.S. were slated to 

do the same road in RC [Regional Command] East, and 

that’s very expensive. They were already about to contract 

that, and we figured that out: “No, get back with the UN, 

and then you guys can build another road.” So, a lot of 

that coordination would happen at -76 as a result of our 

initiative. That was very successful, because it went from 

about, initially, about ten people attending that meeting to 

... well, we exceeded the capacity of the conference room, 

which was forty, and that’s just within three months. So, that 

was very successful. Was that because I was there? Partially, 

because an O-6 can get people to come to meetings. Mostly, 

this was something the staff wanted to do, and we just were 

never able to get the appropriate people to attend or get the 

deputy commanding general, General Jacoby, to agree to 

doing that. You know, some things you can do just because 

you’re an O-6, unfortunately. But that worked very well.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. How would you describe the command climate 

within the CJTF-76 headquarters at Bagram?

COL. BOOKERT: First, it was a joint and combined headquarters. We had, 

you know, folks from other countries. Also, it had people 

from all of the U.S. services, so you had Air Force, Marines, 

Army, Navy folks there, as well. There were a lot of people 

who worked very hard. There were some people who 

barely worked at all. We ran what’s called a joint operations 

center. The command ran a joint operations center, and 

soldiers were assigned to that for six months, and for six 

months they worked twelve-hour shifts every day, and the 

only time you’re not there is if you’re ill. Their morale was 

probably medium to low. I mean, it’s such a strain because 

their roles were to represent their commands out in the 

field doing combat operations, but they were there all the 

time. I mean, they were always there. They knew at all times 

what was going on, and then at the end of each twelve-hour 

shift, they would have to brief the commander on what 

was going on and any significant activities. The operations 

section, the CJ-3, I’d say morale was pretty high because 

there aren’t a whole lot of times that staff officers actually 

get to affect what’s going on in the battle, and they got to 

plan all of that and implement it. So, I would say, overall, it 

was probably medium to high. You could—I mean, there’s 

always 10 percent who will just say, “It was absolutely awful,” 

and for some people, it isn’t. When you think about MPs 
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[military police], the guys guarding the prisoners there—

very professional folks but, you know, they had to deal with 

some awful conditions because they dealt with prisoners all 

the time and there was no rotation. They came in, they were 

assigned prison duty, and they stayed there the entire time, 

and there’s a heavy psychological toll that it takes on those 

folks. Then you have units who had to pull patrols around 

the air base. Not the most exciting thing to do, but they 

did it, and I’d say their morale, for the most part, was high. 

They at least got to leave the compound. The vast majority 

of people on that compound on Bagram Air Base never left, 

so if you can imagine being in an area—well, it’s probably 

not much bigger than—well, it’s probably maybe three 

times larger than Fort McNair, being inside something like 

that, and you never get to leave for a year, other than when 

you go home for vacation or, if you’re lucky enough, to get 

a full day of R&R. So, for a lot of folks that was difficult. I 

would say, personally, it was medium to high.

DR. KOONTZ: And you mentioned the combined and joint nature of the 

headquarters. Did you have any foreign or joint elements 

in your section?

COL. BOOKERT: In my section, I did not. All of mine were U.S. Army, and 

a mixture of active duty and reservists. Most were active 

duty.

DR. KOONTZ: And this is probably as good a time as any to ask the 

loaded question. Did you have any problems as a reservist 

coming in?

COL. BOOKERT: Of course! It was actually very interesting because the great 

point came about three, four weeks after I was there. One 

of my NCOs—when you schedule a mission, it goes into an 

operations center, and then it gets on the list of things that’s 

supposed to happen. Well, he canceled it, and it didn’t go 

through the right process, the formal process, of canceling 

so they could remove that. So, it got briefed. It didn’t happen. 

Now they’ve got to figure out why it didn’t happen, and the 

lieutenant colonel came in my section—my office was one 

room off to the side—and started screaming at my NCO, 

and I threw him out. From that point on, I think they forgot 

I was a reservist; or they realized it and started treating the 

section with more respect.

In that division, the CM section, civil-military section, was 

sort of a detail section. So, if the staff needed something 

planned, “Give it to the -9.” A good example was graves 

registration and dealing with dead Afghans. A huge problem. 

Within seventy-two hours, they have to be returned to their 

family and buried. So, if we killed an Afghan by accident, 

they had given that responsibility to the CJ-9, and that’s not 

where it lay. It actually lay with Headquarters Company. 

They actually have a graves registration section, and they 
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were supposed to handle that. There was a major—the 

operations officer was an O-5 [lieutenant colonel]—and he 

said, “You guys are going to do this.” Over time, as I was 

going through the things we were doing, I saw that and I 

said, “We’re not going to do that anymore,” and went to the 

operations officer and said, “Here’s who should be doing 

it. We’re not doing it anymore.” I was doing those kinds of 

things that I should do, and they realized that I knew we 

shouldn’t be doing that. I think they sort of realized that, 

regardless of me being a reservist, it was not our issue.

So, well, yeah, I mean, I had to overcome that as well. I never 

felt that way from the command—from the two deputy 

commanders, the chief of staff, or from the commander, 

General Olson. I think one way to explain that ... Lieutenant 

General [James R.] Helmly visited three times while I was 

on the staff, and he would always want to meet and talk to 

reservists. I was never, ever put on the list. The third time, 

I finally went to the chief of staff, and I said, “Why do I 

never get to talk to this guy?” He goes, “Oh, yeah. You are 

a reservist, aren’t you?” I was also ordered to put on a 25th 

Division patch, which was not a problem. Reservists don’t 

have to do that, but I did, anyway, and that, I think, went a 

long way to being assimilated into the division and people 

not realizing I was a reservist.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. A while ago, you had mentioned the integration 

of—you know, after a combat operation, you followed 

it up with a MEDCAP [medical civil action program], 

or you followed that up with humanitarian assistance, 

something like that. Did you learn anything about PRT 

work as your role in CJ-9 that you would use later?

COL. BOOKERT: There was actually a civil-military brigade assigned to 

CJTF-76, and their role was to organize and field these 

PRTs whenever you needed a new one, as well as rotate 

replacements in for those. So, PRTs would be replaced, really, 

in two parts. We would replace the civil-military operations 

section of the PRT, and then we would replace the security 

force. The security force was normally an infantry platoon, 

and that infantry platoon was only used for protection of 

the PRT in the conduct of its civil-military operations. As 

the CJ-9, I had command oversight into PRT operations, 

so I had to learn very quickly what they should be doing, 

what they were doing, and then develop recommendations 

to the command on how we might want to use them or get 

them different missions.

So, yes, because we had oversight, I had staff responsibility 

for making sure that they actually had all of the resources 

they needed. A good example is, when you put a new PRT, 

typically they would go into an area, living in tents, while 

we were constructing a PRT compound, which is a fortified 

site. I had the staff oversight in tracking the involvement 
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of the different sections. We had a role in making sure that 

happened. Of course, the logistics section, the operations 

section, getting the—and personnel—so, general oversight 

of making sure everything was happening.

DR. KOONTZ: From your position of command oversight, how would 

you evaluate the way PRTs were operating in Afghanistan 

at that time?

COL. BOOKERT: I think very well, and I think we broke the code. It wasn’t 

my idea, and I don’t recall whose idea PRTs were, but 

the fact that you would put a very small unit—a large 

PRT would be about ninety, eighty soldiers with three 

civilians—three? Yeah, three civilians—Department 

of State, Department of Agriculture, and USAID [U.S. 

Agency for International Development]. The fact that 

you would put that sized unit typically in the capital of 

a province had a huge effect on, one, the population, 

definitely on the civilians; and, then, definitely on the 

government structure there. One, it was a confidence 

builder in the government in that we were supporting 

what they were trying to do there; two, the areas around 

PRTs were considered very safe, and if you look at PRTs, 

we typically would build them away from the main 

population, but growth would start moving out toward 

the PRTs. So, we built new home structures. Compounds 

were being built, and they would start migrating to it, in 

the direction of the PRT because there was this feeling of 

security. And not only that.

One of the PRT’s main missions was to do an assessment 

of the province, and they started with the governor, 

trying to assess his ability to govern, and all of the 

things that affect his ability to govern. Then they would 

get recommendations from him of which parts of the 

province to travel to by priority. And then, these PRT 

commanders would do assessment missions, and their 

responsibility was to travel the entire province, and they 

did that. There were some places I recall in RC West ... 

the Herat PRT went on a mission within—they had to 

go about eleven kilometers from the Iranian border, and 

they rolled into town, and one of the questions that they 

were asked was “You mean the Soviets are gone?” They 

didn’t know that the U.S. was there. I mean, they had no 

radios. They had no television satellite dish. I mean, some 

of these places are very remote, and the fact that PRTs 

would do that and then follow that up with assistance 

of all kinds—you know, some of the things I mentioned 

before: medical, water, emergency support, support to 

their governor—that went a long way of gaining the trust 

of the population.

Now, I’ll go back to something as simple as a well. One of 

the major complaints was dirty drinking water, and there 
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were a lot of illnesses that resulted from that. We got with 

the PRT commander or one of the soldiers. They had 

promised a well. The next thing you know, two weeks 

later or less, up comes some drilling rig with an Afghan 

crew, and they drilled a well, put a pump on it, and they 

have clean water. As minor as those things sound, that 

went a long way to gaining their trust because we would 

do what we told them we were going to do.

Another reason we were successful there was there really 

was no sense of infrastructure. I mean, if you think 

about—I’m going to get myself in trouble—Iraq, I mean, 

they really had an infrastructure already. They had roads, 

they had power, and these kinds of things. If you weren’t 

in a major city in Afghanistan, like Kabul, Herat, parts of 

Mazar-e Sharif, or Konduz, you didn’t have that. So, the 

small things that we could do with such a small budget as 

PRT has, and the things that USAID would do—roads, 

those kinds of things—went a long way to garnering 

support of the population. Like I said, I think the PRTs in 

Afghanistan broke the code because we had the military 

side, and then you had the three civilian advisers to that 

commander, and we were able to do quite a few things 

that helped them tremendously because they didn’t have 

the money; they didn’t have the knowledge; they didn’t 

even have an infrastructure; and anything that we could 

give meant a great deal.

DR. KOONTZ: The reason I asked that is because PRTs are going 

to be an important part of [Combined] Task Force 

Longhorn. So, you had experience, and you knew 

what they were supposed to do, in other words?

COL. BOOKERT: I already knew what they were supposed to do, and part 

of my responsibility, at some times, was to go out and 

evaluate PRT commanders. There were times when there 

were some things not going well, and General Jacoby 

said, “Go find out what’s going on.” I would visit, do an 

assessment, come back, and report to him.

DR. MUNDEY: At this time, are PRT commanders still civil affairs 

Army folks?

COL. BOOKERT: Yes, they are civil affairs, not—no, not always Army. 

During that time, we had Navy commanders and ... let’s 

see ...Navy, Marines, and Army. There were no Air Force 

PRT commanders, but those were the three. There was 

always a marine in command. There was always at least 

one Navy O-5 [commander] in command, and then the 

rest were Army.

DR. KOONTZ: Before we get you over to RC West and [Combined] 

Task Force Longhorn, is there anything else you want 

to tell us?
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COL. BOOKERT: I should probably give you some additional background 

about how I ended up being sent out there. I mean, I’ve 

been a staff officer before. I’ve been a secretary of General 

Staff—the worst job in the Army while you have it; the 

best job in the Army afterwards because you learn how 

general officers think. They don’t think like O-5s or O-4s 

[majors]. I mean, they really do have a different mental 

process they go through, and they expect different 

kinds of information. I had that job as a reservist at San 

Antonio. So, when I got to Bagram and ended up being 

on the staff, I knew how to write for a general officer, and 

one of the things that the previous CJ-9 never did was 

write summaries of what they were doing. That was really 

interesting about that command. They—at least, the staff 

officers—preferred to brief the command, brief the CG 

[commanding general] or the deputy commanders, instead 

of, you know, writing a one-page information paper and 

shooting it into them. And I don’t like briefings, anyway, 

and it’s much more efficient to do that. So, anything we 

did, and even recommendations—you know, I initiated 

it, at least for our section—we would document it. If we 

needed a decision: “Fine. I’ll put that recommendation 

in that and forward it to the chief of staff or to my boss, 

General Jacoby.” That was what I started doing.

Well, one day I get a call-up from the general: “Come see 

me.” He had asked about this initiative to start collaborating 

with the universities. The next thing I know, every time 

I said something—the things we started doing started to 

get a visibility at his level, and so then, of course, when we 

started doing—and I’ll say this. After you start doing well, 

you get more work and more work, and every three months, 

they had a commanders’ conference. The commanders’ 

conference was all of the brigade commanders and the PRT 

commanders. They would assemble at Bagram and give an 

update on what they were doing. Yeah, I think it was every 

three months because it was very difficult to get everybody 

there. So, you’ve got fifteen commanders—General Staff, 

primary staff of CJTF-76, higher command, headquarters, 

operations officer, sometimes the commander, sometimes 

the representative from the ambassador—no, every time 

the representative from the ambassador’s office—anyway, I 

think his direction was “Phil, we’re having a commanders’ 

conference. I want a good speaker. Here’s what I want to 

make sure we cover. Go do it and come back and tell me 

when we can do that and get it organized.” We did it, and 

it went very well, and I say that because right after that, 

he called me in and said, “You know, I like you. I like the 

way you think.” That was all he told me, and I went away 

and, you know, started doing the CJ-9 job again. What’s 

important about that is, I think, that he, also with General 

[Brig. Gen. Bernard S.] Champoux, who was the DCG 

[deputy commanding general] for operations, realized that 

I understood the kinds of information they expected and 
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gave it to them, so they didn’t have to come back. They 

never had to ask me what was going on in civil-military 

operations because I fed that to them, and I think they 

appreciated that.

So, the preceding activities that actually caused RC West 

to stand up was, in the west, there were two warlords. 

One was the governor of Herat, which was Ismail 

Khan. He was the governor of Herat Province. There’s 

a town thirty miles south of Herat called Shindand, and 

there was a warlord there whose name was Amanullah 

Khan—no relation. We didn’t know at the time—sixty 

miles? Yeah, sixty miles southwest of Herat was a border 

crossing, and I’m not quite sure which one, but one of 

them was collecting tolls there, and the other one wanted 

it. It was quite a bit of money they were extorting out of 

people bringing goods across the border of Herat into 

Afghanistan. There was a battle that erupted between 

the two militias, and don’t think like militias in the 

Philippines. These guys had tanks and they had field 

artillery, and they were using them.

General Olson sent 3/4 Cav, Task Force Saber, out to 

separate them. I should be able to tell you the month. I 

think that was August of 2004. So, they went out and they 

did a very good job of separating the forces, and the other 

thing they started doing was trying to basically remove a 

lot of that equipment from the battlefield. There were some 

issues with Task Force Saber. One, in that that was a very 

large area for a battalion-sized unit to just be able to cover. 

I mean, it was just a lot going on, and the battalion staff was 

not really organized, nor are lieutenant colonels trained, to 

deal with a lot of the things that they had to deal with. One, 

a very sophisticated governor—Ismail Khan was a very 

smart guy, very savvy—and then there were three other 

governments there that they had to deal with. There are 

civilian aid organizations you have to deal with, and it was 

very difficult for them to do all of that. General Champoux 

went on a visit—I think it was in late August—assessed the 

situation, came back, and said, “You know”—I’m assuming 

he said this, because when he told the CG that “This job’s 

too big for Task Force Saber,” then General Olson went out 

and visited and spent a couple of days out there, and came 

back, and I’ll relay the story to you as I was told it, because 

that’s what I was told by General Champoux and then later 

by General Jacoby—he said, “I need a brigade headquarters 

out there. Tell me why I shouldn’t send Phil out there to do 

this.” They all discussed it and talked about, you know, “What 

kind of combat forces can he have? What kind of support? 

Can we do this? Where will we get the staff?”—and this 

was on the plane coming back with General Champoux. He 

gets back and has the same discussion with General Jacoby, 

and I think General Jacoby’s words were “It’s a good idea.” 

Now, I don’t know this at that time.
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Also, a new civil-military brigade was rotating in and the 

old one was rotating out. Normally, the commander of the 

brigade is the CJ-9. All kinds of things are happening. They 

were thinking about all the kinds of other jobs they could 

move me into, and then I think September seventeenth—

General Jacoby told me, recounted this story to me. I’m 

pretty certain it was September seventeenth. I can go back 

to my diary because I was pretty jolted, but every day, every 

evening, at 1800 there was a battle update. I think it was 

1800. Yeah, 1900 was the JOC [joint operations center] 

update. It’s a battle update, and I began attending that as the 

CJ-9. That hadn’t happened before, but those were the kinds 

of things that ... you know, I had to get people thinking 

about civil-military operations, and that’s one way you do 

it. The battle update was the Secret/NOFORN [classified 

secret, not releasable to foreign nationals] update, so it was 

just U.S. commanders teleconferencing in and then briefing 

them on combat operations, or on their operations, for the 

day. So, I would always attend them.

On the seventeenth, I was, of course, attending that—I 

always did—and right at the end, if the CG has any 

comments, he makes final comments and he said, “Phil, 

wait,” and he kept the command sergeant major, the two 

DCGs, the chief of staff, and I think that’s all he kept. He 

explained to me, he said, “You know, we’ve got a command 

problem out in Herat in RC West. I want to stand up a 

brigade headquarters there before the elections, and I 

want you to do it. Come back and tell me when you can 

get a staff together and get out and be operational before 

the elections”—of course, this was September seventeenth, 

and the election’s on October ninth—“and here are your 

missions.” One was ensure peaceful presidential elections, 

successful presidential elections, within the west; confirm 

or—I’ve got these written down, so I’ll slow down if you 

need me to—confirm whether, or deny, the existence of 

Taliban in RC West; conduct security operations; conduct 

economic development—no, conduct development and 

reconstruction activities; establish a regional governor’s 

initiative; and the last thing was set conditions for 

assumption of RC West by NATO [North Atlantic Treaty 

Organization]. Up until this clash between the two militias, 

NATO had made overtures that they would assume 

responsibility for RC West. Of course, they started at the 

north, and their plan was to move counterclockwise and 

assume all of the command. After that clash, they pretty 

much said, “It’s a dead mission. We’re not doing that.” 

DR. KOONTZ: And up until that time, RC West had been fairly quiet?

COL. BOOKERT: Oh, yeah. The opinion among the intelligence section and, 

to some extent, OGA [other governmental agency] was that 

RC West was very quiet and nothing was happening—until 

that happened, of course. But then that’s militia activity, so 
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you really think, “Ah, it’s just two guys with a disagreement.” 

Not the case. We’ll get to that later, I’m sure. There was a lot 

happening out there.

DR. KOONTZ: Was RC West ... was it an actual regional command that 

had been stood up at that point in time and was just 

vacant, or was it created when Task Force Saber showed 

up, or was it created when your command comes in?

COL. BOOKERT: There was an area that was referred to as “RC West” in 

all of the other regional commands where they had a 

maneuver brigade or the PRTs reported to the maneuver 

brigade commander. In RC West, there were no combat 

forces, so it existed as an entity, or as an area. PRTs there 

reported to the civil-military brigade, but it did not exist 

as a command in RC West. It was an area. The other thing 

that General Olson sat down and said to me, he said, 

“You know, I soon expect 30 percent of your time, you’ll 

be doing combat operations,” so 30/70 percent combat to 

noncombat operations. That was his theory, and he said 

that he would leave Task Force Saber there. That would 

be my combat force, and, “We’ll get you support that you 

need, and the PRTs will report to your command,” and 

that was the end of that discussion. It wasn’t an “if you.” 

And it was sort of interesting. It wasn’t, “Phil, would you 

like to?” It was, “Phil, I’m sending you out there to be the 

commander of RC West.” That’s how it first started, and 

then all of those other things, and then he gave me the 

missions. So, that was on the seventeenth.

I probably had one fairly decent friend I talked to, who 

was Lt. Col. [Jennifer A.] Caruso, and her job was—I’ll 

think of that in a minute. Anyway, I’m going to digress a 

little bit, but probably July—yeah, about July 2005—the 

CG tasked Colonel Caruso to establish a task force of 

female soldiers, and it just happened to be all female 

officers in this case, to sort of assess how the command 

could improve the state of women in Afghanistan, and, of 

course, if you just listen to that, the whole thing sounds 

like a civil-military operation. She came and talked to 

me, so I supported that mission. In doing that and, you 

know, getting support to get the locations, she and I 

came to know each other fairly well, and that was the 

first person I told that I was going to be the commander 

of RC West. And, you know, I started thinking about 

“I’m going to be doing about 70 percent noncombat 

operations. I don’t need an infantry officer or an armor 

officer as my deputy, because”—and I’ll go back to what 

I said before, is, we destroy stuff very well. It’s very easy 

to do that. So, I asked her, and she ended up being the 

deputy commander. So, probably in the first time of the 

history of the Army, an adjutant general [AG] officer has 

been a deputy commander of [inaudible] brigade, but 

that’s what happened. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. All right, it’s the middle of September. You’ve been 

given your orders from General Olson to go out and stand 

up an actual command in Regional Command West; and 

you’ve been charged to support the elections, which are 

coming in less than four weeks; and you mentioned you 

had to build your staff completely from scratch. Okay, 

how did you do that?

COL. BOOKERT: That’s where Caruso comes in. She was an AG officer, 

been in the company for a couple years, and she knew 

everything. Let me back up. So, having said that, of 

course, he gave the mission to the operations officer—

“Support this”—and they had to develop the operations 

order and activation orders establishing this brigade. So, 

the implied mission is, one, figure out what your MTOE 

[modified table of organization and equipment] is. So, 

figure out what your MTOE is going to be, and then give 

that to the operations officer, and they’ll start tasking 

people to fill that. After I convinced the chief of staff that 

Colonel Caruso was the right person, she and I started 

working on building that into a, first, internal staff. So, we 

identified all of the staff positions I thought we needed. 

What I told her is “This is an expeditionary brigade. We 

are being activated for a specific purpose, and we will be 

deactivated once we achieve that purpose.” It probably 

took us maybe four or five days to sort of develop what 

we thought we needed, and we gave it to the operations 

section, and they started tasking different units to fill it 

out. And it wasn’t just units in Bagram. I had soldiers 

that came from the infantry brigade headquarters and 

from units, you know, out in the field; they came from 

logistics command on post; some came from the primary 

staff of CJTF-76. My operations officer was then–Lt. Col. 

Thomas [D.] Webb. They tasked for communications. I 

actually ended up with a section of civilians. It was a field 

communications package. They ended up being my first 

communications package, and then they somehow found 

a communications unit that was sitting idle in Kuwait. 

They requested it from the CENTCOM [U.S. Central 

Command] commander and got it. I mean, there was like 

a unit looking for a mission. And there was actually a team 

USAREUR [U.S. Army, Europe] that was sent that wasn’t 

needed. It came there, and they ended up being tasked to 

provide support. So, it was pulled out of, really, all parts 

of CJTF-76, except from Task Force Thunder, which was 

the artillery brigade, which was where I was supposed to 

get my fire support officer. I think, when we deployed, we 

probably deployed with a staff of about 80. I think it was 

81. I think the largest number we had was around 100, 

102. 

DR. KOONTZ: How long did it take you to get that staff kind of gelled 

together and operating—or “Did you?” might be a better 

question.
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COL. BOOKERT: Actually, yes, and I’ll get to that. That’s an interesting story, 

because Herat is about 350 miles from Bagram, and so you 

can imagine the difficulty of trying to deploy something 

like that. At that time, you didn’t drive the roads and units 

didn’t drive that route. I mean, that was a one-week—it’s 

actually a ten-day trip about the time we got there, and it 

took that long because we had to worry about attacks. We 

deployed using Air Force assets, C–130s, and I actually 

hit the ground—we were activated October fifth. I hit the 

ground October fourth, and we were located on the same 

compound as the Herat PRT. We ended up leasing new 

buildings and expanding that compound, and we were 

actually operating by October seventh.

Now, mission number one is get there before, and be 

operational before, the elections. So, let’s talk about the 

staff. It took about a month to get everybody out there. I’d 

been on, of course, a battalion staff; corps artillery staff; of 

course, one-star command staff in the Reserves; so I’ve got 

a lot of experience being a staff officer and really charged 

the staff officers. I said, “You know, we are pretty much 

unsupported here. If it’s going to get done, we have to do 

it ourselves.” The story I used was “If somebody attacked 

this compound, it would take air support thirty minutes 

to get here, and that’s if they use the fastest thing they have 

and they come straight here.” I said, “We have to do it 

ourselves. We don’t have time to figure out how we’re going 

to work together, and if you’ve got personal problems with 

somebody, work it out because we’re here.” We didn’t have 

a lot of space. I had, you know, four to six captains living to 

a room sometimes, and it was just crowded. Really, what I 

told them during this initial meeting when I gave them our 

mission was “I don’t have time for you to learn to get along 

with each other. If I have a problem, I will send you back to 

your unit, period, and that could be back to the battalion 

you came from, that brigade headquarters you came from 

in Kandahar, or back at Bagram, but I’m not going to deal 

with that because we don’t have time for that.” I found out 

later from Colonel Caruso, like several months later, that 

one statement, that “I’m going to send you back” did more 

to get that staff to gel than anything else.

The other thing was, my S-1 ... I can’t recall his name. It’s 

probably two weeks into this. We were having some issues 

with personnel in one of the PRTs, and something was 

about to happen to a soldier that was just not right, and it 

shouldn’t have happened. There had been a release from 

DA about that particular topic, and I had asked S-1 to look 

into that, and he gave some off-the-hip answer, and I said, 

“That’s not right. I just read something a month or so ago 

about this. You need to go look it up again, and here’s where 

you need to look.” And, you know, they realized that I had 

broader breadth of knowledge than they expected; and, 

again, good people make it easier. A lot of the commands, 
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when they were tasked with giving up people, sort of gave 

up their, you know, mid-/lower-tiered people, or so they 

thought. Those guys were great. I mean, I can only give 

direction, and the staff has to do it. Colonel Caruso did 

a very good job of—she was, I swear, a human resources 

and economic something, EEO [equal employment 

opportunity] officer. I can’t remember the acronym, but 

that was her title. She was very good at getting people 

to do what they needed to do, and she was very good at 

resolving conflicts and resolving issues. And Tom Webb 

was a fantastic planner and a great organizer. He was also 

a grad of—he got his master’s degree from CGSC [U.S. 

Army Command and General Staff College]. He was one 

of those planners that came out of there, a fantastic guy. He 

understood operations, understood planning, understood 

how to organize very well. It took probably about the end 

of November. So, probably about six to eight weeks, they 

were operating as if they had been together, you know, for 

months, or even up to a year. I mean, they actually did very 

well in a short amount of time.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir, we’ve got your staff built together, and we’ve 

got 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, there. What were the other 

elements in CTF [Combined Task Force] Longhorn?

COL. BOOKERT: I had two kandaks—a kandak is an Afghan infantry 

battalion—2/1 Kandak and 1/1 Kandak—and then the two 

PRTs, the Herat PRT and the Farah PRT.

DR. MUNDEY: Do you know who the PRT commanders were at that 

time? Do you remember?

COL. BOOKERT: The Herat PRT was Lt. Col. Andy Senta-Pinter. The Farah 

PRT commander was a Navy commander. I’ll have to look 

up her name.

DR. MUNDEY: Kimberly Evans?

COL. BOOKERT: Yeah! Kim Evans.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then later, there were some Italian troops that 

were added to the task force; correct?

COL. BOOKERT: Right. The Italians assumed the Herat PRT in ... I think it 

was March thirtieth, 2005.

DR. KOONTZ: So, the core of your task force is basically your cav 

regiment, or your squadron, rather, and your two 

kandaks?

COL. BOOKERT: Right. The two kandaks were supported by—they had 

advisers, U.S. advisers, and the commander of the group 

in the west was Colonel Randy Smith, and he was from the 

National Guard. They were organized with—he had a staff 
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of about twenty that worked with the highest—the Afghan 

command was 207th Corps. Their corps were equivalent 

to a division, but they called them corps. His staff worked 

directly with the Afghan corps commander, who was Maj. 

Gen. [Abdul Wahahab] Walizadah, and their goal was to 

train his staff how to be a staff. And then he would have a 

lieutenant colonel with five, who worked with the brigade, 

the 1st Brigade of 207th Corps. So, those five folks would 

work with him, and then there were three people in each 

battalion. I add that because they probably had the most 

difficult job out there. They lived with the Afghans; they 

advised the Afghans; they—you know, once I got there, I 

started treating them like they were mine, so I started taking 

care of them and giving them missions. They would assist 

the Afghans with planning those missions, and then they 

would accompany those Afghans on the missions. I think a 

huge reason for the security situation improving was their 

ability to train and mentor those Afghan infantry battalions 

and those—you know, that was just a very difficult job that 

they did very well.

DR. KOONTZ: What was your assessment of the ANA kandaks that 

were operating under your command in terms of combat 

effectiveness?

COL. BOOKERT: The 1/1 had sent a company out to provide security for the 

presidential elections, and they—so, they literally started 

doing patrols with some of the platoons from Task Force 

Saber, 3/4 Cav, and they were actually learning how to be 

pretty good infantry soldiers. I think initially it was they 

would do it if you told them and then told them how to do 

it. There was certainly never an initiative problem. Once you 

gave them a mission, they were certainly more than willing 

to do it. I would not give them a mission initially without 

them being task organized with a platoon of either Saber 

or, later on, Task Force Peacekeeper, who replaced Saber 

in January. Task Force Peacekeeper was the MP battalion 

that replaced Saber because they were redeploying to the 

east.

DR. KOONTZ: Had you had any experience with the Afghan National 

Army before this, or was this your first?

COL. BOOKERT: No. First. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, it was a learning process to be undertaken, or—

COL. BOOKERT: Well, again, having Randy Smith there was crucial. I 

learned a great deal about how to use those guys from him, 

and they would recommend the kinds of missions those 

guys were good at. They were very good at going into places 

that I’ve never seen in any military, other than the U.S. I 

mean, really, when the Afghan soldiers would show up in 

a compound, one, typically—not a compound, in an area 
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or a village—typically, villagers were afraid of anybody 

in uniform, especially Afghans, because typically when a 

militia showed up, they’d be in some kind of uniform and 

they were there to steal or take, not to help you. When these 

guys were coming through, and one of the smart things 

we did—and I can’t take credit for this, either—we started 

using these guys for civil-military operations, too. And not 

just that, but just using them in concert with U.S. soldiers. 

Later on, I would say after about February, I would just 

send—we would just send them a mission, and they’d go 

do it with their advisers. They became very good at it. So, 

initially, I would only send them on missions if they were 

task organized with a U.S. unit to accompany. After six, 

seven months, we just tasked them directly, and they would 

plan it. The Afghans would back-brief Colonel Smith. They 

would then brief me on it, and then they’d go do it. And I 

would say by the time they left, they were quite good, and 

they’d been right into combat. They’d had to do combat 

operations, as well, and they were doing rather well.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You mentioned earlier that pretty much the reason 

for the creation of RC West was the dustup between 

Ismail Khan and Amanullah Khan. Were there any 

fallout effects from that by the time that you had gotten 

there?

COL. BOOKERT: Yes. Before I got there, President [Hamid] Karzai replaced 

the governor, replaced Ismail Khan, and not long after that 

replacement, and before I arrived, someone attacked and 

burned the UN compound to the ground. Surprisingly, 

before the building was burned, all the files that had anything 

to do with Ismail Khan were removed. Of course, it wasn’t 

difficult to figure out what happened, but, basically, he had 

hired thugs, had created a protest, burned the building 

down. Kudos to the PRT because they actually rescued the 

people out of that compound. They ran combat operations 

from the PRT compound to the UN compound, went in, 

and rescued the entire staff that was in that compound. We 

learned a hard lesson from that, but everyone got out of 

there uninjured, and then we evacuated them by air from 

the PRT compound to the airfield, and then flew them out 

on a C–130 the next day.

So, the environment that I got in was pretty—when we 

got there—was pretty tense, to the point where on the way 

in from the airport, and the headquarters was seventeen 

miles from the airport, which is on the south side of town, 

I passed two checkpoints. There’s a river that runs through 

Herat called the Hari Rud. Rud is “river.” It’s the Hari River. 

So, the bridge across that river is probably, oh, 250 yards 

long. Went in, there was militia standing there dressed 

in black, AK47s. They never stopped us. On the other 

end was another militia dressed in green, and as we rode 

through town, I would see people just wandering around 
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with AK47s for weapons. My first order was “You’ve got 

to stop that,” and in an initial meeting, I told them that he 

needed to issue an order that made it illegal for anyone to 

be in public with arms other than military or police, and 

then state that anyone caught in public with weapons, they 

will have their weapons confiscated and the person will be 

arrested. Three weeks later, that was not the case any longer. 

But, yeah, so, there were some tensions, and a lot of it was 

Ismail Khan trying to discredit the new governor and his 

ability to secure, or provide a safe and secure, environment 

for Herat. And, of course, President Karzai appointed 

Ismail Khan after he was relieved as the minister for power 

and water for Afghanistan.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Your first big task was going to be the election. 

Would that be correct?

COL. BOOKERT: First big task was the election.

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about the election in RC West. What did 

[Combined] Task Force Longhorn do to support that?

COL. BOOKERT: One thing that Saber did well was work with the Afghan 

army, Afghan police, and the governor’s staff with coming 

up with the security plan for that I can’t really take a whole 

lot of credit for that because the planning had already been 

done, and my role was to support that and let the governor 

know that we—the governors, now, but specifically the 

governor in heart—know that we were not going to reduce 

any support as a result of us getting there. That plan included 

securing all of the polling stations. The polling stations, of 

course, were separate for men. Males and females went to 

separate polling stations. The one change I made was—so, 

we had three rings of security. You would have the police 

guarding the polling station; you would have the Afghan 

National Army patrolling; and then, third, and what I 

changed—because, initially, they only had U.S. Army 

patrolling—is I had the U.S. Army on standby at the airfield, 

where if there was a problem, we would react to that. I didn’t 

want us ... you know, I remember telling someone when I 

was sent out west, I said, “If you see me on the evening 

news, you know there’s a problem.” I had wanted to make 

sure that we didn’t give anyone the opportunity to create a 

problem involving U.S. soldiers. So, that was the only thing 

I changed. And, of course, reporters were there. We were 

quite successful, because by noon the day of elections, three 

reporters—the New York Times, AP, and BBC—flew back 

to Kabul because there was nothing going on. But our role 

was just to support security, and we did that. We, of course, 

had Task Force Saber, and they had transport and combat 

helicopters. We had all of that at our disposal.

In my mind, that really wasn’t the most critical part of the 

elections. The most critical part of the elections was given 
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that you voted ... now, it wasn’t just Herat we were worried 

about, and we had Afghan soldiers in Chaghcharan and in 

Farah and in Qal’eh-ye Now, as well and the other provinces. 

Part of this was getting the ballots to those locations. That 

was all done without incident. My concern was “Now that 

we’ve voted, how do we get these ballots back safely to the 

counting center in Herat?” That was the regional counting 

center. Personally, if I wanted to disrupt an election, I would 

have done nothing. You do nothing on election day. All you 

had to do was ensure one ballot box goes missing and then 

make sure the press knows that you had it. That would have 

done more to discredit the election than preventing people 

from voting. That was my opinion. So, I think Longhorn’s 

real contribution was the after plan, was “How do we 

make sure we secure these things and get them all back to 

Herat?” You know, some of these things were delivered by 

donkeys and some on foot because they had to go to some 

very remote villages. What we did was we used central 

collection points in the provinces, and we used air to move 

them back to the compound—I mean, back to the regional 

ballot counting center, which was on the airfield in Herat, 

and we organized 24-hour security around that airfield. 

That’s another good mission that we gave to the Afghan 

army. The police had the inner circle around the airport, 

and the Afghans ran patrols. We used a ten-kilometer area 

because nobody was going to do a direct attack on that, but 

they would fire rockets. We actually had one rocket attack 

that fired way over the compound, so it didn’t hit anything. 

But they would go out and provide that security and, of 

course, that was successful, as well. That was the greatest 

benefit that Longhorn did as a command, even though we 

did participate in the security the day of the election.

DR. KOONTZ: By the time that you left—and we’ll still have other things 

to talk about, but—there were four PRTs active in RC 

West. Is that correct?

COL. BOOKERT: Correct. That’s correct.

DR. KOONTZ: What was the process by which you doubled your PRTs? 

COL. BOOKERT: Actually, it’s very interesting, because it was very political. 

In December, I got two clandestine visits, and then an overt 

visit in January, while I was on leave back to the States. 

In January, I had a visit from the Spanish ambassador to 

Afghanistan, and it was one of those visits I was told that it 

didn’t happen, and they were interested in two things: one, 

assuming the Herat PRT—I presume because it was already 

established—and two, being the first NATO country to 

command RC West. The second visit was by the deputy 

minister of defense from Italy, who flew down to visit the 

Italian consulate in Herat—at least the Spanish showed up 

in the day. They showed up at night, and it was dark, eight at 

night, because they didn’t want anyone to know they were 
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there or see them. They came in, and I probably spent four 

hours with them, to the point of “If we came. ...” Well, they 

wanted the same thing. The first visit was “We want to take 

over the PRT, and if we came, where would you put us?” We 

were already expanding, and it just so happened there was 

one building we had not yet occupied, and I took them on 

a tour, and they said, “Great! We’ll take it.” All of this was 

rather interesting, because we’d received no guidance from 

higher headquarters, and then it was announced at the 

end of January that the Italians were coming to take over 

the Herat PRT. So, that’s how that transition occurred. The 

Spanish, once they lost that, came back in. They had heard 

already through the grapevine, but they came back for a 

visit in January and expressed interest in establishing a PRT 

in Ghowr. So, that third PRT that’s there now is the Spanish 

PRT in Ghowr, and they actually started establishing that 

before I left. In February or March, we had a visit from 

the Lithuanians. They actually went through headquarters 

in Kabul, but they coordinated with us, and they visited 

Chaghcharan and they began establishing a PRT there. 

That was a little different in that, of course, Lithuania has a 

very small army, and they asked for U.S. assistance. I know 

we had planned to provide assistance. I don’t know how 

much of that unit is U.S. because it was established after I 

left. 

DR. KOONTZ: A while ago, you had mentioned, you know, your 

deploying over to RC West, and you cross that bridge, 

and you have the two different militias, and you go to 

the governor and you say, “We’ve got to do something 

about this.” Tell me about cooperating with the Afghan 

governors in RC West.

COL. BOOKERT: Yeah. It was very different dealing with the governor of 

Herat. A very educated man, had lived in Iran during the 

Soviet occupation, very savvy. Dealing with him was a little 

different, and one of the things I learned very quickly, and 

I’d realized when I was the CJ-9, is Afghans will let you do 

as much as you want, or you will do, and they would get 

out of your way and let you do it. In my initial meeting 

with him, was he was asking for a lot of things, and what I 

explained to him was his primary interface with the U.S. is 

with the Herat PRT commander, not me. My role is to, you 

know, sort of do ... I used the term “economic development 

and reconstruction in western Afghanistan.” But it took a 

while for him to understand that I was not at his call, and 

that actually caused some conflicts later during a couple 

of riots when he asked for U.S. help, and I said, “That’s a 

police problem, and it’s not a PRT problem.” Dealing with 

him ... like I said was, he was more sophisticated, had a 

very good understanding of what we could do. He was not 

accustomed to being told “I won’t do it,” and he learned 

that, and his staff learned that. He had one very good—his 

chief of staff was very good, understood that very well, 
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spoke English, and he and I worked well together behind 

the scenes. But what I made him understand, what I made 

sure he understood, was that, you know, “Herat is the most 

populous province in the west. The west sort of goes like 

Herat goes, and your role in getting more national funds 

and resources in the west will revolve around you trying 

to assist me with this plan for the region.” That he liked 

because that was publicity, and they like publicity.

I mentioned one of the missions that the CG gave me was 

to establish a regional governor’s initiative. When I was the 

CJ-9, that was something that we came to—that was an 

idea we developed. We sent some officers, soldiers, down to 

Kandahar, and they were able to do that. And then, what that 

did is, in a region, you get all the governors together. They 

identify the major issues that they have, prioritize them, 

and then they go to the national government with them—in 

this case, Karzai—and we, of course, had resources to assist 

that.

The governors in the west always felt slighted and felt that 

they were not getting their fair share of national resources, 

so after my initial visit with the governor of Herat, I planned 

visits to the other governors. I went to Chaghcharan and 

met with that governor; then, Farah; and then, to Badghis. 

The governors were very resource poor. Quite often, their 

staffs were illiterate. They didn’t understand the concept of 

government being for the people, so you really had to train 

them how—other than in Herat because they understood 

that. That was not a problem there. But the other thing they 

really didn’t understand was that the government’s role is 

to provide services to the population, so a lot of what—

especially in Farah, I had to sort of give a mission to the 

PRT commander: “Part of your role now is to help train the 

governor’s staff,” and they were more than happy to accept 

that. At that time, of course, dealing with these initial 

meetings, I—and when I say “I,” it’s [Combined] Task Force 

Longhorn. That’s how I’m sort of representing the entire 

command because my S-5 [staff officer for plans], my CMO 

staff, was very critical of doing this because I gave them the 

mission of coming up with the plan for doing this. I mean, 

I’d give direction, consider it, and they come up with a plan, 

but the voice of this was me. So, I mean, it was a big deal 

that the senior U.S. commander in the west was coming to 

see them. Now, they’re used to seeing PRT commanders. 

They’re not used to seeing brigade commanders. So, they 

would listen, which I find just fascinating—that just because 

I was wearing a uniform with a U.S. flag on it—and I think 

that U.S. flag carried a lot of weight—governors, mayors, 

and militia would listen because they understood the force 

behind the flag. I guess that is the way to put that.

So, as I would visit these governors, I would describe the 

problem as I saw it: “If you governors could get together 
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and come up with some regional priorities and a direction 

that you’d like to take the west, I think you could get more 

resources for that.” They all thought that was a good idea. 

Roads are very—I mean, their infrastructure of getting 

from point A to point B is very difficult, and I offered to 

fly them in from wherever they wanted, and that helped 

tremendously. I timed our travel, you know? Herat was 110 

miles south. To drive it took twelve hours: one, because 

the road was bad; two, was because of the militias, and we 

solved that problem. In the time I was there ... I think early 

on, they said it took ten days. By the time I left, it took four 

days to go from Kabul to Herat by road. But convincing the 

governors that a regional initiative was beneficial to them, 

to the region, and to their provinces specifically worked.

The other thing is the only communications they had back 

to Kabul was the governor’s—with the exception of Herat—

was the governor’s personal satellite phone. “Oh, we can 

fix that.” So, we, the command, purchased what we would 

call a communications package, and that communications 

package was three satellite phones and a year’s worth of 

cards to use—minutes, basically—and then I went and 

specifically told them that “We’ll pay for this for a year, 

and then you have to come up with that.” And, then, what I 

called a computer package: three computers, a generator, a 

satellite dish, and Internet service so they could e-mail each 

other back and forth and e-mail back to Kabul, and we gave 

them training on that, as well. So, all of a sudden, they had 

communications, so we could now e-mail these guys and 

e-mail their staffs and the governors could actually start 

talking to each other. We were successful. That happened 

in January of 2005. They all came down to Herat—which, 

again, getting the Herat governor involved. He was very 

happy to host that. It was a big deal. I think the conference 

lasted like three hours, and I had asked them to prepare a 

press release afterwards that I would not participate in, and 

that they would sit down and have a press conference and 

tell, really, the world and Afghanistan, whoever was going to 

watch this, what priorities that they had established for the 

western region and the resources they thought they needed 

from the national government. It got Karzai’s attention, to 

the point where he visited there later in January and met 

with all four of them, so it worked.

And at least once a month afterwards, some U.S. force visited 

in the capital and—it’s just, you know, when you don’t have 

a lot of forces—you can’t do a whole lot with one infantry 

battalion and the three Afghan battalions, which really had 

transportation problems with their trucks and, you know, 

as I said, roads are bad. I would also make sure that we had 

some presence at some time. We’d go out from the central 

pinpoints and make sure we’re visible, and we would repeat 

that. So, there was always some visibility, which maintained 

the governors’ support, that we were supporting them. But 
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that’s how I dealt with the governors, is try to get their 

concerns known to national government and provide what 

assistance I could. In some cases, a couple of times we had 

to go—we had to run—I think the governor of Ghowr asked 

us to do some security missions there, and we did that in 

conjunction with DDR—disarmament, demobilization, 

and reintegration. Have you guys heard of that? I’ll talk 

about that more later on, but did that answer your question 

about how I dealt with governors?

DR. KOONTZ: Yes, sir. Yeah, there are two of the big—we wanted to talk 

about DDR, and then also you mentioned when you were 

talking with the governor, is that your job was basically 

in big-scale development, rather than small-scale tactical 

support. What did [Combined] Task Force Longhorn do 

in terms of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance 

in RC West?

COL. BOOKERT: Again, my experience as CJ-9 helped tremendously 

because, when I got off to the west, they had all of these 

organizations—USAID, UN—doing different things and 

not knowing what the other one was doing. I mean, I got 

out there and found out that India had planned to build 

this huge hydroelectric power plant dam up this river, 

and they had no plan to distribute the water. What sense 

does that make? I mean, they just left it—you know, this is 

about tons of folks not knowing who’s doing what. So, we 

were able to get these different organizations together and 

organize who’s doing what, when, where. Now, that was a 

problem when the PRT was there, and before the brigade 

was there, because these civilian organizations accused the 

military of making it more dangerous for them because we 

all drove these white Toyota SUVs around, and they always 

thought that the Taliban and militias would mistake them 

as soldiers. You know, they’re a lot smarter than that. They 

have an intel network just like we do.

The turning point was ... I think I told you earlier about the 

rioting and burning down the UN compound. After that 

and the PRT went in and rescued those folks, they were 

very cooperative to the point where they started calling 

us and asking if they could get involved in assisting the 

planning. So, we were able to have weekly meetings with 

these people to organize who was doing what. So, that’s one 

thing, and the way we divided that is they went in the areas 

that were safe, and the military, we would go to places that, 

one, either we didn’t know whether or not it was safe, or 

we knew it was dangerous. So, that’s how we split that up. 

I would never—you know, they would tell us where they 

were planning to go next, and if we had not been to that 

area, we would recommend that they not go until we get an 

assessment of that area. The PRT commanders would do 

assessments of the area. Andy Senta-Pinter was great at that. 

I mean, he got all over that place, and in some cases he took 
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the governor with him, which was great, because people 

got to meet somebody from the Afghan government and 

not just the U.S. One of the things we did when we would 

do something—you know, repair a bridge or something like 

that—is we would tell them that the Afghan government 

sent these folks here to do that work, even though we’re 

paying for it and we might have been the one to assess it, 

but it was the—you know, I think the term said “put an 

Afghan face on it,” and that had quite an effect, as well, 

because they began to believe that the government’s actually 

doing something for the people. It also got the government 

to think, because they were getting good reports from the 

people, that “Oh, we should do that.”

So, this one is just sort of organizing the efforts in RC 

West—going to the places where they couldn’t go. One, 

we would do projects there, and we put schools in places 

where it would be thought the population was maybe on the 

edge, teetering on supporting us or supporting the Taliban, 

and we reaped benefits from that. But we did the typical 

things that you do similar to operations—you know, wells, 

schools, drinking water. We renovated and built a couple of 

clinics, and I need to explain that, in that when I arrived, 

we were building clinics left and right, and they sat empty, 

which deeply upset the minister of health in Afghanistan. 

To change the way we do that, any time we would build 

one of those, we would coordinate with the Ministry of 

Health, and if they couldn’t staff it, we wouldn’t build it. So, 

the ones we built either already had doctors there, or there 

was a plan to send somebody there very soon. Of course, 

they needed it drastically. But schools? Easy. You go some 

place. Teachers are there, and they’re teaching out in the 

open under the trees or in tents. So, we had standardized 

plans for 8-, 16-, and 24-room schools, and you figured 

the PRTs would put down what they need, and they would 

recommend those projects to them. Anything over—I 

think $5,000 was the amount that I gave them—and they 

had to go through that brigade headquarters. That was 

another responsibility—that is, of these major projects that 

are being recommended, which one is giving us the biggest 

bang for the buck in the area we were building it; and does 

it support the strategic plan for that area? That was another 

one of the missions I had to give to a commander, so we 

would provide these resources to the different provinces.

DR. KOONTZ: There are these places that civilian and the humanitarian 

assistance organizations can’t go, or won’t go, where there 

is no humanitarian space, or they don’t know if there is 

or not. Other than militias, what kind of anti-Coalition 

or lawlessness was there in RC West?

COL. BOOKERT: I think I told you one of the missions was confirm or deny 

the existence of Taliban in RC West. What that really says—

what that mission really was—was what’s the threat in RC 
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West? And you know, this is public. You’ve read it in the 

newspapers. You may not realize what it actually means, 

but the threat in the west was the narcotics industry and 

bad governance associated with it, and what I mean by 

that—I think you know that narcotics is a huge industry 

in the west. A lot of farmers are doing that, because ... let’s 

see. A poppy farmer at that time was averaging $800 or 

$1,000 a year; a non–poppy farmer, $400 to $500 a year. 

Poppy takes very little. It can grow anywhere. It is a very 

hardy plant. You need two rainfalls, one within the first 

month you plant it, and one a little bit later in the growing 

season, so it’s very easy to plant and cultivate. Narcotics 

corrupted a lot of government officials, police chiefs, and 

some mayors. What I can say is that we were able to show 

a direct correlation between militias, militia locations, and 

the narcotics industry, and that was the primary threat in 

RC West. Once I found that out, that changed the way we 

did operations, and that’s when DDR became very, very 

important to us.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, the narco-trade and the corruption, that’s the 

major threats?

COL. BOOKERT: Yeah. We found no indication of active Taliban activities. 

There were some operations that occurred that I can’t talk 

about, but compared to what you saw in RC East and, 

obviously, in RC South, we didn’t have to deal with that. I 

think one of the major reasons—we had, I think it was, one 

IED [improvised explosive device] in the west in the entire 

time, and it wasn’t even directed at us. It was directed at the 

governor, and it was actually, I think, designed to just scare 

him, not kill anybody, because all the thing did was put a 

hole in one of the streets. I mean, it was just a place where 

it made no sense. It really wasn’t designed to kill anybody. 

Herat is on the silk trade route, and it’s always been like 

that, all throughout history. The border crossing there, 

right here [referring to map], was responsible for—it’s like 

you’re right on that road there.

DR. KOONTZ: Just for the sake of the recording, this is just next to the 

city of Teibad in Iran, about sort of middle of the way 

through Herat.

COL. BOOKERT: It’s actually right on the border of Herat and Iran, and that 

was thirty miles from the city maybe, fairly close. But that 

was a major customs stop, and you may need to check this 

number, but two-thirds to three-fourths of the operating 

income for Afghanistan is customs collected at that point. 

Herat is a very commercial city, and I think a lot of the 

reasons we didn’t have the kinds of activities you saw in 

Kandahar or in Kabul was everybody understood that, and I 

think if anyone had done anything to upset that, the militias 

would have been turned on them, because the militias are 

involved with illegal activities, as well—stealing fuel, having 
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illegal bazaars, stealing goods, or, you know, after someone 

crosses and pays customs, then taxing those folks again. So 

there was a huge interest in ensuring Herat stayed peaceful 

because it kept the commerce moving into other parts of 

Afghanistan and Iran, and that’s just a byproduct of the 

locals. That wasn’t because we were there, and it had been 

operating long before we were there. I think that was one 

of the major reasons that we just didn’t see those kinds of 

attacks, IEDs on the roads, out there because trucks had to 

move, and you blow up one commercial truck by an IED, it 

stops dead. Fortunately, we came to an early realization on 

that, and we stopped worrying about that. It’s these other 

things, back again to narcotics being the major problem. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell us about the DDR efforts of [Combined] Task 

Force Longhorn.

COL. BOOKERT: Task Force Saber was included in on this, as well as the 

PRTs because the PRTs would give us indications of where 

things are suspicious. I talked earlier that when we do these 

assessments and all of a sudden you see a lack of kids playing 

or a lack of fighting-age men, then that’s an indicator. We 

knew where most of the militias were, and when Saber 

got to Herat and after getting with the governor, two 

things happened. One was a lot of these—at least in Herat, 

Ismail Khan’s militia had cantonment sites. I mean, there 

were actually places where they kept their equipment and 

ammunition. There were incentives in the DDR program, 

and the incentives were if a commander—and it had to be 

a brigade commander or higher—if he DDRed 60 percent 

of his soldiers, he would get a package; and if he DDRed 80 

percent, it would be a higher package. I think 60 percent, 

he received a $5,000 stipend and training, some kind of 

business training, and if 80 percent of his soldiers turned in 

their weapons and equipment, then he would also get his 

salary for two years. So, there was a lot of incentive for him 

to do that. The incentives to the soldiers were, if you turn in 

your equipment, you get an ID card, and that ID card made 

you eligible to receive $100 worth of foodstuffs—and when 

you realize somebody makes $500 a year, that’s a lot—and 

training in a trade, and those trades were ... you know, I 

think it was inclusive. I think it was welding, agriculture, 

carpentry, masonry, and tailoring. They would receive free 

training for that, and they would get a stipend during that 

training. That training lasted anywhere from six weeks to ... I 

think welding took six months. So, there was some incentive 

in that. The other thing we did was, if you didn’t have fuel 

or batteries, we would get that for you and do those things.

We established our cantonment area at the airport. When 

Saber showed up—and you know what gunships can do 

to tanks—and they realized that we were there to stay, 

the regimental commander in Herat decided to DDR his 

regiment. So, right after I arrived, we got all the resources 
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334

together and organized it, sort of organized the acceptance 

of this stuff, and started dragging it. They would drive it to 

the airfield, and then we would have a DDR station. We’d get 

the photographs done, and then they’d get processed, and 

they would get their foodstuffs, and then they would report 

for whatever kind of training they had elected. I should 

also add that they were really positive. The soldiers were 

very positive about this because I met soldiers my age—

at that time, I was forty-nine and fifty—who had done 

nothing all their lives but fight, but be a soldier, meaning 

they’re somewhat like National Guard in that when your 

militia commander calls you, you ran off and did that. But 

a lot of them were just tired of doing that, and I think 

that was part of the reason for the success of that—that, 

plus they were actually getting something back, and they 

were learning a trade as well. So, we made sure that they 

understood the benefits.

Number two was, through the commanders on the ground, 

I gave them the authority to tell that “If you don’t turn it 

in voluntarily, we’ll come get it, and when we do, you’re 

going to jail, and we’re going to take your equipment, 

anyway.” The previous effect of Saber separating the two 

militias had a great deal of effect on that because they 

knew what a cav squadron could do, and so they started 

turning them in in Herat first. My staff worked with the 

DDR staff. I think the French had primary responsibility 

for that. But actually, when we would plan operations for 

that, we would actually get them involved because they 

would actually handle the in-processing part of that. 

That was not our responsibility to do that, so whenever 

that would occur, they would be there, as well with one 

of the troops from the cav squadron, doing security and 

making sure nothing unusual would happen. Of course, 

there’s always someone who doesn’t believe you, and, sure 

enough, in Chaghcharan, during security operations, 

there was a platoon just, you know, patrolling one area, 

just driving through, and we later learned this militia 

just fired at them in mistake. They thought it was a rival 

militia—too late. When they figured out what they did, 

they stopped firing, but we arrested them and took their 

weapons anyway and turned them over to the local police. 

We had a cantonment area there. Later—and that would 

have been April—we DDRed the regiment that was in 

Ghowr Province. 

DR. KOONTZ: Your tour of duty with [Combined] Task Force Longhorn 

ends sometime in June?

COL. BOOKERT: No, it ends May thirtieth, when we deactivated. We activated 

on October fifth and deactivated on the thirtieth, when we 

turned it over to NATO.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me about the transition with NATO.
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COL. BOOKERT: In some ways, I think the generals made a smart choice in 

choosing me, not because I was a good tactical officer or 

any number of reasons, but I think one of the reasons is, 

I understand politics somewhat. I think it was important 

to realize that this transition to NATO was not necessarily 

based on NATO’s tactical ability. That was purely political. 

One of the things that I was tasked to report back was 

whether or not NATO was ready to assume the command, 

operationally ready to assume command, and I realized 

very early that that had nothing to do with it. It was they 

said they were coming; they had made statements to the 

world that they were coming; so they were coming. When 

I talked about battalions visiting in December, how they 

broached that subject then, and as soon as—the Spanish 

visit was all right. It was just somebody coming out to 

feel out the west, but when the Italians came, that’s when 

I realized it was serious, that someone from NATO was 

going to assume RC West.

I mentioned that to the boss during a staff call to General 

Olson, and he said, “You start planning for it when I give 

you an order to plan for it,” and in my opinion, if I didn’t 

start planning for it then, it was never going to happen. 

I directed my staff in December: “We have to start 

planning for transition to someone in NATO.” That must 

be February, I think. So, we started doing a little bit of 

planning on this. I had the staff start documenting what 

they did in their jobs, and how they did that; whom they 

were coordinating with in the Afghan army, Afghan police; 

these other organizations, national aid organizations who 

were in the area. So, I just started having people document 

what we do and how we did it. And then in February was 

when it really became official, but not public, that NATO 

was coming, and I began to have visits from everybody 

everywhere, mainly NATO: NATO chief of staff, NATO 

deputy commander, NATO commander.

Oh, I have one other thing I wanted to add about DDR. 

So, you go and you do these operational reports, and you 

tell people that you’re picking up. One time, we had the 

largest cache of enemy ammunition in southwest Asia in 

Herat, and so we sent in the reports. My boss didn’t even 

believe me because I kept asking for engineers in order to 

help destroy this stuff. I had the largest compound in Herat 

at the Shindand Airfield, which was thirty miles south, 

which was an old Soviet airfield. They just abandoned 

their ammunition area, and so we had that to deal with. 

I had a Reserve engineer group, engineer section, of guys 

who were destroying that area. So, then in Herat there was 

a civilian French organization that was part of—it was a 

demining organization that does destruction. But anyway, 

they were destroying. We would capture, bring it in, and 

they would destroy this stuff. We had the largest collection 

of DDR equipment—T54, T62 tanks; 122-, 152-mm. 
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336

howitzers, rocket launchers, BTRs, BMPs [both Soviet-built 

armored vehicles]. You name it, we had it—all this Soviet 

equipment.

The CENTCOM commander was in Kabul. We get a call 

one evening saying, “The CENTCOM commander’s coming 

out tomorrow. He wants to see this stuff and he wants to 

visit with the governor. Organize it.” So, so he lands in the 

airfield, and we go around the berm, and just I’m in the 

Humvee, and I’m explaining what we do in RC West, and 

his comment—and I quote—after he got out of the Humvee 

was “Bullshit!” [Laughs.] CNN was with him, as well as, 

you know, the normal press corps that follows him, and of 

course, they took pictures and all that stuff. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. What happens to Colonel Bookert after you 

transfer authority with the Italians?

COL. BOOKERT: You mean for RC West?

DR. KOONTZ: Well, you personally, or— 

COL. BOOKERT: Oh, okay. So, there are a couple of things. One, first thing 

is the transfer of PRTs—of Herat, of the U.S.—to an Italian 

PRT, a huge event, you can imagine: U.S. ambassadors, 

ambassadors from all of NATO. The next thing is a Spanish 

hospital is put in; and then, transition RC West to NATO. I 

should probably—let me back up a little bit. In March—not 

that we didn’t have enough going on—in March, my staff 

transitions from the 25th Division, which was rotating out 

after their year to SETAF [Southern European Task Force] 

coming in. SETAF had a different view of RC West than the 

25th did. To them, it was not important. We weren’t killing 

people, and “We don’t want to support that.” They had done 

a lot of study, in theory, had run many exercises back at 

home station, and it really wasn’t until after they got on the 

ground that they realized how important, or at least that 

the CG, Maj. Gen. [Jason K.] Kamiya, finally realized, “Oh, 

we’ve got to support this.” So, not only were we assisting 

transitioning to the Italians in Herat for NATO and the 

Herat PRT, we now have a new beginning staff coming in, 

as well. So, that made it a little bit more difficult for me, 

especially for command and control, but they learned. So, 

that’s the other thing that happened.

So, what happens to me after transitioning to NATO? 

My year was up June fifth. So, change of command, May 

thirtieth. June first, flew back to Kabul and out-briefed the 

commander, and one of the best things that he told me was 

they issued an arrest order for Amanullah Khan, which was 

the other militia commander in Shindand. There were some 

things that he was doing and we had been monitoring, but, 

one, we had to build a case; and, two, there were certain 

individuals in Afghanistan who could not be apprehended 
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without direct and personal approval from President 

Karzai.

DR. MUNDEY: That’s very interesting, because one of the secondary 

sources I’ve read about that suggests that Amanullah 

Khan was arrested right after the violence with Ismail 

Khan back in August.

COL. BOOKERT: He was. Here’s how they turned that. He was called to 

Kabul. He wanted to be a national politician. President 

Karzai called him to Kabul, and he was under pseudo–

house arrest. He was not allowed to return to Shindand. But 

was he arrested? No. He was called to Kabul. That was the 

official story in the Afghan news. I think he returned twice 

while I was there, only for a couple of days, but he thought 

he was going to get a cabinet position. He did not, but he 

was still not allowed to return to Shindand. Now, he had a 

brother who was still doing things based on direction from 

him, but he did not return. He was not arrested. But, so, I 

out-briefed the CG, and I get on a plane and fly home.

DR. KOONTZ: I’ll leave with one last question. What have we missed 

in talking to you? What were the important things that 

CTF Longhorn did that we haven’t talked about? Or, is 

there one accomplishment or one story or an anecdote 

that kind of sticks out in your mind?

COL. BOOKERT: Actually, there are two things. One is that CG realized we 

had to put a brigade there. Because of who the commander 

was, I think that was important in sort of achieving the 

exit strategy, and that was for NATO to take over the next 

regional command because, as I mentioned earlier, they 

weren’t going to. I think had he not done that ... then, what 

I think is a major achievement of Longhorn is setting 

conditions for NATO to assume RC West, which would 

never have happened. I mean, a lot of good things, but, 

really, that was the major mission, and all these other things 

were just part of getting to that. Getting NATO to come in 

was probably the overriding—probably the major mission, 

major accomplishment of Longhorn.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, CTF Longhorn—is that because of your 

affiliation at the University of Texas?

COL. BOOKERT: [Laughs.] I knew that was coming! No, and I purposely 

didn’t choose Longhorn. After the CJTF-76 CJ-3 got the 

order to write the op order for putting this brigade, as they 

were actually writing the ops on it, I’m holding it up for 

twenty-four hours because we hadn’t settled on a name. 

So, at that time, I knew who my deputy commander was, 

so I had her. I took four members from my CJ-9 staff out 

with me, and they formed my S-9 staff. And so, I had all 

those guys in, and I wanted one of the gods of thunder and 

lightning—Odin, Thor, I can’t remember them all—a really 
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338

bizarre one, but I liked Odin. I think he’s the Swedish god of 

thunder and lightning—and the deputy commander said, 

“Sir, you think like a professor. You can’t make people 

think like that. They’ll never get it. You need something 

simpler.” And so, they basically didn’t like anything I 

came up with, and I said, “Okay, fine. I want three recommendations on my desk in the morning. I’m out of here,” 

and I left. This was probably about ten to eleven at night, 

and they had three recommendations, all right. There 

was Longhorn and two others that were so awful, and 

we didn’t have time to think about anything else, so I just 

said, “Tell them it’s Longhorn.” You know, I have been 

accused of that, but that’s not why it’s named Longhorn. 

That’s humorous to me because the action officer who 

had to write, did most of the writing of the operations 

order, was an Oklahoma Sooner. I remember him saying, 

“Sir, the first crappy mission I get, I’m sending it to you 

guys” [laughs]. But, no, that had nothing to do with my 

affiliation, but that’s what they came up with. That was 

the staff ’s recommendation.

DR. MUNDEY: No, I think that we covered a lot. I guess I’ll just ask 

one last question. If there’s one thing that the American 

people ought to know about what happened in RC West, 

what would it be?

COL. BOOKERT: I will go back to your question, and I’ll answer your question 

as well—the positive things that we did. You know, what the 

press reported ... you know, we ran combat operations, and 

we had collateral damage, you better believe it. It showed up 

on BBC, or it showed up in the New York Times. Fortunately, 

the New York Times and BBC also reported some of the 

great civil-military operations and humanitarian assistance, 

and I’ll just mention a couple. The winter of 2004–2005 

was the most severe winter they’ve had in twenty years. 

I mean, they had—there were areas in RC West that had 

six to eight meters of snow, and the roads were covered. 

In seventy-two hours, we were running either airdrop or 

airlift missions with emergency assistance with food, wood, 

whatever we needed to assist those folks. And, I would say 

a lot of the good work that we did, you know, working with 

the politicians and humanitarian assistance that we did. 

That was the other thing that I should have mentioned 

earlier that we left out is during that winter, there was a lot 

of humanitarian assistance missions, and what’s going to 

happen? All this snow is going to melt in a hot area, and 

then in the spring, we ran a lot of rescue missions to rescue 

the locals out of flood-prone areas. Because they had not 

had major amounts of rain or snow in two decades and 

started building villages in low-lying areas next to rivers, 

there were huge floods, and we also had to do a lot of rescue 

missions. So, it’s the positive things we did. I mean combat 

operations? Yeah, I mean that’s easy. But, you know, we 

poured on some of the good stuff. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay, sir, I think that’s a good place to go ahead and wrap 

this up. On behalf of the Center of Military History, I 

want to thank you for taking the time to do this. We 

appreciate it, and you’ve told us some very important 

things.

Col. Clarence Neason Jr. served as Commander, 3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, Division Artillery, 25th Infantry Division (Light), as a lieutenant colonel. His battalion was 

part of Combined Task Force Bronco, Combined Joint Task Force-76, from April 2004 

to April 2005. He was interviewed on 22 February 2007 at the U.S. Naval War College in 

Newport, Rhode Island, by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Colonel Neason discusses his battalion’s preparation for deployment to Afghanistan 

and its transition period with the 3d Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, of the 10th Mountain Division (Light). The battalion, augmented with Romanian troops, elements of the 

Afghan National Army, and Afghan National Police units, was designated Task Force 

Steel and operated in Regional Command South under the command of the 3d Brigade, 

25th Infantry Division. The battalion headquarters was located in Kandahar, and its 

eighteen 105-mm. howitzers were scattered around the city in two-gun emplacements. 

The battalion provided supporting fires for Special Operations Forces operating within 

Regional Command South, and its personnel served as gun crews for 155-mm. artillery 

pieces situated in Regional Command East. Colonel Neason comments on the difficulties 

in command and control of his widely dispersed batteries, as well as the performance of 

his artillerymen in patrol and convoy protection operations. During the parliamentary 

election of 2004, the battalion provided local security and supervised the collection, 

transportation, and counting of ballots. After discussing the threats posed by improvised 

explosive devices in the Kandahar area, Colonel Neason concludes with comments on 

the weakness of the Afghan local government and his battalion’s transition with a field 

artillery battalion from the 82d Airborne Division.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is February twentysecond, 2007, and I’m interviewing Colonel Clarence 

Neason regarding his tour of duty as the commanding 

officer of 3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, 25th Infantry Division [25th ID], CJTF-76 [Combined Joint Task 

Force-76], in Afghanistan. We’re at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where Colonel Neason 

is currently a student. First of all, sir, are you sitting 

for this interview voluntarily?

COL. NEASON: Yes.

DR. KOONTZ: And do you have any reservations with Army or other 

researchers using this material, as long as you’re cited 

correctly?

COL. NEASON: No, I do not.
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340

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Thank you, sir. When did you take command of 

3/7 Field Artillery?

COL. NEASON: 2 July 2002.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, and what was the battalion doing at the time that 

you took command?

COL. NEASON: At that particular time, it was right before the holiday, and 

it was still doing conventional operations in preparation for 

a JRTC [Joint Readiness Training Center] rotation.

DR. KOONTZ: When did that JRTC rotation take place?

COL. NEASON: It was the winter of 2003.

DR. KOONTZ: When the battalion did that rotation in JRTC, did the 

battalion perform anything, or did it learn anything that 

it would use later in Afghanistan?

COL. NEASON: No. At that juncture, we weren’t aware of a pending Afghan 

rotation. When I went to JRTC, it was still in sort of the 

light division mode, just going through normal rotation to 

sustain our basic skills, to get an assessment of where the 

battalion was, and use that as a baseline for planning our 

future training events.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, you were not preparing for unconventionaltype war at this point?

COL. NEASON: No, we were not.

DR. KOONTZ: When did you become aware that 25th ID, or parts of 

25th ID, was going to go to Afghanistan?

COL. NEASON: As I recollect, I think it was somewhere around six or 

nine months prior to the rotation, and we went in April of 

2004.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, you found out probably sometime early 

fall?

COL. NEASON: Yes.

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of steps did you take to prepare your 

battalion?

COL. NEASON: Well, for me a little bit different than our infantry brothers, 

as they were planning for that rotation because first I had 

to ascertain as to whether or not we were going to do sort 

of a traditional field artillery role, and that was going to be 

sort of like the bulk of what I was going to do; or, it was 

going to be a combination of doing the field artillery stuff, 

but more on the side, and doing some of the nontraditional 
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341

roles of patrolling in urban areas and that. As we began 

to sort of get more information on that rotation in 

conversations with our brigade commander at the time, 

Col. Dick Pedersen, I was informed that we would, in 

fact, bring all eighteen guns in the battalion, as well as 

be given a geographical battle space and be responsible 

for that area to take and conduct patrolling and stuff 

like that—augmented, which would mean within that 

area, since I was an artillery unit and our battalions are 

not as large—we’re just over four hundred, whereas an 

infantry battalion is typically over seven hundred—I 

was augmented with a Romanian battalion that was in 

place in the area there, that worked with us in the area 

doing that. In addition, as my battalion deployed for the 

25th, we augmented with some other things like that. 

An MP platoon was given to me to take an assist with 

that effort of doing some urban patrolling. Within the 

Romanian battalion that was with us, there were two line 

companies. The third line company within that battalion 

was responsible for base security for our base camp 

where my headquarters was, our brigade headquarters 

was located.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, but you don’t link up with them until you get into 

theater, correct?

COL. NEASON: In theater. That’s correct.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, I want to get you back to before you 

deployed. You get the word you’re going over. What kind 

of guidance did you get at that point in time?

COL. NEASON: We did a whole METL [mission essential task list] 

crosswalk, looked at, what was our training status now? We 

started doing sort of professional discussions both at the 

brigade and battalion level, looking at what our anticipated 

mission was and what adjustments we need to make, given 

the conventional METL set that we had. And given that, 

the division also had—there’s a list of cleaning-type tasks 

that we had to be proficient at, that the division had to 

check off on to say that yes, we in fact were prepared to 

take the missions that were known that we’re going to have 

in Afghanistan—so, that sort of unit assessment with the 

brigade, and for me I had two. I had the infantry brigade 

commander whom I was going to be working for looking 

down at the kinds of training that we were doing and 

augmenting me as necessary with the necessary infantry 

expertise. But I was still under my DIVARTY [division 

artillery] headquarters, so the DIVARTY commander was 

also looking at the artillery specifically, as well as some of 

the other tasks that we were going to have to perform in 

theater. All of that was sort of like amalgamated together, 

and we devised a training plan to take and get after the tasks 

that our soldiers were going to be doing in theater.
Colonel Neason (foreground) secures 

a convoy with soldiers of Combined 

Task Force Steel in Kandahar Province.

342

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DR. KOONTZ: All right. Did you get any guidance above that level? Did 

you get anything from General [Maj. Gen. Eric T.] Olson 

or General [Brig. Gen. Bernard S.] Champoux at the 

time?

COL. NEASON: Yes. The division had a task list that we had to do. As a matter 

of fact, my battalion was responsible for finding some of the 

stations that the entire division went through to conduct 

some of the training leading up to the deployment in 

Afghanistan, things like, you know, convoy ops; you know, 

what do you do upon contact with an ambush, blocked and 

unblocked; looking at hitting IEDs [improvised explosive 

devices] on the road; what are the specific techniques that 

were known that were being utilized in theater and some of 

the emerging techniques that were being utilized; training 

our soldiers on proper ways to taking response; use some 

of the electronic devices that we had to take and detect 

IEDs and different things like that. So, we went through 

an assortment of training to take and prepare for the 

deployment.

DR. KOONTZ: At this time before your deployment, were you getting 

any kind of information or advice from any units in 

theater?

COL. NEASON: I had contact with 3/6 [3d Battalion, 6th Field Artillery] in 

the 10th Mountain [Division]. We were in close coordination 

with them, trying to gain as much of an understanding as 

we could of what it was they were doing in theater because 

we were going to take and assume that mission from them 

at the TOA [transfer of authority]. So, we talked with them 

extensively and I had my whole staff—I was talking to the 

commander there via SIPRNET [Secure Internet Protocol 

Router Network]. My -3 [S-3 operations officer] and my 
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XO [executive officer] were talking to their counterparts 

in theater with regard to, we understand the mission set, 

the kinds of things that are happening there, specifically, 

“What are you doing, and what adjustments did you have 

to make vis-à-vis the training plan that you had in training 

up to get there?” so that we could make those adjustments 

prior to departure and to inform our soldiers as much as 

possible about realistically what it is that we were going to 

be doing vice some of the generic tasks that were going to be 

important to our survival and successful accomplishment 

of the mission in theater—but, more specifically, looking 

at the things and the terrain that they were occupying and 

what nuances we could learn that we could take and sort of 

adapt ourselves to.

DR. KOONTZ: Could you give me an example of some of the kind of 

specific information that they were giving you that you 

found useful?

COL. NEASON: One of the tasks that they were doing that was very 

interesting and intriguing to us was that they did some 

interagency work. What they were doing, they had some 

agencies come over in theater that worked in conjunction 

with them, specifically within—we were—my headquarters 

was in Kandahar, and I was responsible for Kandahar city 

proper in terms of—we had the upcoming election, so 

everything was going to be driven towards preparations for 

the election, securing a site, working with the international 

organizations that were to come here and conduct the 

elections themselves, providing security for them, as well 

as facilitating that. And we also did some other interagency 

stuff where they came over. We did what we called a sensitive 

site exploitation, where we were looking at things within 

their zone, but we were really interested in that interaction, 

that lash-up, with those agencies, since they were—it was 

a nonmilitary agency—how to take and appropriately take 

and deal with them as effectively as we could, getting smart 

on that.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. On the eve on the deployment before you and 

your battalion go over to Afghanistan, how would you 

personally assess the amount of training and preparation 

that had taken place?

COL. NEASON: I thought it was very strong. I thought we were given an 

opportunity from the division to take and assign tasks to 

us that were theater mandated, that all units had to take 

and do. Our brigade commander looked at some specific 

tasks within the AOR [area of responsibility] working with 

this counterpart that he thought that might be important 

for us to take and work into our training plans, as well as 

my interactions with the battalion commander in the unit 

that I was going to take and work with there. So, we took 

all of those approaches, and we tried to make an estimate 
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344

to a cohesive training plan so that they can get after the 

specific tasks that our soldiers were going to be doing. So, 

I’d characterize our training as very good, very specific. It 

was targeted at the kinds of duties that we were going to 

take and experience.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me about the deployment over. How did you 

get from Hawaii to Afghanistan?

COL. NEASON: We flew right out of Hawaii into Ireland; and from Ireland 

to Incirlik, Turkey; and from Turkey into, I believe it’s 

Uzbekistan; and from Uzbekistan we flew into Kandahar.

DR. KOONTZ: About how long did that take? Do you remember?

COL. NEASON: Two days. I think about two days.

DR. KOONTZ: Probably two very long days, it must have seemed.

COL. NEASON: Yes, the flights were long, but they were comfortable in terms 

of the spacing for us, so—and provided us an opportunity, 

I guess, to gain some separation from between when our 

soldiers left Hawaii proper to the separation from their 

families, sort of like all of the time to take and reflect to get 

in an appropriate mindset, to reflect upon a task and the 

mission that we’re going to have ahead and as we went there 

in going to our transition with the unit there. So, I think 

that those two days, while it was long, it was a good time 

to have a period time to take and transition mentally from 

the conventional set in Hawaii to preparations for combat 

operations.

DR. KOONTZ: You’re an FA [field artillery] unit, so you’re bringing a lot 

of large equipment with you. How long did it take to get 

all of your equipment in theater?

COL. NEASON: I can’t remember the exact time spent that it took. I know 

that a lot of our stuff was sent ahead of time, and some of the 

stuff was at sort of a reciprocal unit exchange. 10th Mountain 

left gear on the ground there. We assumed responsibility for 

their howitzers and a lot of that kind of stuff. And in turn, 

my howitzers went from Hawaii to New York. So, a lot of 

the really large, bulky equipment went to them, individual 

weapons and that kind of stuff, crew-served weapons, we 

carried that stuff with us. But the howitzers and all the basic 

initial equipment that went along with that was shipped to 

10th Mountain, and we assumed responsibility for their 

stuff. They sent us lists. We exchanged lists to get a sense 

of which shortages of equipment they had and what things 

we needed to take to augment that. We didn’t just lock and 

stock send everything to 10th Mountain. We said, “Okay, 

what is it you have?” Now we balanced that against the list 

and said, “Okay, here’s what we’re sending there, and here’s 

what we’re bringing with us,” because there were some of 
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our basic initial items for our howitzers and stuff that we 

had to take up some of the pioneering equipment and those 

kinds of things, we had to bring with us because they kept 

theirs at Fort Drum, and we needed to bring that with us.

DR. KOONTZ: So, you actually fall in on the artillery pieces you’re going 

to use. And you said there’re eighteen tubes?

COL. NEASON: Eighteen tubes, yes.

DR. KOONTZ: You said you transferred authority with 3/6. Tell me about 

the transition period between your unit and theirs.

COL. NEASON: I had been speaking with their commander sometime 

before we had got there, so we had planned the typical 

ten-day transition of authority where we get in and where 

my battalion proper was on the ground as an effective 

fighting force prepared to take and assume the mission. 

That’s when those ten days started. Prior to that, on the 

advanced party I sent some key individuals, specifically 

in my operations shop, to go over. That went as far as—I 

think it was two to three weeks ahead of time they went 

over and became a part of 10th Mountain’s battalion that 

was there and worked, so that when I got there, I had guys 

that had been working with them for like two to three 

weeks and doing the missions that they were doing. So, 

that eased the strain of unfamiliarity as we took and 

assumed their mission. So, when I got there, my -3 and 

XO had already—the assistant S-3 had already been on 

the ground there working with them and had transitioned 

from being sort of a second-seater to being the primary 

and doing the missions over there before we got there, 

so when I got there, while we were all familiar with the 

mission set from a theoretical perspective, practically 

when we got there, that transition was eased a lot as we 

got into the mechanics of doing the stuff because my 

own people—guys whom I’d worked with and knew their 

habits of work and trusted—were there ready to assume, 

which made the ten days for the TOA that we had go by a 

lot quicker. In fact, we were prepared to assume prior to 

that, but it was only constrained by my personnel coming 

in and his ability to get their personnel out based upon set 

timetables that had already been established between him 

and me ahead of time.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You’ve had a lot of cross-talk with 3/6, and 

then you’ve got an ADVON [advanced echelon] from 

your own unit there, so you’ve got a fair amount of 

information coming in to you before you set up, I guess, 

your CP [command post] in theater, so you’ve got a lot 

of information coming in. Was there anything that you 

knew about that you either didn’t understand or didn’t 

appreciate until you actually started dealing with these 

sorts of issues?
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COL. NEASON: The biggest thing was, geographically, the size of area I 

was responsible for. We found that as a battalion, even 

augmented with, like I said, a Romanian battalionminus and an MP platoon that we got, the nature 

of the terrain—it’s just—its vastness was very, very 

daunting, and immediately we recognized that we 

cannot be everywhere all the time. So, I gained a greater 

appreciation for that once I got there. Looking at the 

map didn’t really—well, yes, it looks large, but when 

you couple that with the ruggedness and mountainous 

terrain, it’s very, very compartmentalized. That gave new 

meaning to what it was we were going to be responsible 

for.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And you told me earlier that your area 

was Kandahar. About how much of the area around 

Kandahar?

COL. NEASON: Responsible for Kandahar city proper, and some of 

the—what do they call them? Just the surrounding 

areas. Kandahar proper was my largest responsibility. 

It spanned out to the north a little bit and to the south 

a little bit, where we lashed up with some of the SOF 

[Special Operations Forces] forces that were there doing 

other operations that were adjacent to us, and those 

lash-ups came just so that we understood what our 

boundaries were as we began to prepare for the October 

elections that were going to take place. But Kandahar, as 

you know, being sort of the birthplace of the Taliban, was 

the biggest area. That was immediately impressed upon 

me, that we needed to demonstrate presence, consistent 

presence and control, for that particular area. That was 

going to be vital to the success of an open and free election 

that was going to take place there. So, just being in sort 

of an urban area, our ability to demonstrate that the 

government could extend its reach down into Kandahar 

and demonstrate some positive control was important 

to the overall operation, as I appraised the situation. 

Kandahar was the second-largest city in Afghanistan, 

so it was, we thought, critical to the elections that were 

going to be upcoming.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. If you Google “Clarence Neason” and 

“Afghanistan,” you get Task Force Steel as one of your—

that’s the name of your task force, correct?

COL. NEASON: That’s correct.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, and that includes your battalion, the Romanians, 

and your MP company?

COL. NEASON: And we also had some Afghan forces.

DR. KOONTZ: Afghan National Army [ANA] or— 
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COL. NEASON: Afghan National Army.

DR. KOONTZ: Go ahead, sir.

COL. NEASON: A combination of Afghan police, also, because in Kandahar 

proper, I had relations with the mayor and the provincial 

governor for trying to maintain some good order and 

discipline within the city and to assist them with sort of 

facilitating law enforcement there. So, we worked with the 

Kandahar police down there in maintaining security for 

Kandahar proper, as well as enabling their operation through 

the use of sort of certain monies that our government had 

in terms of giving sort of the necessary equipment for them 

to take and do things.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You told me a little bit earlier about the Romanians 

and kind of laid out that you had the two companies 

doing kind of patrolling work, and one working at 

your command post. Tell me about working with the 

Romanians. What was that like?

COL. NEASON: They’re very good. However, there was a stigma associated 

with the Romanians as a result of the Russians being there 

and the vehicles that the Romanians had. So, initially, my 

tour there, we did not—we deemphasized the employment 

of the Romanians in Kandahar city proper. Their vehicles 

were there sort of Marine LAV [Light Armored Vehicle]-

type vehicles, armored vehicles, wheeled vehicles, so it was 

a mobile force, a mobile infantry force. They did perimeter 

regions for us, as we did a lot of stuff there, because a lot 

of the ill feelings that were still resonant within the locals 

with regard to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. 

But working with them? A very professional force. They 

were wholeheartedly into the operation. The commander 

and I frequently met at my headquarters. We had a liaison 

that was one of his guys that was resident with us that was 

on call 24/7, and when we did planning and operations, 

they were in my conference room and we briefed them 

on the operation. The commander accepted the role as a 

subordinate of mine within the organization, and it was 

a tremendous lash-up, very, very positive. They were an 

effective tool for us, that they can get out to mobile areas. 

Since they had been there before us, their rotation cycle was 

not necessarily synchronized with us. When I got there, I 

was there with a unit, with a commander that had been 

there for some time now and was going to be there a couple 

more months before he rotated out. So, I had the benefit of 

all of his experience in the region already prior to another 

one coming in. During my year tour in Afghanistan, we 

went through—there were three separate, three different 

Romanian battalion commanders’ forces that came in.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, moving on. Next, tell me about the MPs that you 

had assigned to your task force.
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COL. NEASON: It was one of the MP battalions from the 25th. We got there 

the—I was fortunate enough that we initiated the linkup 

with the MP platoon that was going to be working with us 

in Hawaii, so that we incorporated him into the train-up 

that we had prior to deployment to gain some familiarity 

with them. So, he was familiar with us as we go there and 

continued to take and develop that relationship. He was an 

MP lieutenant. He was just like another lieutenant within 

my battalion. He became an organic part of us for the 

duration of our tour.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then earlier, you had mentioned that you had 

some Afghans on your task force, and you mentioned 

that you did some work getting them equipped. What 

kind of state were they in, I guess, when you fell in?

COL. NEASON: They were in varying states of readiness. Some of this was 

a result of they just didn’t have the equipment. They could 

not always—they didn’t always have the transporting 

equipment to get themselves from point A to point B to 

take and do things. And sometimes the staying power ... 

the government was working very hard to take and get 

them the tools that they need, but we had to take and bridge 

that gap some of the times and do that. We did not have to 

take and arm them. Although a lot of them, some of them, 

didn’t have arms, we weren’t in the business of arming 

them. We assisted with the sustainment sometimes, of 

taking—when we were out in operations, doing things in 

terms of feeding those soldiers that participated in remote 

operations with us because they didn’t have the logistics 

skill necessary to take and sustain those soldiers when 

they went out to do that. And if we wanted to make that 

relationship work, we had to take and reach across the 

divide and bridge that gap.

But they were—there were some units that I got that were 

what I would call somewhat lethargic as a result of the 

system wasn’t able to consistently pay them. So, you’d find 

that soldiers were somewhat concerned or worried about 

it because that money that they had was going back to 

their families. However, at the other end of that spectrum, 

when they did get paid, a lot of soldiers would leave and 

go back to their villages to deposit that money with their 

families to provide for some of their sustainment and then 

subsequently come back. So, that created some problems 

for consistency with regard to knowing the numbers that 

you’re going to have in terms of available forces to take 

and work. I worked with one unit that was extraordinarily 

professional, and I thought it was because they had just 

superb leadership. It was just an Afghan leader that was 

there. He was eager. He was enthusiastic. He was an original member of the Afghan army before the reorganization 

in the election, with the election of President [Hamid] 

Karzai. He had been like—I believe he was a lieutenant 
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colonel, and then during the reorganization stuff, when 

he came back in his new rank was as a major, but he 

was very, very professional, and he had a very, very disciplined force. They assisted us greatly with regard to the 

Afghan elections.

The only significant problem that we faced with the Afghans 

is just the language barrier. You know, I did, in fact, have an 

interpreter for my battalion that went with all of my forces 

when we went out when we had Afghans with us, as well as 

when we went out and we didn’t have Afghan forces, just 

to bridge that gap of the interaction that we may have with 

the local populace. But the language barrier was significant. 

Now, our soldiers did, in fact, receive—we got some cards. 

We got some language training, some minimal training, 

some key phrases to learn how to use and say, and the team 

developed that as we went along. Some of our soldiers 

learned some more phrases and could have very limited 

conversation with some of the Afghans. But again, the big 

problem was just the language barrier.

DR. KOONTZ: These Afghan forces, were they within your chain of 

command? Did you have command over them?

COL. NEASON: Operationally, yes; administratively, no. When we went 

out and we did an operation, the Afghan forces that were 

there, either myself or my designated subordinate that was 

one of my commanders responsible for that operation, he 

was in fact in charge of employing of all of the forces that 

were there. Usually, what we did was sort of like—with the 

Afghan leadership, I would, inasmuch as I could, try to 

establish a relationship just that—I would share with them 

what it is I could. Some things unfortunately, because of 

OPSEC [operational security], we just weren’t able to share 

with them. So, when they came out and did the operation, 

it was, once we got them there and were prepared to 

take and depart or execute that operation, was when we 

unveiled what we believed they needed to know in order 

to take and move forward on any operation. Unlike when 

I worked with the Romanians some of the times, Afghan 

commanders weren’t in my headquarters and brought in on 

operations briefings: “Here’s the nature of what we’re going 

to do; here’s our mission; here’s our objectives.” I was not 

able to take and do that with them, but it didn’t inhibit my 

ability to take and employ the force in a manner consistent 

with the accomplishment of the missions and my lash-up 

of the organic forces that I had with them to ensure that the 

right things were being done.

DR. KOONTZ: I was wondering what kind of missions you would use 

the Afghan forces on.

COL. NEASON: We went out in some rugged terrain. We had to do some 

patrolling in some remote villages. We would augment 
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350

them with our soldiers because they could assist us 

interacting with the local populace, and they were usually 

much more familiar with the area than we were, although a 

lot of times we got Afghan forces that were in the Kandahar 

region—because of some of the preexisting problems, the 

ANA soldiers that we might have may not necessarily have 

been from the Kandahar area. They may have been from 

up north and unfamiliar with the area, initially. But, more 

often than not, they’d been there longer than we have, so 

when we got there, they understood terrain, moving around 

compartmentalized terrain and interacting with the local 

populace. That was an aid to us.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. What is your chain of command? Whom does Task 

Force Steel report to?

COL. NEASON: I reported to Task Force Bronco, 3d Brigade.

DR. KOONTZ: And that’s Colonel Pedersen?

COL. NEASON: Colonel Pedersen.

DR. KOONTZ: And then from him up to CJTF-76?

COL. NEASON: That’s correct. [Chart 2]

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You’re in Kandahar. That’s where your CP is. 

What I want you to do is kind of take me on sort of a little 

mental tour of your command post. What does it look 

like in terms of facilities, infrastructure, all that kind of 

stuff?

COL. NEASON: It was a panel building. And 3/6 was in one location when 

I went there for our predeployment site survey and looked 

at their headquarters, looked at their operations to see what 

equipment we might need, just internal to the headquarters 

to augment our operations. They were in one location, but 

prior to us coming they moved to another location. I got to 

see the blueprint for that location. It was a panel building, 

roughly, I would say, pretty close to the size of my original 

battalion headquarters back in Hawaii, that had—I had an 

ops center that was better than the ops center in Hawaii, 

for obvious reasons, as we look at it there, with a lot of 

projection devices to show simultaneous sort of things, 

and a briefing area where I took a morning brief from all of 

my soldiers, as well as, I was to take in any key leaders or 

dignitaries that might be coming in through the area and 

want a brief of what it is we’re doing, what our geographic 

boundaries and the like were. And my soldiers manned 

a 24-hour operation where I had a watch officer that was 

on call physically in the building there, with the soldiers 

taking on that. So, the building was more than adequate as 

a facility to take and accomplish the mission that we were 

going to have. I had personal—myself and my sergeants 
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33d Area 

Support Gp 325th Support Bn 300th Inf Rgt (Romania)

to Regional Command East

1st Bn, 501st Inf 

Salerno

Task Group Ares 

(France)

Spin Boldak

2d Bn, 27th Inf 

Oregun E

to Combined Joint Special 

Operations Task Force

Kandahar Air Field,

 Quick Reaction Force

Combined Joint Task 

Force -76 (HQ, 25th Inf Div)

CTF BRONCO

(3d Bde, 25th Inf Div)

Qalat Lashkar 

Gah

Tarin

Kowt

Provincial Reconstruction 

Team (PRT)

Kandahar

3d Squadron, 

4th Cav 

Gereshk

2d Bn, 5th Inf 

Tarin Kowt

2d Bn, 35th Inf

Qalat

3d Bn, 

7th Field Artillery

Kandahar

1st Kandak, 

2d Bde

Qalat

Afghan National Army

3d Kandak, 

1st Bde

Kandahar

Afghan National Army

Chart 2—Combined Task Force (CTF) Bronco Task Organization, 6 April 2005
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

352

major, my S-3, and my XO both had personal office space 

within that building, as well as communal areas for the S-3 

to take and conduct operations. And each of my staff shops, 

my S-1 [personnel staff section], my S-2 [intelligence staff 

section], all those guys, there was more than adequate space 

for them to take and conduct the business that they needed 

to sustain this. And, to boot, we had a conference room that 

was there, also.

DR. KOONTZ: Some of the people I’ve spoken to have had pretty austere 

operating environments, but that wasn’t your case?

COL. NEASON: Not at my main CP back at Kandahar proper, no. That 

was—now, whenever we went out to take and do operations, 

again, now we’re talking about bringing tents and setting up 

on the field and doing that. But back at Kandahar proper, 

which was adjacent to the airfield there, the airport that 

they had there, it was fairly robust.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You mentioned a while ago you had morning 

meetings. Did you have sort of a battle rhythm within 

your headquarters?

COL. NEASON: Absolutely.

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me how that worked out.

COL. NEASON: Couldn’t really do specific times because everything was 

in Zulu [Greenwich Mean Time], but every morning 

what we had was I’d have a battle update. My staff would 

come in and give us the last twenty-four hours, the current 

projected missions we have on the table now, as well as any 

significant events that may have occurred that night, and 

that was a running meeting that I ran every day, six days a 

week. We ran it every day except Sunday, and we ran unless 

we had an ongoing mission. If there’s an ongoing mission 

where either myself or I had subordinate commanders 

deployed out, then we would conduct that every day. It had 

all the necessary secure content interface. And in addition 

to that morning update that I had, we started off initially 

with the Bronco Brigade having daily updates, which then 

transitioned to—I believe it was just every other day where 

we had updates. There was a standard format that said, 

okay, we talk about ongoing missions, future missions. We 

talk about the planning where we’d provide, we’d schedule 

and provide those necessary updates to Colonel Pedersen 

about ongoing as well as future operations.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. About how often would you get out of your CP 

and into the field, I guess, to see what’s going on?

COL. NEASON: Probably for me, if there’s an ongoing mission that we had, 

something that was going on, obviously I’d go out there to 

field with that. But what I tried to take and do, in addition to 
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geographic responsibilities that I had in Kandahar proper, I 

had my eighteen guns, were split out in two-gun sections, 

and it was nine, then it went to eight remote locations that 

were throughout the theater. We were in a southern AOR 

[area of responsibility], but my guns went throughout the 

CJTF. So, when Colonel [Gary H.] Cheek took geographic 

responsibility of these, sort of, what I would call east and 

we had south, my guns were in both areas. So, I sort of 

acted as the theater artillery commander, and I would 

get out—I tried to get out to one of those sites—about 

every two and a half weeks I’d try to get to a different site, 

depending upon what was going back on at Kandahar or 

what ongoing operation that they had out of those remote 

sites, to take and both check on the soldiers and make sure 

that they were being adequately provided for because we 

did not—those soldiers still remained my responsibility in 

terms of providing logistics for them to take and sustain 

their operations. Now, resident at these remote sites they 

had, whether they were lashed up—a lot of them were 

lashed up with SOF forces, and the SOF forces provided 

a lot of this, you know, the feeding and care and those 

kinds of things for them. That was done by them, and we 

would take and augment any shortfalls that might occur. 

And I was responsible for the moving around of all of the 

large items, for instance the 105 rounds for the howitzers 

as they shot in missions, those kinds of things. The care 

and sustainment of the equipment was my responsibility. 

So, about every two to three weeks I would get out to a 

site there and do that, and that was in addition to any 

meetings that we might have in Bagram with CJTF, which 

occurred—that was an infrequent thing.

I also had some meetings in the eastern AOR with Colonel 

Cheek, who remained, from a home station relationship, 

my boss. I worked for Colonel Pedersen on a day-to-day 

operation and responded to him as my senior commander 

on the ground, but my rating chain still stayed with Colonel 

Cheek, my DIVARTY commander. So, I linked with him 

not because of that, but rather because of the howitzers that 

I might have in that area. And while in theater what we 

did was, also, in addition to my 105s that I had in theater, 

we brought the 155s from Hawaii in theater to take and 

assist with the border region because the 105s didn’t have 

the range in the eastern area, as a lot of stuff was occurring 

along the Afghan-Pakistan border in that no-man’s-land. 

So, we brought those 155s from Hawaii to Kandahar. I was 

responsible for conducting the train-up of those forces and 

doing all of the functions checks and conducting the live 

fire with those howitzers prior to employing them in their 

combat roles.

DR. KOONTZ: How many 155s did you bring over?

COL. NEASON: I believe it was eight.
Soldiers of the 3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, position an M119 howitzer near Forward Operating Base Cobra in 

Oruzgan Province to support Combined Task Force Bobcat, 23 October 2004.

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354

DR. KOONTZ: Were they employed as a battery, or were the split up into 

different places like your 105s?

COL. NEASON: They were employed as two platoons, but they remained in 

the eastern AOR. They come to me in the south. I conducted 

the train-up. I had the commander and all those soldiers 

there. I did all their certifications. Once they completed 

those certifications, they boarded aircraft and went into 

the eastern AOR and were on the compound proper with 

Colonel Cheek.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, they weren’t your responsibility after that 

point?

COL. NEASON: No, because the 155s, they are an organic asset to the 

division, whereas my battalion was a direct support 

battalion. That was an organic division asset. Now, initially 

all of the soldiers within that battalion, they deployed with 

me. They deployed with me to augment my 105s and to 

assist with the patrolling mission that we’re going to have 

because, initially, we did not foresee bringing the 155s in 

theater, and when they brought them, I had to break those 

soldiers, detach those soldiers, from the operations I had 
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ongoing, get them certified with their howitzer training, 

and then they were employed in another AOR.

DR. KOONTZ: How do you adjust mentally to this kind of fragmentation 

of units and splits in chain of command?

COL. NEASON: For me, personally, it wasn’t that difficult. I had a great 

relationship with Colonel Pedersen as the DS [direct 

support] battalion that supported that artillery brigade in 

theater. So, we already had built the relationship because 

deploying with my third unit command two years prior to 

that, to include going to a JRTC rotation, I’d worked with 

Colonel Pedersen. So, I was very familiar with him, and 

very comfortable with him as he was with me. There were 

no real disconnects with regard to the chain of command 

because while Colonel Cheek remained my rater, other than 

providing some periodic updates to him as to what we had 

going on when I could—and, I think, I made two trips to 

his location which were specifically mission related—there 

was no real interference. It was as if Colonel Pedersen was 

my rater.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I need to go back and ask you something. You were 

mentioning those site visits out to those eight or nine 

bases where your guns were operating. What were those 

like?

COL. NEASON: They were very austere. They were in very rugged terrain, 

very remote. Most of them were in support of SOF forces, 

to enhance their reach because we had a lot of no-man’s 

land. The SOF guys would go out on these long missions, 

but they didn’t have any organic and direct support to take 

and assist them with either enabling them as they had 

contact and/or breaking or disengaging contact. Those fires 

were able to provide some destruction to these sites where 

people were launching mortars into their compounds. It 

created standoff, and once we got the guns out there, it was 

immediately known and had an immediate impact upon 

the operations in terms of assisting and safeguarding their 

base of operations, as well as supporting them when they 

went out on operations external to their remote locations.

DR. KOONTZ: What was the process for coordinating with the Special 

Operations Forces to provide that kind of support to 

them?

COL. NEASON: Largely, that was done through CJTF-76. A need was 

articulated. I went through the necessary channels at CJTF, 

and we had an artilleryman working on staff there. As a 

matter of fact, my replacement worked on the staff there, 

so I had contact with him, and we’re talking. So, as these 

needs were arising to take and put these guns to these 

remote locations, then that was then transmitted down the 

chain saying that the division commander has approved 
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the mission for guns to support SOF forces at this location 

and the elements which I would need to put together the 

package to take and facilitate that. And I say that because 

the unique challenge that we had is, typically in an artillery 

battalion with eighteen guns, you have three firing batteries. 

Those three firing batteries each have one fire direction 

center, so I had to split my fire direction centers multiple 

times in order to facilitate the ability to provide the indirect 

fire computations for those guns to take and shoot at those 

remote locations. So, that was a unique challenge, but largely, 

the determination was made by higher headquarters, and I 

received orders to take and prepare to have guns to go to X 

location to be in position to fire no later than X.

DR. KOONTZ: How are those—I guess “two-gun team” is probably not 

the right word—but how are they manned? Was there a 

permanent crew assigned to each one of those guns, or 

did that responsibility rotate?

COL. NEASON: No. What I ended up doing was, I ended up getting—the 

crews for those guns went there. I ended up finding my key 

NCOs that could take—and normally, we have a gunnery 

sergeant and a chief of fire, one per battery. Well, I had to 

find multiple senior guys that were capable of operating 

sort of in a noncontiguous, remote location so they can 

do these independent operations. I assigned a lieutenant 

and an NCO as the leadership package in addition to the 

section chiefs for each of those howitzers to take and go up 

there, and then we tried to augment them as we could with 

whatever personnel to enable their ability to do 24-hour 

operations, which often would mean that the biggest strain 

on that came within the fire direction center, just having 

the organic capacity to have the people that were trained 

to take and do that mission. So, we augmented them as 

much as we could. My battalion FDC [fire direction center] 

section was, in fact, decimated in order to facilitate that, to 

getting the additional 13-E’s [cannon fire direction specialist 

military occupation specialty] out to these remote locations 

to assist.

DR. KOONTZ: I’m getting the impression there was a lot of kind of 

improvisation and learning on the job in the employment 

of your troops. Is that a fair assessment?

COL. NEASON: Not necessarily improvisation, I guess. Normally, we’re 

employed centrally, and then it’s always been about 

volume of fires in the conventional sense. Well, now 

what we had to take and do is we broke my three entities 

up into eight to nine entities, and they were essentially 

doing the same thing, just on a smaller scale. So, in terms 

of the tasks that they’re performing, it was a typical task 

that they would do as a cannoneer. They’d just be doing 

it more. So, in that sense there was no improvisation, but 

it was unique in that they would just remote it out from 
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the parent headquarters, and they didn’t have—I didn’t 

have a battalion FDC articulating fire missions down 

to the battery FDCs, and then the battery FDCs then 

fired in support of a brigade operation, like we would 

normally do or in support of a battalion operation. They 

were doing support in terms of individual support to 

SOF operations, and they had to do both the tactical 

employment of that system as well as the operational 

computation of fires to take and employ those guns in 

support of the SOF forces.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, so once this subdivision of the normal tactical unit 

gets worked out, everything worked out efficiently?

COL. NEASON: Yes, yes.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Way back in the beginning of the interview, 

when we started, you mentioned that before you deployed 

some of your soldiers trained for nonartillery tasks like 

convoy escorting and things like that. Tell me about the 

transition of your soldiers from cannoneers into these 

other functions.

COL. NEASON: We spent a lot of time on that. As I said, my battalion was 

responsible for the conduct of the combined operations 

sequence of training for the entire division. So, pushed 

out some smart guys to be the lead trainers to get their 

expertise up, and we went through a credentialing process 

with them to take and make sure that they were there. 

And then, we internally sort of trained ourselves on these 

particular tasks, and I liken them to a lot of just sort of 

advanced basic soldiering. What we did was we took—a 

lot of our soldiers learned a lot of the basic techniques 

of fire and maneuver that you get introduced to in basic 

training. Well, we harkened back to that with an emphasis 

upon “Okay, how do we effectively take and disembark 

from a truck? Should we have it at a halt or upon contact?” 

or something like that. So, reemphasized that. I think the 

soldiers adapted to it pretty quickly, I think, for a number 

of reasons, probably the most significant of which is that 

it was very real to them that they were going into a hostile 

environment and that these were going to be essential not 

only to the successful accomplishment of the mission, 

but their personal survival also, as well as the survival of 

their buddies. So, the soldiers were focused. I mean, they 

were honed in upon the importance of these tasks, and we 

had a number of enablers. We had, I think, a team from 

the [Joint] IED Task Force and that kind of stuff came to 

Hawaii and assisted us with training events and that kind 

of thing to give us the perspective on what’s the latest and 

the greatest things being employed out there, and what are 

some effective defeat mechanisms that they’ve identified, 

and how the threat is, in fact, adapting to some of the things 

that were going on so the need for soldiers to be vigilant, to 
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358

be alert all the time. So, I would say that our soldiers readily 

and rather quickly adapted to the necessary training.

DR. KOONTZ: I was going to ask, in the Army or any other kind of 

large bureaucratic organization, whenever you have 

changes and you get people out of their lanes or out of 

their training, there’s a certain amount of resistance and 

grumbling. Did you notice any kind of— 

COL. NEASON: No, none to speak of. I think once the announcement was 

made that we were, in fact, going to take and deploy and 

we went through the necessary tasks—the division list for 

the tasks that the theater commander says that units must 

be proficient on prior to deployment, once we go through 

that—I think sometimes there’s a little hesitancy because 

people believe that “I know how to do that! Why am I 

going through that again?” Maybe just on the fringes, just 

a little bit of that. But then, actually, as soldiers got into it 

and went through that training, they recognized that it was 

necessary for them to take and refresh themselves on some 

of these tasks that some of them hadn’t reviewed since basic 

training. So, I think we had marginal, if any, resistance with 

regard to that training.

DR. KOONTZ: And from what I hear you’re saying, once they actually 

started doing these things in the field in Afghanistan, 

things went largely as training—or, the training paid off, 

I guess, for lack of a better word?

COL. NEASON: Yes. Yes, I think it did. There’s still learning. There’s still 

some adapting. Terrain provided some really unique 

challenges for us as you went out there, doing patrolling 

in some remote sites in Humvees, and our guys were 

not necessarily used to some of, just the tight spaces 

that they’d have to go with some of these vehicles and 

really zooming out and looking at all of the hazards 

associated with that. I think there was some continual 

learning. Field patrols went out, you know? Patrols were 

giving intel updates or giving briefings on—we talked 

about any known impediments out there with regard to 

training or known obstacles so that we could take and 

warn our soldiers about that and talk about techniques 

for successfully overcoming them. And when soldiers 

went out and they encountered what they believed to 

be unique obstacles and things that were not necessarily 

covered as we talked about in the training that we were 

doing in theater ... because our training didn’t stop 

there. We were constantly refreshing ourselves and 

updating ourselves to how to successfully go out there 

and accomplish a mission and come back. I think that 

enabled us to be, I think, more successful.

DR. KOONTZ: What did your battalion do to support the 2004 

elections?
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COL. NEASON: In conjunction with the—I just lost the name of the 

organization.

DR. KOONTZ: Is it UNAMA [United Nations Assistance MissionAfghanistan]?

COL. NEASON: UNAMA was there. We talked with a lot of them, but there 

was a specific sort of election team that came down, and 

one of the gentlemen that I worked closely with was an 

Australian. We, in Kandahar, we had a lot of remote election 

sites that were out there, and I was responsible for providing 

security for the sites in and around Kandahar proper for 

the election, as well as running the election control site. The 

soccer stadium in downtown Kandahar was going to be the 

central collection location for all of the balloting coming in 

within that region. We were responsible for security of that 

while they brought the ballots in and did the counting and 

that kind of stuff.

So, I remoted my battalion headquarters out into Kandahar 

city proper. We found the location relatively close to the 

soccer stadium where we set up and did 24-hour ops, and I 

was personally there the entire time, as well as had patrols that 

were still ongoing throughout the city and other elements 

that were responsible for the securing of the election sites—

that is, facilitating them. There were civilians that were out 

there that were actually not engaged in the election proper, 

just for the security and the facilitating and transporting 

of the ballots. The balloting is done here, assisting with the 

escorting of the balloting back to the central location at the 

soccer stadium. So, we did that from the beginning of the 

setting up the sites, the designation of the sites, through 

the election, through the computation process, and the 

transport of all of the ballots out of Kandahar was when 

our operation ended.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I’m curious about that central polling site. About 

how big was that soccer stadium, and how big was that 

security force there?

COL. NEASON: It wasn’t necessarily as large as some of the soccer stadiums 

that we have here in the U.S., but it was a soccer stadium 

that was oval in shape.

DR. KOONTZ: I’m thinking kind of like a small college football field, a 

big college football stadium?

COL. NEASON: Probably a small college football field, with the surrounding 

stadium structure. There were stands and that kind of stuff. I 

probably had my battalion-minus there in terms of—because 

we were still doing patrolling in Kandahar proper, as well 

as external to Kandahar, as well as facilitating security and 

doing that, so we had a number of simultaneous operations 

ongoing there. So, my emphasis at that particular time was, 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

360

in fact, the elections. So, I probably had my battalion-minus 

there. I still had some people back at Kandahar proper 

manning the link there with that headquarters. But from 

that remote site is how I communicated directly with the 

brigade headquarters, from that site.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And did you have any interaction or observation 

with the people that were doing the ballot collecting 

there?

COL. NEASON: Yes, I visited the site several times while I was there. I got 

to—initially, during the setup process, went there to see 

what it was going to look like, as well as when the ballots 

were coming in, I got to take and be with the civilians that 

were actually responsible for the care of the whole balloting 

process, got to walk through a remote site to see them 

as they were doing that. And we acted as a filter for a lot 

of the local Afghans who worked at the election site. We 

established a series of barriers around the stadium and had 

central access points so that we can take and control that, 

and all of the workers that came in that were responsible 

for assisting with the counting of the ballots came in from 

a centralized location. So, from that perspective, I saw it in 

operation both sort of throughout the process.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you get any kind of resistance to the election, either 

at the central balloting stadium or the outlying polling 

places?

COL. NEASON: At the central balloting location, no. At the remote 

locations, just sporadically. You know, there was always the 

concern that there was going to be—people were going to 

be inhibited from participating in the election process, and 

that’s why we had the patrolling going on. We were trying 

to make sure that access was available, that people felt 

secure in terms of going to the polling sites. But we did not 

receive any overt sort of resistance, and there was really no 

resistance by external elements to inhibit any people to go 

to the polling sites that we could detect at that time. There 

was a tremendous buildup to that. Prior to the election 

itself, we had intensified our patrolling in the area, trying 

to take and demonstrate to the people that our presence 

was in fact going to enable the security, that they could feel 

comfortable going to the polling sites. So, we did that some 

weeks prior to the election, and we sustained that through 

the election.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You’re in Kandahar, which as you said is part of the 

Taliban heartland. Tell me about the kinds of opposing 

forces that your battalion had to deal with in Kandahar 

and the outlying regions. Whom were you fighting?

COL. NEASON: It was very much transient elements. There were no 

firefights, so to speak, in Kandahar proper. The encounter 
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was from—the contact was being encountered from IEDs, 

and to take and to illuminate the impact of IEDs, we—and 

that was one of the purposes of the patrolling that we did, 

demonstrating to the people that there was, in fact, security 

in Kandahar, as well as manning the roads and being on the 

lookout for IED devices, lessening that so that not only would 

we not be harmed but neither would the local populace. 

So, we didn’t have any—there was never a deliberate 

opposing threat to us there. It was always, everything was 

done on the fringes. Something would pop up here, and 

you’d attempt to take and respond to that. In Kandahar city 

proper, fortunately, I guess—we like to think it was because 

of the intensity of our security and stuff—there was never a 

significant threat. In and around the elections ... as I recall, 

this was after the election. There were some populace, local 

populace, that were disgruntled with the local leadership 

in terms of some of the things that were going on, so we 

did encounter one time where crowds became unruly and a 

potentially dangerous situation could occur, because that’s 

when you’d have some rogue insurgent, that might be just a 

single individual, that could take and stir something up and 

make it seem as if it was a concerted effort when it possibly 

wasn’t.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have any sense of who was planting these IEDs? 

I mean did you know if it was Taliban or al Qaeda or HIG 

[Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin] or just generic kind of rogue 

elements?

COL. NEASON: The belief was and the reports were that Taliban because 

we had—forgive me, but I don’t—down in the southern 

portion, there was a road that ran from Kandahar running 

south down to the Pakistan border, and they believed 

that a lot of things were occurring in and around there. 

SOF forces had some responsibility down there, and we 

augmented that with some patrolling in and along that 

road to enable some security there. But because that was 

believed that that was how a lot of the insurgent elements, 

these onesies and twosies, never a compelling force, that 

were gaining access and coming into the area and causing 

disruptions. More often than not, the kinds of problems 

that we would encounter is that we’d go into a remote 

village to demonstrate presence and make contact with the 

local leaders. And I used to do that by going to the weekly 

shuras and making contact with them. And when we 

encountered any resistance, it was usually because either 

there was someone that favored the Taliban ideology who 

had recently been there or was there, and the people were 

very, very standoffish and just—and so we’d try to intensify 

and/or increase our presence there to weed that out and 

let them know “Hey, look. We’re here for the long haul. If 

we can get you to tell us who these bad people are, we can 

either have the local police arrest them or do something of 

that nature,” because they can dissipate this threat that they 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

362

were having, so that they could hopefully come into the 

fold, because some of the remote locations, while we had 

provincial governor, the reach wasn’t always out to these 

remote locations. It usually was in Kandahar proper and 

just the adjacent areas, and the further you went out a lot of 

times. It wasn’t as—not that there were a lot of bad things 

happening there, but it was, I guess, what we would call 

almost a semi-ungoverned space.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have any kind of interaction or coordination 

with the local government in Kandahar to extend the 

reach?

COL. NEASON: I met weekly with the police chief in Kandahar. I met very 

frequently with the brigade commander, with the provincial 

governor. I met frequently on an as-needed basis with the 

local mayor of Kandahar to address any concerns or needs 

he had or, you know, if he’s concerned about some operation 

that we’re having or any negative impact that you think it 

might have on a population or what was going on around 

there. I met with the local government frequently.

DR. KOONTZ: How effective would you evaluate that local government 

as being? You mentioned that it needs its reach extended 

and there are ungoverned areas.

COL. NEASON: My personal opinion is they just didn’t have the apparatus 

to reach out. There were no subordinates, sort of as we think 

of county and town people to take and that he could reach 

out and hold accountable, responsible, that understand 

what he was trying to do such that that could be articulated 

down to the people. So, I think there’s some uniformity 

with regard to understanding the government. The local 

elders at the local shuras were, in fact, the governing 

piece as you went out to a lot of the remote sites—for that 

matter, even within some of the towns within Kandahar. 

As you went and met with them, they spoke for the people, 

and deference was given to them as we reached out and 

touched them to find out what their needs were and find 

out what their position was with regard to the national 

government. Usually, that was readily apparent, because 

they’d have pictures of President Karzai. That was the 

means of bridging that gap, letting us know that they were 

loyalists and supported the government. I think because 

President Karzai had—even though his family was from 

Kandahar, they had no effective, consistent reach down 

there. His appointment of some of the local provincial 

governors was extraordinarily important. However, I will 

tell you that a lot of those guys were—everything was 

done along tribal lines. I mean, the tribe was everything 

in Kandahar. As I dealt with the people there, I had to 

remain very, very conscious of “Am I dealing with the 

Barakzai or the Popalzai?”—you know, making sure that 

I am not inadvertently empowering one tribe over the 
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other, because then that would cause friction between 

them and then you would have problems. So, I think the 

local leaders gained power based on tribal dominance, 

and whatever lead tribe there that was in power, then 

that was good for the people; and the minority tribe, 

you kind of like didn’t hear anything from them. I guess 

from a political perspective, it’s a smothering, majority 

rules, okay, and you don’t hear a lot from the minority 

voice from a particular region. But they, in effect, locally 

governed and controlled everything, and that’s why the 

elders were, in fact, very, very important.

For instance, the provincial governors, a lot of the guys 

gained prominence and/or popularity as a result of the 

resistance fighting with the Russians, and not necessarily 

the most educated people amongst the population, but 

had reputations for heroism fighting them and hence had 

enhanced stature, and that gave them power. Sometimes 

it was because, you know, this guy was in fact a ruthless 

fighter and was known for his heroism in the fight against 

the Soviets. Hence, he ascended to power. So, power was, 

a lot of times, direct ties. It wasn’t necessarily based upon 

political savvy and that kind of stuff.

DR. KOONTZ: By the time that you left Afghanistan, did you notice any 

kind of changes in the acceptance of the Afghan National 

Government in Kandahar?

COL. NEASON: There were a lot of changes that occurred while we were 

there. The provincial governor changed a couple of times. 

The police chief changed, I think—the government was 

seeking to demonstrate its ability, or its reach, by, in effect, 

trying to get effective governors in the region that were 

responsive to the national government. So, in that sense, 

I think that there was a positive turn, I think, because 

when the people began to see things occur, some of it 

through us, Coalition forces—that is, us and the Afghan 

army—working with the local government to do things 

as rebuild mosques and rebuild schools so they can assist 

with some of the infrastructure rebuilding in Kandahar 

and the surrounding area. That was, in effect, a way of 

demonstrating the government’s reach because what was 

important to us as we did things was, emphasized from 

CJTF on down to us, “We must ensure that an Afghan 

face is put on all the operations that we’re doing. We 

don’t want this to be perceived as a U.S. or the Coalition 

doing this for them, but in fact try to demonstrate that 

the government was in fact behind this, and we were just 

assisting with that effort as they do that,” to take and to 

be empowering to governmental structures.

DR. KOONTZ: What do you think was your battalion’s greatest 

accomplishment or greatest achievement during your 

tour of duty in Afghanistan?
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COL. NEASON: I would think I was very proud of the manner in which the 

elections took place. I mean from start to finish because 

there was a lot of concern about that, that that was going 

to be a place where the Taliban was going to take a stand. 

They were going to come across the borders from Pakistan 

and come in there and be a disrupting agent and, in fact, 

take and nullify the election by contaminating the results in 

Kandahar. So, that was a significant accomplishment for us 

there—the successful running of the election that went off, 

you know, really without a glitch.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. When did you leave Afghanistan? That would have 

been probably about— 

COL. NEASON: I was scheduled to leave in April. We transitioned with 

the battalion from the 82d. However, they had—the 

commander there had a family emergency that took 

him away, so I remained in Afghanistan after the bulk 

of my battalion had left an additional two and a half, 

three weeks, and ran the operation with that battalion 

from the 82d until that commander was able to return. 

It was, I guess, maybe about two weeks; two, two and a 

half weeks.

DR. KOONTZ: And you were just doing the same thing that you had 

been doing before?

COL. NEASON: Yes, I acted as the battalion commander.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me about the transition when the commander 

from the 82d came in. What kind of guidance or advice 

did you give him?

COL. NEASON: Same thing. We established prior coordination. They came 

over on a PDSS, a predeployment site survey, at which point 

I provided him a briefing of “Here’s what it is we’re doing. 

Here’s the geographical area.” We had provided all the 

products that we were able to take and provide with him so 

that his unit can begin to take and study the operation that 

we had going on and anticipate any future missions that we 

might have. And then, we conducted a TOA much like I 

did with 3/6 from the 10th Mountain. We established a tenday period, which was a mandated thing, that we would 

take and actually get his battalion fully on the ground, and 

he and I would left-seat/right-seat, and then as we proceed 

through that ten-day period, my staff and I would back off, 

and he would assume the helm with us there for several 

days where he was totally in charge of the operation and we 

were just observers.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. What happens to Colonel Neason after he leaves 

theater? Where did you go after deploying out?

COL. NEASON: Back to Hawaii.
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And how long did you stay with the battalion?

COL. NEASON: I got back in, I believe it was May, sometime in May, late 

May. I changed command in June, toward the end of June, 

I believe. Yes, third week of June, I changed command.

DR. KOONTZ: And where did you go after the change of command?

COL. NEASON: I remained in Hawaii a fourth year and was the division 

inspector general.

DR. KOONTZ: Were there any major lessons learned or kind of 

experiences you had during your deployment in 

Operation Enduring Freedom that changed the way 

that you think about, I guess, either yourself, your 

leadership, the way that you approach decision-making 

processes, anything like that?

COL. NEASON: The big thing for me was I liked being involved in everything 

that my battalion has going on—intimately involved, 

familiar with what’s going on—and allow my subordinates 

some freedom of doing things. Probably, centrally, the 

battalion established a plan for everything, and then we 

briefed down to our subordinates and then directed their 

actions as we went out doing things. In Afghanistan, as I 

said, with the eight to nine separate locations I had, the 

howitzer batteries, and even with the fixed responsibility 

I had in Kandahar, I had to remote out one of my battery 

commanders. I had to really zoom out from what was 

going on, understand what was going on, resource what 

was happening, but, in effect, recognize that he had the 

situational awareness of what was going on the ground and 

allow him to take and conduct that operation and remain 

apprised of the situation such that if he gets in any difficult 

spots, I could effectively take and resolve it without the 

mission suffering. So, a big lesson for me was just moving 

out, backing away from things that are going on. And, as 

we trained prior to the deployment, of empowering our 

subordinate leaders so that they can conduct operations 

and doing things. Well, we got to take and really actualize 

that, which doesn’t necessarily always occur in an artillery 

battalion when you’re doing centralized operations and 

providing volumes of fire. Now I got these guys going 

out to these separate locations, and we were separated by 

hundreds of kilometers and just getting periodic reports 

on what’s going on, and trying to resource the fight from 

a remote location while trying to get out to see them, as I 

said before, about every three-week period of time, which 

meant that if I went to Unit 1 here, it was some time before 

I got back to Unit 8 because just moving a lot. And then, 

that could be disrupted based upon operations that we had 

ongoing back at Kandahar. During the period of time for 

the October elections, I was not out visiting for probably a 

six-week to two-month period.
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DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir. I’m out of questions, and you’re the one 

who was there. You have all the knowledge, and we’re 

just trying to pull stuff out of you. What’s the important 

thing that I should have asked you that I missed?

COL. NEASON: I think you pretty much covered the gamut. I guesswe talked 

about it, I guess, but more indirectly is, the whole notion ... 

I thought it was the unique mission for the operation, just 

the conduct of activities from my battalion there, because 

we truly operated more as a maneuver battalion than we did 

as an artillery battalion. We still retained the ability to take 

and do all the artillery things, but back at Kandahar proper, 

I just had two guns. I had two guns at Kandahar proper, and 

the sixteen of my other guns were throughout the Afghan 

theater. So, a big thing for me was just this notion of—well, 

we typically support the maneuver operation. Well, now I 

found myself both supporting maneuver operations, as well 

as conducting maneuver operations, which was a unique 

thing for an artillery unit. But it wasn’t a huge stretch, 

though, because, like I said, a lot of it is basic soldiering 

tasks and understanding the things there. And I did have the 

entire brigade staff and the brigade commander available 

that I’ve briefed on all of the missions that we’re going to do 

in a sequential process leading up to all the operations.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Is there anything else you’d like to add, sir?

COL. NEASON: Not that I can think of.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I want to 

thank you on behalf of the Center of Military History for 

doing this.

COL. NEASON: Sure. Thank you.

Col. Terry L. Sellers served as Commander, 2d Battalion, 5th Infantry, 3d Brigade Combat 

Team, 25th Infantry Division (Light), as a lieutenant colonel. His battalion was part of Combined Task Force Bronco, Combined Joint Task Force-76, from April 2004 to June 2005. 

He was interviewed by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military History on 

21 February 2007 at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Colonel Sellers 

discusses his battalion’s training efforts and preparation for its deployment to Afghanistan 

in April 2004. Originally stationed in Ghazni, the battalion replaced the 2d Battalion, 87th 

Infantry, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (Light), and conducted joint 

operations with the 6th Marines. Colonel Sellers comments on working with the local government, Afghan security forces, and the Ghazni provincial reconstruction team, as well 

as the battalion’s first casualty, before deploying to Oruzgan in June 2004. He describes the 

battalion’s forward operating base and area of operations and joint command and control 

and command structure issues there. The battalion experienced success in registering vot-
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ers for the 2004 parliamentary election but had to work with an ineffective and corrupt 

local government. Colonel Sellers comments on types of operations, intelligence gathering, 

and opposition from Taliban forces in Oruzgan. The battalion was disestablished during the 

modular reorganization of the 25th Infantry Division after its deployment, and Colonel Sellers concludes the interview by listing the battalion’s accomplishments, the postdeployment 

transition of its soldiers, and his memories of the four soldiers killed in action while serving 

under his command in Afghanistan.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, this is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the twenty-first of 

February 2007 and I’m interviewing Col. Terry Sellers, 

who is currently a student at the Naval War College 

here in Newport, Rhode Island. I’m interviewing him 

about his experience as the commanding officer of the 

2d Battalion, 5th Infantry, 3d Brigade, 25th Infantry 

Division, Combined Joint Task Force-76, in Operation 

Enduring Freedom [OEF]. First of all, sir, you’re sitting 

for the interview voluntarily?

COL. SELLERS: That’s correct. 

DR. KOONTZ: And do you have any objection with Army or public 

researchers using this information, as long as you’re 

cited correctly?

COL. SELLERS: No, I do not.

DR. KOONTZ: Thank you, sir. When did you take command of 2/5 

Infantry?

COL. SELLERS: Took command of 2/5 Infantry on the first of July 2002. 

DR. KOONTZ: And what was the battalion or the division doing at that 

point in time?

COL. SELLERS: It basically just normal training and theater engagement 

exercises with partner nations in the PACOM AOR [U.S. 

Pacific Command area of responsibility], so just really 

training and normal security duties and those kinds of 

things.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And you were in command for about a year and a 

half before the deployment to Afghanistan?

COL. SELLERS: Well, yeah. I guess we actually got word—we’d done a 

deployment, which we thought was going to be our major 

contribution to the Global War on Terror[ism], by taking 

my battalion from Hawaii to West Point to do cadet summer 

training for the fourth-class and third-class plebes and 

yearlings as they were coming into West Point. So, when 

we got the alert notification, we were about two-thirds of 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

368

the way through that particular three-, three-and-a-halfmonth deployment. That would’ve been in the fall of 2003. 

DR. KOONTZ: How did you get the word that your deployment status 

was going to change? 

COL. SELLERS: Well, initially, the division commander, Maj. Gen. [Eric T.] 

Olson, came on a visit, and he had some indications that at 

least one of the brigades was going to be alerted to deploy 

for Operation Iraqi Freedom—not sure whether it was 

going to be 2d Brigade or 3d Brigade at that point, but you 

know, that kind of put us on the radar screen: “We should 

probably be taking a look at how we’re preparing.” And I 

guess it was upon our return, then, that they confirmed 

that, yes, both brigades of the 25th were going to deploy. 2d 

Brigade was going to go to Iraq, and 3d Brigade was going 

to go to Afghanistan. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. After your brigade got the notification that 

you were going to Afghanistan, what kind of preparatory 

processes or exercises took place?

COL. SELLERS: Well, you know, I was fortunate enough to do a JRTC [Joint 

Readiness Training Center] rotation in the first six months 

of my command, and one of the things in preparation for 

JRTC is I told every one of the leaders that their ticket to 

ride at JRTC was to know the enemy, know the terrain, and 

know the weaponry that the JRTC OPFOR [opposition 

force] would use. So, using that same kind of construct, 

turned right around, and said, “Okay, if we’re preparing to 

go to Afghanistan, same rules apply. You’ve got to know the 

terrain; you’ve got to know the people; you’ve got to know 

the culture; you’ve got to know the weapons systems; you’ve 

got to know the history, particularly looking at history as 

it revolves around the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan.” 

So, immediately tried to start putting our hands on some 

books that we could read on the Afghan people, read on 

the Taliban, read on the positive and negative aspects, 

and [Lester W.] Grau’s books were instrumental in our 

preparation both from the Soviet perspective and from the 

Afghan mujaheddin perspective, and getting to know the 

terrain and tactics and weaponry that people would be using 

because, frankly, I wanted us to concentrate on operations 

and not “Oh, excuse me, can you tell me about how many 

of them, and what kinds of weapons?” That should just 

already be known, all the way down to privates in rifle 

squads. And I did four letters to combat. I did one at West 

Point that said, “Hey, 365 days from now, our battalion will 

be engaged in combat operations,” and then I updated that 

almost on a quarterly basis, the last one published probably 

in March, as a “Hey, final last-minute things you can do 

in the last forty-five days before deployment.” There’re a 

number of repetitive themes and topics that guys should be 

using to prepare themselves physically, tactically, mentally, 
Waging War

369

family aspects—you know, to make sure their family is 

prepared for them to deploy. 

DR. KOONTZ: Going back to that JRTC rotation, one of the things 

that kind of comes out, and you sort of implied this—I 

don’t want to put words in your mouth—is that when 

you do a JRTC rotation or a NTC [National Training 

Center] rotation, there’s a certain amount of kind of 

gaming involved in that you can kind of guess what the 

OPFOR is going to do, given the fact that the terrain 

and everything is fixed. Were there any things that you 

learned from that JRTC rotation that you would apply 

later in Afghanistan?

COL. SELLERS: Oh, yeah, definitely. You’re right, there is a gamesmanship 

aspect to JRTC. We tried to minimize that because we wanted 

it to be an honest appraisal of our combat readiness. So, 

tactical operations center systems, communications systems, 

how we communicated orders—we were able to refine all of 

that, which really paid off in Afghanistan because when you 

look at the map and see where my companies were actually, 

physically located in the province, provinces that we were 

responsible for, communications was a huge challenge. No 

longer could you talk by FM [frequency modulation radio], 

sometimes not even by TACSAT [tactical satellite radio], 

so how were we going to communicate orders and intent 

and everything else? JRTC stretched us to the point where 

we were already struggling—limited experience across the 

battalion in TACSAT, and, you know, some people could 

make FM communications work to their advantage and 

others couldn’t, so it really identified where we were weak 

in those kinds of areas. And then tactically, as far as kinetic 

operations, I’d say our squads 

were probably as good as 

anybody else’s.

The nuanced piece, though 

... you know, for example, 

when you get into some of 

the villages where depending 

on how your unit acts and 

engages with the local 

populace and the insurgents 

that are there, you can either 

grow the insurgency or you 

can turn those insurgents 

to your side and make that 

beneficial, we experienced a 

mixed bag. Some things we 

did pretty well, kind of by 

accident, I think, at that point; 

and other things, we increased 

the enemy’s capability by the 

ways we acted, the things that 

Cmd. Sgt. Maj. Frank M. Leota (left) and 

Colonel Sellers in Oruzgan Province
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370

we did, and the tactics that we employed. But I think it 

was our first true indicator that, for company commanders 

and platoon leaders in a decentralized fashion, you know, 

“That’s where you’re going to beat that kind of enemy. That’s 

where you’re going to have the best opportunity to defeat 

that kind of enemy.”

DR. KOONTZ: At this point in time before the deployment, what kind 

of guidance did you get concerning what the battalion 

was going to do in Afghanistan?

COL. SELLERS: Well, that was kind of a mixed bag for us because the brigade 

was going to be employed in Regional Command South at 

that point, and my battalion was going to be employed in 

Regional Command North or East. So, we knew almost 

from the outset that my battalion was going to be detached 

and work for the 6th Marine Regiment, where 2d Battalion, 

87th Infantry, from the 10th Mountain Division was. I 

was going to replace [Lt. Col.] Dave Paschal there. So, we 

kind of knew that our deployment sequence in time and in 

location was going to be different than what the rest of the 

brigades was. One of the first things we did was I asked my 

S-2 [intelligence staff officer] and my XO [executive officer] 

to set up a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information 

facility] in our battalion headquarters, and so we emptied out 

a room adjacent to the S-2’s shop that he turned into a SCIF 

where we could actually put in SIPRNET [Secure Internet 

Protocol Router Network], we could actually put up maps, 

and we began a dialogue with 2d of the 87th—Dave Paschal 

is a friend of mine—and started getting their situational 

reports. And we actually updated and maintained situation 

maps as much as we could inside this SCIF, where we could 

leave it 24/7. Company commanders and platoon leaders, 

and their platoon sergeants and first sergeants, could come 

in and look and see what was on the map. They could read 

the INTSUMs [intelligence summaries] that we were able 

to get our hands on, and then we could have planning 

sessions where we could plan in a secret environment and 

then secure all that—you know, that body of knowledge, I 

guess—to bring back out and continue our preparations, 

whereas normally a battalion doesn’t have that. You don’t 

have that kind of connectivity, or at least to this point we 

didn’t have that kind of access.

DR. KOONTZ: Speaking in sort of broad themes, what kind of things 

were you learning from your SITREPs [situation reports] 

that you were getting from the 82d?

COL. SELLERS: Well, from the 10th Mountain Division, really what it was is 

almost tactics and techniques that worked and didn’t work. 

How does the enemy, if he’s going to fight you, how does he 

fight? You know, there were small engagements, normally at 

a little bit greater distance. The engagement would happen, 

and the enemy would disappear. So consequently, when we 
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deployed to the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, 

we crafted platoon-level live-fire exercises that mirrored 

that kind of enemy, an enemy that would hit and then melt 

away maybe to appear someplace else, so, certainly, TTPs 

[tactics, techniques, and procedures] that the enemy was 

employing against us and first introduction to improvised 

explosive devices [IEDs]. 2/87, at that point, I think had 

been hit with two or three, had a number of individuals 

killed, and how are we going to deal with that? How do 

we recognize them? How do we disable them? How much 

engineer support are we going to have? How much EOD 

[explosive ordnance disposal] support are we going to have? 

So, how are we going to train to that? I think another thing 

would be dealing with the local populace on issues, not 

strictly kinetic combat operations—where the enemy looks 

like the next-door neighbor, how do you separate those two 

out? And then, now that you’ve separated the populace from 

the enemy, how do you effectively deal with the populace? 

You know, I guess one of the company commanders says, 

“Well, we don’t negotiate.” Well, we found out very quickly 

you do negotiate and start trying to figure out and think 

about the things that we could give to the populace or get 

from the populace to make that a better relationship. 

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned a few minutes ago that you crafted those 

letters to combat and got your troops sort of reading up 

and learning things, and then you also mentioned having 

to deal with the local populace. Did you have any kind of 

cultural training regarding the Afghan population?

COL. SELLERS: Not specifically Afghan, but I was fortunate to have a 

number of Spanish speakers, and because we are out in 

the middle of the Pacific, we had some Pacific Islanders, 

and I think probably the key thing that we did there was 

really work on “Okay, you said you don’t negotiate but we’re 

going to have to. What things can we do that won’t sacrifice 

the overall mission, but might be small concessions?” 

We started getting used to talking through interpreters, 

where I would select the leader of a village based on a 

particular language capability he had, and then I would 

select a competent interpreter and say, “Okay, for this 

scenario, you’re not a member of your particular squad or 

platoon. You’re the leader of this village, and here are your 

grievances that you want something done about.“ And then 

we’d brief the interpreter similarly so that he was read into 

the situation, and then we’d select maybe another platoon 

to play the combination aggressors and local populace, so 

that the company commander would come in with one of 

his platoons or his platoon leader—maybe even a squad 

leader, because we thought we might have to go down to 

that level—and they would have to, through an interpreter, 

talk to the village elder, the leader, whatever we termed it at 

that point, and try and find out what’s really the situation? 

What are the grievances? Has there been any activity in 
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372

this particular area? And that, while it didn’t specifically 

replicate Afghanistan, was close enough that when we did 

engage in that environment. Afghanistan, as we were a little 

bit familiar with—I won’t say that they were good at it right 

off the bat, but it was certainly a method to start changing 

their mindset.

DR. KOONTZ: From your perspective as the battalion commander, how 

would you assess, sort of overall, the training that your 

battalion received before you deployed?

COL. SELLERS: I really think it was pretty good. We did an after action review that was published by companycommander.com following in kind of the same vein. The 82d had done that 

with the 10th, and the 10th had done that for us. We had 

both of their previous products, and we were looking at not 

specific TTPs that they used because we knew that the environment would change over time, but really, we used major 

topic areas to kind of focus our training. And we didn’t stop 

training once we deployed. I mean, I think that’s a common 

theme that you find most places. You know, we ran cycles 

where guys were on mission and guys were doing support 

tasking for their particular fire base or forward operating 

base [FOB], and we would cull out opportunities for them 

to continue to train, to continue to refine the TTPs that 

were working in country. So, I guess to get back to your 

question, I think we were pretty well prepared in a number 

of areas. Was it an exact match? No, it certainly wasn’t. I 

mean, guys had to continue to think outside their normal 

comfort zone how to do operations. A good example is, 

at the company level, company commanders kind of had 

to change how they used their fire support officer [FSO]. 

They had to use their fire support officer. In our case, we 

used them as intelligence officers, so what I asked company 

commanders to do at their outlying FOBs was really kind 

of make a microcosm of a battalion staff. An officer was 

their S-2. An officer or a senior NCO would become their 

civil affairs officer, and we’d take the engineer squad leader, 

for example, and make him the civil projects officer and so 

on and so forth, so that each company was kind of creating 

their own mini-staff to handle planning and tracking it and 

tracking civilian population. 

DR. KOONTZ: And you deployed sometime around March or April 

2004, right?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, it was April. I think we actually—I think I got into 

country, Afghanistan, on the twenty-first of April, and 

different from what we had done in the past. Like when 

we went to JRTC, I didn’t deploy right up front. I sent an 

advance party to open accounts and set up this and set 

up that. I looked at the deployment to Afghanistan a little 

differently. I took all my company commanders, I took my 

S-4 [logistics staff officer], I took my S-3 [operations staff 
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officer], my S-2, and a couple senior noncommissioned 

officers, first sergeant and a sergeant first class, and I 

did it like a leader’s recon, where I left people in Manas, 

Kyrgyzstan, to push our soldiers forward as they came into 

the country. I left a small element in Bagram to receive those 

people and immediately link into, or as the marines would 

call it, snap into 6th Marines. And then everybody else, all 

the leadership, I brought forward, and we embedded our 

leadership where Dave Paschal’s leadership was actually 

operating in Ghazni Province, for kind of the left-seat/

right-seat ride concept. We would watch and see how 2/87 

did their morning and evening updates. We would watch 

how company commanders crafted their operations and 

executed their operations. It was really kind of a leader’s 

recon to really get to know the physical terrain, get to 

know the key personalities, and figure out what kind of 

operations 2/87 ran. Now, as soldiers arrived, as companies 

arrived, I sent the company commanders back for a shorter 

than they anticipated period of time to Bagram, to brief 

their soldiers and do in-country training there, and I 

never returned to Bagram. I stayed forward the entire time 

and shadowed Dave Paschal the entire time, met the key 

personalities, and we started that shift of him backing away 

and me interjecting myself as the next Coalition force that 

was going to be engaged with all these same personalities 

and same forums. And then, as a company commander was 

comfortable that his subordinate commanders, platoon 

leaders, platoon sergeants were getting the troops ready 

and they were passing all their RSOI [reception, staging, 

and onward integration] tasks, I allowed the company 

commander to bring all of his platoon leaders and as many 

of the platoon sergeants as he could forward to do the 

same thing, kind of the company level. Then that led into 

the full-up left-seat/right-seat ride where, really, thinning 

of the lines from 2/87 as we built capability in each of the 

different company areas.

DR. KOONTZ: I should’ve asked you this before. You mentioned you 

had this previous contact with the 2d of the 87th, and 

you’re getting their SITREPs and stuff, and then you also 

mentioned that when you get to Afghanistan you’re going 

to be working under the 6th Marines. Did you have any 

kind of contact with them?

COL. SELLERS: I did. We rolled in, it was probably around seven o’clock at 

night, into Afghanistan with everybody bleary eyed from 

the C–130 flight down from Kyrgyzstan, and I notified 

immediately Col. Dave Garza, the 6th Marine Regiment 

commander, that we were on the ground, and he said, 

“Meet me at my headquarters at this time.” I spent two 

hours—my S-3, S-2, and I—being briefed and debriefed 

by his staff. I got his commander’s intent, what he wanted 

our force to do as we replaced 2/87, and then at, I think 

about three or four the next morning, we’re loading plates 
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374

into our IBA [Interceptor body armor], uploading ammo, 

and we were on CH–47s out to Ghazni, out to link up 

with Dave Paschal and his commanders and staff. So, I 

probably at that one opportunity, I had about a two, twoand-a-half hour time block with Dave Garza, where it was 

crystal clear what his intent was, what he expected me to 

do, the successes that Dave Paschal had experienced to 

that point, and then what he saw as the future for our battalions we took over from Dave.

DR. KOONTZ: And this all takes place in theater?

COL. SELLERS: In theater. No, I really did not have any connectivity with 

6th Marine Regiment’s staff or the commander until we 

were in country.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And what was that commander’s intent that 

Colonel Garza gave you?

COL. SELLERS: Well, I mean, he had, as he called them, “lines of operation,” 

and it’s, you know, really kind of our concept of the 

operation tasked to subordinate units, if you will, “Here are 

the things I want you to concentrate on.” Voter registration 

was going to be important, but more important than that 

was finding and capture/killing the Taliban, al Qaeda, 

HIG [Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin] members that were anti–

Afghan government, anti-Coalition. And then, partnering 

with the PRT [provincial reconstruction team]. We were 

collocated in Ghazni with the Ghazni PRT, shared the same 

compound, and Lt. Col. Steve Ford, Reserve civil affairs 

officer, prior Special Forces officer, he and I had a great 

relationship. But partnering with the governor; partnering 

with the provincial police chief, the NDS [Afghan National 

Directorate of Security] chief, their secret police kind of 

intelligence apparatus, really making the linkages there 

and the continuing development of good governance; 

development of schools and education, medical treatment 

facilities; and really not replacing their capabilities, but 

putting the Afghan face on those capabilities as they stood 

up; coaching, teaching, mentoring them to be responsible 

for those things, manage their own money, and manage 

forward progress. And then I guess the last one that 

finally got introduced was we were to receive one of the 

first battalions of the kandaks, Afghan National Army, to 

come in, and had to coordinate that with the governor 

and the Afghan Militia Forces [AMF], to coordinate the 

interjection of the new Afghan National Army at an old 

Soviet air base, and those Afghan soldiers were going to 

help with expanding voter registration and then security of 

voter registration sites as we got them.

I guess one of the other things that Dave Garza told me 

was they referred to Colonel Paschal as “Commander 

Dave,” and Commander Dave had gone on the radio and 
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television on a spontaneous show, Afghan local radio, with 

the governor, the deputy governor, the provincial police 

chief, and others to try to talk about Coalition initiatives, 

talk about Afghan initiatives, and then just answer the 

general public’s questions. They would write in questions, 

and they would spontaneously feed those questions out 

and amongst that group of people they would determine 

who was going to answer the question, and a lot of time it 

was designed to put the Coalition commander on the spot. 

The PRT commander was involved in that, too. And you 

know, Dave Garza’s message to me was “Hey, I want you to 

sustain that because that’s a way to get the word out to more 

people and demonstrate that we’re here for everybody’s 

betterment, getting rid of the bad guys, adding structure, 

and then doing projects.”

DR. KOONTZ: So, you became “Commander Terry,” then?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, I don’t think anybody ever referred to me as that. 

Really, we were there for about a month and a half before 

we received orders to move someplace else. I was there 

from April until June. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, you get to Ghazni in late April, and you 

said you were there until June. So you’re there for about a 

month and a half, and you get your commander’s intent 

from Colonel Garza. Now, how much were you able to 

accomplish in Ghazni before you moved?

COL. SELLERS: Well, I think—and, I mean, I think quite a bit. You know, 

the second day that we were fully in charge of AO [area 

of operations] Ghazni—and I forget what the actual name 

of the AO was; I’ve got it written down someplace—but 

we had our first—we thought it was an IED, but actually 

ran over a large antitank mine. One soldier, [Sgt.] Jorge 

DeLeon, lost his right leg in that and one of our interpreters 

had a broken leg and we experienced our first catastrophic 

kill on an up-armored vehicle. Probably one of the first 

successes was being able to, in cooperation with the Afghan 

security element, their secret police, intelligence apparatus, 

the deputy governor, and the provincial police, we were 

able to apprehend the individuals responsible for that less 

than two days later, and they were actually HIG-affiliated 

operatives—a father and his five sons, and we actually 

had to release one of his sons because by our estimate he 

was only twelve to fifteen years old, so that didn’t meet 

the detention criteria. But all those individuals were 

eventually apprehended, along with items secured from 

their compound that implicated them in this one particular 

attack.

So, I mean, that’s one success. The broader success, though, 

I think was us working side by side with the PRT. The PRT 

commander and I, on a weekly basis, sometimes multiple 
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times in a week, would meet with the governor and his 

deputy with the provincial police chief, the mayor of the 

bazaar, if you will, and find out what’s important in the 

province of Ghazni; what’s important to the district chiefs; 

what’s important to the district police chiefs—you know, 

“Here, we need your priorities on what we can accomplish.” 

And so, Steve Ford would handle the things that were civic 

projects, primarily big-dollar kind of items. We would 

do smaller civic projects, wells, you know, maybe school 

improvements and school supplies, those kinds of things—

limited CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response 

Program] dollars doing that. But then in a little smaller 

forum, the NDS chief, the Afghan National Police chief, 

and the deputy governor and I would handle the items 

that were security issues. A big success was drawing in 

the Afghan Militia Forces commander, an ethnic Hazaran 

who didn’t get along well, at least initially, with the Pashtun 

governor, and cooperatively working our resources to find 

out who and where the bad guys were, who and where the 

caches of munitions were at.

One of the governor’s own security forces, kind of a private 

militia at that point, the commander there ran an old Soviet 

armor base where there were literally thousands of 120-

mm. rockets, at that point one of the weapons of choice for 

IEDs, and then thousands of antitank and antipersonnel 

mines—again, great assets to build IEDs out of. We brought 

in UN teams to destroy all that ordnance. We took out 

all the things we couldn’t destroy, but some of the things 

stacked on top of each other, don’t know whether they’re 

armed or not. But through district chiefs, through this one 

particular AMF commander that worked for the governor, 

we were able to pull close to a dozen SA–7s from him, a 

couple hyperbaric rounds that the Soviets had left behind, 

and then one of the district chiefs was very cooperative and 

provided British Blowpipes and other antiaircraft missiles. 

So, they knew they were going to be monetarily rewarded, 

probably, for these things, but also at least in the case of 

the commander, very concerned that those weapons would 

get into the wrong hands. You know, here’s a guy that’s 

not being paid on time by the governor. His loyalty to the 

governor is kind of questionable. He’s an ethnic Tajik, and 

I sat and listened to him and I talked to him, and we talked 

about world politics and we talked about local politics, and 

we talked about Pakistan; we talked about Afghanistan; we 

talked about the United States; and over a couple hours and 

eating lunch, at his invitation, he came up with a scheme to 

make it look like I forced him to give me these weapons and 

it all worked out. Probably one of the strangest experiences 

I had was, as we walked around inspecting his compound, 

Afghans are very comfortable holding hands, man to man, 

and something in our culture ... we don’t do that, and he 

reached out and grabbed a hold of my hand and held my 

hand the way I hold hands with my wife, as we walked 
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around inspecting his compound. Fortunately, only a small 

number of soldiers and the sergeant major saw that, because 

otherwise I’m sure I would’ve been the butt of a number of 

jokes on that one. But the way I told them is that “Hey, if it 

gets us these weapons that we’re looking for, I’m all for it!”

DR. KOONTZ: Now, where did the money to buy those off come from? Is 

that CERP funds?

COL. SELLERS: Some of that, for the information and some of the—it 

came from small rewards funds, different than CERP funds 

and managed differently—a lot of restrictions on how we 

controlled those funds, and that was probably one of the 

things that we, initially, were not prepared for, but once 

in country, there were a number of certification programs 

to get the right number of officers in the right locations 

qualified to authorize low-level CERP funds. My S-2 was 

the only one authorized for small rewards. Now, he did use 

the FSO that we employed in companies as the company’s 

S-2’s recommendations: “Hey, this guy provided us with 

this kind of information, or he brought us this particular 

weapons system. We think it’s appropriate to reward him,” 

and kind of used 2/87’s sliding scale for their small rewards 

on how we were going to employ the same thing, because 

we didn’t want to overcompensate somebody or pay too 

much for something that we thought was a dangerous 

weapon system. I don’t remember the exact price, but I 

think somewhere, somebody was setting the price for, 

if you’ve got a Stinger missile it’s worth about this much 

money, and we tried to keep that as classified as we could 

so that the Afghans didn’t find it out, send us on wild-goose 

chases looking for stuff that wasn’t there.

DR. KOONTZ: Just to backtrack a little bit to something you’d mentioned 

earlier, you mentioned the second day there, you had that 

IED go off, and Sergeant DeLeon loses his leg and you 

get the Humvee destroyed. You’d done a lot of training 

for this. Was that kind of a wake-up call, in any kind of 

sense, that it’s serious now?

COL. SELLERS: Well, I think that, certainly, as unfortunate as it was, I think 

it had that effect. I think across the battalion—it happened 

in Bravo Company; Jorge was driver for 1st Platoon in Bravo 

Company—but it was a wake-up call across the battalion 

that “Hey, we’re not just playing here. We’re not playing or 

training. There is a real, tangible consequence to things not 

going well.” You know, we were very concerned because 

we’d driven over the same route a few times over the past 

couple days: “Well, we need to change how we’re doing 

things. We don’t want to set up discernible patterns. We 

don’t want to telegraph what we’re going to do.” Certainly 

for the families back home, it was a definite shock to the 

family support group system on how are we going to deal 

with this and I think probably one of the smartest decisions 
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I made was leaving one of my best junior captains back as 

our rear detachment commander to deal with not only the 

soldiers that were nondeployable, but to watch over our 

families. You know, I kind of referred to 2/5 Infantry, the 

Bobcats, as the Bobcat Ohana [Hawaiian for “family”], and 

taking care of families is pretty important. That night, called 

my wife and told her, “Hey, this is not officially released 

because DeLeon’s family’s not notified yet, but you need to 

know this, and you need to contact the rear detachment 

commander, and the two of you talk about, after official 

notification’s done, how the family support group is going 

to support DeLeon’s family”—two small children, a spouse, 

residing on island—“How are we going to take care of them 

the same way we’re trying to take care of him?” And at that 

point, you know, it was touch-and-go on whether he was 

going to live or not. So, big wake-up call, I think, on how 

things are going to go and what the true consequence to 

what we’ve trained for really is.

DR. KOONTZ: You told me before the interview started you’re a 

veteran of Desert Storm. What was the level of veteran 

experience within your battalion?

COL. SELLERS: I would say it’s probably less than 15 percent, and I base that 

mainly on not a lot of guys were Desert Shield/Desert 

Storm veterans. Certainly our senior noncommissioned 

officers had maybe stretching back to as far back as 

Grenada, so some Grenada, some Panama; but again, one 

or two here or there, probably the largest percent Desert 

Shield/Desert Storm vets, but most of those would’ve 

been in the officer ranks, would’ve been platoon leaders or 

squad leaders, maybe, in the enlisted ranks. And then we 

had a smattering of guys that had already seen service in 

OEF—the original phases, OEF I, OEF II—and in a rare 

case, a guy that saw a little bit of service in OIF [Operation 

Iraqi Freedom] at that point, because you know, we’re 

talking 2004, so some guys—and then some guys came to 

us with less than six months underneath their belt from a 

deployment to either Afghanistan or Iraq, so those guys, we 

consciously left on island a little bit longer to get settled with 

their family, but gave them a definite time period: “Hey, 

we’re bringing you forward because we want to use your 

experience.” And, oh, by the way, we needed the people 

because we were close to built full, if not right-out full, 

unitwise, but obviously anticipated that we were going to 

have casualty problems or injuries or something like that, 

so we wanted to keep the replacements flowing in. So, yeah, 

not a lot of folks had seen actual combat operations, kinetic 

combat operations.

DR. KOONTZ: When did you move out from Ghazni to Oruzgan?

COL. SELLERS: It would’ve been early—it was about the thirteenth or 

fourteenth of June. Again, I was able to fly a small leader’s 
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recon element. I took my S-3, my S-2, my S-4, and I think 

one or two other—my FSO went with me. My battalion 

fire support officer captain went, and it was really—they 

flew from Ghazni. We flew back, met with Colonel Garza 

for about two and a half hours; flew from Bagram then 

down directly to Kandahar and met with my parent 

brigade commander, Col. Dick Pedersen, and his staff, 

and then remained overnight in Kandahar. The very next 

morning, flew up and linked in, snapped in for the first 

time with 22d MEU [22d Marine Expeditionary Unit 

(Special Operations Capable)] on the ground in Oruzgan, 

in Tarin Kowt—very rudimentary FOB, FOB Ripley. You 

know, the MEU doesn’t normally venture too far from the 

ship, and now find themselves well inland and had been 

there for about, I think, forty-five days at that point, and 

normally they’re on the ground for about sixty days and 

then pulled back, so no real hard structures constructed 

there at all. But, immediately, they welcomed us, set up an 

addition to their COC, their command operations center, 

gave us a workspace, tried to get some air conditioning 

inside, computer connectivity, SIPR and NIPRNET 

[Nonsecure Internet Protocol Router Network], phones, 

and we worked there for a day. We remained overnight, one 

night with them, and then went back to Kandahar, back to 

Bagram, back to Ghazni, and then got the word that the 

very next morning, I was to take a reinforced company 

back and start operations immediately with the MEU. 

And in that process, there were only about at least three 

different ideas—probably four, if you count mine—on how 

we were going to be employed, who was going to backfill 

us in Ghazni, how all of that was going to sort itself out. 

Was I attached? Was I OPCON [placed under operational 

control]? Was I TACON [placed under tactical control]? 

Was I none of those things? Whose AO was I really going 

to work in? It was very confusing for the staff to try and sort 

all that out, but we sorted it out. I became OPCON to the 

22d MEU. Col. Frank Mackenzie was the MEU commander 

and immediately carved out part of the FOB for us, 

immediately started planning three simultaneous combat 

operations to take place three and a half days after units 

were closing at Oruzgan, and units were only going to close 

at about two-thirds strength because company executive 

officers remained behind in Ghazni under the control of my 

battalion XO as we transitioned for 3/6 Marines Battalion 

from the 6th Regiment, transitioned Ghazni to them. So, 

company executive officers are under the command and 

control of my battalion XO. We were actually collapsing 

our FOBs in and around the Ghazni area and transitioning 

those operations to their counterparts from 3/6 Marines. 

In the meantime, company commanders with two to two 

and a half platoons of their combat power—no equipment 

at this point, really, and equipment, I’m talking about 

vehicular equipment and so forth—prepping for combat 

operations, and so really closely micromanaging the flow 
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of equipment. It would flow, some of it by ground convoy 

back to Bagram and then driven on lift, Heavy Equipment 

Transporters, down to Kandahar, and then either convoyed 

forward to us; some of it was driven to Bagram, picked up 

by the Marine C–130s and flown directly to Tarin Kowt; 

some of it convoyed down to Kandahar to convoy to us. I 

mean, we were really patching things together to get these 

three company-level combat operations going at the same 

time, commencing on the nineteenth of June. So, very 

limited planning and resourcing time, but you know, the 

MEU was doing everything they could to help us out, both 

in moving our stuff, giving us supplies that we were short 

on. And the complementary thing that I did in return was, 

they hadn’t had hot chow in forever. I had cooks available. 

The cooks were like, “Sir, we’re sitting around looking at 

these REFRs [refrigerated trucks]. There’s frozen food in 

the REFRs. We’ve got some of our equipment here, and 

we’ve got some of the Marines’ equipment. We can start 

providing hot chow for the entire FOB.” So, about two days 

later, maybe the seventeenth of June, we started cooking 

hot meals at least once a day for the entire MEU and then 

whatever force we were added to.

DR. KOONTZ: Why was it that your battalion was moved to Tarin 

Kowt?

COL. SELLERS: Well, at the time, CJTF-76 [Combined Joint Task Force-76] 

believed we were conducting decisive combat operations, 

decisive kinetic operations, to eliminate Taliban and al 

Qaeda presence in the Oruzgan Bowl, and I would say 

that the Oruzgan Bowl stretches from, really, Helmand all 

the way through Oruzgan into Zabol, Zabol, Paktika, into 

Pakistan itself. So, if you view that as a limited-mobility 

corridor for the enemy to move back and forth in, they 

were moving key personnel, supplies, back and forth in 

that area and almost using Oruzgan as a lower portion 

of the Hindu Kush support area. And the places we were 

looking for the insurgents, the Taliban, the al Qaeda 

operatives—in any place where there was an intersection 

of a village, at least a trail, some sort of food source, and 

some sort of water. So, in a general area, there’s a place 

where the enemy might be conducting their refit and 

planning operations. 

DR. KOONTZ: And your battalion is OPCON to 22d MEU, so you’re now 

out of the command structure for Task Force Bronco?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, I left Task Force Stonewall, which was 6th Marine 

Regiment, kind of just passed through my parent brigade 

headquarters, Bronco Brigade from the 25th, and then 

moved up and was really OPCON to the MEU until the 

eleventh of July, tenth, eleventh of July, when I assumed 

responsibility for all of Oruzgan Province, and then on that 

day reverted back to parent Bronco Brigade control. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And Task Force Bobcat, that is just simply your 

battalion, correct?

COL. SELLERS: At that point, Task Force Bobcat was an artillery battery, 

my engineer platoon, my ADA [air defense artillery] 

platoon, all my organic companies. The only difference was, 

from the time I arrived in Ghazni, they required me to have 

a platoon’s worth of soldiers in Kabul conducting quick 

reaction force and security missions for CFC-A [Combined 

Forces Command-Afghanistan], and try as we might to get 

that platoon back, I had to maintain a platoon in Kabul 

our entire thirteen-month deployment. When I arrived in 

Oruzgan, I had to split out another platoon-sized element to 

work with Special Forces out in the Deh Rawod Raoud area, 

and that was a commitment that one of my sister battalions 

had from 3d Brigade, but when Oruzgan became my AO, 

the JSOA [Joint Special Operations Area] that was part of 

that. I became responsible for it, so I provided the security 

platoon along with that Special Forces detachment that 

was there, actually two ODAs [Special Forces Operational 

Detachment-A]. So, really—and once we got to Tarin Kowt 

in Oruzgan, again, we were partnered side by side with the 

PRT, so the task force grew in size then to about thirteen 

hundred soldiers, give or take, as they added engineers 

to help construct the PRT’s compound adjacent to FOB 

Ripley and then just—since we were that far out, I ran 

the C–130 airstrip, so I had to have refueling capabilities, 

rearming capabilities for helicopters, so I got a piece of the 

support battalion to come out, augmented with additional 

maintenance personnel, so that just kind of add on. And 

then, as we eventually built the Tarin Kowt-to-Kandahar 

road, I got vertical and horizontal construction engineers 

to not only build my FOB but construct the road. 

DR. KOONTZ: Now, before we get you started on your operations there, 

you mentioned that when you get to FOB Ripley, it’s pretty 

austere, no air conditioning, not much infrastructure.

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, it was the surface of the moon when we got there.

DR. KOONTZ: Take me on a little tour of FOB Ripley as it was when you 

arrived.

COL. SELLERS: When we arrived, the first thing that you noticed—we did 

not land in C–130s. We landed in CH–53s, Marine Corps 

aircraft—two of which were non–mission capable and 

didn’t move for the next two days after we landed—and 

you literally walked out, no joke, at least shin deep in a 

fine brown talcum powder dust. The MEU has an airfield 

control element with their air traffic controllers, and they 

run all their own—they looked at those soldiers, and the 

soldiers were the same color as their uniforms. So, you 

just felt like you were on the surface of the moon. Hesco 

barriers and guard towers were up. A lot of barbed wire, a 
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lot of concertina wire. If you can imagine a perimeter that 

is about five and a half miles in circumference, to include 

the dirt C–130 strip, and then to secure the key pieces of 

terrain to make sure that the Marine COC stayed secure, 

that’s about all there was. There’s the Marine COC; the 

support element; their maintenance; all tents; and then 

each one of the marines lived in their own individual pup 

tent contraption that the Marine Corps issues to them, 

and those were replaced by our own version of single-man 

tents, adjacent to that. Wooden latrines, burn-out latrines, 

stationed strategically so that it would support each of the 

different command and control nodes and the sleep areas 

for the soldiers, and then some out by the guard towers. 

And then two sets of gravity-fed showers—gravity-fed 

nonheated showers, but showers nonetheless—so the time 

that you wanted to take a shower was after the sun went 

down and the wind hadn’t kicked up yet so that you didn’t 

immediately get wet and get talcum powder dust back on 

you. Laundry service nonexistent, obviously. All those 

capabilities we eventually built into the location. Not long 

after we arrived, the Marines had a very small contingent of 

Afghan National Army, and then over time I had anywhere 

between a company and company-plus of ANA presence. 

So, the ANA would then—we built a compound within a 

compound for the Afghan National Army.

And, then, the PRT at the time was really like Fort Apache. 

I mean, here was the Alamo built inside the perimeter 

of the MEU FOB Ripley. At that point in time, the PRT 

commander and the PRT XO were much, much more 

concerned about their own physical security than they 

were doing anything external to the FOB. Very fortunate 

for us, the PRT chain of command changed out about two 

weeks after we arrived. So, had a very good relationship 

with Col. Bill Lafontaine and his executive officer, his civil 

affairs team chief, as we did away with the Alamo mentality 

and started getting his guys outside the gate paired with 

my guys to do very similar to what Steve Ford and I had 

done and go out in Ghazni. I did the security piece, and 

he did the civil affairs piece. Priority number one for us 

was getting gravel brought up from the riverbed, and it 

was huge boulder-sized gravel, but getting some of that 

down so that I could put my TOC [tactical operations 

center] tentage, which I borrowed from the brigade, 

and it was actually the brigade’s ALOC [aerial line of 

communication] facility alternate operations center. That 

was on permanent loan to us now that we put over this 

rock so that we could minimize the amount of dust that 

would interfere with our computers and electronics and 

everything.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And then you mentioned that you go into 

operations pretty shortly after getting there. What kind 

of operations are you conducting?
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COL. SELLERS: We did an operation, Asbury Park II, which the Marines 

had done Asbury Park and had just finished it when we 

arrived. So, 1/6 BLT [Battalion Landing Team], Lt. Col. 

Asad Khan was the commander for that unit. He had just 

returned from a sweep down into the northern part of 

Zabol, extreme southern part of Oruzgan, northern part of 

Zabol, kind of a circular mission, and then returned back 

to FOB Ripley. Asbury Park II had the same objectives, 

but it was really driven by the kind of enemy contact that 

we had on how many of those objectives we’d actually get 

to, and that was a decision to be made between myself and 

Colonel Mackenzie, so on that particular—that was the 

main effort operation. Asbury Park II was main effort. 

I reinforced Bravo Company on that particular mission. 

Second mission, my Alpha Company was to go back out to 

Khas Oruzgan and reestablish what had formerly been an 

outlying Marine FOB, and we called that FOB Anaconda, 

and it was in the district center of Khas Oruzgan in the 

far northeast corner of Oruzgan. Eventually, in the latter 

stages of [Capt.] Andy Brosnan’s mission to establish FOB 

Anaconda and our mission Asbury Park, I was moving 

north in Zabol Province as he was moving south, trying 

to squeeze the Taliban in between us. And then the third 

one, the third mission, was done by our Charlie Company. 

Cadillac Ranch was, I think, the name of that one, and 

that was really more of an establish presence, determine 

whether or not there is Taliban, al Qaeda presence in the area 

that they’ve established, and then transition to a medical 

MEDCAP [medical civil action program] operation, 

treating the people, delivering some foodstuffs, delivering 

some needed supplies, and things like that. It’s more of a 

just, kind of, area familiarization, kind of drawing attention 

away from Asbury Park and Anaconda, and really all 

of those were setting up the MEU’s last operation, which 

would go off into the west, western portions of Oruzgan.

All during this time frame, because of their limited 

mobility and the limited numbers of marines that they had 

available—I mean, that’s why we were added to the MEU, 

to significantly beef up the numbers out in Oruzgan—voter 

registration had not taken place in the majority of the 

districts in Oruzgan; so one of my first missions as I took 

over was, as we’re getting to the end date for voter registration 

in preparation for the national elections, get out and get 

more people registered to vote, make that available, and 

we really facilitated UNAMA [United Nations Assistance 

Mission-Afghanistan] in moving around and allowing 

voter registration centers to open up.

DR. KOONTZ: That’s a pretty wide variety of mission requirements 

there.

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, we developed kind of a buzzword that we called 

“flipping the switch,” and flipping the switch was kind of 
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our code word for transitioning immediately to kinetic 

combat operations if we had to because, you know, getting 

people to register to vote, I don’t think you would’ve seen 

that in our training plan as we got ready to prepare to go 

to what we thought was kinetic combat operations. So, 

initially we would conduct cordon and search operations 

or clearing operations or blocking operations in an area 

and link up with the village elder. Between company 

commander platoon leader, sometimes even squad leaders, 

“Hey, what’s the enemy activity been like in this area? What 

have you seen? What have you had?”—you know, what are 

the problems, and then transition to an operation where we 

would transition to voter registration, transition to treating 

animals, transition to treating people, providing maybe food 

to some of the folks that needed it the most, and clothing. I 

mean, any civic operations that we could, preparing to lay a 

contract with a local Afghan contractor to dig a well, increase 

help with irrigation, provide tools for better farming, and 

then nest that with operations to bring the PRT in, where 

they brought obviously more CERP dollars, USAID [U.S. 

Agency for International Development] dollars, when we 

could start talking about education; and we could talk about 

medical clinics; we could talk about good governance, how 

to be a good district chief and how the district chief should 

interface with the provincial government.

But one of the challenges we had was Jan Muhammad 

Khan, who was the provincial governor of Oruzgan, was—

we termed him kind of our “good bad guy,” an unsavory 

character that you kind of felt like you needed a shower after 

you worked with him, but he was the guy that was in charge 

and he was the guy that was in power—a family friend of 

President [Hamid] Karzai, from the same tribe as President 

Karzai, the Popalzai tribe, not recognized necessarily as the 

leader of the Popalzai tribe, but definitely a guy that had 

his own private militia and was powerful in the province 

of Oruzgan. And you know, one of the missions that we 

immediately took on kind of happened by accident, but 

we figured it out that he’s surrounded by a lot of armed 

guys—and I say kind of by accident, but on purpose, we 

stumbled across a cache that supplied his private militia, 

and I seized it and I destroyed it, and over the next three or 

four days—this is when I owned the province now, after 11 

July—I hit successive caches, all of which belonged to his 

private militia. I took all the weapons, destroyed them all, 

and really demonstrated to him—I think he was confused 

as to how I was finding these things and getting to him, but 

I was decreasing his power, and that’s when we could start 

the dialogue of “Well, you don’t need a private army. That’s 

what you’ve got Afghan National Police for. That’s what 

you’ve got the Afghan National Army for. What you need to 

concentrate on....” And this was a long-term process, and 

we never got there with him, was “Stop being a good Taliban 

killer”—which, he’s a pretty good muj [mujaheddin], I think, 
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and least his stories from the Soviet days and his stories of 

the exploits with President Karzai as they rid the country of 

the Taliban. Now, he needs to concentrate on being a good 

governor, and between Bill Lafontaine and I, our job was to 

coach, teach, mentor him into being a better governor, and 

we—Bill did that primarily. I did that for security issues, 

and we used the Department of State rep to try and further 

that along, as well.

DR. KOONTZ: How was it that you were finding those successive 

caches?

COL. SELLERS: Well, part of it is I had what I called the governor’s liaison 

team, something that the Marines had established, and I 

wrung my hands for a long time on how I was going to 

resource this, because the Marines resourced it with a 

major, two captains, a couple senior NCOs, and a couple 

marines, and I just didn’t have the bodies to do that. So, we 

handpicked our civil affairs officer. One of them—I had two 

majors and a captain. I took one of them, took one of my 

staff officers, an NCO from my staff, and two soldiers, and 

they went and lived inside the governor’s compound, and 

their job was to monitor what was going on throughout 

the day in the governor’s compound, meet and greet, keep 

track of who came in and out, and just contact from the 

people. People would say “Hey, do you know about this?” 

or “I know where a bunch of weapons are,” and befriending 

those individuals—and again, small rewards for those kinds 

of individuals that provided us useful information. A lot of 

times one piece of useful information would lead to bigger 

pieces of useful information. But, as I say, there is an aspect 

of luck to discovering the first one, and then intelligence, 

probably coupled with a little more luck, led to about four 

in a row, when it took out some pretty significant caches 

of weapons, heavy weapons and munitions, and took them 

away from his private militia. 

DR. KOONTZ: Were you there when he was finally removed, or was that 

after you ...

COL. SELLERS: No, that was after I left. But one of the last things that 

General Olson asked as the outgoing CJTF-76 commander 

was—he was obviously going to have an opportunity to 

speak with President Karzai—“Who in the provincial 

officials and district organizations do you think needs 

to go?” Bill Lafontaine and I, in coordination with the 

Department of State rep, put our heads together and 

wrote a two-page information paper on when we thought 

the time would be right for replacement of Governor Jan 

Mohammed and, frankly, we had an op plan we called Op 

Plan Zulu. If we had to remove Governor Mohammed 

immediately from office, we thought there might be some 

sort of armed response to that, so we had taken the time to 

figure out how we were going to lock down the city of Tarin 
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Kowt, which is the provincial capital, in order to facilitate 

that forcible transition, I guess it would be. It was certainly 

an op plan that we did not want to have to execute. But, 

you know, over time he did change. He became a better 

governor, but by no means would I term him, certainly by 

our standards, a good governor, but you know, getting out 

and meeting with the people in the province. And there 

were, a couple were natural disasters that were—one group 

was snowed in in the Bahguchar Valley in the extreme 

northeast. They had been snowed in since October, and we 

flew the governor in my command and control helicopter 

out, and we brought in two Chinooks of mixed U.S. and 

Afghan National Army soldiers to bring water and food and 

warm clothing to these people. We brought the governor 

so the governor could talk to the village elders. I mean, it 

was a huge success because they’d never seen the governor 

before. We had the same experience in the spring with 

floods along the Helmand River valley. Took him out, and 

rescued a number of people off islands in the middle of the 

river, and then he spent probably three or four days out 

there talking with village elders and trying to coordinate or 

to find out what people needed, and him working through 

his reconstruction minister and us working through NGOs 

and our own system to provide what people needed. So, he 

got better, but still our “good bad guy.” 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You mentioned a while ago the voter registration 

efforts. What was your task force’s contribution to the 

2004 election?

COL. SELLERS: I think pretty significant, in that we probably increased 

the voter registration in the province several hundred 

percent over where it was when we arrived in June. So, 

a large majority of the eligible voters in Oruzgan were 

actually registered to vote, and then when you look at the 

turnout from the elections, darn close to 85 to 90 percent 

of the people registered actually came and voted, and that 

was despite the fact that a number of people with voter 

registration cards had been killed. Some of the UNAMA 

workers were attacked, ambushed, assassinated in their voter 

registration efforts. I provided two of my battle captains, 

two of my planners, to UNAMA down in Kandahar to 

assist in planning and resourcing how we would conduct 

the elections and collect ballots back from the province 

of Oruzgan, and they spent a week down in Kandahar, 

working side by side with the UNAMA planners on where 

would maybe be the best locations: “How should we get 

the ballots back and forth? Who and how should those 

ballots be secured once they’re completed?” And again, 

our direct contribution on election and postelection days 

was almost a roving presence, where you could respond to 

calls for assistance to any number of specific voter polling 

locations, but working with the governor and his district 

chiefs and the district police chiefs, again through the 
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company commanders. Immediate security for the polling 

site was Oruzgan Afghan National Police. External to 

that was kind of a combination between some of the 

governor’s still-private militia, Afghan National Police, 

UNAMA security workers, who were almost an outer 

ring to that polling site, and then beyond them, connected 

by Thuraya phones, were really the U.S., Coalition, and 

Afghan National Army forces.

So, in a couple instances, a polling site was attacked to try and 

discourage voters from coming in. The immediate Afghan 

National Police called the UNAMA workers on a Thuraya 

phone, Thuraya phone to my company commander: “Hey, 

we’re being attacked.” This location responded to the attack, 

looked for, eliminated the attack, and the poll reopened 

forty-five minutes later. A couple different instances where 

IEDs were planted on the roads, discovered by locals—again, 

through the Thuraya phones, reported—Bravo Company 

moved to a different location, secured the IED, and polling 

continued. So, I would say elections were a major success.

DR. KOONTZ: Who is it that’s doing this voting? What were your 

impressions of the people of Oruzgan?

COL. SELLERS: Oh, I mean, the ballot was picture ballots, so most of the 

folks—a high percentage of the Afghan population is 

illiterate to begin with, so the majority of the people out in 

Oruzgan, one of the remote areas, a lot of them illiterate. A 

lot of them probably voted by rumor, reputation. A lot of 

them voted, probably, by, you know, what the mullah in the 

mosque was reporting—a lot of dialogue inside the mosque 

from the mullahs. We made a concerted effort over time 

to befriend and co-opt good mullahs so that our message 

was getting out in addition to the Taliban message to the 

Afghan people. It wasn’t us standing up preaching in front 

of somebody, telling them what they should believe and 

what they should think. It was somebody they’re familiar 

with and somebody they know extolling the virtues of a 

centralized government in Afghanistan.

So, I think a lot of them, you know, it’s by hearsay, by 

reputation, “I recognize President Karzai,” but you know, 

postelection, those that voted wanted to show that they’d 

voted. They would point to a picture of President Karzai: 

“Karzai good, Bush good.” But again, you had to prove to a lot 

of people why government mattered to them at all, because 

you know, they’re remote people. The central government, 

at least to this point, in a lot of locations, had not been a 

provider to them, and they didn’t really understand or see 

a benefit to having a centralized government: “I’ve raised 

my sheep and goats and vegetables on this piece of land 

for hundreds of years and not had a central government. 

Why do I need one now?” But the education aspects, 

the medical improvements where functioning clinics, 
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functioning schools were in place, they start to see a change 

in the amount of commerce in their bazaar—products 

and services available, just the physical appearance of the 

bazaar. They made those connections. We helped make 

those connections for them, that “Hey, this is because you 

have a stable government because they’re providing money 

to staff the clinic. They’re providing money to construct the 

road, money to provide school supplies for the education of 

the children.” 

DR. KOONTZ: What major operations did you conduct after the 

elections?

COL. SELLERS: There’s, I think—I don’t know the exact number, but those 

are color coded by company—no, time periods, I think. 

Yeah, they’re color coded by time periods, so if you look at 

the green ones, the green ones are MEU operations, of three 

simultaneous MEU operations, and then the ones—area 

development, we’re kind of—how do we figure out what’s 

going on in this area? Bobcat Freedom and Bobcat 

Freedom II, those are post ... Bobcat Freedom II, II and 

III are all postelections, so there’s probably, I don’t know, 

thirty-five, forty different major operations that lasted 

anywhere from three to ten days long. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. So, these probably also sort of vary in purpose 

as well, like those earlier ...

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, they all start—one of the things we did is we produced 

these interesting little cards that are for the commanders. 

They’ve got bigger size of these, but it lists tasks and 

purposes that the graphics—and one of the things that 

we had to be careful of is wording that indicated strictly 

kinetic combat operations was not approved by CJTF76. So, I guess, maybe in sort of a deceptive way to get 

around that, the first time we had an operation kicked 

back because it was too kinetic in its communication, 

I said, “Okay. Strip the kinetic verbiage off in the task 

and purpose and leave the graphics on the card so that a 

clear graphic symbol on the map still tells the company 

commander what I want him to do. I want him to clear 

the area of Taliban or al Qaeda forces.” But the overall 

purpose of the mission has a civil affairs focus to it, and 

again, that’s where the flipping the switch comes into play. 

If we went into a location with no specific intelligence on 

an individual or individuals, then immediately it was a 

prepared posture for kinetic operations; but as soon as 

nothing happened, like if we weren’t attacked or shot at 

on infil, then we immediately transitioned to engaging the 

village elder, assessing the schools, assessing agriculture, 

assessing the police presence in that particular area, 

and going to projects, providing food, providing tools, 

whatever it might be. So, every operation we did had a 

kinetic and a nonkinetic component.
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Now, operations where we had specific intelligence on 

individuals, obviously much more focused on initial 

aggressive posture, but focused on specific targets: “I’m 

looking for Mullah Abdullah,” and we gained as much 

information on Mullah Abdullah as we could. And I’m just 

pulling that name out of a hat, but if I had a picture of him, 

everybody would have his picture. If I had a description, 

everybody would have the description. If I knew generally 

what compound he was in, in addition to the map marked 

with a red dot—not listed as an objective, but as just a red 

area of interest—there might be a piece of imagery, a picture 

that would show what the surrounding area might look 

like. I know I’ve got one. But that would be distributed, you 

know, circled as the major objective, where he could be in 

one of these, what looks like seven or eight compounds but 

on the ground it turns into, like, fifteen compounds because 

they all latch together. So, here’s the guy Mullah Abdullah 

we’re looking for. He could be anywhere in this area, and 

we can go in.

We eventually developed the TTP of an aerial reaction 

force where I kept a scout squad under the command 

and control of either my S-3 or one of my experienced 

assistant S-3s so that as we flew in to cordon and search 

one of these specific intel-driven objectives, anybody 

that squirted out to the sides, the aerial reaction force 

would fly in behind, sit down, sort out the individuals 

on the ground, and then either detain or release those 

particular individuals. Or, a number of times, we’d keep 

a team on the ground to just collect the squirters, as we 

called them, in one location until we could sort out what 

was actually taking place on the ground. And that’s why 

the number of operations is limited, because we had 

limited EOD, limited sensitive site exploitation, limited 

in tactical questioning interrogation teams. So, I’d surge 

those individuals to different companies, and they might 

finish one operation in one location, be immediately 

picked up, have a day in between to do the next operation 

with another company. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right, we’re looking here at this map, and there’re 

thirty-three different operations. Do any of these stick 

out in your mind as being particularly effective or 

particularly difficult, or just for some reason you have a 

strong memory of?

COL. SELLERS: Well, one that I’ll talk to is Operation Landgrab. It was 

an interesting operation. I did not really have clearance 

to go out and really establish FOB Cobra. Landgrab was 

really focused initially on voter registration in the extreme 

northwestern portions of Oruzgan. The hidden intent for 

us was to establish FOB Cobra, find an empty compound in 

an area where I knew the enemy to be operating, and I had 

many discussions with Colonel Mackenzie about this, on 
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390

where I needed to be to effectively manage AO Bobcat, 

i.e. Oruzgan Province. So, we did the voter registration—

very successful, although the UNAMA voter registration 

force was ambushed and a couple of their workers 

were killed. On exfil, when we came to a town, several 

compounds in the middle of a dry riverbed, the company 

might have stayed, did not return. They were there less 

than twenty-four hours when they received their first 

attack by the Taliban, and that remained a contentious, 

hot area for quite some time. The first two soldiers 

we had killed were killed by an IED strike at the end 

of a convoy resupplying an FOB Cobra, and then there 

was a series of operations after that which were 

specifically designed to tame and rid this particular area 

of Taliban presence.

And I’m looking for the right—oh, Operation Outlaw,

23–27 October ‘04—two soldiers were killed, one soldier 

blinded permanently, and a platoon sergeant injured 

severely enough that he returned to the States—took 

place just a couple days prior to that. So, went back out 

specifically—and again, a company-plus size operation, 

so I borrowed soldiers from Bravo Company to go 

out and reinforce Charlie Company. I did a split TAC 

operation where my S-3 controlled one end of the valley, 

I controlled the other end of the valley, and it was a pretty 

dedicated series of operations from then on. You can see 

9–13 November, and then there should be another one 

in the November time frame where one operation after 

another, and each time they became less kinetic at the 

outset and more civil affairs focused. But each time, all 

three of those operations, very, very informed by detailed 

intelligence on what facilitators and what Taliban forces 

might actually be there. 

DR. KOONTZ: All throughout the interview, you’ve mentioned the 

Taliban. Who are the bad guys in AO Bobcat?

COL. SELLERS: The bad guys in AO Bobcat, out in Oruzgan? Really, strictly 

the Taliban. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, you’re not getting very much al Qaeda or HIG? 

COL. SELLERS: Almost no HIG. Al Qaeda, some linkages, potentially, 

between the extreme northern portions of Zabol and 

southeastern portion of northeast Oruzgan, the area 

that we saw, these valleys in here, that there might be 

movement between key figures. I know in the Zabol 

Province, where 2/35 Cacti, [Lt. Col.] Scott McBride, 

was operating, a number of foreign fighters there. In my 

engagements in Asbury Park down in this area, I think 

we encountered, although did not capture them, foreign 

fighters in that area, as well. So, a little bit of al Qaeda, but 

primarily Taliban guys.
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DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about fighting the Taliban. What kind of tactics 

did they use, and what kind of tactics did you use to 

counter them?

COL. SELLERS: Well, one of the things that was spot on from Grau’s analysis 

is it’s almost this inherited ambush points. You know, I 

was personally ambushed on Operation Asbury Park in 

a location that was really kind of a good exfil route for 

the ambushing force to leave the ambush site, but it was 

really a poor ambush site. There were several locations 

along the route that we had to travel in and out of this 

particular valley that would’ve been better ambush spots 

and probably would’ve resulted in casualties to our side. 

But in this particular instance, we suffered no casualties—

you know, dings and dents, bullet holes in vehicles—but 

really did damage to the ambushing force until such point 

as they used their exfil route, and the exfil route was a 

defile that they were able to move on to the backside of 

a hill mass, a small mountain, that led to another village. 

So, if we were going to employ any sort of ordnance that 

had a high circle probability of error, you run the risk of 

maybe killing the ambush force, but also maybe killing 

some of the civilian population in that particular village. 

So, that’s why I say in the exfil route, pretty smart, but the 

ambush site? The only good thing that protected them, it 

was uphill. So, in order to pursue the ambush force, we 

had to move uphill with our ANA squads and with our 

infantry squads to get to them, so that offered them some 

element of protection, but fields of fire and chokepoint 

was not there. So, not very tactical savvy in that respect.

Another key aspect was you can always count on, once 

you started hearing weapons fire, that they’d pretty much 

shoot what amounted to a magazine, maybe two, of 

ammunition and then they would melt away and disappear. 

RPGs [rocket propelled grenades], many times, were fired 

inaccurately and then if they—sometimes, if they were 

accurate, in their haste to fire multiple rounds out of one 

or two weapons, they would not remove the arming pins, 

so the round would impact where they shot but would just 

splinter apart because the round was not armed. Now, if 

it was a thin-skinned vehicle or obviously an individual, 

it’s going to go through them. I had no casualties to RPG 

rounds, direct-fire RPG rounds, but I did have, at least on 

one of our communications vehicles, where multiple RPG 

rounds had gone through the wood and just splintered 

apart on the inside because they were not armed, so they 

didn’t detonate. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, these are typically just kind of pray-and-spray 

attacks?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah, they were just—and I think the exception to the 

IEDs, because the IEDs became more sophisticated 
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over time. And even those, a lot of times, malfunctioned 

because it’s not necessarily the hardcore Taliban organizer 

that is conducting the attack. They’ve paid somebody how 

much ever money it takes to get some money to perpetrate 

the attack. Why? Because they need the money. So, that 

complicates the process. You’re not necessarily always 

looking at the attacker. Although we would detain the 

attackers or, best case, kill the attackers, I guess, maybe, 

what we’re really looking for is the organizer and the 

facilitators. But they did appear many times to be poorly 

selected tactical sites to conduct their attacks—poorly 

executed, and hastily executed, primarily so that they could 

move away to come back and attack again.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have a standard ROE [rules of engagement]?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah. I mean, there was a standard listing of rules of 

engagement that was very well understood, I think, by 

the soldiers. And that was one thing that ... routinely, as 

variations in the ROE came down, or even if there weren’t 

new additions or changes to the ROE, we conducted 

periodic training to make sure that we were engaging 

the right people and, if necessary, killing the right people 

and not causing civilian casualties. But we did have some 

incidents that required investigation.

DR. KOONTZ: How well do you think that your battalion balanced 

kinetic and nonkinetic operations?

COL. SELLERS: I think pretty well. It’s difficult to judge, though. I mean, 

you sit around and second-guess yourself all the time. But 

given the difficulty of collecting—and I hate this word, 

I guess—actionable intelligence, there’s a lot of dots to 

connect before you could go after a specific individual or 

group of individuals, make all the right connections to say, 

“Yup, that’s the guy that we want, and here’s the reason we 

want that guy,” but I think it was a pretty good balance.

You could see the difference. I pressured the governor hard 

before we left to put good district chiefs in charge, and we 

measured that by satisfaction of the populace in that district 

with the policies and how the district chief was conducting 

his operations. Same thing with the police. We provided 

a number of training opportunities where we conducted 

operations with them to try and bring them along. Again, 

were the police taking bribes? Were they detaining people 

or putting up illegal checkpoints just to get money for 

themselves? Or, were they actually going out investigating 

a complaint by somebody? Medical clinics and schools? 

I think those went a long ways. Or, medical doctors in 

conjunction with the PRTs. They did a lot of good work 

getting the money to not go into somebody’s pocket, 

but go into the actual clinic and doctors and medicine 

themselves.
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But you know, then after we left and turned over our 

AO to somebody else, you kept hearing about increased 

resurgence of Taliban: “They’re preparing for and 

executing more aggressive and more frequent operations. 

They’re taking over district centers.” So you know, you 

kind of wonder, “Well, did I do such a good job, or did 

I not do such a good job?” I know that of the guys we 

put away, 90 percent of them were detained for extended 

periods of time, so that kind of gives me the feeling that 

we focused on the right guys, collected the right evidence, 

and then either killed or captured the right guys. Very few 

were turned loose as just “Hey, you got the wrong guy.” 

So, we kind of used that as a measure. More time—you 

wish you would’ve had more time to do these kinds of 

things. Twelve, thirteen months is not a long period of 

time. Just when you know the personalities and know the 

area and can anticipate the way somebody’s going to react, 

then it becomes time to transition to somebody else. So, I 

guess in hindsight we’ve second-guessed a lot of the things 

we’ve done.

Certainly, one of the aspects of Oruzgan—and I think 

Helmand Province is similar—is, as the Afghan government’s 

policies on drugs become formalized, the resurgence in 

Taliban certainly is connected with the resurgence in 

drug lord activity. Everyone would like to believe that the 

Taliban outlawed opium and opium was not produced in 

the years that the Taliban was in control of Afghanistan. 

That’s horseshit. A lot of the Taliban’s money comes from 

opium production. So, as we have an impact on the opium 

growers, the opium transporters, the producers, we’re 

affecting the Taliban’s livelihood; we’re affecting the drug 

lords’ livelihood; and, you know, the first time you get shot 

at by anybody, that now becomes your enemy. So, a drug 

lord starts feeling his means of support and his livelihood 

slipping away, he’s going to strike out at whoever’s doing 

that. So, I think it’s kind of a combination of the two of 

those things. 

DR. KOONTZ: You kind of touched on this before when you were 

talking about the detention rates of the people that 

you’re bringing in. What kind of metrics do you use to 

determine success or—failure’s probably too strong a 

word—but nonsuccess in an unconventional war like 

this?

COL. SELLERS: There were two products that ... kind of a combination. We 

leveraged a few things that we thought were indicators of 

enduring success, and eventually the brigade came up with 

two—it’s kind of like a PowerPoint picture that you put 

bullets on, but nested with that was an Excel spreadsheet 

that measured good governance or reconstruction activity, I 

think it is, and the other one—yeah, one was a developmental 

assessment, and the other was a security assessment. It 
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started out that initially I was filling out both of those, and I 

filled those out by pulsing the company commanders. There’s 

a series of metrics in the Excel spreadsheet that—you know, 

how many shura meetings have there been, how many—and 

most of them are quantifiable. They’re not subjective, kind 

of touchy-feely things. So, company commanders would 

fill those out, and company commanders filled out both of 

those spreadsheets for development and for security.

Eventually, Bill Lafontaine, the PRT commander, and I 

cooperated on these, where I would do a developmental 

assessment, he would do a developmental assessment; we 

would put the two together, and then send that forward 

to the brigade headquarters. We’d do the same thing on 

the security. He would give me his impressions overall on 

security, and I would take the detailed input from company 

commanders. We’d compare the two, discuss it, come to an 

agreement, and send that forward. And, you know, under 

the developmental assessment, what we would list is we 

would list current initiatives that were going to move one of 

these areas from a stoplight chart of red, amber, green from, 

say, amber to green or from red to amber or something like 

that. So, I think we tried to use as quantifiable, objective 

criteria to make those evaluations as we could. I hope I 

answered the question. 

DR. KOONTZ: When you left Oruzgan in April 2005, you get a year 

there, which isn’t a whole lot of time. Were there any 

differences that you noticed?

COL. SELLERS: Yeah. You know, when you looked at the Tarin Kowt area 

itself, the bazaar area had changed drastically, not only in 

its physical appearance, but just kind of the shadiness of 

the vendors that made up the bazaar. A lot of that had to 

do with low-level CERP projects that I initiated, and then 

larger CERP projects tied to USAID projects that the PRT 

was bringing. You know, we were eventually going to pave 

the bazaar. I graveled it initially as a low-level CERP project 

so that in the wintertime it wasn’t sloppy muddy. The police 

traffic circle in the center of town had always been a place 

where criminals and Taliban, at least according to the 

governor, were killed and hung out for display. Now it was a 

two-story, like a police precinct headquarters in the middle 

of the traffic circle, brightly painted so the Afghans thought 

it looked nice. Checkpoints had gone up at key locations 

where the Afghan National Police could monitor traffic 

flow in places where people had historically been held up 

or robbed or something. I mean, again, those were almost 

like district police or precinct houses where the police were, 

and they stationed out of to do their patrolling.

The clinics were vastly different. Schools were vastly 

different. And when I say a clinic’s vastly different, staffing, 

at least on a volunteer basis, of a trained doctor or a trained 
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nurse being there at predictable hours during the week 

with medications or other items to help the people. In the 

past, yeah, it’s a clinic, but there was a lock on the door and 

nobody was ever there. Schools—difficult in the Pashtun 

areas to convince everyone that the girls should attend 

school, but I would say a majority of the males, young males, 

were in school. So, those are the kinds of tangible things. 

The road from Tarin Kowt to Kandahar being worked from 

Kandahar north and from Tarin Kowt south, not long after 

we left was finished, completed, and paved, and I’ve got 

to think that has improved commerce significantly in the 

Tarin Kowt area. Farmers now have an easier way to get 

crops to market and things like that.

The president’s brother, Hamid Karzai’s brother Qayum 

Karzai, runs an IGO [international governmental 

organization], Afghans for a Civil Society, and we had, 

through Colonel Pedersen, inspired him to come out 

and work on establishing a provincial shura where the 

districts, the district chiefs, district shuras would provide 

representatives to the provincial shura—very similar to 

the way we bring grievances to the county seat where the 

county takes them to the state, trying to inspire them to 

do the same thing so that the provincial shura is almost 

an extension of the governor’s administration. They take 

input from the governor. So, the Department of State 

rep, Qayum Karzai, Afghans for a Civil Society, the PRT 

commander, myself, I think, felt that that was moving in 

the right direction. They were beginning to understand the 

initial stages of their form of democracy—certainly didn’t 

look like ours, didn’t function like ours, but that’s kind 

of what it was, and even as kind of shady as we still felt 

the governor was, when we first arrived you couldn’t do 

anything without greasing his palm or providing contracts 

to some of his cronies. But you dealt with him only, and 

that was it. As we departed, me first and, I think, Bill 

Lafontaine about a month, month and a half after I did, the 

governor’s cabinet of ministers, two deputy governors, and 

assorted judiciary, regional, rural development, education 

ministers, were not only being paid on a fairly reasonably 

frequent basis, but you didn’t have to go to the governor to 

always get approval. You could go directly to one of those 

ministers with an idea, or he would come to us with an idea 

on “Hey, we would like to do this in the province.” In one 

of the districts, and obviously there had already been some 

sort of meeting between the governor and his ministers, 

if you will, on what needed to be done. So, I think those 

are tangible, observable improvements, but certainly not to 

our standards. If you wanted to compare U.S. rights and 

democracy freedoms to Afghan style, they’re still totally 

different. A lot of that’s cultural. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right, you’ve got almost a year in Oruzgan. When the 

SETAF [Southern European Task Force] guys come in 
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to replace you, what kind of guidance or what kind of 

experience or advice can you pass on to them?

COL. SELLERS: Very similar to what we had viewed in the 10th Mountain 

and, before them, the 82d [Airborne Division]—AARs, 

formal AARs, written out and published. We provided 

the same thing to 173d [Airborne Brigade], SETAF. It 

was obvious that the SETAF commander had done a lot 

of research and development of his folks on insurgency. 

There’s a published document that he had. I had all my guys 

read it so that, hey, when we’re talking, we’re speaking the 

same language.

But, again, our disappointment was the battalion that was 

designated to come in directly behind and replace me at FOB 

Ripley never came. We started into transition. We’re two and 

a half, three days into our left-seat/right-seat ride, exchange 

of equipment, and everything else when the decision was 

made by SETAF, then the new CJTF-76 commander, 

that “Hey, we’re not going to backfill the battalion out in 

Oruzgan. Instead, we’re going to put a SOF ODB [Special 

Forces Operational Detachment-B] out there and beef up 

the number of ODAs with an ANA battalion”—an ANA 

battalion which really amounts to an ANA battalion-minus 

by the time personnel fill trickles down. Had an ODA 

at every one of our FOBs with about company-minus of 

ANA personnel. So, all of the preparatory work, e-mail 

exchanges, visits that 173d—504th [Infantry Regiment], in 

specific—had done to backfill us came to nothing because 

they were used in another area, I think, primarily RC 

East, at that point, for SETAF’s version of kinetic combat 

operations. So, I think, even despite their best efforts, the 

already struggling concept we had of manning and staying 

in touch with the entire province of Oruzgan, now we’re 

replaced by a unit that’s roughly a third of the size that we 

were. I think the ODB SOF forces were challenged to keep 

pace with everything, and I think that some things may 

have backslid because of it. I know they had good successes 

with the ANA, and I think that they probably still are. I 

think all of our FOBs, my last check, are still operational in 

some form or another.

That was difficult, but I think we tried to provide as much 

detailed information on “Hey, here’s the enemy as we see it; 

here’s the historic engagements; here are the IED contacts 

over time; here are the direct fire contacts over time; here’s 

the electronic monitoring spectrum that we’ve seen over 

time; here are the projects that we’ve instituted, the ones 

that are completed, the ones that are still in the works, the 

ones that are planned for the future; here are the good guys 

as we see them; here are the good bad guys as we see them; 

and here’s just the flat-out bad guys.” All that information 

that we had started to transition with the 504th, certainly 

we turned it all over to the ODB, but, again, by the time 
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that decision was made, there’s maybe a week’s worth of 

transition between us and the ODB, and they certainly 

weren’t staffed to secure the large FOB, and, I mean, we 

were robbing Peter to pay Paul, to keep that security going 

anyway. So, the security issues that they had, and then 

trying to conduct operations, they were greatly challenged 

by that, I think. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, what happens to Colonel Sellers and his 

battalion when you leave Afghanistan?

COL. SELLERS: You know, we came back, and four guys KIA, which is 

when compared to some other units not significant; four 

individuals without legs; one guy that’s blind; another soldier 

recently had both of his feet amputated from a mission that 

ended just a week before we were to redeploy. You know, we 

came back by company, a reinforced company. The battalion 

headquarters element was the last to return. Great welcome 

from the division, great welcome from families, but, again, 

we were the last unit to return from our division. The 2d 

Brigade had been back for awhile from Iraq. We were the 

last unit to come back from 3d Brigade. So, in some sense, 

it was a little bit anticlimactic, but soldiers were able to take 

a full thirty days of leave, spend time with their families, 

either on island or off island. And then, you know, they went 

through a small reintegration process immediately when 

they got back, before we went on leave; went on leave, and 

then came back and continued the reintegration process, 

which was needed. I mean, I personally felt that there was 

about a three-month period where you were coming back 

out of the environment and readjusting to normal life as you 

knew it before the deployment, and I think that’s probably 

consistent with other units and other deployments.

But then, you know, it became “Let’s transition and prepare 

for the change of command,” which was going to take place 

towards the end of June in ‘05. And then a month and a half 

later, sadly, on a lot of accounts, as part of transformation, 

2/5 Infantry ceased to exist. It was deactivated, colors 

folded, and it was transformed into 3/4 Cav as what was 

then known as a RSTA [reconnaissance, surveillance, 

and target acquisition] battalion in 3d Brigade. I guess 

immediately after the leave period, soldiers began to feel 

the effects of that. I pretty much made—unless there was a 

compelling reason for a soldier to PCS [make a permanent 

change of station transfer] outside of that ninety-day 

stabilization window—pretty much everybody stayed, but 

as soon as that ninety-day window was over, major portions 

of the battalion were transferred to 2d Brigade or to other 

units as we were making room for the new MOS [military 

occupational specialty] and the transition to the 3/4 Cav. 

The 3/4 Cav, I think, is about a third the size of the standard 

infantry battalions in numbers of personnel—300-some 

versus 750-some—and that caused, I think, soldiers a 
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lot of problems, because here was the unit that they had 

trained with, gone to major operational deployment with, 

lost friends with, and now it’s not there. It’s like it didn’t 

exist, in some sense. So, I think that added to some of the 

adjustment problems that some of the soldiers had, some 

of the leaders. I think some of the leaders actually stayed 

behind. Like, my S-3 became the XO for the unit. The guy 

that was my XO became the deputy IG [inspector general] 

for the division and things like that. 

DR. KOONTZ: When did you leave that position?

COL. SELLERS: Change of command was, what, 26 June? So, I left the 

command thirty-six months later, and I did a week’s worth 

of leave on island. But the day our vehicle drove off of 

Schofield Barracks, I didn’t go back, and unless somebody 

initiated contact with me from the battalion, I never went 

back to say, “Hey, how’s it going? How are things now?” 

It just didn’t feel right doing that. But it was certainly a 

huge change, both for me and my family, to no longer be 

responsible for anywhere between 750 to 1,350 folks and 

their families. So, while the huge gorilla came off your back, 

you missed that sense of importance and responsibility, the 

great opportunity command gives you. So, while it was 

great that the phone wasn’t ringing at three in the morning, 

you kind of wish sometimes that the phone was ringing at 

three in the morning: “Hey, one of your guys is in trouble 

downtown.”

DR. KOONTZ: If I could ask a personal question, and this may be related 

to what we’re talking about or may not, what’s the deal 

with your bracelet on your right wrist?

COL. SELLERS: Those are the names of the soldiers that were killed. And 

I wear that all the time, and it’s still tough to think about. 

These are guys that were doing their job, and they were 

doing a job that I told them to do. And I can’t put all the 

guys that were injured on there but, you know, you feel a 

sense of responsibility, then and now, for what happened 

there. I still talk to the families. One of the families ... 

Jacob Fleischer’s father is a colonel in the reserves. I invited 

him and his wife to the change of command. They flew all 

the way to Hawaii to go to the change of command. So, it 

never leaves, and I guess maybe I induce that, but I think 

it’s important. There’s a cost, and that’s one of the things I 

try to spread to people here at the War College. I mean, 

I was an instructor at the War College in joint military 

operations for eighteen months before I became a student. 

All the great think pieces we do and theory and everything 

else that we banter around in the classroom, there’s a cost 

to getting that wrong, and there’s a cost even if you get it 

right. We’re in a dangerous business. These certainly aren’t 

the first four soldiers that I’ve seen killed in twenty-two 

years of active service, but I feel personally responsible for 
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these guys, and I don’t think that I or anybody else should 

forget the sacrifice that those guys put forward willingly to 

do what I asked them to do. So, that’s why I still wear it. I 

certainly didn’t lose as many soldiers as some commanders 

have, or units have, but one’s too many. But that’s the nature 

of what we do. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir, I’ve taken up two hours of your time. What 

else would you like to add?

COL. SELLERS: I think it’s a great privilege to command in the first place. 

I think it’s an even greater privilege to serve the soldiers 

and their families in an operational deployment like what 

we did in OEF. Done it twice now in Desert Shield/

Desert Storm, OEF, and, if I stick around long enough, I’ll 

probably get asked to do something again. It’s important, 

and I think—we don’t always get to choose how or when 

we’re going to get engaged to do these things, but we’ve 

got to be ready to do them and do them to the best of our 

ability, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed about my time in the 

battalion. So, I guess that’s the only thing that I would add 

to this.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, sir. With that, we’ll go ahead and end the interview. 

I want to thank you for taking the time to do this.

Lt. Col. Timothy P. McGuire served as Commander, 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry, 173d 

Airborne Brigade, Southern European Task Force (Airborne), Combined Joint Task Force-76, 

which operated in Regional Command East from April 2005 to March 2006. He was interviewed at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, by Christopher Koontz 

of the U.S. Army Center of Military History on 22 February 2007. Colonel McGuire took 

command of his battalion while it was deployed in Tuz, Iraq, after its original commanding 

officer was wounded and evacuated out of theater. The battalion conducted counterinsurgency operations in concert with Iraqi security forces before returning to Italy for a year of 

refit and training prior to its deployment to Afghanistan. Colonel McGuire describes the 

local conditions and government in Paktika Province, where the battalion was stationed 

within Regional Command East, and discusses the battalion’s successful cooperation with 

the provincial government to rebuild the Bermel District through construction projects and 

training of local officials and police. He comments on the command structure in Regional 

Command East, the battalion’s coordination with Special Operations Forces, the instability 

of Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, and the integration of small-scale air assault operations with reconstruction and humanitarian missions. Throughout the interview, Colonel 

McGuire stresses the importance of coordination and cooperation with the Afghan government and military in his unit’s successful counterinsurgency efforts.

DR. KOONTZ: All right, this is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the twenty-second 
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400

of February 2007, and I’m interviewing Colonel 

Tim McGuire about his experiences as the battalion 

commander of the 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry 

Regiment, 173d Airborne Brigade, CJTF-76 [Combined 

Joint Task Force-76], in Afghanistan. We’re at the Naval 

War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where Colonel 

McGuire is currently a student, right? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: That is correct. 

DR. KOONTZ: First of all, sir, are you sitting for this interview 

voluntarily? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yes, I am. 

DR. KOONTZ: And do you have objections with Army or public 

researchers using this information, as long as it’s cited 

correctly? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I do not. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Thank you, sir. When did you take command of 

your battalion? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I took command of the battalion on the third of November 

2003 in Tuz, Iraq. 

DR. KOONTZ: What was the situation behind that? Were you already 

stationed with the battalion, or did you have to go 

there?

LT. COL. McGUIRE: No, I had been pre-positioned in Italy, and I had just finished 

twelve months in Afghanistan. I arrived in Italy and served 

for the ninety days as part of the Joint Task Force Liberia. 

As soon as the joint task force stood down, my predecessor 

in command, Lt. Col. Harry [D.] Tunnell, was wounded in 

an ambush, so I was brought forward to take command of 

the battalion. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. How long was the battalion in Iraq after that? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We remained in Iraq for another four months. We 

redeployed to Italy at the end of February. 

DR. KOONTZ: Did anything happen during that three-month period in 

Iraq that was notable? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I was very proud of our battalion and the brigade’s fullspectrum approach to fighting and winning a counterinsurgency. And I think we did a very effective job of building Iraqi capacity and helping enable the Iraqi leadership 

to govern. As a result, the insurgency did not gain traction 

in our portion of Iraq. We also incorporated what I had 

learned in Afghanistan in terms of the standing up of the 
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Afghan National Army [ANA]. The model worked well in 

Iraq with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and helped us to develop a new institution which had the trust and confidence 

of the Iraqi populace. We took that model, then, with us 

to Afghanistan, when we deployed there a year later, with 

similar positive results. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, your battalion was working with the Iraqi 

National Army? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yeah. We owned the battle space. Each of the companies 

owned battle space, and they realized to be successful, 

they had to take a full-spectrum approach. So, they daily 

interacted with their police counterparts. We stood up 

the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps battalions, which included 

working with civic leaders to recruit volunteers, equipping 

those volunteers, and then training them. We quickly 

realized the most effective ops were joint and combined 

operations with our Iraqi counterparts. So, the soldiers 

got to see the importance of working with a partnership of 

equals in Iraq, and we applied that lesson to our actions in 

Afghanistan the following year. 

DR. KOONTZ: What was it like to take command of a battalion in theater 

like that, after a previous commander had been wounded? 

Was there any kind of acclimation or transition process? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: It was a little daunting, being on the aircraft going down 

there to take command eight months earlier than I expected. 

But I actually think it was much easier to take command in 

combat, because on Day 1, that was my battalion. I knew I 

needed to get out and focus in on the mission and take care 

of my subordinates. It made it much easier for me to come 

back and prepare the battalion for Afghanistan because I 

had been able to live and fight with them in Iraq, that I had 

established my credibility with them, and vice versa. So, 

while we were coming back for only a one-year reset and 

train-up, we knew we would be ready. We knew, as a team, 

where we needed to go. 

DR. KOONTZ: Once you got out of Iraq okay, then you go back to Italy, 

and you said there’s a reset period. What transpired 

during that reset period? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We went back and had a week of half-days where we executed 

reintegration classes, and then we sent the battalion out on 

thirty days of block leave, which was fantastic. It really gave 

everybody an opportunity to reconnect with themselves, 

with their families. In hindsight, when we got back from 

Afghanistan, we actually were able to wait a couple more 

weeks before we took the block leave, which I thought was 

an improvement, just in that we were able to let soldiers 

decompress at home station under the supervision of their 

chain of command, and if they had any issues, you could get 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

402

them with counselors those first couple weeks back. Getting 

everybody back on block leave was very important. We had 

about ninety days then, no training, where we focused in on 

maintenance and working back on reestablishing systems. 

Then we started individual skills train-up for about ninety 

days. And then, we went into an intensive collective training 

period. At the welcome-home ceremony before going on 

block leave, we found out we were going to Afghanistan, 

twelve months to the day, 365 days from when we got back. 

I thought that was very helpful to know, and we were then 

able to focus our train-up plan on where we were going in 

Afghanistan and tailor it. I applaud the Army for letting us 

know right off the bat because we made decisions on that. 

We were able to craft our train-up to deal with going to 

Afghanistan vice Iraq, and it gave a predictability, and so 

we were then able to balance the training requirements with 

the need to get soldiers time off, and I think that balanced 

approach paid its dividends. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. When you got the word that you were going to 

Afghanistan, what kind of information did you have 

other than, you know, you’re being deployed again? Did 

you have any kind of specifics? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: No. The specifics just were we were on orders to go to 

Afghanistan. As it neared and the deployment got closer, 

they identified the unit we were going to backfill. We were 

attached to Regional Command East, so my battalion was 

not part of the 173d. We started off as part of the division 

artillery for the 25th Infantry Division, and then they were 

replaced by 1st Brigade of the 82d [Airborne Division]. 

So, we spent our twelve months in Afghanistan as part of 

Regional Command East, while the bulk of 173d was in 

Regional Command South. Once we found out where we 

were going, I was able to send a small PDSS [predeployment 

site survey] recon team out to get with the unit that we were 

replacing. That was 2/27 Infantry from the 25th Infantry 

Division. Lt. Col. Walt [E.] Piatt did a great job of providing 

us the information we needed at the battalion level, company, 

and down to platoon level, of where his forces were, what 

missions they were conducting, the personalities among 

our Afghan counterparts, so we could start, as we did our 

train-up, actually training to where we were going to go. 

We started doing VTCs [video teleconferences] probably 

two months out, where we were able to talk with our 

counterparts and ask them the questions that were relevant 

to us, and they’d provide us great insights. And then we 

tried to do the same with the unit that replaced us, so they 

could really hit the ground running. What was important 

to us was that there was no degradation of effects, and with 

the 2/87 Infantry that backfilled us, we considered our 

measure of success as, how well they did the first ninety 

days, that they could come in and operate at the same level 

and hopefully surpass us. 
Colonel McGuire after taking 

command in Kirkuk, Iraq

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DR. KOONTZ: Can you give me some specifics of the kind of information 

that you were getting back from that unit in theater—the 

kinds of things that they were telling you about? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yeah—everything from missions that they had done in the 

past, their after action reviews, their databases in terms 

of their targeting process. Information operations is such 

a key component of the successful counterinsurgency 

fight, so their personality profiles for both kinetic and 

nonkinetic targeting were important data to have. We got 

DVDs with just their staff continuity books, with “Here’s 

what the S-1 [personnel staff section] or the S-2 [intelligence staff section] had put together during their twelve 

months,” and we did the same. We actually had a Web 

page link to this encyclopedia of all the products we had 

created in our twelve months there so, once again, when 

the unit replaced us, they weren’t starting over reinventing 

the wheel. We received from 2/27 a recommended campaign plan for the next two months if they were sticking 

around, and we gave the same to the unit that replaced. 

Once again, I think is very important because the commander that’s on the ground really has a feel for how to 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

404

set the unit up for success that’s replacing us. So, the rightseat/left-seat ride process to me—you know, the ten-day 

overlap, I think, is one of the great innovations out of OEF 

and OIF [Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation 

Iraqi Freedom, respectively]. And I know we got that 

from the Balkans, but I think we’re, as an organization, 

doing a very good job of sharing the lessons learned of all 

organizations with the units that are replacing them. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You’re getting this feedback from 2/27. You’re 

getting this information on them, what they’re doing, 

what they’re up to. What kind of guidance were you 

getting up your command chain? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: You know, SETAF [Southern European Task Force] and 

the 173d did a good job of the LTPs [Leader Training 

Programs]. We did training programs up in Grafenwoehr 

with BCTP [Battle Command Training Program] coming 

out to help augment it, where I think General [Maj. Gen. 

Jason K.] Kamiya did a good job of identifying the nature 

of the fight, which by that time had shifted focus. It was 

clearly identified to our team that it was a counterinsurgency 

focus, with the center of gravity being the legitimacy of 

the people, the human terrain as the critical terrain, and 

that the priority of efforts would be those to build the 

Afghan capacity and ensure good governance. So, I think 

both General Kamiya and Colonel [Kevin C.] Owens, the 

brigade commander, were united in that and did a good job 

of pushing that message down, and that’s why we spent a 

lot of time, just as a battalion, as part of our train-up really 

talking about the essence of counterinsurgency theory and 

doctrine and how to fight and win a counterinsurgency and 

getting down with platoons, down to the team-member 

level, talking through our campaign plan and why we were 

going to do specific tasks, and why, when you go out to 

train an Afghan policeman or an Afghan National Army 

soldier, how that links back into winning the overall fight 

and, more importantly, winning the peace that follows. 

DR. KOONTZ: I probably already know the answer to this question, but 

I’ll ask it, anyway. Your battalion already had a tour in 

Iraq, and you get almost a year of time to prepare for this 

next mission, which you know about well in advance. 

How well-prepared was your battalion for a year of 

counterinsurgency work? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I thought we were very well prepared. I think we realized that it was a squad-, a platoon-level fight, so we 

did not—our training was very focused in on the lower 

levels and really worked on building strong, cohesive, 

and lethal squads of platoons. We spent a lot of time on 

leader development for the company commanders on 

how to think. The training exercises were set up to mirror Afghanistan. Hohenfels, Germany, did a great job 
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of replicating Afghanistan, with Germans role-playing 

Afghans. We were able to train using interpreters. We 

forced our company commanders, our platoon leaders, 

platoon sergeants, down to the squad leader level, to do 

negotiations training, to go through and deal with interacting with their Afghan counterparts. So, I was real 

pleased that the unit was ready to go. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Let’s get the battalion to Afghanistan. What was 

the deployment process like? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: The deployment process? We were the first to go from the 

brigade. Actually, from SETAF, we were the first to roll. 

The area support group pushed us out, and they did a good 

job. We had sent a couple members of our staff out as an 

ADVON [advanced echelon], who did some great work on 

fighting through some of the friction of being the first unit 

to be there. The 25th did a good job of receiving us up in 

Bagram. So, we went into Bagram, and then from there we 

pushed out to Paktika Province. 

DR. KOONTZ: That probably wasn’t a direct flight, was it? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We went from Aviano straight into Bagram. 

DR. KOONTZ: About how long did that take? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I don’t recall the specific hours. I think it was six, seven 

hours. 

DR. KOONTZ: On that aspect, you were lucky. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yes [laughs].

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You get into Bagram. How long were you in Bagram 

before you went to Paktika? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: For myself, I was probably there two days. I’d say most 

soldiers were two to four days. We went there in the—this 

was February time period, so we did have some challenges 

with weather being able to fly down there, but I think on 

average, we spent no more than a few days. Everybody got 

out in about three to four days. 

DR. KOONTZ: And how did you get to Paktika? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We flew rotary-wing, for the most part CH–47s, but also 

some Black Hawks, down into Bagram—or, excuse me, 

into Orgun[-e], which was the battalion FOB [forward 

operating base]. And then, from there, we pushed out into 

the company-level FOBs. 

DR. KOONTZ: We’ll get to your FOBs in a minute. Okay, then, you get 

to Paktika, and then you transition. You do your right-
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406

seat/left-seat with 2/27, that’s correct? You talked a little 

about it before, but tell me a little bit more about the 

transition. How did that go? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Transition went very well. They got us out to see their 

area of operation. They had a good plan. They gave area 

orientations to everyone first, and then as much as the 

weather would permit, got the units out to their specific 

versions of the battle space. While we were up in Bagram, 

the division ran some training—the latest on IEDs 

[improvised explosive devices] and some cultural nuances 

to Afghanistan. I think for the most part, the cultural ROE 

[rules of engagement], we were familiar with. I think some 

of the latest IED countermeasures were new from when 

we’d gotten it, but they did have some classes there. When 

we got down with 2/27, one of the most effective things 

was having a formal process, where they would introduce 

us to the Afghan leadership in each one of the districts. 

The relationships matter so much in Afghan society, that 

the ability of Colonel Piatt to introduce me to someone 

he spent the last twelve months with as a personal friend, 

and then I’m able to meet him, it really made the transition 

much easier. The hardest thing on the right-seat/left-seat 

ride for us was inventorying of the stay-behind equipment 

because trying to do that—for the company commanders 

to try to do that, with everything else that’s going on, it was 

very time consuming. So, one of the lessons learned for 

the unit that replaced us was, we asked them to send their 

company commanders, supply sergeants, a couple days 

early so they could take care of that before the bulk of the 

soldiers arrived, so once they started that orientation, they 

had a singular focus. 

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned when you arrived, you got kind of a 

cultural ROE. What was included in that ROE? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Oh, just aspects of Pashtunwali [Pashtun moral and ethical 

code]. I think one of the keys to success is leveraging the 

culture to your advantage. You know, if you understand it, 

if you embrace it, it can provide you with great benefits and 

so understand the points at play on hospitality; respect for 

women; on the soldiers understanding how the concept of 

revenge within Pashtunwali; some basic phrases in Dari 

and Pashto. But, once again, that was stuff we were doing as 

part of our predeployment training also. 

DR. KOONTZ: That’s something I wanted to ask you earlier—before you 

employed, if you had gotten any kind of training about 

that. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yeah, yeah. We went down to the individual soldier on 

the basics of Afghan culture, Afghan history. It was more 

specialized. While we were there, the National Assembly 

provincial council elections took place. That was going to 
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be one of the big events of our twelve-month period, so 

we had classes on the Afghan constitution. I think most 

of our soldiers were as informed on the current Afghan 

constitution as any Afghan they encountered—that ability 

to be able to talk intelligently about the area, about the 

country, got us great legitimacy in the eyes of the locals. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right, sir. What was the situation on the ground like 

when you arrived at Paktika? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: When we arrived, it was definitely heart of winter. There 

was a foot of snow on the ground, and it was a lull in 

the battle because the insurgents had gone to ground. 

2/27 had really utilized, though—I think the light bulb 

really came on for them that it was a counterinsurgency, 

and they spent a lot of time trying to help the Afghan 

government exert itself. So, we wanted to build upon 

their success. They had taken their governor, prior to 

the presidential elections, out on a speaking tour. We did 

the same in the spring. So, I think one of our keys to 

success was, as soon as the snows melted, we were out 

of the blocks, seeking to seize the key terrain, which was 

the human terrain.

So, at some of the locations, due to the mud as the snow 

was melting, you couldn’t get out for several weeks. 

When we arrived, there wasn’t a meter of pavement 

anywhere in Paktika—all dirt roads. Paktika is one of the 

poorest provinces in Afghanistan. President [Hamid] 

Karzai, when we were there, said it was the province in 

greatest need of reconstruction. You could argue it was 

construction; it just didn’t have a lot of infrastructure 

there. To get from Orgun, which was my location of my 

battalion FOB, to Sharan, which was the capital—Orgun’s 

the business capital for Paktika, Sharan was the political 

capital—took over fourteen hours when I arrived. During 

my first trip up there, due to the weather—you know, 

you drive up a river bed, get stuck in a Humvee probably 

half a dozen times, and then all commerce, all Afghan 

trucking, stopped moving four kilometers outside of the 

provincial capital because of mud flats. So, on the major 

quote-unquote “highway” there was no movement, which 

we realized gave us a lot of opportunities to bring about 

some visible signs of progress. One of the things we did 

in our twelve months was get heavy engineers attached 

to us to improve, to actually build, the road from Orgun 

to Sharan. What took us about thirteen, fourteen hours 

to do the first time, you could do in ninety minutes when 

we left. That visible sign of progress brought us huge 

dividends and, more importantly, brought the legitimacy 

of the Afghan government. Thus, we beat the insurgents 

to the human terrain in that spring, and I think they 

were unable during our twelve months to ever reassert 

themselves.
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We went out to seize the human terrain by the visible signs of 

progress in the reconstruction, by aggressively training the 

Afghan National Army, by training the police. You know, we 

found on the police force that no one had uniforms, and by 

the time we left, by working with the Afghan government, 

everybody had uniforms. We were able to get the governor 

out to connect with each one of his districts. And once again, 

we kind of looked at that as fundamental to extending the 

reach of the central government, and so we took him into 

those areas, in which the past the government had never 

gone, and let him meet with his people.

One of the operations I’m most proud of was what we 

and our Afghan counterparts achieved in Bermel District. 

Bermel District is an area where they’d had—Bermel’s a 

border district with Pakistan, you know, part of Waziristan. 

For fifteen months, there had been no legitimate Afghan 

government presence there because the Taliban had come 

in, or al Qaeda, and executed the chief of police, killed his 

police force, and the district subgovernor did the rational 

thing and left and returned to Kabul. In my first, critical 

meeting with the governor on my second day there, he said 

“I’d like to reestablish government presence in Bermel.” 

And he also said, “And here’s what I can provide: fifteen 

policemen, a couple vehicles, and a quality man to be 

the mayor.” But then he asked, “What can the Americans 

provide?” And, specifically, he’d been coached by the UN to 

ask for “Will you help build the government compound?” 

We went and took a look at it and thought, “That’s exactly 

what we need to be doing,” because that was the major infil 

route from Pakistan into Paktika. And we said, “You know, 

if you want to build Afghan capacity, you want to extend the 

reach of the government, retaking Bermel, would represent 

both a tactical operation and strategic victory.”

So, we went and took a look at it and was able to get 

funding from higher headquarters. We came back with the 

governor and said, “Hey, we’ll go in and not only build you 

a government compound, but a school, a mosque, a clinic, 

and a post for the Afghan National Army.” The governor 

had wanted to build it right in the corner of Bermel, about 

a kilometer into the district, as far from the Pakistan border 

as possible, in a very progovernment town—we said, “Mr. 

Governor, if you want to go in, we need to go in right to 

the heart of the staging area for the insurgents,” the Bermel 

bazaar, which was the crossroad of all the infil routes. 

“You’ve got to go in and retake it and regain the key hub of 

that district.” He was very surprised and unsettled “What 

part don’t you get, Colonel? The last time we did that, the 

chief of police got killed.” And I said, “Hey if you go in, 

you’re not going in alone. We’ll go with you.” When he 

realized he wouldn’t be alone, he was willing to commit to 

going to the heart of the insurgency. And so, I sent one of 

my companies to go in and establish that, an ODA [Special 
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Forces Operational Detachment-A] team also, and more 

importantly, was able to get the battalion—at the time, it 

was a company, but it extended into a battalion’s worth of 

Afghan National Army, and immediately, we were able to 

see the populace gain more confidence in their government. 

That’s just symbolic of a full-spectrum approach to fighting 

this thing. Prior to going in, we brokered a land deal, and 

once again, it was the Afghan government brokering their 

agreement with the support of the UN and my battalion, 

to give the government land to build this compound on. It 

was the first time all five tribes had agreed, and at the end 

of the day, we were able to shut down the key infil route and 

build a physical sign of the government presence out there. 

And that turned the tide, and that bazaar went away from 

its insurgent leanings because it was very quickly realized 

by all the locals that the government now was the strongest 

player in town. We’d built everything we said we’d build. 

We followed through on our promises, and at the end of 

the day, you had now, on the major infil route, an Afghan 

National Army battalion there. And we did similar things 

along other infil routes in the south with—because we 

didn’t have, at that time, any more Afghan National Army 

units to use, we had to use border police. It was the same 

type of thing, empowering and emboldening the Afghan to 

get out and solve their problem, but to do that, it takes the 

logistical weight of the United States military, the comms 

platforms that we bring, and just the moral support of 

knowing that you’ve got an American soldier out there to 

watch your back and reinforce you, if required.

The other thing I was proud of, on the day that this company 

went in to set up this base, you had a company commander, 

Captain Joe [C.] Geraci, and Afghan government officials, 

meeting with the tribal elders, engaging them on what the 

future was going to bring. You had a flag-raising ceremony 

where all the tribal elders raised the Afghan flag within 

visual sight of the Pak border. You had construction starting 

on the base itself; you had soldiers training the police; you 

had soldiers training the Afghan National Army; and you 

had local doctors out working with American doctors to 

treat the local populace. So, the hearts and minds are going 

on, but it also sent quite a message to the insurgents. We 

thought we were going to get in a big, kinetic fight because 

we once again stuck a stick right in what used to be the 

staging area for the insurgents when they crossed the 

border. We never really had a big fight there. I think that, 

by going in strong, it sent the perfect message because it 

left no doubt that the government and the Coalition forces 

were much stronger than anything the insurgents could put 

together and that the government was the future and the 

people got on board. And I think the beauty of that is, at 

the end of the day, we were able to pull out, the U.S., to 

cut down our presence there, but you still had the Afghans, 

now, because we helped them build the base infrastructure. 
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They were going to take that over. And, once again, tying 

back into the cultural aspect, with the Pashtunwali and 

the revenge and the pride, the people were able to see that 

the insurgents talked a big game, but they were unable to 

regain that, and so that just furthered the strength of the 

government. I know I got sidetracked on that, I’m sorry. 

DR. KOONTZ: No, no, that’s quite all right. How long did it take from 

the time that the governor says, “I want this changed,” to 

the point that you guys are going there and raising the 

flags with the tribal leaders? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We took about forty-five days for that because we wanted to 

make sure, when we went in, it was not piecemeal, but very 

strong. When the governor first discussed it, we started; then 

got the funding; then started pushing the resources out. So, 

we actually went and occupied the ground, brokered a land 

deal and said, “We’ll be back in one week to establish it,” 

and one week to the day, this force of a hundred Afghans, 

in what we called the jingle trucks, full of supplies, along 

with my company of soldiers, some heavy equipment we 

had rented, the Afghan National Army, and the police force 

that the governor had sent down, at sunrise, just came over 

the horizon and started construction—to me, that’s the true 

shock and awe for the counterinsurgency. It was the shock 

and awe of positive progress. And so, we said we’d be back 

within a week, and we kept our word. When I made it down 

a couple days later, I went in and just did a patrol into the 

bazaar and went to my guys: “Hey, where is the roughest 

place? Where do you get the weirdest looks from?” And 

we went to that part of the town, and they invited me in, 

and in a statement to me that was telling, I said, “What do 

people think about the government being here?” and they 

said, “Hey, we’re on board.” And I said, “Why?” And they 

said, “This is the first time in the history of Bermel that 

our government and Coalition forces have kept their word.” 

And so, by going in and resourcing it, not piecemeal, and 

having what was required to do that, really paid us huge 

dividends. 

DR. KOONTZ: And so this is all part of the spring offensive there? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: That was part of the spring offensive, and that’s where, you 

know—too often, we define “offensive” as kinetic, taking 

the fight to the insurgents. I think a better way to look at 

offensive is to view it as any action that unhinges the enemy 

and gains the support of the population. If your objective is 

to seize and retain the human terrain, if that’s your critical 

terrain, focus in on that because if you’re going out and 

extending the reach of the government, our philosophy 

was, as we’re doing that, then the insurgents will come to 

us, and we’ll fight them; and if they don’t fight us, then 

we’re still increasing the capacity and the legitimacy of the 

government. And so, we really went and focused on, instead 
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of getting in an attrition battle with the insurgents, we’re 

going to go in and extend the reach of the government and 

build that capacity; and in that process, when the insurgents 

show themselves, we’re going to fight them.

Another part of our spring offensive was getting the 

governor out on a campaign stop to reconnect with his 

people; going out and training the police, training the Army; 

and, bringing about visible signs of progress. I talked about 

the lack of pavement. We started building cobblestone 

roads, which—you know, this is an infantry battalion, but 

we quickly realized that we can get great bang for the buck 

on the hearts and minds by building roads, by the simple 

act of getting some pavement in. So, we built some roads 

with heavy engineers being sent down from Bagram, which 

cut the travel time from fourteen hours to ninety minutes. 

With CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Program 

funds], we were able to build these cobblestone roads, 

which, to me, was the equivalent of dropping a bomb on 

an insurgent training camp because word quickly spread of 

these cobblestone roads, and out in the hinterlands, where 

the insurgency still had some support, you get the locals 

asking, “Hey, when are we going to get a paved road?” And 

it was very easy, in terms of the information operation, to 

say, “You can’t get the road because it’s not safe enough to 

get the engineers out here. We need intel on who these 

insurgents are.” Well, they wanted the road. They’d provide 

that intel. They’d turn over the caches. And it gave the 

governor great credibility. Every project we did was through 

the Afghan government, so once again, the governor and 

his subgovernor’s authority to actually produce some signs 

of progress gave them much more—it gave them greater 

standing with their constituents and increased their ability 

to govern their areas and their influence.

For me, though, the biggest change from, you know, 

a Cold War Army, fighting the Soviets, to what we’re 

doing now, as a full-spectrum counterinsurgency force, 

is the kinetic operations, information operations, or 

CMO [civil-military operations], are no longer distinct, 

sequential actions. In the past, you break something; then 

you try to go and reconstruct; and then you talk about it. 

It’s all seamless right now, and so I don’t want you to get 

the impression that all we did was build roads. When we 

had any intel where bad guys were, we would act on it 

immediately. We did, as part of the spring offensive, also, 

some very effective air assault raids, once again targeting 

the leadership, the insurgent leadership. We had great 

partnerships with Special Forces and with OGA [other 

governmental agencies]. And they were combined, in that 

we did everything with our Afghan counterparts. But we’d 

get intel, and we’d pounce on it. But as we were doing that 

cordon and search to get the insurgent leader, you know, 

at the same time, you’ve got a MEDCAP [medical civil 
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412

action program] going on, treating the local populace; 

and you’ve got a leader engagement going on, where 

you’re explaining why you went out—the purpose behind 

this operation and how now is the time to commit to 

the government—so it’s that simultaneous kinetics/

nonkinetics—you know, the CMO and the information 

operations. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Is your battalion part of a larger task force within 

RC East? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yeah. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me your command structure. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Okay. Command structure? I was part of Regional 

Command East. RC East was based out of Salerno, FOB 

Salerno, up in Khowst. My battalion’s sector was Paktika 

itself, and later on, I picked up four districts of Ghazni. 

But it was just my battalion in Paktika and Ghazni, so 

I worked within the framework of the brigade, first 

DIVARTY [division artillery], and then Task Force 

Devil. I started off with, like, four companies. I used 

my headquarters company as a maneuver company. 

They used their mortar, scouts, and engineer platoons 

as small-sized standard infantry platoons. Each of the 

companies were then out at a different FOB location. A 

couple months into the rotation, based on the success, 

Bravo Company went to Kandahar and became part of 

Regional Command South. So, we had three companies 

in AO Fury: my headquarters company was up in 

Sharan, the provincial capital; my Alpha Company was 

in Orgun, where my battalion was located, and they had 

a company in Bermel; and then my Charlie Company 

was down in Waza Khwa. And then, these company 

commanders owned their battle space, and they each had 

ranging from six to eight districts, in which they were 

responsible for everything that took place in there. They 

then broke them down into platoon areas of operations, 

in which they were responsible for mentoring districts 

and partnering with Afghan security forces, both the 

police and army. 

DR. KOONTZ: Did you spend most of your time with your headquarters 

company? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: No, I rotated among all the companies. I would spend 

the bulk of my time conducting battlefield circulation. I 

was blessed with a great battalion XO [executive officer] 

and S-3 [operations staff officer], so I was able to spend 

a lot of my time out in field circulation just moving 

between the three companies, but my staff was located 

with Alpha Company in Orgun. 
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DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Tell me about your FOB there in Orgun. Take 

me on a little tour of it. What are your facilities or your 

infrastructures like there? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Infrastructure there—it had been established in 2002, so 

we had a hardstand TOC [tactical operations center]—

you know, everything was hardstand. We used the local 

contractors to build barracks. 2/27 had started building 

barracks. We then continued that construction. It was 

Afghan local contractors doing the construction—tin-roof 

barracks, Hesco barriers. While we were there, built a gym 

and a mess hall. We did not have any KBR [Kellogg, Brown 

& Root] type of facilities. Our cooks did the cooking, along 

with local, national Afghans that we hired—probably had 

about two hundred local nationals working there between 

laundry and cooks and running some of the logistics—

“logistics” isn’t the right word—the maintenance type. Early 

on, it was burn-barrel latrines and the Afghan workforce 

had upkeep of that, and it was similar then at the company 

FOBs, also, just a smaller scale. But soldiers had, you know, 

heaters, and living conditions were not bad. 

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have sort of a daily battle or a weekly battle 

rhythm that you tried to keep up? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: For myself? 

DR. KOONTZ: For yourself, and then also for your staff. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: You know, we did have a battle rhythm. We did work 

seven days a week. For the staff, about ninety days into the 

rotation, we decided to give the soldiers a little break, so 

on Sundays, they could come into the TOC in PT [physical 

training] gear, but we did work seven days a week. We had 

our morning update every morning. We did that over the 

SIPRNET [Secure Internet Protocol Router Network] so 

the company commanders could log in to that, also, if they 

were at their FOBs. We did a TACSAT [tactical satellite 

communications] update in the evening every night with 

the company commanders in which I would get assessments 

from each commander. These fostered crosstalk and sharing 

of good ideas among the company commanders. We would 

do weekly information operations and kinetic targeting 

meetings, and those targeting meetings, once again, we 

followed a full-spectrum approach where we looked at 

both where we needed to do kinetic operations to kill or 

capture an insurgent, or where we need to push projects, 

or where we need to send someone down to meet with the 

leader. Those were on a weekly basis. One of the good battle 

rhythm events was getting all the company commanders 

back to a centralized location for commander conferences. 

Because company commanders were out on their own—I 

got to see them often, but they didn’t get to see their fellow 

company commanders, so about every six weeks, we tried 
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414

to get the company commanders at a centralized location 

so they could share good ideas. They participated in the 

weekly targeting meetings via VTC, but face-to-face 

interaction was valuable. The other key player we had in 

Paktika, though, was the PRT [provincial reconstruction 

team], and one of the things we were proud of, we did call 

ourselves Team Paktika because we wanted to break down 

the perceived differences between the maneuver battalion 

and the PRT. We felt that the key was to be working 

together, so all these battle rhythm tasks—you know, the 

PRT was included, so we could make sure we had a unified 

front out there. And I’m sorry I don’t remember more of 

the specific battle rhythm tasks, but those were probably 

the most significant ones. 

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of, I guess, regular contact did you have with 

your higher headquarters? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I did a commander’s daily conference call with the brigade 

commander daily via TACSAT, and that was seven days a 

week. 

DR. KOONTZ: Another thing I wanted to ask about your task 

organization was did you have any nonorganic units 

assigned to your battalion or attached to your battalion? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I did get MPs [military police] pushed down, which were 

invaluable. We were able to utilize them very effectively. 

We established a five-day training program for the Afghan 

police force. My soldiers were doing that, but it was really 

great having actual policemen so that we were able to 

make it a little bit more extensive, where they would cycle 

throughout the province and train the police. We had 

engineers come and go—the heavy engineers that built the 

road. We also had route-clearance packages, which, that, 

to me, is one of the huge successes—the route-clearance 

packages going out and being able to clear and look for the 

IEDs.

And, occasionally, I would get more assets for named 

operations. We did some large-scale battalion operations 

along the border with Pakistan, and when we did those, 

Devil-6, Colonel [Patrick J.] Donahue, sent additional 

units. He said he would push another company down 

from the 82d down to give me some more maneuver forces 

because I didn’t want to move an entire company out of its 

AO. I felt it was important to keep some presence with at 

least a platoon from each company. So, I’d pull away twothirds of the company to surge in specific locations, but 

always keep a presence throughout the entire AO. 

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have any kind of interaction or any kind of 

coordination with any SOF [Special Operations Forces] 

efforts? 
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LT. COL. McGUIRE: Yeah, we had SOF located in Orgun with us. Initially, it 

was ODB [Special Forces Operational Detachment-B], 

and we did a lot of operations together. I think it was a 

very positive relationship. When they moved out—that 

was 7th [Special Forces] Group—when they moved out, 

there were only backfilled with an ODA team, and that 

ODA team was not as proactive, and we didn’t do as much. 

But eventually, in my tenure there, SOF ended up working 

only on the border. But as I mentioned, Bermel was a joint 

SOF/Task Force Fury operation, and I was able to get the 

funding to do a lot of construction through SOF. My staff 

was able to synchronize the planning, and my company 

commander took charge of the construction, but we did 

have an ODA team there. When Bravo Company was sent 

to RC East, we turned over the base that we built to the 

ODA team, and they did a great job keeping that up and 

running. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. You’ve spoken several times about the human 

terrain. What was the human terrain like in Paktika 

when you got there? What was your sense of the populace 

there?

LT. COL. McGUIRE: The populace? A lot of distrust of the government. I think 

2/27 had done a good job of starting to establish trust, and 

we had a very positive, strong governor in Gulab Mangal, 

and he had really broken down some barriers in the fall with 

2/27. But I think during the winter, the doubts rose: “Is he 

going to be there in the spring?” And so, we decided it was 

critical to get the governor back out among the hinterlands 

in a series of visits we called 1774 to correspond with our 

first Continental Congress because it was to go build support 

for the upcoming parliamentary National Assembly and 

provincial council elections. When they saw that, it was 

reassuring to them, but a lot of promises had been made by 

the governor in the fall that hadn’t been followed through 

on. So, that’s why we took it so important, that whenever 

Coalition forces or the government makes a promise, you’ve 

got to produce on that. So, we made our goal, if we agreed 

to anything, we would follow through on it. We were very 

systematic on what we agreed to. But if we said we were 

going to build a school; we said we were going to build a 

road; we said we were going to produce a well, we did. And 

so that’s where—when our patrols were going out, we could 

be going out looking for bad guys somewhere, but it was 

with our Afghan counterparts, so we were training them in 

the process. But along the way or along the way back, we’d 

stop off at the school or the mosque or the road that was 

being built to do QA/QC [quality assurance/quality control 

check] because we realized if we didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get 

done, and that a school not built or a school built poorly is 

a win for the insurgents. It’s a blow, a devastating blow, to 

the legitimacy of the government. So, we didn’t look at that 

as somebody else’s job. We realized it’s all about producing 
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416

visible signs of progress, so—but because we did that, then, 

the locals got on board.

I mentioned Bermel changing. Another example was the 

positive change by Charlie Company, down in Waza Khwa. 

Governor Mangal saw the success we’d had in Bermel and 

came back a month after we started the construction there. 

The governor came back to formally install the subgovernor. 

When he was there, there were over a couple thousand men 

that came forward to meet the governor, Afghan flags flying 

everywhere. That, to me, you know, just represented a huge 

sea change on what had been a safe haven is now shifting 

towards the government. That didn’t mean all the problems 

had been fixed. If we had pulled out, the government 

would have failed. You’ve got to stay afterwards, you’ve got 

to have that constant presence there. But the governor saw 

that, and he said, “Hey, I want to do the same thing down 

in the south.” At that time, we didn’t have more Afghan 

National Army to send down there, but we sent border 

police. Make a long story short, we did a similar operation 

with border police, on two major infil routes in the south, 

and built compounds for the border police. My soldiers 

lived with them. My soldiers trained them, and that’s why I 

did take great pride in the leaders and soldiers of this task 

force. I thought the best ODA teams in Afghanistan were 

my rifle platoons and squads. They embraced the Green 

Beret mission in terms of full-spectrum operations; they 

embraced the FID [foreign internal defense]; they embraced 

the unconventional warfare; they embraced the civil affairs 

aspects. Here is a great example of what this can achieve. 

The head of the shura, the tribal council down there, when 

we arrived, was the uncle of the number one insurgent 

leader we were looking for. This insurgent leader had to stay 

the entire time in Pakistan. We went after him on one air 

assault raid and ever since, he stayed in Pakistan the entire 

time we were there. But his uncle, who was not a supporter 

of the government, was eventually voted out by the tribes, 

and he was replaced with the most positive, progovernment 

mullah, religious leader, in the south. And that’s where that 

full-spectrum approach, where you’re building the local, 

national capacity, is so effective. It emboldens the common 

Afghan man to do the right thing, and for me, seeing them 

vote out the uncle of the insurgent leader and replace him 

with a very progovernment official spoke volumes. 

DR. KOONTZ: You’ve mentioned the border several times. You’re right 

there, and you’re trying to close off these major infil 

routes. What kind of cross-border infiltrations were you 

getting? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We were getting some—not as much as it appears they’re 

getting now. Because of that, we pushed out the Afghan 

presence along the borders, and our CJTF-76 and Task 

Force Devil worked to establish better coordination with 
Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry, patrol the town of Naka in 

Paktika Province, April 2005.

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the Pak army. While I was there, I did do meetings with my 

Pak army counterpart, and if I was staying longer, I would 

have liked to have built upon there. There were pockets and 

infiltration that did take place. 

DR. KOONTZ: These are pretty small groups?

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Small groups coming in, and that’s why we felt that, 

rather than try to find these small groups, we focused in 

on building the Afghan capacity to stop them at the key 

choke points in the bazaars and the crossroads, and in the 

process, make a target that they may want to come fight 

you over, and if they do, you destroy them there; and if 

they never show themselves to fight, you’ve won anyway, 

because the people see that, and they’re going to side with 

the government because, the inaction on the part of the 

insurgent shows they’ve ceded that area. So, down in the 

south, we had some firefights right after we started building 

those compounds, and a very effective return on our part, 

and they never came back. So, word spreads quickly. 

DR. KOONTZ: A while ago, you mentioned you had your spring offensive 

where you went out and closed off Bermel and these 

other things. Did you get a Taliban spring offensive? As 

you said, they’d gone to ground? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: No. I would say, we never saw what I would call a Taliban 

spring offensive. They were never able to mass. You’d get 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

418

some occasional night letters, but I felt by beating them 

out of the blocks in the spring, it completely unhinged 

them. We also did a successful operation with OGA and 

SOF, where we killed one of the key insurgent leaders, and I 

think they were unable to coordinate amongst themselves. 

We desynchronized their attack in the spring, and then 

when the government was able to get out and then start 

following through on the promises, then the locals wouldn’t 

let them—they denied them the safe haven. You know, we 

had insurgents lay down their arms following the visit of 

the governor to the province. Both the governor and I were 

proponents for the reconciliation program, where, you 

know, if you want to live in peace, as long as you follow by 

the rules and truly lay down your arms and not fight again, 

you can make peace with the governor, and we had a large 

number of insurgents take advantage of that. So, we really 

did not have a lot of activity. We did have some IEDs, but 

the vast majority of IEDs were terminated by locals, and 

when we left, all the key leaders that we were going after, 

all HVTs [high-value targets] were across the border, so 

they knew we were looking for them. The communities had 

turned against them. I think they knew if they came too far 

into the province, somebody would turn them over, and so 

they stayed out of reach. But if they’re out of reach, then 

they’re not causing problems. The government’s continuing 

to get stronger. 

DR. KOONTZ: And also, you’ve mentioned that you did have kinetic 

operations that went on and largely resulted in the bad 

guys’ getting hammered. Is there sort of a typical kinetic 

operation you can describe to me, in terms of size, scope, 

purpose? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Well, very small scale, for the most part. Now, we would 

do some battalion-level operations, but the operations were 

more to show our ability to go anywhere in the province we 

needed to. We did operations with adjacent units to show 

that we could cross boundaries. If we perceived there was 

a seam or the insurgents thought we were only sticking to 

provincial boundaries, we would do an operation to make 

sure the Afghan National Army would move from Paktika 

out through Ghazni to Ring Road, which links Kabul to 

Kandahar, because we wanted them to know that we would 

go anywhere to look at them. But these operations were not 

the norm. The majority of our time was spent on what you 

would call, for the most part, routine policing. We did not 

go in and shut down entire towns to go search every house. 

We did very surgical strikes for which we had already 

gathered the intel, so we knew where we were going for. 

Part of the policy on our watch was we didn’t search homes 

at night without the three-star General [Lt. Gen. Karl W.] 

Eikenberry’s approval, which I think was smart. But we 

quickly realized—we thought we did better than that. We 

didn’t search homes at night because the Afghan police or 
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army were the ones searching the homes. We did not do an 

operation in which we did not have Afghan counterparts 

because we realized, one, they know what looks out of 

place; but more importantly, it comes back down to we 

wanted to work ourselves out of a job. So, it’s both a training 

aspect, but it’s, more importantly, a legitimacy aspect. The 

people have got to have confidence that their government’s 

getting stronger, that their government’s going to defend 

them. So, every operation we did was a combined offensive 

operation, and every time we left the wire every day was an 

offensive operation. The vast majority of the time, they were 

nonkinetic, but they were still offensive. We went to seize 

and retain the initiative. We went to keep the enemy on the 

run, even if it’s just going in to meet with locals. A company 

commander, a platoon leader, attending a city council 

meeting—that’s an offensive operation. By going in an hour 

before or the day before to help the mayor prepare for a city 

council meeting or a tribal shura meeting, so he could go in 

and run an effective meeting, that’s an offensive operation. 

We were taking the fight to the enemy by building those 

schools, by the successful elections. The enemy can only 

destroy. He cannot build, so our asymmetrical advantage 

was, we were able to bring about signs of progress. So, we 

really prided ourselves on those things we did to build the 

capacity of the Afghans.

In the center of the province, once again, on the main 

highway, in the west of the province, we took an old British 

Afghan fort that was in disarray. The locals had believed 

it was haunted because the Taliban had executed a lot of 

people in there. We went and got funding to refurbish 

that fort and turn it into a battalion headquarters for the 

Afghan National Army. It became a source of great civic 

pride because it was a symbol of the twenty-five years of 

war and destruction and became a sign of progress. It was 

in ruins, and Afghan constructors went in, built a backup, 

and at the end of the day, you’ve got a battalion’s worth of 

Afghan National Army soldiers there that could work the 

seam between Ghazni and get its way out to the borders. 

Another safe haven had been eliminated.

And getting back to the MPs, with the police training, you 

know, we would go in and do the five-day curriculum, and 

we’d always, on Day 5, do a hands-on exercise, and it was, 

where do we have any intelligence on where a possible bad 

guy could be? We would then have the Afghans go in and 

search that compound. More times than not, they were dry 

holes, but occasionally, that would be the correct intel. So, 

every time we went out on patrol, you know, if you found 

that intel, you would go and act upon it. Because of that, the 

most effective ones were the small-scale. But we did do some 

large-scale, and those were mostly to show that we could 

blanket multiple districts at once, to show the range of the 

Afghan National Army. But then, the most effective kinetic 
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420

operations would be the air assaults we would do, and those 

air assaults were raids—normally, a platoon, possibly two, 

with company C2 [command and control elements] and 

then some battalion C2, with Afghan counterparts, and 

then those were always targeted on insurgent leadership. 

So, if we get any intelligence from national-level assets, 

any word on an insurgent leader had entered back into our 

province, we’d go after him as soon as we could get aircraft, 

and then we would really publicize the success. We put 

together what we called “the list,” and they were prevetted 

targets. It was really the governor of Paktika’s ten-mostwanted list, and there were ones that we had discussed, if 

they stepped foot anywhere in the province, we were going 

after them. And once again, by being able to get a couple of 

those guys, word quickly spread, and they never came back 

into the province. 

DR. KOONTZ: Where did you get most of your intelligence—mostly, 

human intelligence [HUMINT]? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Mostly HUMINT, then we’d also work in with OGA using 

some national-level assets. But HUMINT was the most 

effective, and that would range from children coming to 

tell you of an IED up ahead or a suspicious individual to 

tribal leaders turning in caches or letting us know about a 

potential cell. HUMINT was the most effective. 

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about Team Paktika and working with the PRT. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We were talking about maintaining the initiative, offensive 

vice kinetic, you know, knocking the enemy off the fields. 

With Team Paktika, we sought to achieve unity of effort 

without the unity of command. We quickly realized we 

needed an effective division of labor for the PRT. We 

realized for us to be successful in a counterinsurgency 

fight, we couldn’t just be the door kickers, and the PRT is 

the one that does the reconstruction. The PRT’s not going 

to kick any doors in, but my soldiers have to be seen as a 

force for more than just going after bad guys. So, we came 

up with a division of labor. It would take the PRT, which is 

a small element, you know, a day or more to get from one 

area to the next, so rather than having them think they’ve 

got to try to be everywhere, we wanted the PRT to utilize 

my soldiers. I told the PRT commander: “My guys are out 

in the hinterlands. Let me be your eyes and ears out in the 

hinterlands. If you’ve got an issue, pick up the TACSAT, 

talk to the company commander or the platoon leader 

down there because we can cut down your response time 

on getting an answer filled from days to minutes.” So, we 

really came up with an effective division of labor where we 

tried to get the PRT to focus in on the big provincialwide 

systems, those things that would take a more long-term 

solution, and then my guys focused in on the grassroots 

implementation of it. And when we really got that going, 
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I thought we were able to get some great return on our 

investments. 

DR. KOONTZ: Way back a long time ago, you’d mentioned the Afghan 

constitutional election. Tell me about what your battalion 

did to support that. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I had one of my captains go in and embed with the UN 

reps that were responsible for it. He served as the LNO 

[liaison officer], and if we hadn’t forged that partnership, 

the election might have failed. He was able to prevent a lot 

of balls from dropping. He had a very good partnership 

with all parties. We came up with a comprehensive security 

plan—we were responsible for the security of it, but we used 

this as an opportunity to build the capacity of the Afghan 

government. So, we went through and came up with what 

we felt the security system should look like, but then we 

brought our Afghan counterparts in and did combined 

planning for it. When we issued our operations order, we 

had the United Nations present, and the Afghan National 

Army commanders, and each one of the chiefs of police, 

and we looked at that as a historic event and a vehicle for 

them to establish their credibility. As a result, then, by 

helping them out, they got to see how we plan operations, 

how we command and control it, and based on some of the 

success, we had no incidents during the election. All of the 

ballots safely made it back up to the hub, and then in Kabul. 

We were able to steamroller that thing into more combined 

planning. From then on, we started doing routine—I talked 

of the weekly targeting meetings we did. Those became—

we’d have an internal one, but then we’d also have one with 

our Afghan counterparts, where we’d go through the same 

methodology with the hope being when we left—and by 

“we,” I mean, we Coalition forces in general—they would 

continue the process.

One of the things during the elections we established was 

a provincial coordination center that was just a really coordination node to work issues with the UN, the Afghan 

government, the Afghan security forces, and ourselves. We 

had this up running 24/7, with Afghan maps and reps from 

each of the Afghan security forces. This enabled us to better synchronize activities. At that time, the Afghans did not 

have adequate C2 infrastructure. It was cell phones or no 

provincewide communication, so their ability to synchronize operations was very limited. With this coordination 

center, if an incident came on, they could help get the word 

out through our radios. This helped the Afghans gain confidence and fostered greater initiative on their part since 

they could talk to adjacent units. That was very beneficial 

for us. And those provincial communication centers have 

been sustained throughout, and now they have their own 

radios so the Afghans can do it themselves. But we had incidents come in where Afghans would find out about an 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

422

incident in one of the districts, and they’d be able to get five 

other district police forces to go in and assist. That is what 

this is all about, working ourselves out of a job. The provincial communication centers are an example of the good 

that came out of supporting the elections.

DR. KOONTZ: A while ago, you mentioned that you did take part in 

some named operations from time to time. Do you recall 

any of those? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: Well, okay. 1774, just once again, because I think it’s important—you know, the first ones we did were just the campaign 

stops with the governor, but I maintained this defeated more 

insurgents than any other named operations we did, and 

a shot wasn’t fired. It was getting the governor out into the 

hinterlands to meet with the people, and you could see there 

[referring to briefing slides] that this is just the roads lining 

up to welcome him into a village. But by going out with security, and the security was provided by the Afghans—my 

guys were out of the limelight. We tried to empower the 

government, and that’s why I was very proud of 1774. And 

then a brother battalion commander of mine, [Lt. Col.] Tom 

Donovan at 2/504, further north of us in RC East, ended up 

doing Operation 1776, which, same thing—just prior to the 

elections, getting the governor out to talk through why they 

should support the elections, and I think he’d tell you the 

same, in terms of effectiveness. Operation Corregidor was 

the named operation going into the Bermel bazaar. We did 

these operations—these were the air assaults we did, which 

Operation Verona was the first one we did, combined with 

OGA and SOF and Afghan National Army. By using two 

Black Hawks and two Apaches, we were able to go in and 

take out insurgent leaders. This set the conditions for getting that border compound built. Interceptor was what 

we named the operation when we went and built the border 

police compounds in Tarah Wat and Wor Mamay districts 

and—let’s see, some other names. Verona was the first air 

assault we did, and we did several of them over that time period; Corregidor was going into Bermel; 1774 was getting 

the governor out on his campaign trips; Interceptor was 

what we did down in the south; Omaha Beach, Unified 

Strike were ones where we would mass several companies 

of both Americans and Afghans to eliminate seams. Vicenza

was similar to Verona in that it was a series of air assaults. 

Neptune was prior to the elections once again, getting a 

large-scale, just flooding the zone to stir up any intelligence 

we could and eliminate seams, and then the elections themselves. And then we did some more air assaults in the fall—

again, targeting some lower-level insurgent leaders, and then 

Winter Drive was letting them know that because we were 

able to fix the roads, we were not constrained as we had been 

upon our arrival by being limited to our FOBs, so we had fullyear coverage now. They would not be able to return during 

the winter. For the most part—there were a couple districts 
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that we couldn’t get to by ground, but Winter Drive was to 

make sure the insurgents knew that we would be outhunting 

them at all times. Those are the named operations, but every 

day, we’re doing the daily offensive operations that I talked 

about, you know? We’re heading out of the wire every day; 

working the good governance, the Afghan capacity; leading 

from behind; embracing the FID; training them; constant interaction, talking to the people, gathering that intel, building 

the infrastructure, so when you get that intel, you go out and 

go after the insurgents.

I’ll go back to answer your question, but that’s [referring to 

photograph] some of the cobblestone roads that we built, 

which we’d hire hundreds of Afghans to build. You know, if 

an Afghan’s out spending his time during the day in honest 

labor, he wasn’t willing to put that at risk to go dig an IED 

in. And so, in terms of return on taxpayer dollars, we’re 

paying them $4 to $5 a day to build those roads, but we had, 

in addition to the roads we built, they would put in solar 

lights, which was the first lighting in the evening that they 

had in Paktika. These solar lights—ten years, maintenance 

free—$1,200 to put in, but the IO [information operations] 

message it sends is invaluable. It’s a physical sign of progress in their lives. I had a little old lady come up with tears 

in her eyes to tell one of my captains through his translator—he says, “Anything wrong?” She said, “No, these are 

tears of joy. Orgun’s becoming just like the United States.” 

Now Orgun, rest assured, has a far way to go, but the fact 

that she’s perceiving a positive change spoke volumes—and 

that’s why people were able to give us the intelligence we 

needed, and that’s why they didn’t come back on it. 

DR. KOONTZ: When did you get notice that your tour was up, that, you 

know, it’s time to start transitioning with the guys that 

are going to replace you? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: We knew, pending any changes, it’s going to be twelve 

months going in. I’d say probably six months out, we knew 

the unit that was backfilling us and we quickly—they came 

out on a site survey, like we had done. I was able to meet 

with the battalion commander. He was actually able to come 

this time. So, I was able to meet with him, and that’s where 

we started taking the great products that 2/27 had built for 

us, and we tried to improve upon them. Not only did we 

recommend projects, but we got the funding preapproved 

for them. We were able to tell them “Here’s what we do for 

the next sixty to ninety days in terms of operations,” and 

we actually went in and obtained over $2 million worth of 

funding for projects and got the projects contracted out 

and ready to go, so not only in the spring when the snows 

melted, would they be taking the governor out to meet with 

the people, they’d be, the minute the snows melt, meeting 

with the people and have a groundbreaking ceremony 

on the start of a project. So, we just wanted to make sure 
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we could even more effectively stop the insurgents from 

gaining any traction with the populace. And we maintained 

the weekly—we did weekly VTCs with them. Each one of 

the company commanders knew his counterpart before he 

came over, and by that, we were able to, I think, prepare 

2/87 pretty effectively. 

DR. KOONTZ: What would you point to as the greatest success that your 

battalion had during your tour in Afghanistan? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I think the greatest success was embracing the full-spectrum 

approach because it really got after what everybody had in 

their mission statement as the key task, which was building 

Afghan capacity and assuring good governance. That is 

hard work. It’s not glamorous, but I think the soldiers, for 

the vast majority, realized the importance of that and took 

great pride in that. And that was one thing we learned. If 

you’re fighting a counterinsurgency effectively, you most 

likely will not get a lot of large firefights because the human 

terrain’s with you, and, like I said, when we went after 

bad guys, it was normally just a handful because the vast 

majority of folks were with us. As a result, it was imperative 

that soldiers understood measures of effectiveness. The 

key to success in a counterinsurgency is not the number 

of insurgents killed; it’s the degree of stability, the degree 

of security, within the area, because if you’re doing kinetic 

operations in which you’re killing fifty but you’re motivating 

another hundred to join the cause, you’re at a net loss. If 

you can defeat the insurgents through campaign stops 

from the governor, going in and by getting the people to 

buy into, believe in the legitimacy of, the government, that’s 

how you win. And so, I think I am most proud of the fact 

that my soldiers did a very effective job of treating their 

Afghan counterparts as partners, building their capacity, 

and increasing the legitimacy of the government in the eyes 

of its people. 

DR. KOONTZ: What happens to the battalion when you leave the area of 

operations and get back to Italy? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: After we did our right-seat/left-seat ride, we redeployed 

through Bagram, did some additional out-processing tasks, 

some health questionnaires, some reintegration-type classes, 

and then the battalion flew from Bagram to Manas, and from 

Manas—we spent a day or two there, and then we’d fly from 

Manas into Aviano, and then bus back down to Vicenza. We 

went through the seven half-day classes for reintegration, 

and we had done reintegration classes ahead of time to try to 

identify anybody who might have a family problem awaiting 

on the far side, but that half-day schedule is a very good idea 

in getting that training. We had counselors there for soldiers. 

Because we were the first battalion back, we were able to wait 

a couple weeks longer than we did coming back from Iraq 

before we sent soldiers on block leave, and I thought that was 
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good because we were able to spend a couple more weeks 

working some maintenance issues. We were able to inspect 

all our equipment, get it tagged, turned in, and get the parts 

all in order, so when we were gone for thirty days, the logistics system was able to send the parts through. But, more 

importantly, I think having the extra couple weeks there gave 

soldiers more time to decompress under the supervision of 

their team leader and their squad leader, platoon sergeant, 

than sending them right off on block leave. So, I was pleased 

with that. We then had ninety days of maintenance and very 

little formalized training—a total of ninety from when we got 

back—and then right after that, I changed command. The 

battalion spent most of the summer doing individual skills 

training and now they’re prepping to go back next summer 

to Afghanistan. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. All right, we’ve covered a lot of ground here in an 

hour and forty-two minutes. I’ll let you have the last say. 

Is there anything you want to add to this, sir? 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: No. I’m just very proud of what our soldiers are doing 

over there. One thing I didn’t discuss was disciplined 

professionalism. The importance of professionalism 

and discipline of the individual soldier over in Iraq and 

Afghanistan cannot be overstated. I’m just very proud of 

these soldiers, who realized the importance of displaying 

restraint and doing the right thing. I also realized that we 

asked soldiers to do tasks that they were not trained for, 

in terms of when they joined the Army, but by applying 

just some of the values of middle America, from the 

Golden Rule to what they learned in civics class, you had 

squad leaders, platoon leaders, on a daily basis teaching 

economics, ethics, democracy, law enforcement, Business 

101, and by embracing that and realizing that, it’s not about 

just winning the war. It’s winning the peace and working 

ourselves out of a job. They were able to push the ball down 

the field. But in a counterinsurgency, you’re not going to be 

able to throw the hundred-yard touchdown pass; it’s a lot 

of three- to five-yard gains. But I was just extremely proud 

of the job the soldiers did to every day take the fight to the 

enemy and just do it through a wide variety of methods. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, sir, I think that’s a good place to stop. On behalf of 

the Center of Military History, I want to thank you for 

taking the time to do this. We really appreciate it. 

LT. COL. McGUIRE: I hope it helped. 

Security and Assistance

Lt. Col. Eugene M. Augustine, USMC, served as Commander, Lashkar Gah Provincial 

Reconstruction Team, which operated in the Helmand Province in Combined Joint Task 

Force-76’s Regional Command South, from 2004 to 2005. He was interviewed by Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army Center of Military History at the U.S. Naval War College in 

Newport, Rhode Island, on 22 February 2007. Colonel Augustine discusses his transition 

into command of the provincial reconstruction team, as well as the team’s mission to provide 

security and to build the physical and political infrastructure in Lashkar Gah and outlying 

districts in Helmand Province. He describes his area of operations, including the terrain and 

its inhabitants, as well as the development of the forward operating base where his team was 

stationed. The team was composed largely of Iowa National Guard. Colonel Augustine comments on working with local police and political officials, as well as the challenges in building 

Afghan institutions in an impoverished and underdeveloped region where the major source 

of income is opium production. He attributes the successes of the team to its guardsmen, 

civilian augmentees, and the will of the local Afghans to build a more stable society.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is February twentysecond, 2007. I am interviewing Lt. Col. Gene Augustine, U.S. Marine Corps, about his tour of duty as the 

commanding officer of the Lashkar Gah Provincial Reconstruction Team [PRT] in Afghanistan. First of all, sir, 

are you sitting for this interview voluntarily?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I am.

DR. KOONTZ: And do you have any objection with Army or other researchers using this material as long as you’re cited correctly?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I don’t.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. To get started off, give me a little bit about your 

background.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Background? I am an infantry officer in the United States 

Marine Corps. I’ve been in for approximately eighteen 

5
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and a half years. Previous assignments were as a platoon 

commander during Operation Desert Storm; later on, 

I was a mechanized company commander with Battalion 

Landing Team-18. We basically went out on a Mediterranean 

cruise with the 26th MEU [marine expeditionary unit], were 

involved in Operation Silver Wake, which was in Tirana, 

Albania, I believe, in 1996, ‘97, that time frame. Prior to 

going over to Afghanistan, I was assigned out of III MEF 

[marine expeditionary force] headquarters in Okinawa, 

Japan, as a G-3 [staff section for operations] planner, and I 

went over to Afghanistan on an individual augment billet.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. You mentioned that operational experience 

that you had in Albania. Did that give you any kind 

of insights or any kind of experiences that you used 

later in Afghanistan regarding low-level conflicts or 

unconventional conflicts?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I’d say yes—and not just that, but being submerged into the 

whole MEU training cycle. You know, it’s a six- to eightmonth work-up prior to an actual deployment, so that 

whole process is a thorough process of training, evaluation, 

simulated exercises—very real world exercises, where 

you’re constantly being tested on rules of engagement, you 

know, your ability to think quickly and act quickly. So, just 

Colonel Augustine (U.S. Marine Corps) meets with local officials in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province.
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Security and Assistance

that background definitely gave me better insight when I 

got over to Afghanistan.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And other than that, did you have any other 

experiences or any other kind of professional duties that 

prepared you for your work for the PRT?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I’d say working out there at III MEF, doing a lot of joint, 

multilateral exercises—you know, working a lot with the 

Thai military, Singapore military, Japanese military, Korean 

militaries, working with those folks, and also civilians 

in those countries, as well. That type of coalition-type 

operation did help me prepare for Afghanistan.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And what was the process by which you got sent 

from Okinawa to Afghanistan. Why did you get tapped 

to do this?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. III MEF had been assigned a number of individual 

augment billets. A friend of mine that I worked with at MEF 

G-3, he had—he was the first PRT commander at Lashkar 

Gah. He was the guy who actually set up the PRT. His name 

was Lt. Col. Ty Yanvary. I had been in contact with him while 

he was the PRT commander. We didn’t know ... when the 

billet came out in a tasking message, it said, “Prov. Recon. 

Team Commander,” so it sounded pretty operational. 

You know, it sounded like it might have had some recon 

in there. We thought “recon” meant “reconnaissance,” not 

“reconstruction,” but when he got over there, he figured out 

that it meant reconstruction. So, he was communicating 

with me on a routine basis. There’re a lot of IA [individual 

augmentee] billets, you know? I kind of thought it would 

be good—and I knew it was a command billet. He had kind 

of formed the PRT while he was there, so I knew it was 

a command billet, and kind of independent operations, 

which appealed to me. So, the next time this billet was 

coming open, I got approved to go. I got approved by the 

CG [commanding general], III MEF, and I was a one-forone replacement for Lieutenant Colonel Yanvary.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. What’s the approximate time frame that all of this 

is happening?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: This is late October ‘04, was when I actually went in country 

and took over the job, and I was done in May of ‘05. So, 

I knew several months in advance that I was going to be 

going over and taking over that job.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. What kind of preparations did you take before?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: There was no formal training or anything else to go through 

in preparation. I just read up on some joint pubs, Marine 

Corps pubs, the Small Wars Manual, those type of things, 

just basically on my own. I did do some weapons training—
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430

basically, went to the pistol range prior to going over there, 

that type stuff. So, it was just basically stuff on my own.

DR. KOONTZ: I guess my question is, there’s no magic book, How to Be 

a PRT Commander, is there?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: There’s not now. However, I think since the time I’ve gone 

over there, there is a lot more training. I think the Army 

did a lot more training in preparation for guys going over 

there. They all kind of went over as a unit because most 

of the other PRT commanders came from the Army civil 

affairs section. So, they came over—I’m not sure which 

unit it was, but they came over basically as a unit and went 

into PRT commander billets that they were already tagged 

to. So, they did do a lot of work-up training prior to going 

over there. And I believe the Navy is starting to take over 

some of the PRTs now, and they are sending folks through 

training prior to going over there.

DR. KOONTZ: What kind of communications did you have with Colonel 

Yanvary?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I had SIPRNET [Secure Internet Protocol Router 

Network] communications with him, as well as telephone 

conversations. I was able to talk to him every once in a 

while on the phone.

DR. KOONTZ: And what kind of advice or guidance was he passing on 

to you?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Just basically about prep, gear prep, and things like that, 

and then once I got there, I had a good solid week or so 

ground time with him, which was an ample turnover.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And before you left Okinawa, did you get any kind 

of advice or guidance from any of your commanders? 

Did anybody tell you, “This is what we want you to do?”

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: No, no. No, just basically, “Hey, good luck! Stay healthy.” 

But I don’t—no one out there at III MEF really even knew 

what the PRTs were doing. It was still a relatively new 

concept. Like I mentioned, Lieutenant Colonel Yanvary 

got there in country—I guess he was there probably seven 

months before I went, and there was no PRT down in 

Lashkar Gah. He kind of went on initial site visits down 

there—you know, kind of recon, check out the place, talk 

to the provincial governor, see if there was possibility of 

getting a piece of land where they could set up a PRT and 

start building a PRT. He did that initially, started getting 

folks together. So, when he started out, he basically went 

down there with a handful of guys and some money, moved 

into like what they call the safe house, and kind of started 

out there. Eventually, once they built the security perimeter, 

basically the wall around the PRT compound, once they 
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got approval to build that, then the PRT slowly moved over 

there. When I got there, it was basically a wall with very few 

buildings built yet. We were still sleeping outside. We didn’t 

have any head facilities or any of that. So, that was slowly 

coming online while I was there.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Tell me about the deployment from Okinawa 

to Afghanistan. How did you get there?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. I flew from Okinawa to Tampa and reported in to 

CENTCOM MARCENT [U.S. Central Command, U.S. 

Marine Corps Central Command] there and basically 

waited a week or so. And then, they have something called 

a rotary flight that I—they flew me from Tampa up to 

Baltimore, caught a rotary flight and went into, I think it 

was K2 [Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan]. It might have been 

K2. I’m not sure. It was somewhere up there to the north, 

either—I’m not sure if it was Uzbekistan; it’s been kind of a 

while—but somewhere up there to the north. And then from 

there, we waited there a day or two and then caught a flight 

down into Bagram. Spent a few days at Bagram talking to 

Task Force Victory folks. There was a Marine detachment 

there in Afghanistan. Had to do some admin stuff—you 

know, kind of check in with those guys for pay and all that 

other kind of stuff, and then finally caught a flight from 

there down to Kandahar, and then from Kandahar, I caught 

a flight to Lashkar Gah.

It’s pretty interesting flying in. The whole way I’d been flying 

either commercial airlines, some military aircraft, but I was 

landing in—you know, Bagram is a major airfield. Kandahar 

is even a pretty big airfield. It used to be an airport. So, I 

was flying into those two places. And, you know, you’re 

flying regular flights, landing on a tarmac and then etc. 

Well, the last leg of the flight from Kandahar to Lashkar 

Gah, I was able to get on a Blackwater flight on some small 

aircraft, and I’m talking maybe a six-seater aircraft. And 

just basically me and another guy, a sergeant that I’d met up 

with at Kandahar that was actually part of the PRT. So, we 

start flying to Lashkar Gah. Not that far from Kandahar—

I’m thinking maybe it’s sixty miles or so; I’d have to do 

the map study—but we’re flying in there, and the aircraft 

is circling and I’m looking down and I don’t see anything 

except desert, so I’m thinking like, “What, am I not seeing 

the tarmac? I can’t see it,” and I didn’t know what was going 

on. And then all of a sudden, the pilot is doing the final 

approach, and I just see green smoke coming up. And then 

we hit, and gravel and everything else, and dirt and dust 

and everything else, is flying up. Well, there was no tarmac 

there at Lashkar Gah. There was no airfield. It was basically 

just basically a level piece of desert that the Russians used 

to land aircraft on there. And we were capable of landing 

C–130s there because we did do that once or twice, but yes, 

there was no control tower or anything else. The control 
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tower was one of us on a handheld radio, and then we’d 

throw green smoke to let the aircraft know we had the little 

airfield secure and it was safe to land. So, that was actually 

my buddy, Ty Yanvary, who threw the green smoke and met 

me at the airfield and gave me a big hug and said, “Hey, this 

is home!” So, it was pretty funny.

DR. KOONTZ: Right. All right. So, your colleague and buddy, like you 

said, slaps you on the back: “Welcome to home!“ What’s 

running through your mind as to what you’re there to 

do and what your job is? What’s your conception of what 

you are going to do as the commander of this PRT?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: My conception was I was going to help rebuild 

infrastructure in that province, and also help to provide 

security in that province. So, my goal was to do as much 

reconstruction as I could during the time I was there, try 

to make the place as safe as I could while I was there, 

basically kind of developing the critical institutions and 

infrastructure that they were lacking there. And I knew 

they were lacking. My friend had told me, “You won’t 

believe it when you see it how little they have there.” And 

Lashkar Gah is a little, small place. I mean, Bagram and 

Kabul are kind of built-up places, and even Kandahar 

is pretty built up. Lashkar Gah and Helmand Province 

really isn’t. It’s more farmland more than anything else. 

But there is a little town there in Lashkar Gah, which was 

largely built by the U.S. back in the forties and fifties, you 

know, Peace Corps–type folks. I would constantly run into 

elders that spoke a little English that said, “Yes, I learned 

English from Mrs. Smith. She was my teacher back in 

1964 when she was over here with the Peace Corps.” So, 

Lashkar Gah actually had a reputation of being—let’s see 

if I have the term here in my notes here. It says [referring 

to notes], “Lashkar Gah was largely built by the U.S. in 

the fifties and sixties as a model of nation building.” I 

think what was going on there was that the U.S. was kind 

of building down south while the Soviet Union was kind 

of more interested in moving in from the north. But they 

had a beautiful dam there, a hydroelectric dam there in 

northern Helmand Province, that was built by the U.S. It 

had fallen into ruin over the years and was only producing 

maybe three to five megawatts of electricity, but I think 

the capability and the goal that we were trying to get to 

was just to try to get up to fifty megawatts of electricity, 

which is pretty significant for over there.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. I think you answered this before, but how long was 

your left-seat/right-seat?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: A week to ten days.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And what did you learn or experience in that 

period that you didn’t know already?
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LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Basically, the key players in the region. I learned more how 

best to operate, you know? You weren’t just dealing with the 

provincial governor and government. You were also dealing 

with the district governments, as well. So, more the local 

governments, more of that stuff. The PRT had not really 

been in existence for all that long before I got there, so they 

hadn’t established a lot of places. There were still places in 

the province they hadn’t been to, districts they hadn’t been 

to yet. I learned about what the ongoing projects they had 

going at that time. Our CMOC [civil-military operations 

center] wasn’t up and running yet. It was one of my first 

goals was to get the CMOC up and running, as well as the 

basic infrastructure of the PRT. I wanted to get that running 

so the guys can be well rested, focused on the mission each 

night, and it’s kind of tough when you’re not sleeping real 

well and your facilities aren’t that good. I mean, it’s obviously 

better. You know they can get better rest if their facilities 

are a bit better.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And you’d also already talked a little bit about your 

site of operations. When you arrived, you basically said 

it was kind of a walled compound, and that’s about it. 

Take me on kind of a quick, just kind of mental walking 

tour of your compound.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. We had—it was a walled compound. It was probably 

about 200 meters by 250 meters, the interior. In each corner 

of the compound, there were basically twenty-foot-high 

watchtowers. Outside the walled compound, there was 

space all around the PRT as well, so we were able to dig a 

trench basically all around and then place triple-strength 

concertina wire around that so there was some standoff 

from even getting into the PRT. We were in the process of 

building vehicle ramps so that if there was an attack, we 

could have the up-armored Humvees drive right up onto 

these vehicle ramps, and we’d be able to bring their weapon 

systems to bear right over the wall of the compound. So, 

basically you’ve got a wall there; you’ve got a ramp here; the 

vehicle drives up; the driver is able to bring his weapons to 

bear. We were trying to get a fuel storage point so that when 

we did get fuel for the compound, for the vehicles and for 

the generators, it would be far enough away so it wouldn’t 

be in the blast zone. We had an underground ammo storage 

point that we were working on. Basically, we were able to 

bury several CONEX [container express] boxes, three or 

four CONEX boxes underground, under about six feet of 

dirt, and then put our ammo underground like that. Oh, 

what else? A helipad. We were working on a helipad. We 

were working on basically barracks for the troops, working 

on a recreation room. We did have a headquarters building. 

That was the first building that went in, so there was already 

a headquarters building when I got there, a place we could 

have meetings. We had our comms system set up there and 

everything else. We were working on a CMOC as a separate 
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part, kind of a separate compound almost, the civil-military 

operations center that had kind of a private entrance so that 

folks could come in and out of the CMOC for meetings—

you know, local Afghans, etc., without being exposed to the 

rest of the compound for security.

Surrounding the outside of the PRT, there were some 

homes, some villages. All the houses over there, basically, 

they all have walls around them. People put a wall around 

their property almost all the time, whoever owns it. So, 

the PRT was pretty desolate around us. By the time I left, 

there was a lot more buildings going on all around us, and I 

think that was because of the relative security that the PRT 

brought with it.

DR. KOONTZ: What were the walls of your compound made out of?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Everything that was there was built locally, so there were 

no U.S. contractors building any of the buildings or the 

walls or any of that stuff. We did use KBR [Kellogg, Brown 

& Root] to do electricity, plumbing, that type stuff, but 

everything else was built locally, basically built with, you 

know, mortar, dirt, some rebar, that type stuff. But it was 

well built. I mean, the construction on that was very good.

DR. KOONTZ: Would it be fair to say this is a pretty austere operating 

base when you got there?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Very austere. No toilet facilities. We built little wooden 

outhouses, basically, so we were burning the waste with 

diesel and everything else. Having problems trying to keep 

everybody keep their hands clean and everything else, a lot 

of guys getting sick just from dirty conditions, from living 

in a field environment.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And by the time you left, you mentioned all 

these construction projects are going on at the operating 

base. What kind of progress was made on all those by the 

time you left?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: By the time I left it was, I’d say, 98 percent complete. We 

had—it was beautiful. We had a great PRT. I mean the 

construction on it, the guys that had worked on it, between 

the KBR guys and our guys internally, this staff sergeant—he 

was a national guardsman out of Louisville, Kentucky, a real 

sharp guy, an engineer by trade, but a national guardsman, 

a reservist, and he wasn’t full-time Army, but he did a great 

job overseeing the construction. One of the great things 

about having guys like national guardsmen and reservists 

is a lot of these guys do construction or are mechanics or 

whatever in their civilian jobs, and are very good at it and 

have been doing it for a long time. So, whenever we needed 

something, as long as we can get the tools, if these guys had 

some downtime or whatever, weren’t going out on patrol, 
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whatever, they’d grab a circular saw or a jigsaw, whatever, 

and start building stuff for us. So, they did a great job.

But, yes, we had a grand opening ceremony where 

we actually invited all the local government officials, 

Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad, who was the ambassador 

at that time, he came to it. It was a great ceremony. Colonel 

[Richard] Pedersen, I believe, I think General [Lt. Gen. 

David W.] Barno was there. But, you know, just a fantastic 

grand opening ceremony, and the PRT looked great. We 

had very good billeting areas for all the soldiers. We had 

a very good dining facility, a very good recreation room, 

a full weight room and everything else, a TV room with 

a big-screen TV that they got for us. The big thing was 

electricity. We had gotten these high-speed generators. 

They were all up and running. We had three. You’d have 

two running different types of electricity, one 110-watt, 

220-, and then the other one was off cycle. And that type 

of stuff is probably too much detail, but all those ramps 

were built. Those were up and good to go, the vehicle 

ramps. What else? We had built a little field. We were 

trying to grow grass. It wasn’t working out too well, but 

we had leveled off a good soccer/football field, probably 

about sixty yards by forty yards, and it was a common 

occurrence for us to be out there playing flag football or 

soccer or whatever when we weren’t out on mission or 

whatever.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And again, you just kind of mentioned this a little 

bit, but tell me about the geography and the terrain that 

you’re going to be operating in.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. Pretty rugged, semiarid desert. The south was a lot, 

the south and southern districts were very flat, open desert. 

As you move north through the province, when you get up 

to the north in those northern districts, very mountainous, 

a lot of snow up there, very rugged terrain, tough go in a 

lot of areas up in Bagram Valley, up through there. The 

Helmand River runs basically through the entire province 

from Kajaki, and it exits all the way down to the southwest 

border there with Nimruz Province, and then the Helmand 

River continues through Nimruz Province into Iran, into 

Zabol, Iran. What I was going to say about the terrain 

there, very few roads, very few paved, asphalt roads; a few 

in Lashkar Gah. Ring Road, that ran from Kandahar out to 

Farah, that ran through the town of Gereshk, kind of cut 

the province in half, so when we did go into Kandahar we 

can get up to Ring Road there and take it into Kandahar. It 

kind of made the trip not too bad, but getting from Lashkar 

Gah up to Ring Road, it was all kind of cross-country–type 

movement across very tough terrain, very hard on the 

vehicles and equipment.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And tell me about the people of Lashkar Gah?
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LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: The people of Lashkar Gah? Very interesting, friendly 

people. I mean the Afghan people, as a whole, they take 

their hospitality seriously. They were always inviting 

us into their houses. I don’t think we ever went to a 

meeting or went to a district where they didn’t host us 

for a meal, very, very friendly people. Within Lashkar 

Gah—Little America, or whatever they called it, that 

was, like I mentioned before, largely built by the U.S. 

So, that did have paved roads, and it was a nice, little 

town. It was a small town, but a nice, little town that was 

kind of—people had very little, you know. They had no 

plumbing systems. They had very little electricity. They 

didn’t have a sanitation system. As you can imagine, 

no real irrigation system, so they had gotten rain there 

pretty heavily in January through February and March 

of that year, and they literally hadn’t had any rain in 

seven years. So, there was a lot of damage and a lot of 

flooding and everything else because of that. But the 

people handled it pretty well. We did a lot of relief ops. 

I’m sure we’ll get into that later, but we did a lot of relief 

ops for everybody throughout the province during that 

time. But counter to—you know, you kind of think 

people don’t want the impression, “Hey, we’re here to 

stay,” that type thing. There, they were like, “We hope 

you stay,” because they knew us being there would help 

to provide security and stability and generate income 

and jobs for a lot of people, so they welcomed us with 

open arms.

DR. KOONTZ: You just anticipated my next question there, so I’ll go 

ahead and drop that one ...

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I’ll caveat that by saying the average citizen welcomed us 

with open arms and was happy we were there. The other 

thing about Helmand Province is it’s the number one 

poppy producer in Afghanistan as a province, so there 

was a huge amount of poppy being produced throughout 

the province, and everywhere we’d drive and go we’d see 

these fields of poppy. The other thing the U.S. did while 

we were there in the fifties and sixties was we built a 

pretty extensive canal system off of the Helmand River. 

So, this canal system allowed big farms to flourish in 

that area because it was a really good canal system using 

the water off of the Helmand River. The way the farmers 

would farm there is that they would basically flood their 

fields, and then they would allow them to drain. So, I 

learned a lot about farming when I was over there, both 

about how to grow poppy and produce heroin, as well as 

best practices with regard to things like drip irrigation 

and the way they do farming and how to desalinate the 

soil, all that kind of stuff. So, it was pretty interesting.

DR. KOONTZ: We’ll get to the nonaverage citizens later. Tell me 

about the local government in Lashkar Gah.
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LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. Lashkar Gah was the provincial seat there for 

Helmand Province, so you had the whole provincial 

government right there in Lashkar Gah. I met with on a 

weekly, sometimes three four times a week depending what 

was going on, with the governor. The governor at the time 

was a guy named Sher Muhammad. He was later elected—I 

don’t know exactly what position he was elected to, but he 

moved up to Kabul and was working the government up 

there. But he was the district governor the whole time I was 

there. Basically, the major players are the district governor, 

his deputy, the police chief, and the intel chief. Those 

three [four] guys are usually the main players at any given 

province. So we had Sher Muhammad, Daoud Muhammad 

Khan was the intel chief, and then a guy named Abdul 

Raman Jan was the district police chief. I don’t believe any 

of them stayed in their jobs thereafter.

DR. KOONTZ: How effective were they in, I guess—I’m trying to think 

of a way to articulate this—doing their job? I mean, how 

well were they governing?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: You know, I think they were all making pretty good efforts, 

but there was always a question of corruption, and with all 

of the drugs and poppy production going on in Helmand, 

that was always a—these guys always had that in there as 

a question mark behind them, not just from me but from 

higher headquarters, intel. Everybody else was always like, 

“Are these guys involved in drugs?” That was always the 

thing behind every conversation—this ongoing chess game 

of corruption, who’s making money, how are they making 

money, you know? It’s kind of an ongoing problem over 

there.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Earlier you had mentioned that one of the 

important things that you wanted to do was to do 

reconstruction and building institutions, but then you 

also mentioned that the average citizen wanted you to be 

there and wanted help. Is this a humanitarian space that 

you’re going into for the most part?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: In what respect? What do you mean by that?

DR. KOONTZ: In terms of security.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: For us, it was. I mean, since we had our own kind of traveling 

security, we felt we could go into wherever we wanted 

to go and start doing humanitarian efforts. Other NGOs 

[nongovernmental organizations] and other agencies didn’t 

feel the same way. They didn’t have their own security, so 

they wouldn’t go into Helmand at times because of fear of 

something happening to their workers or their supplies or 

what have you. So for us, since we had our own security, 

never really a problem. We kind of felt like we could go 

wherever we wanted, and the whole time I was there, 
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438

within Helmand Province and, really, with my predecessor 

as well, we didn’t have any real direct attacks—probably 

some ancillary incidents, maybe mistaking who we might 

be when moving at nighttime or something like that, but 

never any direct attacks against the PRT.

DR. KOONTZ: How about attacks against the NGOs and others?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: There were occasional things that would happen. Whether or not they were attacks because they were NGOs, or 

whether there were attacks as a criminal activity, is kind 

of hard to say. For example, one of USAID’s [U.S. Agency for International Development’s] subcontractors was 

a company called Chemonics, and they were basically 

doing an Alternative Livelihoods Program, where they 

were hiring locals to work on some of those drainage 

and canal systems that I’d mentioned. Basically, those 

things have to be cleaned out every so often or else the 

water doesn’t drain properly from the fields and you get 

an oversalinization problem there. So, they were hiring 

these guys to come clear out these trenches and paying 

these guys in hard currency, in Afghans—a very effective 

program. They’d get up to a few hundred locals working at each different farm, and they would be working 

at different farms. One time they did have an incident 

where a couple of the workers ... they got carjacked, 

basically. The car got taken from them. These guys were 

actually taken to a farm somewhere else and dropped 

off. So, they basically stopped work at that one particular location. I believe it was in Nad Ali District. So, that 

kind of shut them down for a while, but it kind of sent 

a message like, “Hey, we’re doing this. We’re bringing in 

money for you guys. If you guys can’t provide security 

for these guys or be on the watchout, then we’re not going to keep doing these programs.” And enough of the 

people wanted to continue to do these programs that it 

became an issue. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay, sir. What I’d like to do is transition into the actual 

PRT itself. What was your chain of command?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: My chain of command as a PRT commander was—I reported 

to Colonel Pedersen. He was the RC South commander, 

and then he reported up to C[J]TF-76 [Combined Joint 

Task Force-76] up in Kabul.

DR. KOONTZ: You’re a Marine officer. You’re now working for an Army 

unit. Was there anything you had to kind of learn from 

the joint aspect?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Not really, you know? I mean, it was very seamless 

integration. That’s an infantry headquarters, C[J]TF—

Colonel Pedersen and Task Force Bronco, they’re an 

infantry brigade. I mean, I had no problems plugging right 
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into those guys, speaking the same language. Really, it was 

very easy.

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about the composition of your PRT.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. The composition would fluctuate occasionally, but 

for the most part we had somewhere around a hundred 

personnel, seventy-five to eighty of them being infantry 

from Iowa National Guard. We had some U.S. Army 

regulars. We had some U.S. Army Reserve. We had myself 

as a marine, and then we had a few civilians. We had a 

USAID rep, Mr. Pat Irish. We had a Department of State 

rep, who got there kind of near the end of my tour. His name 

escapes me right now. We also had a U.S. Department of 

Agriculture rep, a veterinarian who worked with us as well. 

The Army active duty were based out of Hawaii. They were 

normally the folks that provided comm support and also 

human support, human intelligence support. The reservists 

were—I believe those were the military policemen. And 

then, like I said, Iowa National Guard for the rest. So, I’d 

say 75 or 77 percent were Iowa National Guard, 10 percent 

U.S. Army Regular, 8 percent U.S. Army Reserve, 1 percent 

Marine, and then 3 or 4 percent civilian.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And you as the commander of this conglomeration 

of personnel, what did you see as your primary tasks or 

missions?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. Basically, two main missions were security and 

reconstruction. The mission statement that I had was 

“Provincial Reconstruction Team Lashkar Gah will conduct 

civil, military, and security operations in Helmand Province 

in order to facilitate reconstruction and reform and to deny 

enemy influence over Helmand Province.”

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. How do you do that, I guess, is my question.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Okay. Security—basically, by our presence, was helping 

security. The other way we did it was working with Afghan 

National Army, and then even more so with the provincial 

and district police. We actually would run some, basically, 

training seminars at the PRT for these folks, and we were 

trying to set up, working with Colonel Pedersen, trying 

to set up a mini-police academy out there in Helmand 

Province.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And you’d mentioned that your PRT was doing 

some training with the district and provincial police. 

What kind of training were you giving them?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Well, not only training but equipping, as well. We were 

providing them with police vehicles so they could actually 

do their jobs, to include border police as well so they could 

actually patrol the borders, working with them so that they 
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440

had comm systems, radios so they could communicate 

with each other, training as far as riot control, things of that 

nature, proper search of vehicles; basically the basic police 

officer skills. And I did have some military policemen 

attached to my PRT, and those are the guys who were 

running these little training seminars.

DR. KOONTZ: I guess my question was going to be is this kind of—

cop training, or is this kind of more like paramilitary 

training?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: A bit of both. Their job there isn’t like you would picture a 

typical city cop would be or a detective, you know? It’s kind 

of more vehicle searches, more security, that type stuff.

DR. KOONTZ: And what kind of efforts did you have to undertake to 

build that police academy?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Well, we just used the PRT compound. We never actually 

had the police academy built. There was a police academy 

in Kandahar, but it was always full to capacity. We would 

send guys there, but it just wasn’t enough room in order 

to get this done, so the thought was “You know, maybe we 

should push out police training teams to the provincial 

level, instead of bringing them all in to either Kandahar 

or Bagram or wherever these academies were, and maybe 

we can kind of push it out and send out expert teams out 

there to do that.” Whether or not they actually got there, 

I don’t know. It was kind of an ongoing process when I 

left.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, this is more of providing capabilities rather 

than facilities?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Right, right. Here’s some point I failed to mention before. One of the unique things about Helmand Province, 

compared to the other provinces in RC South, was that 

the other provinces ... they would have a PRT there, and 

they would also have an infantry battalion. So, out there 

in Tarin Kowt, there was both—and Oruzgan both—there 

was a PRT out there in Tarin Kowt and the infantry battalion out there, as well, in Kandahar PRT and an infantry 

battalion. We didn’t have that. We were out there, kind of 

as Dances with Wolves out there, without that infantry battalion support. So, what we can do and how much we could 

travel was kind of—we didn’t have that additional security. 

In the other provinces, the PRT battalions worked closely 

together for both security and reconstruction efforts. Our 

PRT was a little bigger with Iowa National Guard infantry 

because we were providing our own security wherever we 

went. I just wanted to kind of point that out.

DR. KOONTZ: There’s two questions I have based on that. The first one 

is how big is your area of operations?
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LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Let’s see. I don’t have the exact statistics, and you really 

couldn’t relate it to U.S. terms. I think landwise it’s the biggest 

province in the country. It’s very big. I mean, it would take 

you two days to get all the way up to the northern part. 

From Lashkar Gah up to the northern part here, it would 

take you a good day and a half to get up there just because 

it’s a tough go. So, you could say, “Hey, it’s one hundred 

kilometers,” but it might take you two days to get that one 

hundred kilometers.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, your PRT is responsible for the entire province 

of Helmand?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Right, and all the districts within.

DR. KOONTZ: And the reason that you did not have the associated 

battalion, was that because of the relative security in the 

province?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: No. We just didn’t have the manpower. We just didn’t have 

an infantry battalion to put out there. Whenever they 

could, they would try to reinforce. At times, we would get 

some infantry support from other places. I think there was 

a unit that had been out in either Herat or Farah that was 

getting ready to redeploy, and they brought them in and we 

worked with these guys. It was an air cav unit.

DR. KOONTZ: I had planned to get into this later, but this might be a 

good time to go ahead and transition into that. You had 

talked a little bit about that Helmand is the number one 

poppy producer or region in Afghanistan. Were you 

aware of that at the time that you arrived?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I was, yes.

DR. KOONTZ: And other than being able to go out in the provinces 

and see these fields of poppy—I mean, you can’t hide 

that kind of thing. Could you see other kind of physical 

evidence of opium growth, opium trade?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes. Actually in meetings with the provincial governor, 

that would come up as a topic because it was very—that 

was when President Karzai was really telling the whole 

country, “Hey, we can’t be a narco-state. We’re not going 

to get the long-term aid that we want. We need to start 

eradication. We need to stop it on our own,” and kind 

of put out the word to the provincial governors: “Hey, 

this is your responsibility. I want you guys to make this 

happen.” So, at our weekly meetings, the provincial 

governor would report to me and say, “Hey, we eradicated 

this much poppy, and we busted and seized this many 

kilos of heroin,” or—it was raw opium. It was in a raw 

state whenever we saw it. And he would show me, “Hey, 

this is what we’ve confiscated.” And then we also—and 
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I didn’t mention this before. We also had a Ministry of 

Interior rep, Colonel Fakir, who was basically working at 

our PRT on a daily basis. So, he was kind of the guy who 

reported directly to Kabul, to the Ministry of Interior 

there at our PRT working with us, that if there was 

poppy, he would kind of report on poppy eradication as 

he saw it and what was going on, as well when there was 

a drug seizure or whatever, he would make sure that that 

actually did get destroyed and didn’t wind up in some 

bazaar somewhere else.

DR. KOONTZ: And counternarcotics efforts, as you said, were 

supposed to be the official kind of domain of the 

British. Did your PRT get involved in any kind of 

counternarcotics efforts?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: No, we didn’t. It would have been counterproductive 

to our reconstruction and, probably, security mission. 

So, it was kind of a fine line there, a very gray area. I 

knew we weren’t doing counternarcotics. We did see 

it there, but it wasn’t our mission to go and eradicate 

fields. We mentioned, “Hey, long term, you guys cannot 

continue to produce poppy and make that your means 

of livelihood. We need to find something else.” But there 

were also “What else, okay? If not poppy, this number 

one cash crop, what else? What are we going to do to 

feed our families?”—and this and that. We had folks 

there from USAID and places like that who would talk 

about Alternative Livelihoods and what other choices 

they might have had, but it’s difficult because if you’re 

growing a different crop, how do you get that crop to 

the market if you don’t really have the roads? You know, 

it’s not like you can grow melons and then be able to 

transport melons to Kandahar. By the time you got the 

melons going over those roads, they’d be destroyed. So, 

it was kind of everything kind of melded together. Well, 

you can’t do this if you don’t have the infrastructure. Well, 

you’re not going to get the money for infrastructure if 

you’re growing poppy. So, it was kind of—there were a lot 

of things that kind of needed to happen simultaneously. 

This whole reconstruction effort was like an elephant, 

and how do you eat an elephant? Well, you take one bite 

at a time. So, it was basically the same thing. We would 

try to do whatever we could for that day, at the same 

time keeping an eye on a long-term goal. We developed a 

five-year plan for reconstruction efforts in our province. 

All the PRTs and infantry battalions developed a fiveyear plan for what could we do, what were we going 

to do, spread amongst a number of different areas for 

reconstruction within our province. We submitted those 

to Task Force Bronco, the RC South commander, who 

compiled those. We met with the—we’d have a governors’ 

meeting where we met with everybody, and we would 

try to implement as much as we could.
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DR. KOONTZ: Do you remember what your five-year plan looked like, 

just kind of in its broad construction?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes. It was based on the Afghan National Development Plan. 

They had basically four pillars, which were human capital 

and social protection, physical infrastructure and natural 

resources, trade investment, and public administration 

security and rule of law. So, those four pillars, basically, 

and then there are subcategories under those, but they’re 

just categories. There’s no implementation plan. Like for 

example, under rule of law, you have effective judiciary. 

Okay, effective judiciary—what does that mean to Helmand 

Province? Well, it means in Year 1, we are going to establish 

a courthouse in Lashkar Gah; then we were going, in Year 2, 

to establish a courthouse down at the district levels in three 

districts; Year 3, courthouses at the district level in however 

many more districts, until you have, over a five-year plan, 

now each district has their own courthouse, as well as a 

courthouse in the provincial capital. So, it’s basically a way 

of implementing this grand Afghan National Development 

Plan, a way of actually putting some realistic, or potentially 

realistic, goals to the problem, to this reconstruction 

plan. So, we kind of looked at that. You need schools in 

each of the districts, and how many towns? What are the 

population centers? USAID was doing a lot of that from 

Kabul, and at our level, with our USAID rep, we were going 

around ensuring those projects were being done properly. 

But what we did at our PRT was, we kind of task organized, 

and we went around to the thirteen districts that I had, and 

we sat down with the district leaders, the district shura, the district police, all these different folks. We sat down 

with them and we’d find out “Okay, what exactly do you 

need, and what is the priority?” and by doing that, by task 

organizing and doing that, we were able to accomplish a lot 

of things each time we made a visit to the districts. We had 

to prioritize. We knew “Hey, Musa Qala, that province or 

that district, what do they need? What is their number one 

priority?” and we would know and we would go from there. 

So, I kind of felt like that was our job to know which each of 

the districts, what their priorities were, what they needed, 

what was the state of security there, what problems were 

they having. So, we kind of really closely monitored that 

and then implemented plans to actually make these things 

happen. Basically, the weapons at our disposal were having 

USAID there and what they were doing. Plus, our province 

had a $6.4 million CERP budget, Commander’s Emergency 

Response Program funds, that we could actually “Okay, you 

need this? All right. Everyone agree?” Or, my civil-military 

affairs guys: “Make sense? Okay, let’s work up a proposal 

for a contract.” They would give us a proposal of what they 

wanted. Say it was a hospital. Nobody else was building a 

hospital, and we could, within our realm of possibility, go 

ahead and do that. We’d put that project out for bid. Maybe it 

was—not a hospital, maybe more of a twenty-bed clinic, or 
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whatever it was. We’d put that project out for bid. We’d hold 

bidders’ conferences at our PRT. Folks would put in bids on 

those projects, and then we would award the contract, and 

then, boom, then they would go and start that twenty-bed 

clinic or whatever it might be.

DR. KOONTZ: Are these locals that you’re opening the bids to?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes, they’re all Afghans. There were occasionally folks 

from construction companies coming in from Pakistan or 

whatever, but to the maximum extent possible, we would 

award the contracts to locals from those districts. So you 

have the benefit of, A, they’re getting a clinic, and then, B, 

we’re putting money back into that district by paying the 

contractors who hire workers there, etc.

DR. KOONTZ: Was CERP the major source for your infrastructure 

building funding?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: It was for the PRT commanders and battalion commanders. 

It was definitely CERP. The bigger money was coming in 

through USAID from Kabul. They—and that’s why you 

always had to coordinate with USAID before you did 

any project like, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this.” 

And the USAID rep was right there all the time, anyway, 

and he’d know automatically, “Hey, you guys are thinking 

about doing this, right? All right, let me check and see if 

there’s any plan up in Kabul at USAID headquarters to 

do anything like this.” “Okay.” “No, there isn’t.” “All right, 

fine.” And the other thing we would do is sometimes we 

would supplement what was going on. Say, USAID built a 

hospital, but the hospital didn’t have the proper equipment 

so they could run the hospital. USAID didn’t normally 

provide hospital equipment, but perhaps we could with 

CERP funds. Perhaps we would find a source that would 

bring in hospital equipment; hospital beds, X-ray machines, 

whatever it was. Same thing in schools. USAID might 

build schools and basic buildings and stuff like that, but we 

would potentially use the money to buy desks and chairs 

and books, whatever, or coordinate with other NGOs to get 

that kind of stuff in.

DR. KOONTZ: This is something I should have asked a while back. What 

was it like to have these kind of civilian augmentees 

embedded into what’s basically a military structure?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: You know, I call it interagency operations at a tactical level. 

I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s what we should be doing. 

More is better. To have a USAID guy working right there 

alongside the military, great. Not only do we know ground 

truth of what’s going on at USAID, but we’re also providing 

security. USAID just couldn’t tool around, go around 

Afghanistan, potentially, without any security; but by us 

being there, we could accomplish both missions. Same 
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thing with USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture], you 

know? There’s only so much, and there should be more of it. 

There’s only so much knowledge, me, as a PRT commander 

or infantry officer, has about things like rule of law, 

education systems, grid systems, those type things, better 

farming practices. But, you get folks like USAID, USDA, 

State Department—there should be more of that. There 

should be an expert on education systems. There should 

be an expert on department of public works systems, road 

management, grid systems, all that kind of stuff. I firmly 

believe that that interagency-type activity is the way to go 

down there at the tactical level. Great if they’re up at Kabul 

talking about these things, but they need to be down there 

at the implementation level, as well. I think we were able to 

create a lot of synergy by working together and going out 

instead of the USAID going over and visiting a district and 

the USDA guy going over and visiting a different district, 

State Department having a separate meeting over there. No, 

we’d all go together. We’d sit down with our counterparts at 

the district level, and at the end of it, we’d all kind of come 

to an agreement and we’d all kind of agree, “Hey, these are 

the projects we need to do, and why we need to do it,” and 

we’d be able to share information, as well.

DR. KOONTZ: Way back when we started, you mentioned that your 

previous experience had given you a lot of experience in 

working with civilian agencies and things like that. Did 

you get any sense from your USDA and your USAID and 

your State Department reps that there was some kind 

of learning process on their part to work in a military 

system?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: No, I don’t think there really was. I mean, it just so happened 

the—I think everybody—those three reps had all had prior 

military experience. I know our State Department guy was 

a prior military intel guy. I think our USAID had some 

prior military experience. But, the USAID guy had been 

around for a long time with USAID, so he had done other 

operations with other military guys in other parts of the 

world. So, those guys have great experience. They’ve been 

around and done the stuff, and some of the guys from 

some of the subcontractors under USAID had had a lot 

of experience. These guys, some of them had experience 

in Colombia and places like that, so they knew about the 

narcotics and people being involved in that, but also being 

government officials, so they were pretty savvy to a lot of 

that stuff. There’s a constant—a lot of these meetings with 

different people is a constant chess game, a mental chess 

game in your mind of “Why is this guy asking me for this? 

Why is this his part? That doesn’t make sense, of a bazaar 

road being his number one priority over a hospital or a 

school or whatever,” you know? “I wonder if this guy owns 

the bazaars over there.” So, it was a constant mental chess 

game that we’d all kind of—when these meetings were over, 
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we’d sit back and recap and talk, and after a while, after a 

few months of doing this, you start to really understand 

what makes sense and what didn’t make sense. I could 

think of several incidents where we’d get a report like “X 

is going on, this place is under attack by this guy,” and be 

like, “That doesn’t make any sense. I just talked to that guy 

yesterday and things were going fine there. That doesn’t 

make any sense,” and, sure enough, that report would be 

wrong. It would be either misinformation or a mistake, or 

who knows why that report came in. But you could almost, 

after a while, understand. You kind of knew who the players 

were and where they were coming from and why they were 

coming from there.

DR. KOONTZ: Did you have kind of a weekly routine with the PRT? Did 

you have a battle rhythm that you tried to operate on?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes, we definitely did. For example, we had our infantry 

guys broken down into five squads. Okay, we had two 

mission squads, so one squad would be designated Mission 

1; the other squad would be Mission 2. The third squad 

would be the quick reaction force, and then one squad 

would be on day watch on the towers during the day. The 

other squad would be on night watch towers at night. So, 

Mission Squad 1, whatever mission was going out that day 

whether it be taking a patrol to get the PRT commander 

and staff out to a meeting at the governor’s place, that 

would be—a mission squad would do that. Maybe 

another mission squad, a different meeting was going on 

for whatever reason, or one of the civil affairs guys was 

going out to a site where we were doing a construction 

project and he was going to check on that construction 

project in one of the other districts, they would take him 

out. The quick reaction force would know both of those 

missions and would be ready to reinforce as required, 

and then the other two would be on guard duty. The civil 

affairs guys who worked for us—once we got that CMOC 

established, we had some real sharp civil affairs teams. We 

had two basically civil affairs teams working out there. 

They would be running operations in the CMOC for the 

day. We’d always have people coming in, either NGOs, 

locals, different people within the Afghan government 

coming in to talk to us, maybe contractors coming in to 

talk to us. They would keep that going during the day, 

and everyone else was kind of as required. But each night, 

we’d have a daily meeting and kind of go over what the 

schedule was for the next day and the week out and then 

whatever missions we were going on the next day. Later on 

that night, we’d brief up the missions, do a mission brief. 

Any time anybody went out of the PRT compound, we’d 

have a mission brief. We’d know who was going, numbers 

going, when they were going, where they were going and a 

way to put in a quick reaction force if needed to reinforce 

those guys.
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DR. KOONTZ: What’s the thought and planning process behind the 

missions that your two mission squads are going to 

go out on? How do you identify what missions need to 

be done?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Basically, we knew what districts we wanted to get out 

to. So, if we were going to go out and do a district visit, 

we would basically bring in the PRT commander, the 

Department of State rep, USAID rep, one of the civil affairs 

teams, the Ministry of Interior rep, our police training 

guys, our medical guys, our USDA guys. We would try to 

space out going to the different districts, and some of those 

missions would be ... you know, you could go get out early 

in the morning, visit with these guys for four or five hours 

during the day, have meetings, whatever, and then make it 

back that night. Other ones might require an intermediate 

stop, remain overnight, set up security, and then push on 

the next day. So, we kind of kept it going in a cycle. These 

are the thirteen districts: “When was the last time we were 

here? All right, we’ve got to get that one.” That way, we had 

weekly scheduled meetings with the governor on projects. 

We had to go and check on the projects to see what the 

status was, see what the status of work was on the projects, 

maybe do a site visit to see, “All right, this is where these 

guys want this road. What are going to be the parameters 

of that?” So, there was always something to go out on. It 

just depended on what was going on at that particular 

time—humanitarian assistance when the weather was bad, 

providing aid, getting aid out to folks, stuff like that.

DR. KOONTZ: As you mentioned before, you’re going out on lots of these 

missions and site visits to meet governors and provincial 

officials and things like this. Can you kind of take me 

through kind of a typical meeting that you would have 

with an Afghan official? Is there sort of a ritual, I guess, 

or is there a pattern to this?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes. Basically, whenever I went out to the district teams, 

I would try not to just meet with the district chief or 

whoever it may be. In one of our districts, it was actually 

the governor’s brother. He was the district chief in one of 

the districts. Now, if you just meet with him, you’re going to 

get the world according to him, so I would very rarely just 

meet with him. I would meet with him and what’s called 

the shura, which is basically the tribal elders from that 

district. So, I would usually sit down with these guys, local 

doctor, veterinarian, police chief. They might be having 

side meetings with some of my guys at the same time. But 

I’d sit down with the district chief and the shura and talk 

to those guys about security, what’s going on with security, 

what are the problems we’re having: “One of the schools 

got broken into. Who do you think did it? What do you 

think the problem is? Do you think it was a Taliban thing, 

or do you think it was just criminals?” You know, that type 
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of thing. We’d talk about security. Then we would talk about 

reconstruction: “Hey, what are your priorities? What are 

your goals? What do you want to happen?” And then we 

would just talk in general, just general stuff, establishing 

rapport—family life. We’d always sit down, have a meal 

with these guys, and do that type stuff, kind of a sharing 

of the culture, that type thing. We talked security and 

reconstruction. We’d also get into politics a little bit: “What 

do you think about the elections? What do you think about 

the government in Kabul? What do you think about the 

Ministry of Interior?” and anything like that.

DR. KOONTZ: Probably drank a lot of tea, I would imagine.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes, absolutely. Tea all the time. They always put out these 

great raisins and pistachio nuts, ate a lot of that stuff—a lot 

of goat.

DR. KOONTZ: Had you had any kind of cultural training?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: No, not Afghan-specific. Just in the Marine Corps, you 

kind of naturally travel around the world, so you are 

getting cultural training. But I didn’t have any Afghanspecific cultural training. A critical piece that I didn’t 

really mention when I talked about PRT personnel 

is in addition to what we had, U.S. folks working, we 

also had locals working. We had locals working in our 

little mess kitchen there. We had local guards, so we had 

guards working around the PRT compound. When one 

of our guys would be on watch that night, they’d have 

an Afghan alongside of them, and that was important 

because if you ever had a problem at one of the gates or 

whatever, you had someone that spoke the language able 

to be with you and help take action. Whenever we went 

out and did something where we thought there might be 

riot and control problems and stuff like that, where we 

thought that might be an issue, we’d bring these guys out 

with us because they could—it looks better for them to 

be pushing the crowd along than it does a U.S. soldier 

pushing the crowd along. And they know how to—it’s a 

cultural thing. They know what’s acceptable and what’s 

not.

And the other people that were critical to us is our 

interpreters. You know, our interpreters were key. That’s 

always—not only did we have local hires for ‘terps; we also 

had a few of what they call Class A ‘terps that are U.S. citizens 

that work as interpreters. Those guys are—you can’t even 

put a value on those guys because those guys, they have the 

clearance and they’re U.S. citizens, and they can actually 

kind of sit quietly in the corner of a room and let you know 

if the interpreter that’s working for you is actually saying 

what’s he supposed to be saying, or is he putting his own 

political spin on things, which would occasionally happen. 
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You’d have to check on these guys, and then if that was the 

case, you’d have to either talk to them or get rid of them.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned that hydroelectric dam that was there, 

that the Peace Corps built, had fallen in disarray, and 

then you mentioned you did some work on that. What 

did you do to rebuild that dam?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: That was a USAID project. That dam was built, I guess, 

back in the fifties or sixties, and I think it was by a U.S. 

company. I believe it was Westinghouse, if I’m not mistaken. 

I’d have to go back and check my notes. But there was a 

reconstruction project, refurbishment project funded. I 

believe it was by USAID through Siemens, and they were 

basically going in there and adding turbines in there. They 

were either refurbing the turbines or whatever they were 

doing, but they were basically up there kind of doing a 

complete overhaul of the facility up there at the Kajaki Dam. 

The infrastructure was there, the dam was there, and the 

location for the turbines to go into and all that other stuff 

was all there. It just needed to be upgraded and rehabbed. 

And, the grid system was out there. I mean, at least part of 

it was. So, if they can get—I’d be curious to know what they 

did now, how many megawatts of power it’s producing now. 

But by the end of that project it was supposed to get up to 

like fifty megawatts, up from like three to five.

DR. KOONTZ: And you mentioned that there really wasn’t very much 

opposition in Helmand, at least that affected your 

PRT. Is there any way that you can describe the limited 

opposition that was there? What kind of tactics would 

be used against those NGOs that couldn’t protect 

themselves?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Occasionally, a schoolhouse would get burned down by 

people who were reported to be Taliban because Taliban 

didn’t want women or girls in school. Occasionally you’d 

hear that. There would be attacks occasionally, and some 

of the police would be threatened. You’d hear different 

people saying they were threatened by people reported to 

be Taliban saying, “Hey, don’t work with the U.S.”—kind of 

intimidation tactics, things of that nature. But, you know, 

it’s pretty hard to discern how much of this is actual Taliban 

and how much of it is drug lords, organized-crime types, 

people who may have an interest other than what our 

interest is.

DR. KOONTZ: So, it’s kind of more just sort of generic criminality?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: That’s what I always felt like it was like, yes. I didn’t really 

feel like it was like, “Hey, this is a Taliban stronghold, and 

we don’t want you guys there.” Then again, they really didn’t 

have a reason. The PRT is there to do reconstruction and 

to assist the police force. I don’t know that they necessarily 
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had a reason to—it probably would have done them more 

harm than good to disrupt the PRT. You would hear 

occasionally some of the—occasionally, there would be 

shootings between the local police force and what was 

reported to be Taliban. Now, is that because the local police 

came upon drug smuggling and whoever was smuggling 

those drugs, whether they be Taliban or just some other 

organized criminals, and they got in a firefight over that? 

So, there were a lot of strange things. We had heard that 

one of the police chiefs had captured a Taliban guy that 

was probably a mid-level Taliban guy whose name we had 

heard and knew of and came to find out that the reason he 

had this guy was because the Taliban had shot up some of 

his policemen, so he had captured this guy and was going 

to ransom him back to the Taliban as kind of punishment 

for those guys shooting up some of his policemen and, 

obviously, to make some money. So, we kind of got wind 

of it through some intel sources, whatever, and we just 

happened to pay a visit to that district headquarters the 

day that that guy was being held. Some of our HUMINT 

[human intelligence] guys happened to—and Ministry of 

Interior rep Colonel Fakir happened to stumble, and I say 

that tongue in cheek—happened to stumble upon this guy 

being held in this guy’s jail cell, and then they were able to 

[say], “Hey, Ministry of Interior wants this guy, and they 

want him now, so we’re going to take him with us. Colonel 

Fakir is going to take him with us and get him transported 

up to Kabul.” So, it was kind of a little cat-and-mouse game 

like that: ”Hey, we stumbled upon this guy now. Hey, wait 

a minute! Oh, you got this guy? Great police work! We’re 

going to take him from you,” and that police chief was 

pretty pissed off. But you know, hey, he’s operating illegally, 

and that’s kind of part of the problem, is when you’re in a 

place there is no real rule of law. So, your average farmer 

growing poppy or selling narcotics, there’s nobody that’s 

going to arrest you and put you in jail and put you through 

the criminal process because there is none, or there was 

none when I was there. There was no court system or true 

police system at that time.

DR. KOONTZ: How far do you think efforts to build the rule of law and 

to extend the reach of the government and build some 

kind of responsive, responsible rule in Helmand—how 

far had that gone?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I’d say, just off the ground. I believe one of our projects was 

to build a courthouse. There were some—we had met with 

the different judges from the area. As I recall, I believe the 

judges were also kind of investigators in some cases, so it 

was different than what we were used to, and there were 

different types of judges—kind of judges that handled 

strictly law things, and then also kind of a religious judge 

who kind of handled other things. And in other countries, 

other cultures, you basically have a religious judge that 
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handles things like marriage, divorce, inheritance, and 

things like that. So, there was kind of that, but it was 

not fully up and running by the time I left there, but it 

was certainly an area that needed to be addressed and 

continued to be built on.

DR. KOONTZ: What can you point to as the greatest success that your 

PRT had while you were commander?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I would say the establishment of the CMOC and making 

that a viable place for the average Afghan leaders, 

shuras, Afghan government folks, NGOs, PVOs [private 

volunteer organizations], folks like that, and government 

organizations, as well, for U.S. government organizations. 

For them to go to in Helmand Province and know “Hey, 

if I go to the PRT, I’ll be heard, I’ll get pointed in the right 

direction, and I have a place to go. There is a place to go 

to that people will hear what I’m saying.” So, I think the 

establishment really of the CMOC, and our work with the 

districts, getting down to the district level and making sure 

the shura know that we were out there to support them, the 

various shuras, that they knew we were there to support 

them, I think that was kind of our—the best thing that 

occurred during my time there. The PRT really became 

established during my time there.

DR. KOONTZ: And what could you point to as the most pressing 

challenge or most pressing concern?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I would say a true Alternative Livelihood for these folks, 

other than poppy. You know, Afghan folks are just like 

anyone else. They want security. They want job opportunity. 

They want education for their children. Really, providing 

an alternative to poppy; what can we do for these folks? 

What is it that—what market, or what crop can they grow? 

Maybe it’s not farming. Maybe there’s something else, some 

other industry or business, that these folks can get into to 

give them an opportunity to support their families, find a 

better way for their families and everything else.

DR. KOONTZ: Based on your experiences, what’s your assessment of 

the PRT as a means of, I guess for lack of a better word, 

prosecuting irregular or unconventional war?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Yes, I don’t know if that, really, you want to get into that as 

a PRT’s mission. I mean, they support winning the hearts 

and minds of people by their actions, but you wouldn’t want 

your PRT to be doing direct action.

DR. KOONTZ: I guess what I mean is this a strategic weapon?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: I believe it is, because it is interagency. We are bringing a lot 

of our capabilities to bear. A series of successful PRT events 

can have strategic effect, I would think.
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DR. KOONTZ: So, do you think overall the PRT model, or the concept 

behind it, is a successful one?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: If it’s given the proper manning, given the proper funding, 

I think it is. I think if you can push these interagency 

operations down to this tactical level—get State 

Department guys in districts, in provinces, I think that’s 

what you need; USAID folks down to that level, USDA 

folks. And I think we could go, as I probably mentioned 

before, go even deeper and get educators down to that 

level working with the PRT, get folks that understand how 

municipalities work, folks of that nature. I’m sure if we 

hired people, there would be people that are willing to go 

over in harm’s way to do these things as a civilian working 

for the government. It doesn’t have to be a foreign service 

officer, I don’t think. I think it could be—ask for volunteers. 

Ask for people. They’re volunteers, but you’re still paying 

them well, you know? I’m sure there’re educators that 

would be willing to do that.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. I’ve got two minutes left with you before I have 

to turn you in. What should I have asked you about, or 

what do you want to talk about?

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: The national guardsmen, Iowa National Guard. What 

I will say is these guys were just fantastic, very, very 

professional, really committed to their job, really 

committed to the Afghan people, knew that they were 

doing something special. My one big takeaway is I tip 

my cap to the National Guard for what these guys are 

doing. They were away from their families for probably 

like fifteen months total, leaving their jobs, leaving their 

families, and going to do this, and they just performed 

great. And for me, as a marine, it was my first time really 

submerged into an Army unit, and it worked out great. 

It was never any rivalry—I mean, kidding around all the 

time, but they treated me just like I was one of their own, 

and it worked out great. Colonel Pedersen and his staff at 

Task Force Bronco, they were great, great guys to work 

for. Always got good support from them. So, it was great 

to see. Afghan people, they’re great people, you know? I 

really respect them. I really came to love these people, as 

a whole. Like I’ve said, their hospitality is unparalleled. 

They want the same things that Americans want—just 

an opportunity, security and an opportunity. So, I think 

there’s more we could do there. I think we should continue 

there to do more for them because I think it’s a worthwhile 

investment.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. With that, we’ll go ahead and close the interview. 

Sir, on behalf of the Center for Military History, I want 

to thank you for taking the time to do this.

LT. COL. AUGUSTINE: Sure. My pleasure.
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Lt. Col. Robin L. Fontes served in the Political-Military Affairs staff section of Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan from June 2004 to June 2005 before taking command of the Tarin Kowt Provincial Reconstruction Team in July 2005. She was interviewed on 27 February 2007 by Lisa Mundey and Christopher Koontz at the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. Colonel Fontes describes her duty positions in Afghanistan, including her responsibilities as director of the political-military 

office in Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan. She explains differences between the 

commands of Lt. Gen. David W. Barno and Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, particularly 

in their strategic emphases. After volunteering for provincial reconstruction team duty, 

Colonel Fontes was assigned to the team in Tarin Kowt. She describes the terrain of 

Tarin Kowt, the town, and the people, including the tribal makeup of the population, as 

well as the joint, combined, and interagency composition of her team. The challenges in 

Tarin Kowt included a corrupt and unreliable government, an exploding narcotics trade, 

and resultant violence in the region, caused by either Taliban or drug traders. Colonel 

Fontes concludes the interview by recounting the transition with the next commander, 

her favorite stories, and lessons learned.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. This is Dr. Lisa Mundey, with Dr. Christopher 

Koontz, interviewing Lt. Col. Robin Fontes regarding 

her time in the political-military [POL-MIL] office in 

Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan [CFC-A], 

and as commander of the Tarin Kowt Provincial 

Reconstruction Team [PRT]. It is 27 February 2007. 

The interview is being conducted at the Center of 

Military History. Are you sitting for this interview 

voluntarily?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes, I am.

DR. MUNDEY: Do you have any objections to the interview being used 

by historians or researchers with the understanding that 

you will be quoted or cited accurately?

LT. COL. FONTES: Nope.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay, great. Now, you’ve actually had a couple of different 

jobs in Afghanistan, so if you could just kind of briefly 

outline what you did and when to start us off, that would 

be great.

LT. COL. FONTES: Okay. I arrived in mid-June 2004 to assume duties as a chief 

for the political-military affairs section from Lt. Col. Tucker 

[B.] Mansager. I held that position until the end of February, 

when I was replaced by Col. Barry Shapiro. Then I became 

the chief for the Regional Engagement Division of the 

POL-MIL section, and I held that job until 1 July, when 

I went to assume command of the Tarin Kowt Provincial 

Reconstruction Team, and I relinquished command around 

the tenth of May of ‘06.
Colonel Fontes at Camp Eggers, Kabul, 15 June 2005

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454

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Describing it for someone who does not know 

what the duties of a political-military officer are, could 

you explain your duties and responsibilities when you 

were at Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan?

LT. COL. FONTES: Okay. I had a section of anywhere from three to five officers, 

and a couple of enlisted folks to do administration. One 

of those officers was the liaison with the United Nations 

[Assistance] Mission in Afghanistan. The rest were politicalmilitary officers. And, basically, we watched political 

events, provided the commander with talking points for 

his meetings with Afghan officials and other government 

officials. There were many visitors from the Coalition, as well. 

We took notes during the meetings, wrote up summaries 

of those meetings. We provided some political-military 

analysis of internal Afghan events, as well as regional 

events, political events impacting Afghanistan. That could 

range from political events associated with the presidential 

election, or issues concerning the drug trade and how it 

affects the political relationship between Tajikistan and 

Afghanistan. We also prepared agendas and briefings and 

did all coordination for the Tripartite Border Commission, 

which involved Afghanistan, Combined Forces Command, 
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and the Pakistani government. So, we prepared information 

papers, talking points, etc., referenced border incidents 

either between the United States or Coalition forces and 

the Pakistanis or different issues with Afghanistan, and in 

that, trying to develop methods to increase cooperation 

between the Pakistanis and the Afghan government.

DR. MUNDEY: No, that’s great. That’s great. So, with whom did you deal 

regularly? What would be the key people that you were 

talking to on a daily basis, or very frequently?

LT. COL. FONTES: As part of the POL-MIL office?

DR. MUNDEY: Yes.

LT. COL. FONTES: Okay. As part of the POL-MIL office, we liaised regularly 

with the United Nations mission; our office with the defense 

representative in Pakistan, to help coordinate meetings 

and such; members of the embassy political section, 

political and economic section; representatives from other 

embassies; occasionally with members of the Ministry of 

Defense, senior leaders of the Ministry of Defense; very 

regularly with the regional officers in the Afghan National 

Security Council and ministry representatives, as well.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. You were there during a change of command from 

General [Lt. Gen.] David [W.] Barno to [Lt. Gen.] Karl 

[W.] Eikenberry. Is that correct?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes, I was there for about a month and a half after General 

Eikenberry took command.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, what were his priorities for you, working in the 

POL-MIL office?

LT. COL. FONTES: At that time, I worked strictly in the regional engagement 

section, and under General Barno we had a much wider 

focus for regional engagement. It was with all bordering 

countries—minus Iran, of course—in the areas of border 

security, counternarcotics, military-to-military exchanges, 

etc., counterterrorism, as well. Under General Eikenberry, 

the focus became much narrower—primarily, Pakistan—

so, we really ... other than watching the events in the other 

country and reporting on them, our real focus was on, and 

all of our time—I would say 90 percent of our time was 

spent on Pakistan, the Tripartite [Border] Commission, 

and trying to develop ways to get them more involved in 

the fight.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Chris, if you have any—

DR. KOONTZ: I was wondering, other than these changes of emphases 

in the regional engagement section, did you notice any 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

456

other changes in the command after General Barno left 

and General Eikenberry came on board?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, one of the long-term projects we had under General 

Barno was the development of this campaign plan, and 

the campaign plan encompassed—it was really kind of 

an interagency effort, many different lines of operation. 

There were nine or twelve different lines of operation. 

When General Eikenberry came in, it was much more 

focused on what—it seemed to me that it was much more 

focused on what the military itself could do, certainly 

in conjunction with our interagency brothers, but it 

wasn’t—the plan became a little—it didn’t—the plan 

really didn’t involve them in as much detail, I should say. 

It was still the same plan, still the same basic plan. It just 

looked different on paper, and it was expressed differently 

in words, where General Barno’s plan would have—well, 

I can’t even remember. It was certainly economics 

infrastructure, counternarcotics, counterterrorism, 

counterinsurgency, development of police or security 

forces, etc. I mean, it was huge. We called it “the magic 

carpet” because there were so many things going on on 

the slide. It was a great piece of work, though, I must say. 

When General Eikenberry got there, he kind of focused 

it down into the main effort being security, whether that 

be counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, or developing 

the security forces; and then, the supporting efforts were 

judicial reform and improving governance on one line of 

operation, and the other line of operation was facilitating 

economic development and infrastructure development. 

And those were lines where the military was participating 

in specifically, but also supporting, the efforts of the 

interagency, and then in that was regional engagement 

and information operations. There wasn’t a—although 

counternarcotics was addressed, it wasn’t addressed as 

its own line of operation as it had been before. So, it’s 

not to say there was less emphasis on counternarcotics 

because many of the same linkages that had been made 

between the interagency and the CFC were still there 

and still kept alive when General Eikenberry came in.

Other than that, the only other really visible change, I 

would say, was the combining of political-military office 

and the C-9, the Civil-Military Operations Directorate, and 

this entity that was called the ... it’s the EIPG, the Embassy 

Interagency Planning Group, EIPG, and basically, we 

restructured those. We combined them together in order to 

have more control in the headquarters of an entity that was 

providing advice to ministries in Kabul, advice, support, 

etc. General Eikenberry focused funds less on ministries 

in Kabul and tried to push those down to the provinces a 

little bit more. There was a pot of money. I have no idea 

how much it was that was left for this civil affairs entity. 

It’s about—I don’t know. I think it was about ten or fifteen 
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Security and Assistance

officers who were each responsible for a different ministry, 

and they had this pot of CERP money, this Commander’s 

Emergency Response Program funds, to use within the 

ministries. General Eikenberry kind of pulled that back, 

got a little more focused on what that money was spent 

for and that it directly—in order for it to directly support 

the military campaign. We were giving money to, like, the 

Ministry of Women’s Affairs. That’s not really a military 

thing, so he kind of refocused that money more into—not 

necessarily the security elements, but other elements that 

affected what was going on on the ground, and just provided 

a little more direction to those guys that were going out and 

having contact with ministry. That was really the big—I 

mean, very structural, not necessarily impacting how the 

mission had been done before, except in minor ways. But it 

just in some ways, it was just a different way to express the 

same philosophy.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. I know that there were certain times, like around 

the elections, where they did a troop surge where they’d 

temporarily have more troops in the country. What was, 

during the time that you were there, what was about the 

standard size of the Coalition force?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, I guess between sixteen thousand and twenty-two 

thousand, I believe. It kind of fluctuated a little bit, you 

know? Obviously, we surged whenever we had a relief in 

place. We surged when we had the elections, and then, by 

the end, ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] was 

coming in with greater forces than we had, especially in the 

south with greater forces, and we had vacated the south. 

The same with the west. There were more then, so that kind 

of explains the discrepancies. But I would like to comment 

on the elections, just once.

DR. MUNDEY: Sure.

LT. COL. FONTES: I mean, we—I was there for both of them at different 

viewpoints, one in Kabul and the other one in Oruzgan 

and Daykondi. We saw the elections as a strategic event, 

and as a result of it being a strategic event for us, I think we 

projected on the enemy that it was also a strategic event for 

them when, in fact, it really wasn’t. I mean, in my opinion, 

it wasn’t. I think it’s almost like a benefit to them to have an 

elected government in place that can’t perform, and then 

that verifies what they have already told the people. So, I 

don’t really think they tried to stop the election. There was 

a little bit of violence. I wouldn’t say there was necessarily 

an increase of violence at that time, but there were a couple 

of events that may lead us to believe that there was an 

increase. There were some vehicle-borne IEDs at the time 

that were discovered, but I don’t think the enemy placed as 

much emphasis on the elections as we did. It kind of—we 

Westerners projected that, maybe.
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DR. MUNDEY: Is there anything else that you want to tell us about your 

experiences either in the POL-MIL office or the regional 

office that you were in before we move on to your time as 

a PRT commander?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes. Boy, it sure would be nice to have a few more foreign 

area officers in the POL-MIL section, you know, folks 

who—you don’t necessarily have to be an expert in the 

area, but have an understanding of what political-military 

affairs entails and an ability to write on that. It would have 

been extremely helpful. I mean, the people I had, they 

worked hard and they learned, but it’s just not the same, 

and in a fast-paced environment like that, it’s hard to train 

people up—not impossible, but we could have been more 

effective and more supportive of the commander if we 

would have had a few more foreign area officers. Put that 

on the record.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Well then, when was it that you learned that you 

were going to be going out to a PRT?

LT. COL. FONTES: When Colonel Shapiro came in at the end of February, 

there was a little bit of “What do we do?” kind of thing, 

and, basically, I was talking to Colonel [David W.] Lamm, 

the chief of staff, and he had recommended splitting the 

section, that I would take one part and then Colonel 

Shapiro would take the other. And, basically, I told him 

because I went to Afghanistan with the intention of 

getting a PRT somehow, and I told him, I said, “Well, 

just let the colonel take the section. That’s fine, and I 

want to be a PRT commander for my second year here,” 

and he was very supportive of it. General Barno was, as 

well. So, they supported me in the interview process with 

[Combined Joint Task Force]-76 and selection process for 

commander of PRT. So, after that we had a board up at -76 

with General [USARNG Brig. Gen. James G.] Champion, 

and a couple of days later they said who was selected and 

who was going where. I was originally supposed to go to 

Panjshir, mainly because I had worked with a lot of the 

Panjshiris in Tajikistan when I was the defense attaché out 

there in ‘98 to 2000.

DR. MUNDEY: So, what does this selection process entail?

LT. COL. FONTES: Put your name in. You get an endorsement from your 

commander or supervisor, and then you had an interview 

board with General Champion. I think it was the -76 J-3 

[staff officer for operations] or assistant J-3, I’m not sure, 

and then the civil affairs brigade commander. It was just a 

series of questions. I think they asked everybody basically 

the same questions, some civil affairs oriented. Many 

were security oriented—What would you do in this type 

of a situation? How would you deal with the governor 

or a governor that didn’t necessarily support the central 
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government?—questions like that. That was about it. It was 

about a 30- to 45-minute interview and then a questionand-answer kind of thing, and that was it.

DR. MUNDEY: And then do you know why you ended up getting switched 

to Tarin Kowt instead of the one you originally were?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes. I wasn’t terribly excited about going to Panjshir. It wasn’t 

even open at the time, and there was no real—no one knew 

when it would happen, especially with the change between 

General Barno and General Eikenberry. And the Marine 

officer who was selected to Tarin Kowt was a guy from the 

CFC J-5 [staff section for plans]. He went back to his parent 

unit to like pack out or something, and they told him then 

that he wasn’t going back. So, it was open, and so I just sent 

an e-mail to the chief of staff and said, “Hey, you know, I 

understand this is the situation. If he doesn’t come back, 

I’d like to be considered for that job,” and so they said, “Yes, 

okay.”

DR. MUNDEY: Did you get any sort of training on how to be a PRT 

commander?

LT. COL. FONTES: There was a PRT precommand course thing that was run 

by the -76 CJ-9. If I knew nothing else about PRTs before I 

went there, I would still know very little. So, I mean, most of 

my training, most of what prepared me for it, was working 

that year in Kabul.

DR. KOONTZ: I’d like to ask you a question now. A while ago, you 

mentioned that you went to Afghanistan with the 

purpose of eventually working your way to a PRT. What 

interested you into getting into that line of work? Or, 

why would you be interested, I guess, could be a better 

question.

LT. COL. FONTES: When I was in Tajikistan, I worked with the government 

officials. I was the only military representative there. It was 

right after their civil war. They had—it was still very unstable. 

They still had a lot of regional leaders/warlords, opposition 

commanders. They were still trying to implement the peace 

agreement and work out the power-sharing issues, and I 

just really got a kick out of working with these guys. And so, 

you know, getting down at the grassroots level and working 

with people was kind of—not just the political angles, but 

also the reconstruction stuff as well. And it’s just out in the 

wilds of Afghanistan, just kind of sounded exciting, so ... 

I was at CENTCOM before I went out to Afghanistan as 

the Afghanistan POL-MIL desk officer, and when I heard 

about the PRTs, I decided right then that’s what I wanted to 

do next, so I had to check the other box first.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then you also mentioned that you went to that 

precommand course and came out still kind of knowing 
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460

very little. Did you have any kind of preconceptions in 

your mind or concepts of “This is what a PRT is, and this 

is what I want to do with mine”?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes. Along with being in the development and having kind 

of worked with these guys long-distance from Kabul as we 

were working on the provincial leadership assessments, 

that helped me, as well as spending some time out at the 

Herat PRT back during the Ismail Khan thing in September 

of ‘04. And, understanding what the command priorities 

were, understanding the campaign plan, I had a pretty good 

idea of what I wanted to do and the direction that I wanted 

to go and how I could get this to marry up with the overall 

campaign plan. So, really, what prepared me is this year in 

Kabul and some of the stuff I was able to do there.

DR. MUNDEY: Now, to someone who’s never been there and never seen 

this place, could you describe your arrival in Tarin Kowt, 

like, the geography, the people there? What, literally, 

does this place look like?

LT. COL. FONTES: It’s very brown [laughs]. Tarin Kowt sits in kind of one of 

these bowls. It’s a little valley, surrounded by mountains on 

all sides. There’s a couple of gaps in the mountains, where 

you go down to Kandahar and where you can get out to Deh 

Rawod, but it’s—you know, I arrived in July, so it was over 

100 degrees and there’s very little irrigation except right at 

the river because the Tarin Kowt River goes right through. 

So, anything outside of the very immediate valley of this 

river is brown. There’s no irrigation—brown, flat, dusty, 

you name it. And then it’s very green in that little valley 

where they grow some crops other than poppy, although 

they grow plenty of poppy there as well. And this PRT sits 

inside a FOB, inside a forward operating base, which is—

the base itself is surrounded by these Hescos filled with dirt 

and some concertina wire. The PRT, which sits up against 

one side, the side facing the—it faces the town, and it’s like 

this old fort. It’s cement walls, probably about ten, nine or 

ten feet high, and then there’re these round towers on each 

one of them, on each one of the corners. So, your guards sit 

up on the towers, and they have pretty much 360 vision.

When you go outside, at the time that I got there, there 

were no paved roads. It was all dirt roads, very rough dirt 

roads, including the main street of the town. And when you 

go down there, it takes—you’re probably, from the PRT to 

town, it might be a half a mile until you first hit the edge of 

the actual town, and it’s all basically brown mud structures, 

the one-story structures. When you get to the very center of 

town, there’s a couple of two-story buildings on the corners, 

and then you go around this traffic circle which has like 

this little stand where a policeman would sit, although they 

don’t. And then you go around that, you drive down past 

the main street of the bazaar, I guess, and you go right into 
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the governor’s compound, which is a walled compound in a 

two-story building in which there really is no electricity, no 

running water most of the time. There’s probably, I would 

say, there’re probably thirty thousand people in Tarin Kowt, 

maybe, and I only guess that because I know these people 

have children and I know they have wives, so I assume that 

they’re out there somewhere. It has a hospital, which is a 

scary thing to go through, but they do have a hospital. Next 

to the governor’s compound is a high school which has—

inside the walls they have a dirt field where they play soccer. 

It’s a one-story building, very overcrowded, and probably 

five teachers that really know what they’re doing. There’s 

no real equipment. There’re no real books to speak of. 

Again, the only running water that any of these places have 

typically is the hand pump well that is in the courtyard, and 

that water may or may not be potable. Down Main Street, 

there are these drainage ditches, and God knows what’s in 

them. It can be pretty disgusting. It’s not a clean place.

The people are—you very seldom see anybody in Western 

clothes there. Most of them are in the salwar kameez with 

a turban. You know, the police were all with weapons. They 

typically did not—when I got there, didn’t have uniforms, 

or if they had them, they didn’t wear them. I remember the 

day I got there they said that the governor had dumped 

a couple of dead bodies in the circle. “Taliban,” he called 

them. Probably, they get a little vigorous in their questioning 

at the police station, and he would just dump them in the 

square or the circle, the traffic circle, for their family to 

come pick them up. There aren’t very many bridges. For 

the most part, if it’s a ditch, there will be a little cement slab 

over it so you can drive over it, but the rivers for the most 

part don’t have any bridges, so you have to drive through 

them, or the streams. A lot of the roads there are riverbeds, 

dry riverbeds. There wasn’t a lot of food out at the bazaar—

meat hanging, you know, in this heat of the day, just big 

lamb quarters and stuff just hanging there.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned that you were kind of guessing the 

population because you were assuming that there had 

to be wives and kids somewhere. Were the women and 

children cloistered up?

LT. COL. FONTES: It was very, very rare to see a woman on the streets, and 

never without a burqa unless she was from the Coalition. 

Children, you know, you’d see them. If you were out on foot, 

they would just come out of the woodwork—I mean, they 

would be everywhere. But you don’t always see them, is the 

thing. You might drive down the street and you won’t see 

anybody, but you know people are there. And a lot of them, 

you know, on walking patrols we’d go down the street, and 

they would go back inside their yard and close the door. 

So, you just don’t always see them. You know, if you went 

on walking patrol, you could see thousands of kids, and 
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462

you’d never be able to get rid of them, especially if you gave 

anything out to them. They would walk all the way back to 

the PRT with us just to get more.

DR. MUNDEY: Ethnically speaking, what were the people in the area?

LT. COL. FONTES: They were pretty much all Pashtun, I would say. That is, 

in the Tarin Kowt area because Oruzgan is split between 

Pashtun and Hazaran up in the two northernmost—in 

the northernmost areas there are Hazaran, as well, but 

these Pashtuns can be from just about any tribe. I think 

the dominant tribe, I think, is the Barakzai, but the tribe in 

power at the time were the Popalzai, very close to the Karzai 

family. The Karzai family used to spend some summers in 

Tarin Kowt because it’s cooler than Kandahar, if you can 

believe that. And they had all—the Barakzai tribal leader, 

which was the police chief, and the governor, who was 

Popalzai, were both in pretty good with President [Hamid] 

Karzai. They had gotten fighters to join him when he came 

back in in 2001, and the governor had supposedly been with 

Karzai’s father when he was killed, and he had also been a 

prisoner of the Taliban in 2001 when we went in. And there 

are also Achakzai, and I forget the other name of the other 

dominant—there are four basically dominant tribes in the 

area, and I will remember the other one. Alikozai, I think it 

was.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. What actual geographic area were you in charge of 

at the Tarin Kowt PRT?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, we were basically the PRT for all of Joint Special 

Operating Area Carolina, which encompassed Oruzgan 

and Daykondi, which is—on this map, there’s the northern 

part of Oruzgan. We did get to Daykondi a couple of times, 

but it wasn’t something that we spent a lot of time on for 

a couple of reasons: one, because it’s very difficult to get 

to; two, we had our hands full in Oruzgan; and three, the 

Hazara actually have a lot of people looking after them. The 

UN was there with mostly UN agencies, and a lot of NGOs 

[nongovernmental organizations] were already there 

working with them. So, it wasn’t—I mean, we could have 

done things, but it wouldn’t have necessarily been directly 

supportive of our military mission, either, if we would have 

done something like that. We did like a MEDCAP [medical 

civil action program] up there, and it was a great learning 

experience to work with the Hazara and also to get their 

viewpoint on what was happening with the Taliban. But I 

had—my boss, the [C]JSOTF [(Combined) Joint Special 

Operations Task Force] commander, basically put the PRT 

in charge of all reconstruction humanitarian operations 

that were going on in the province, which meant that the 

two CA [civil affairs] teams that came out of the 96th [Civil 

Affairs] Battalion, I guess they were in direct support of 

the ODAs [Special Forces Operational Detachment-A] 
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out on the fire bases in Khas Oruzgan and Deh Rawod. 

They coordinated their projects with us so that we could 

say, “Yes, that makes sense.” We could take it to the local 

government, and the local government could say, “Yes, I 

would like that done”—or, the provincial government, 

I should say—that they had visibility in what was going 

on. And then up in Cahar Cineh or otherwise known as 

Shahidi Hassass, which is up in the northwestern corner, I 

sent a couple of my CA guys up there to be the CA team in 

support of those ODAs.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Well, this leads us directly into the next question. 

Each PRT is organized uniquely. Could you describe the 

internal structure of your PRT, who was there, who was 

working for you?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes, I had a Civil Affairs [Team] A [CAT-A] and [Civil 

Affairs Team] B [CAT-B] detachment, which is four persons 

each, basically. It was headed by a lieutenant colonel, and 

his—I guess he was the CAT-B commander, and then 

the CAT-A commander was a major, and they did all the 

civil affairs and reconstruction stuff in conjunction with 

the USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] 

representative. My force protection company, basically, 

was out of the Texas National Guard. These guys were 

outstanding. There’s just no other way to put it. They 

were very professional, very sharp, extremely competent 

people. That company provided basically the staff of the 

PRT as well. The platoon leader was the S-1 [staff officer 

for personnel]; the company commander doubled as the 

S-3 [staff officer for operations]. The supply sergeant was 

my supply sergeant. They provided the communications 

personnel for the tactical communications. The cooks, 

they provided them to run the mess hall; a motor pool. So, 

I got his headquarters platoon, and this basically a force 

protection platoon kind of on steroids. So, that was really 

the bulk of the PRT, those guys, and then we had individual 

augmentees. I had a three-man military police [MP] 

team. Initially they were an Army team from the—I can’t 

remember what it was—the MP company out of Germany. 

And then I had some overlap with them and the security 

forces or security police out of the Air Force that came in. 

They were on, I think, four-month rotations, so they were 

also replaced by some other folks as well. My S-2 [staff 

officer for intelligence] was an individual augmentee Air 

Force, typically junior NCOs, until the second rotation. 

Then I got a junior NCO and a relatively senior NCO. 

For some reason I ended up with two, which is cool with 

me, very good. What else did we have? The medical unit 

was also—I had a small medical unit that came out of the 

infantry company. I had a State Department rep, Raphael 

[Carland]. I had a USAID rep, which was Kerry Greene, 

who was on his second year in Tarin Kowt when I got 

there. I had DynCorp police mentors, initially two, and in 
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the last three months I ended up with a couple more, was 

able to get a couple more. And in that last three months we 

also had their contract security guys. We also on the PRT 

had the UNOPS [UN Office of Project Services] engineer. 

The only way that the UN would allow him to come down 

was if he lived on the PRT for security purposes. And he 

was running—they were the implementing partner for the 

USAID projects in the province, so we were able to provide 

him security to get out and check things, and he helped us 

out as well. And he’ll probably go to jail for doing that, but, 

oh well [laughs]. What else do we have? I know I’m missing 

something. Oh, Navy Seabees to provide engineering 

support to CA. Starting in October, I had two Australian 

officers, an information operations officer, which is another 

one—I had an American operations officer, as well, and an 

engineer. Because the Australians were going to come in and 

partner with the Dutch to take over the PRT in Oruzgan, 

they came in to find out what the deal was. They worked 

directly for me. It wasn’t a liaison relationship. Americans, I 

also had the computer, the IMO [information management 

officer] guys that came in. I had two of those guys.

DR. KOONTZ: I could ask you a question about your force protection 

company there. You said you got a headquarters platoon 

and then, as you call it, force protection platoon on 

steroids. Two questions; first of all, about how many men 

are those two platoons all together?

LT. COL. FONTES: I think it was fifty-five.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. And then, secondly, you mentioned that they 

were Texas guardsmen. Did you notice these guardsmen 

bringing in any kind of civilian skills from their other 

lives that you noticed in the field?

LT. COL. FONTES: Oh, yes. These guys—well, we had some construction 

workers that helped us out with QA/QC [quality assurance/

quality control] on some projects. They also helped build 

a lot of the facilities around the PRT to make life a little 

bit better. We had a guy that was a computer systems guy 

who helped with the unclass system, as well as the MWR 

[morale, welfare, and recreation] systems. We had police 

officers who—a police sniper. Their skills were very helpful, 

not only for training for the other members of the PRT, but 

also for the police. Those are the ones that come readily to 

mind, but these guys were—I mean, they—I lost one of my 

guys in an IED [improvised explosive device] in Shahidi 

Hassass, and I had to replace him. And I didn’t have a lot 

to pick from, because—what I ended up doing was crosstraining one of my assistant squad leaders from the force 

protection platoon to go up there. I mean, it was a very 

hot area, first of all, so his infantry skills were very good, 

and it enabled him to quickly integrate with the ODAs up 

there who don’t respect just anybody, and rightly so. But 
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he also had—you know, his construction skills and just his 

interpersonal skills were basically the reason why I selected 

him to cross-train and go up there, and he did a great job. 

He really did.

DR. MUNDEY: Given the amount of rotations that you’ve been talking 

about, it sounds like you had a constant stream of 

personnel coming in and coming out. How did that affect 

the operations of the PRT?

LT. COL. FONTES: It was difficult. Thank god the CA guys and the USAID guy 

didn’t rotate and the force protection guys didn’t rotate. If 

they would have, it would have been very difficult. As it was, 

the problem with rotations is not so much the quality of 

the person going in and out. The problem is that they don’t 

have enough time to overlap to really do a good handoff 

a lot of times, and that’s a function of sometimes the unit, 

and sometimes just regulations. While a person may think 

what they do is fairly easy and they can pass it down by the 

book, it’s not as easy for a guy coming into theater for the 

first time who has no clue what he’s getting into. You know, 

he’s been told, “Okay, you’re going to be training police,” or 

something, but he doesn’t really understand all the nuances 

of working with these particular people or what it means 

to go out and conduct an assessment. And sometimes, you 

can’t always work those things into the schedule because 

there’re so many things you’re doing that the turnovers 

become very difficult. And there’s a lot of just—a lot of 

doing things seemingly for the first time again. That made 

it difficult. The change—I worked with three different State 

Department officers in ten months, and that was frustrating 

and really unfortunate. They were all extremely sharp, all 

extremely capable individuals, but it just takes time to get 

to know what’s going on. And not only is there integration 

into the PRT, but that person and the commander need to 

develop a relationship, as well as the person and individuals 

in the community. It’s very difficult for these—I mean, the 

Afghans understand because they know that we’re going 

to rotate, and they get really sick of it, too. But you always 

hear them say, “Well, you’ll be gone. The guy two times ago 

promised me this, and he left and didn’t do anything. You’ll 

do the same thing,” and that’s something that we have to—

it’s impossible to overcome with the rotation schedules, but 

you know, the less turbulence you have, the better. I think it 

would make our mission—make us more effective working 

with them, as well as make the organization more effective. 

Turnover is a bad thing.

I ended up taking over the FOB [forward operating base] 

around November, right after the election, November, 

December time frame of ‘05, I guess. And so, within this 

organization, I had the Afghan National Army kandak that 

was on the FOB, worked with the Australians, worked on 

the transition of the space to NATO and turning things 
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over to other units. We had the CASH [combat surgical 

hospital]—originally, the FST, the field surgical team, I guess 

it is, and then it became a CASH-minus. We built a nice 

hospital and everything. We had a forward aerial refueling 

point with the helicopters. We had responsibility for C–17-

capable airstrip. We had somebody else there, too. We had 

like a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] unit, a contract UAV 

unit. We had the Special Operations Forces—well, some of 

which was on the PRT.

DR. MUNDEY: So, with all of that there is there anything that even would 

approximate a typical day for you?

LT. COL. FONTES: No. That was the great thing is you woke up, you never 

knew what was going to happen. You never even knew 

if you were going to make it to PT [physical training], 

which is only thirty minutes from the time I got out of 

bed to when I started. I mean, the typical things would 

be the battle update brief, and, always, the op order 

brief for the next day would be that evening. A couple 

times of week, you have staff call, and the staff call was 

because I hate to have too many meetings. It was the 

entire FOB that would sit in on this staff call. Most of the 

information, most of what was discussed, was PRT stuff, 

but the other guys would attend as well, and I personally 

think they kind of liked that, to find out what people 

going outside the wire were doing. And they all started 

calling themselves the PRT anyway, so I guess they kind 

of liked it. We would—I would see the governor three, 

four times a week, the police chief. Someone would 

always come up to the PRT. Every day, somebody would 

come up to the PRT that we would meet with. It could 

have been the provincial council, president, one of the 

governor’s deputies or assistants; it could have been one 

of the police chiefs, one of the police commanders, one 

of the ministry representatives. That was a pretty typical 

meeting. Every week, we would have a meeting with 

those ministry representatives involved in some type 

of reconstruction activity. I mean, it’s just—and in the 

midst of all this, we’re working. You know, when I first 

got there, we were getting prepared for the provincial or 

the parliamentary elections, so there was a lot of planning 

and a lot of work that went into that with the Afghans, 

without the Afghans, etc., come rehearsals. And then 

after that, we focused pretty much on the reconstruction 

planning until about December time frame, and then 

after that it became—and then after that, we were working 

internally very hard on the transition of the FOB and the 

PRT, as well as the transition of governors and police 

chiefs, which really made my day. So, it was like you had 

a long event that you spent a lot of time planning for, but 

there were missions to go out on and different projects 

to go see to evaluate the potential to meet with village 

officials and stuff.
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I would try to go on a mission outside of Tarin Kowt at least 

twice a week. Sometimes I only made it once a week, but I 

would always get out with my guys. We would do walking 

patrols about every three weeks, two or three weeks, kind 

of varied that up a little bit. There was a mission every day 

outside the wire with the exception of Friday. Typically, 

Friday was the down day. It was a maintenance day, and it 

was also steak day [laughs]. So, the other six days a week, we 

were outside the wire. People were gone, either checking on 

a project, looking at one, doing a meeting somewhere, or, 

at night, counter-IED patrols or something like that. So, it 

was—I mean, my guys were out much more than—nothing 

against the Special Forces guys. They have a very specific 

mission, but, I mean, they were shocked at how much we 

went outside.

DR. MUNDEY: So, how did that work with your relationship with the 

locals? Did they appreciate your coming out? I mean, how 

would you characterize that relationship with them?

LT. COL. FONTES: Oh, I think it was pretty good. When I initially got there, a 

lot of the locals would come to—you know, they heard there 

was a new PRT commander, so they were going to try to get 

what they can, say that these promises were made, yada, 

yada. So, they would all come to the gate and say, “I want 

to meet with the new PRT commander! I’m Bill or Jill from 

such-and-such place.” And, you know, I met with a couple 

of them to kind of get the feel of what this was going to be 

like. But the agreement that I came to very quickly with the 

governor was that we were just there to support him, and 

we were not going to make any decisions on projects or 

anything without his blessing. So, what we ended up doing, 

we figured out which ones of the ministers were actually 

good or potentially good, and we would tell the people, “If 

you have a recommendation, you need to go to such-andsuch a minister, whichever one is involved in that kind of a 

project; and if he endorses it to us, then we’ll look at it and 

see what we can do to help out.” So, pretty soon, we were 

just turning people around at the gate. They got the clue, 

and they started going to their government officials.

We interacted very regularly with these guys. They would—

two, in particular—would often be at the PRT almost every 

day, the ministry representative for reconstruction and 

rural development, Engineer Hashem, and Engineer Kabir, 

who was the representative for the Ministry of Irrigation. 

They were by far the best guys we worked with, both very 

capable engineers and both seemingly interested in helping 

all the people and not just the people from their particular 

tribes or their particular areas. In fact, we told them right 

off the bat that we were going to keep track of where these 

places were and what tribe was dominant in the area, etc., 

and how much money we were spending, so that we were 

sharing the wealth. They had absolutely no problem with 
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that and really did a good job of getting things outside of 

Tarin Kowt, outside of the Tarin Kowt district into other 

districts, etc. So, that was kind of how we got to know 

the locals, and I know the government officials were very 

appreciative of us kind of empowering them because it was 

a problem when the PRTs first started. Until the PRT gets 

a chance to kind of mature and the relationship between 

the local government and the PRT leadership to mature, 

you always have a little bit of a struggle as to who’s really—

not necessarily in charge, but who has the most influence, 

struggle for influence. We didn’t want to necessarily usurp 

the influence of the local government, in most cases. 

However, that said, if you have a bad government, as we had, 

you don’t want to empower that individual. So, there were 

certain things that we would not do because it was—you 

know, we didn’t want to give the governor too much credit 

for something. We’re certainly not going to badmouth the 

governor or anything—he’s Karzai’s representative, but this 

guy was as corrupt as they come. But the people that were 

trying to work under him, we were able to give them a little 

more influence by supporting their efforts.

DR. MUNDEY: Given the male-dominated Afghan culture, did you have 

any problems stepping in as a female commander?

LT. COL. FONTES: No. I thought that I would, and I actually had this 

conversation with [Lt. Col.] Lynda Granfield, who 

commanded the Jalalabad PRT. She went to Jalalabad 

mainly because she didn’t—you know, because of the 

concern about going into this very conservative, very maledominated area. And I was concerned, but basically, if you 

wear the uniform, first of all, you’re a representative of the 

United States government; you’re also the representative 

with the cash, and they know that. So, it’s like having this 

revolving lit dollar sign over the PRT all the time. It’s kind 

of funny. But if you wear the uniform and you don’t do 

anything to mark yourself as a female—you know, like, as 

long as you don’t wear a scarf or something or makeup—

then they don’t have to respond to you that way. You know, 

it kind of gives them an out, if you will. I think it actually—

you know, every once in a while, they would say something, 

but it was very, very seldom. You know, maybe the first 

couple times we met, the governor would say, “Well, why 

aren’t you married? How come you don’t have any kids?” 

and such, you know? But after probably the first month, it 

was like, “Okay, we’ll just deal with you,” and the only real 

indication I got, I think, from the police chief was in the 

last—it was probably about March of ‘06. He invited me 

to lunch at his place, and he introduced me to his wives. 

He took me back and locked the guys out and introduced 

me, and we chatted with his wives for a while. So, that was 

kind of a shock to me, and his only real indication that 

he may have looked at me any differently, I guess. So, it 

really turned out not to be an issue, which I found very 
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surprising. And once you get—you know, I can do the nice 

routine, and I can also do the not-so-nice routine, and 

after having done that with them a couple times, you kind 

of establish some ground rules. But the amazing thing 

was, around February, the mullah—the provincial council 

president was a mullah, and he came back after a couple 

weeks in Kabul, and he actually gave me a hug, and then 

he kind of realized what he was doing. So, it was kind of 

funny. He was just so happy to see me, so.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. How would you describe the security situation 

around Tarin Kowt in the sense of were the problems 

mainly with warlords, corruption, Taliban, al Qaeda, 

HIG [Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin]? What were those 

security issues that you had to deal with?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, the Taliban were really the issue. It wasn’t necessarily 

al Qaeda and HIG that we could determine, anyway. That 

was the security threat that affected us in particular. When 

you talk about the security situation as it affects the locals, 

though, it’s very much the tribal issues, competition and 

rivalries, corruption, narcotics, and all these things, to 

include the Taliban issue, are all very interwoven, because 

a lot of the Taliban that operate in Oruzgan are actually 

from Oruzgan, and some of the Taliban higher leadership 

is from Oruzgan as well. These people all know each other 

personally, and they may not believe in ideologically what 

the Taliban stands for, but if the Taliban can help them 

out in some way, they will enlist them on their side in a 

tribal fight. A lot of the Taliban from Oruzgan are from the 

Noorzai tribe and from the Ghilzai confederation vice the 

Durani confederation. So, because there was such a huge 

rift between the Ghilzai and the Durani, first of all, there 

were a lot of problems there as far as who the Taliban, so to 

speak, would attack; and then, when you mix in the Durani 

split between the Popalzai and the Barakzai and their 

two allies, it becomes—I mean, there’s a lot of underlying 

issues and a lot of different security concerns from many 

different areas. And then, lay over that this competition for 

the poppy, which I firmly believe the government was very 

into. Then, you have people using the excuse of Taliban, 

because they know it gets our blood up, to get rid of people, 

so you have people with either a tribal grudge to bear, or 

an economic grudge to bear in the narcotics industry, so to 

speak, that they will use that to get us to help them out, and 

they continued to do that the whole time that I was there. 

But having said that, most of what happened in Oruzgan, 

with the exception of a few mid-level commanders that 

came in and would wreak havoc, there weren’t a lot of 

security issues. You know, you would have some exchanges 

of gunfire that we had primarily at night, which could have 

been Taliban or could have been Taliban sympathizers, 

could have been anything. We had IEDs. Again, it’s hard 

to say who actually put them there. Most of the trouble 
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up in Cahar Cineh, Shahidi Hassass, I think, was Taliban 

related.

But it was very calm until the January time frame that I 

was there, and “fairly calm” doesn’t mean necessarily calm, 

but I mean, for Oruzgan, it was fairly calm. And then it 

just—it was like all hell broke loose. I mean, the first week 

of January, we had a suicide bomber that blew himself up at 

a dogfight the same day that we had the ambassador there 

on his visit. So, we had a MASCAL [mass casualty] event, 

and then it just steadily got worse after that. We had more 

IEDs. We had more incidents of shooting. We had some 

serious—it was like they were—and I’ll explain kind of why 

I think this happened, but we had, basically, Taliban forces 

converging and moving in closer to Tarin Kowt, I mean, 

moving in quite close to Tarin Kowt. The Aussies were in 

a firefight, a twelve-hour firefight, right outside of Tarin 

Kowt. I mean, it was only a couple miles. You could see it 

from the FOB. And then from there on it was very—it was 

dangerous just to go outside the gate. We typically didn’t 

worry too much about going into Tarin Kowt, but, I mean, 

even by then, you had to be concerned about going out in 

Tarin Kowt. We had a suicide bomber hit our convoy on 

the first of May when we were coming back from seeing the 

governor, so we had reports of a lot of SVBIEDs [suicide 

vehicle-borne IEDs] running around in Tarin Kowt at the 

time.

But what I think happened is that after the elections, after 

the parliamentary elections in—I guess they were like the 

first or second week in October—everyone knew there 

were going to be some personnel changes made, and there 

had already been discussion about replacing the governor 

who controlled most of the forces, most of the real security 

forces, and the police chief also knew that his days were 

probably numbered, and they both kind of just decided 

not to try to provide any kind of security. So, we would go 

out on a mission out past Tarin Kowt, maybe to Chora or 

something, and you wouldn’t see any police or anything. 

Basically, they vacated the space that they had previously 

kept some semblance of security in and allowed this 

movement in towards Tarin Kowt of the Taliban or of the 

enemy, because by the end of their tenures there, they had 

pretty much just thrown up their hands and given up as far 

as security was concerned. Others had to tell us how bad 

security was. And the governor was using this as a way to 

say, “See, if I leave this place, they’ll take over. I have to stay 

because I am the big provider of security here,” and he had 

the locals convinced that that was the case, and if he left, 

they would be overrun by Taliban. And then when he was 

replaced, I had village elders by the dozens come in to tell 

me their story, how they needed Jan Muhammad to stay 

and could I please relay this message to Kabul because they 

couldn’t get up there. It was incredible. And we’d seen the 
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same thing happen in Kandahar, when Gulagha Shirzai was 

replaced, as well. But, anyway, that’s what I think happened 

is the security system seriously deteriorated.

DR. MUNDEY: I guess this segues into my questions concerning combat 

operations in the area. Did the PRT support combat 

operations, or was there a role for the PRT in that or 

were they kind of separate things?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, we didn’t go on combat operations, per se. However, 

we were ambushed a few times and whatnot. So, I mean, 

there was a little bit of action, but for the most part any 

combat operations were conducted by either the Australians 

or the Special Forces that were there. We supported a 

couple of their operations in that their ODAs, the ODA 

that was at Tarin Kowt, was a little bit undermanned, and 

they had requested that we provide them with a few of our 

force protection guys to be gunners and whatnot, so we did 

that. That was probably the one example where we really 

supported a combat operation. It really went the other way, 

I would say. It was kind of a give and take between what the 

ODA was doing and what the PRT was doing. They would 

accompany us on some of our missions, like to MEDCAPs 

or VETCAPs [veterinary civil action programs]. They’d send 

a couple people along, send their medical personnel along 

to help us out, to increase our capabilities, as well as to get 

them familiar with the different areas, and then if they had 

an operation, there were a couple of times they went into 

some towns or had conducted operations in towns that we 

went in afterwards and provided humanitarian assistance to 

those people who had lost something or provided medical 

assistance to those who needed it. So, we kind of supported 

each other based on our capabilities and needs. It worked 

out that way. But other than that, we weren’t like the quick 

reaction force or anything. We were prepared to do that if 

need be, but that wasn’t—I mean, we weren’t the first-tier 

QRF [quick reaction force], if you will.

DR. MUNDEY: Now, you mentioned that you were involved in 

supporting the parliamentary elections, and then you 

were focused on reconstruction, and then you were 

focused on transition. So could you outline some of 

perhaps the major accomplishments or some of the key 

projects that you worked on that you think are worthy of 

mentioning?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, the biggest thing was just the security support for the 

parliamentary elections. Together with the different forces 

that we had in the province and the Afghan security forces, 

we worked out the plan on how to provide security for the 

ballot box movements, as well as for the polling station 

security and QRF functions, etc. We did that not only in 

Oruzgan, but also in Daykondi, and supported the ANA 

[Afghan National Army] battalion that was up there in 
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Daykondi trying to make this thing work, and we had far 

more problems in Daykondi than we had in Oruzgan. But 

that was—the fact that it went off, basically—you know, we 

had a couple incidents, but it went off pretty well. It was 

certainly a success, I guess you could say. I think we could 

also say it was a success to actually empower government 

officials to take the lead on reconstruction and certainly 

take the lead on projects and begin to think in a long-term 

way. In conjunction with the key ministry representatives 

in the province, we developed a mid-term reconstruction 

program and determined priorities for projects. It truly 

was a joint effort to determine needs, identify projects, and 

determine priorities.

I would say that facilitating the removal of the governor 

was an accomplishment. That would be Jan Muhammad. 

We provided the command with a lot of information 

on what was happening that they were able to use at the 

highest echelons to convince the president to remove him. 

The transition of the base to—well, first, the transition 

of the base to the PRT, we saved the government quite a 

bit of money; and then, to transition to—at least, lay the 

groundwork for the next PRT to transition it to the Dutch 

was no easy feat. Projectwise, I would say that improving 

the road between Tarin Kowt and Deh Rawod was very 

important to not only transiting of goods, but also to 

improving our reaction time for security to different areas. 

The cash-for-work project that we worked on in conjunction 

with USAID, just getting USAID to allow us to identify 

projects and to distribute the money for that, was a huge 

interagency victory, and we put a lot of people to work. I 

think we put a couple thousand people to work doing that 

throughout the country because we had, with the USAID’s 

permission and their subcontractor’s permission, we were 

able to run that program in Cahar Cineh where there were 

no contractors, or there were only U.S. military. I think 

getting rid of the contract security that the PRT had when 

I first got there—we got rid of them like three days later. 

But getting rid of them and partnering with the ANA to do 

all of our missions and taking a government official along 

with us, getting them to voluntarily come and teaching the 

ANA how to do a MEDCAP/VETCAP, how to do kind of, 

I guess, information dissemination so that they were really 

the people interacting with the locals, their own people 

... they were able to provide—by the end of this time, by 

the end of about four months, they conducted their own 

MEDCAP/VETCAP without us, and I think that was a 

pretty big accomplishment. It’s not terribly complex, but to 

give them all these medical supplies to use, to give them all 

this humanitarian assistance stuff to distribute and not be 

terribly concerned about them diverting it for their own 

purposes, I think, was a big accomplishment. I don’t really 

think we would have been at that point if we would have 

done it right off because it took them really interacting with 
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the people and getting to know them and understanding 

what their needs were that really kind of pushed that along. 

The vocational training for, basically, construction skills, 

and I would say that’s one of the PRT’s achievements. As 

far as long-term impact, I guess I’m not a big believer in 

building of buildings as an accomplishment. I mean, you 

know, you can build a government—you can build—one 

of the things that we were building when I got there, it 

was a provincial government building; but if you don’t put 

capable officials in there, it doesn’t really matter if you have 

a building. So, I guess that was one of the things.

DR. MUNDEY: Counternarcotics ...

LT. COL. FONTES: My favorite subject!

DR. MUNDEY: Could you tell us about the situation in Tarin Kowt?

LT. COL. FONTES: In ‘04, they had actually run a fairly—well, the governor 

was very active in promoting not cultivating poppy, as per 

the president’s orders. What my State Department guy, who 

had been there when I arrived—his take on that was that 

Jan Muhammad had basically gotten his rivals, had gotten 

them not to grow poppy. And at that time, if you went out 

in the summertime, you would see—before harvest, you 

would go out, and you would see different crops, and then 

in the center of that crop was a little bit of poppy. So, you 

wouldn’t—it wasn’t terribly visible. I mean, it was there, 

but you wouldn’t see a lot of it. The next year, as Governor 

Jan Muhammad was on his way out, he basically said, “Yes, 

grow poppy. Grow all the poppy you want,” and they did. 

You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing a field of poppy as 

big as whatever space was available. If you looked out of the 

windows of the governor’s mansion, so to speak, into the 

river, into the river valley, it was just covered with poppy. 

It was amazing. Everywhere you went, it was everywhere. 

Many times on walking patrols, people in the bazaar would 

say, “Why do you not want us to grow poppy? It’s our only 

way to make a living, and if you don’t provide us with 

something else, we have no choice.” So, it was pretty much 

all over the place. There was no way to get around it. It 

was even worse out in Deh Rawod, apparently, than it was 

around Tarin Kowt.

So, as far as Oruzgan goes, the places you were likely to 

see it were basically in the southern portion, and most 

of it was centered around the Tarin Kowt River and the 

Helmand River. But that’s not to say you wouldn’t see it in 

other areas, as well. When it was poppy harvesting time, 

just about every other project would come to a screeching 

halt because there was no labor. They would all go up to 

the poppy fields where they could get, I think it was, $15 a 

day or more to harvest poppy, where we were only paying 

them a couple bucks a day. Police would leave their posts. 
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I remember one village actually worked it out so that they 

would send their people, their sons or whatever, to harvest 

the poppy, and they would pay the police extra to stay on 

duty so that the police wouldn’t also go up to harvest the 

poppy, and that was a local remedy to the situation. It was 

everywhere. There just weren’t a lot of—most of what you 

saw there was just raw opium. It wasn’t—I think there may 

have been some processing labs, but I don’t know about 

them. A couple of times, the SF [Special Forces] ran across 

some opium during their operations. Whenever we ran 

into a poppy field, basically we got the coordinates for the 

poppies and gave its location to the police. Those were our 

instructions. The police chief was just as deeply into it as 

anybody, so, I mean, it made it very convenient for him, but 

nothing happened. It’s not working.

DR. MUNDEY: So, the British had the lead on that, but you couldn’t see 

them actually doing anything in that particular area?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, representatives of the Counter Narcotics Working 

Group came down a couple times to talk to us about the 

eradication plan, but they were so overwhelmed with 

Helmand that they were never going to make it up to 

Oruzgan. One, they didn’t have the support of the governor, 

so actual eradication was just not going to happen. The 

Alterative Livelihoods Program run by USAID was a joke. 

To even think that you’re going to replace poppy with wheat 

is absurd. It doesn’t make nearly as much money. To expect 

the Afghan government officials, especially the governor, 

to distribute wheat to anyone but his own supporters was 

not going to happen. He gave it only to the guys he needed 

to have influence with. He was not concerned about the 

farmers who needed it in exchange for growing poppy, and, 

in fact, he trucked half of it up to Daykondi to sell in the 

market.

The information campaign, this poppy elimination program 

group that’s supposed to come down and do this elimination 

campaign and a couple other things, you know, they’re not 

giving it—they don’t have any assets to actually get out and 

do everything. They don’t have any security. And other than 

telling people that it’s wrong to grow poppy and it’s against 

Islam, you got to give them something to live off of or it’s 

just not going to matter. So, on the ground, the program is 

not coordinated and not really well thought out for how to 

attack it on the ground. I mean, I’ve seen the plan. It sounds 

great. It really does. The big strategy sounds great, but as far 

as implementing it at a tactical level, it is not happening. 

And I mean, let’s get real: The Brits aren’t putting nearly the 

resources against it that we are, and certainly none of the 

Europeans are, and if you don’t have some kind of—I mean, 

right now the Dutch are in there, and the Dutch don’t want 

to—they wouldn’t touch counternarcotics, any aspect of it, 

with ten-foot pole. Wasn’t that cheery [laughs]?
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DR. MUNDEY: Okay. On to a more happy subject. The CERP program, 

heard a lot of people say that was a fairly useful tool. How 

did you use CERP funds at your PRT?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, the way we did it with both CERP and AID money 

was according to lines of operation. We figured out which 

systems we could affect most with our money based on 

what our operational priorities were, what the government’s 

priorities were, etc. From that, we developed a plan on 

what systems it affects, such as irrigation. And it was very 

useful to kind of pair that money with the USAID cashfor-work money. Some things cash-for-work can’t pay for 

that CERP can, and vice versa. We used it for roads and 

for the—you know, because roads as part of a system. We 

used it for the vocational training as part of the human 

capital development kind of things. It was very useful to 

attack the—it was very useful when you’re talking about 

infrastructure and economy. It’s a little more difficult to 

apply it for governance and for judicial reform because 

judicial reform is not a matter of something necessarily 

physical that you can give them. Those are the two areas 

that are most difficult for PRT to affect, in my view. Then the 

default becomes “Okay. Well, do I use that CERP money to 

build a building?” Well, no, it’s not very effective use of your 

money. So, you end up using a lot of the money towards 

the infrastructure and the economy, and you figure out 

other ways to use at least U.S. assets, whether it be a USAID 

program like the Judicial—I think it’s the Provincial Judicial 

Development Program, or something to affect that one, and 

then governance. We used it for—at least we planned to 

use it as part of a conference, to conduct a conference with 

representatives from the ministries in Kabul with ministry 

representatives at the provincial level and district level so 

they can jointly develop a plan on what needed to be done 

in Oruzgan. We weren’t able to pull that off before I left, 

mainly because of the transition of governors, and then I 

don’t know if it happened after I left or not. But, those are 

the ways to use it.

The problem with CERP is that you cannot use it for security 

or anything that smells of security, and because that is the 

main issue, really, in Afghanistan, you tie the PRT’s hands 

when it comes to trying to make the security forces more 

effective or to help the governor with security, who is the 

representative of the central government. So, when it came 

time to try to provide security for Tarin Kowt, for example, 

or the governor, we couldn’t provide him with things that 

he needed to improve security, whether it be facilities or 

uniforms, weapons ammunition, that kind of thing—and 

that is his number one concern, basically, staying alive so 

that he could do his job or keeping his people safe. So, 

that was a little bit difficult. The fielding plan for both the 

ANA [Afghan National Army] and ANP [Afghan National 

Police] is not conducive to just waiting on the equipment 
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476

and training to trickle down to the provinces, and it’s not 

responsive enough to use that as a way to improve your local 

police force. I mean, you could train these guys forever, and 

they could be very well trained, but if you don’t have the 

equipment to do the job, they can’t do it. So, I found that to 

be a little bit difficult to work with. And not just—when I say 

the security forces, not just ANA and ANP, but also the NDS 

[Afghan National Directorate of Security], who, while we 

see them as a security/intelligence organization—and they 

are—oftentimes, they’re the most effective, or potentially 

effective, security force in the province. They certainly were 

in Tarin Kowt because they didn’t owe their allegiance to 

the governor or to the police chief. So, they were really the 

keepers of the policies of the central government, and if we 

could have helped them, we could have—I mean, it would 

have made certainly a difference—maybe slight—but a little 

more flexibility with the CERP money would have been 

good. And we originally had—I think it went away like the 

thirty-first of July 2005. It went away, and I understand why. 

I mean, we were putting all this money towards police and 

the ANA, but the problem was, if you needed—you had to 

go all the way to the SecDef to get an exception to policy, 

and it just kind of ties the commander’s hand at every level. 

So, I’m a big supporter of CERP, but I think the authority 

should be broadened a little bit. I mean, not totally to the 

point where the PRT commander could just spend, spend, 

spend, but a little more flexibility would have been nice.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, when you were nearing the end of your time 

in command, how did you start transitioning for your 

replacement? Did you meet your replacement?

LT. COL. FONTES: When he got there.

DR. MUNDEY: Was there an overlap?

LT. COL. FONTES: We had a couple days’ overlap, yes. We had exchanged a 

couple of e-mails, but the connectivity was not very good. 

And then I think we had about, maybe, five days of overlap. 

I told him that when he was ready for me to leave, I would 

leave.

DR. MUNDEY: What was the situation at that time? What did you tell 

him were the major issues that you were looking at?

LT. COL. FONTES: Well, we all had continuity books of what had been going 

on; what was in the future; what promises had been made, 

what hadn’t been made; what he was likely to see; who 

were the main contacts on what issues; how to deal with 

every situation I could think of that might arise, like how 

to deal with the separate chains of command with the 

State Department and the military; you know, how to be 

an escort for General Eikenberry; you know, stuff like that. 

So, we each had these books just in case we weren’t able to 
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do a good handover, but we did, you know, the left-seat/

right-seat ride and went over the different issues there. My 

XO and base ops officer were both going to be there for a 

little while longer, so they were able to fill in any gaps that 

I wasn’t able to, as well as the Australian officers that had 

been there for quite some time. They were able to do that, 

as well. So, we had a couple of people that were holdovers 

that were able to help and could fill in most of the holes if 

the books didn’t cover it or if our right-seat/left-seat didn’t 

cover all the issues.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay.

LT. COL. FONTES: It was a very—this unit, this force protection unit, they 

were the first ones to come in from the new PRT, and it 

was their first day without, you know, the old guys. The old 

guys had got on the plane the day before, and the very next 

day we had this suicide bomber get into the convoy and 

detonate. It really—I mean, it rattled us all, there’s no doubt 

about it—but I mean, it rattled these guys to the point 

where I had a hard time getting them outside the gate, and 

rightly so. I mean, when you first get there, you’re most 

vulnerable in your first three and your last three months. 

And we spent a lot of time during my personal turnover 

working with the force protection guys, both myself and 

my replacement, working with these guys to get them so 

that they were confident in what they were doing. They 

knew what they needed to do, but after that incident, they 

lost a lot of their self-confidence. So, we were doing some 

pretty intensive hand-holding, for lack of a better term, 

and maybe didn’t have quite this—you know, we were both 

a little bit distracted. That probably took away from our 

turnover.

But with the XO there, it had the potential to make it a lot 

easier, because my XO knew everything I was doing, and 

he was totally right into everything. I had no qualms about 

going off with him in charge. He would often tell me that he 

wished I would call a little more often when I was gone. So, 

he was a great guy. He was into everything. So, the turnover 

was a little bit more difficult than we would have hoped and 

more difficult than anticipated.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Do you have a favorite story?

LT. COL. FONTES: Yes, I guess. Do you want to hear it?

DR. MUNDEY: Yes.

LT. COL. FONTES: This provincial government building was—this contractor, 

Mr. Hamidi, he was really in tight with the governor, who 

I think was one of his silent or not-so-silent partners. So, 

he’s the guy that’s building the provincial government 

building. Right next to it, he’s building this guest house, 
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and he was a little bit, you know, delayed in his completion 

of the building, of the provincial government building. 

So, called him in and said, “It doesn’t look like you’re 

going to make your deadline, and I just want to remind 

you that there’s a clause in the contract that says we 

can penalize you for not meeting the contract.” And he 

had all kinds of excuses—you know, security. Security 

is always the number one excuse for everything: “The 

security was bad.” I said, “Well, you’re from Tarin Kowt. 

You know exactly what the situation is here. You should 

have considered that before you committed yourself to 

go in this building in six months,” and “Oh, by the way, 

security doesn’t seem to be affecting the pace of building 

this here guest house.”

So, we ended up—I think all told we penalized him 

20 percent, and we told him this was going to happen. 

So, he didn’t like it but finally he just went away, and then 

we made the final payment, and it was 20 percent short. 

He says, “Well, where’s the rest of my money?” “Well, 

you’re penalized, as it says in this piece of paper. You’re 

penalized 20 percent.” And so he says, “Well, I’m sorry. 

I’m sorry I’m late.” “Okay, I’m glad you’re sorry,” you 

know, and then finally he goes away. So, then he comes 

in with the governor. The governor ... I can’t remember. 

He was sick or something, but he was over at the CASH 

because he constantly was in seeing the doctors about 

something. So, they told me he was in there, and he 

wanted to talk to me. So, I go over there, and the governor 

proceeds to browbeat me on this money, and I said, “No, 

he’s not going to get it. We told him this was the deal.” 

And he’s like, “Well, he’s poor.” I said, “Well, he’s not so 

poor, because his son speaks English and is working as 

an interpreter over here. He’s building this guest house,” 

and all the other things that he’s done. “Oh, but he’s 

poor. You took 20 percent, and he’s poor. You can’t do 

this.” And, “No, no. Not going to pay him.” “Well, can’t 

you forgive him?” “No, I can’t. You know, this is not my 

money. It’s not like it’s my money, and I can just pay him. 

This is government taxpayer money, and they want their 

money’s worth.” And he says, “Well, he’s sorry.” I said, 

“Well, I appreciate that he’s sorry, but he’s not getting his 

money.” “Well, you know, this is like if you missed one 

of your five times of prayer during the day. You just tell 

Allah that you’re sorry, and Allah forgives you.” I said, 

“Well, I’m not Allah, and I forgive you, but I’m not going 

to give you any money.” So, I mean, this went round and 

round, this same thing for about—oh, man! I must have 

been there for about an hour and a half, and finally the 

governor gave up, and he said, “Well, I guess he’ll just be 

a poor man.” Well, the reason he’s a poor man is because 

you took all the money! I mean, you’re not kidding 

me. So, anyway, it was one of those stories where you 

probably had to be there, but it was kind of comical.
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The other very short one I like was being told that it’s 

actually okay if you drink alcohol as long as you’re under 

a cement roof, because Allah can’t see through cement. So, 

I kind of like that. And there were many different things, 

many different very comical situations. There’s one more. 

Can I tell you this?

DR. MUNDEY: Sure.

LT. COL. FONTES: Okay. We’re up in Chora, and—I guess this is when we 

were taking the, going with the, police. They had asked us 

to go up there with them, and they took the new district 

chief up there. It had rained really bad that night, so we 

couldn’t get across the river to get into town, and we’re 

sitting there listening to the chatter of the Taliban, right? 

And these guys, they were so funny! You hear these guys 

saying, “Yes, we see them.” “Yes, you see them?” “Yes, we 

see them.” “Well, should we attack them?” “Yes, I think 

we should ambush them.” “Okay. So we’ll ambush them in 

thirty minutes.” “Well, okay, yes, thirty minutes.” And then 

twenty-five minutes goes by, and the guy goes, “Okay, are 

you in position?” “Yes, I’m in position.” “Are you ready?” 

“Well, why don’t we ambush after lunch?” So, then we 

all have lunch, too, as we’re sitting here, and we had an 

overwatch crew and everything, so we weren’t terribly—we 

were a little bit concerned, but not terribly.

So, after lunch, they get back on and chatter: “Well, you 

ready?” “Well, I think we should pray first.” So, one thing 

after another that these guys had to do. This is all—my 

interpreter is listening to this busting a gut laughing, because 

it’s incredible. It’s like, “Who are the clowns on the other end 

of this thing?” you know. And then two weeks later, they 

actually did ambush us, but they waited until we had split 

again. We had an overwatch force and then us, and they 

waited until we were all together again and then ambushed 

us, which was not very smart. I remember coming up out of 

the river valley that time and hearing these guys say, “Okay, 

you ready. We’re going to ambush them?” And I just said to 

Sergeant Clary, I said, “You know these clowns. It’s going to 

be just like the last time. They’re not going to do anything.” 

And then a little rocket, and it was like, “Okay, so they are!” 

I mean, it’s easy to look back and laugh on that now, but at 

the time it wasn’t quite as funny. But the lunch and prayer 

breaks at the time were pretty hilarious.

DR. MUNDEY: Do you have any final thoughts that you want to share 

about your experience in Afghanistan—things that you 

want to get on the record of your experience, or lessons, 

or just any final thoughts that you had?

LT. COL. FONTES: PRTs are operating at about 40 to 50 percent effectiveness for 

a couple of reasons. One, they’re just undermanned for the 

mission that they have based on the need and the amount 
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480

of space that they’re expected to cover or be responsible 

for. They do not have the right skills. They don’t have the 

skills that they need to really do the job at more than maybe 

40 or 50 percent effectiveness. They don’t have the skills to 

affect the governance piece or the judicial reform piece 

that they really need to have; or, for that matter, to some 

extent, the reconstruction piece, because you don’t have 

a whole lot of trained engineers, and you need more than 

one. It’s hard to do. I mean, you would run that person to 

death when all you have is one because they got to go out 

to everything to check the engineering of different projects 

and stuff. You know, I realize that that’s not a skill that, say, 

State Department has, or that any of the other executive 

branch departments have, but it seems to me very simple 

to obligate the money, appropriate the money, and get 

contractors who might be willing to do that. I mean, KBR 

has people banging down their door to go over there. You 

know, why can’t we contract to man, to get the appropriate 

skills to these PRTs? Because although you see progress 

as you’re there—I mean, you can always find something 

to feel good about and convince yourself that you do all 

these wonderful things, but all of it is for naught if we don’t 

fix the governance piece, because that includes ... to me, 

governance also includes good leaders for the security 

forces. If you don’t have those, then everything that you’ve 

accomplished or every project that you’ve completed will 

just deteriorate in a couple of years. They won’t take care 

of it because there’s nobody there to make them take care 

of it, and there’s nobody skilled to take care of it because 

you haven’t taught anybody how to do it. You can do it to 

a certain extent. You can teach the guy the skills, but if you 

don’t have somebody to sit there and tell them to do it, so 

you supervise him as he does it, and to pay him, then you 

really haven’t gotten to the root of the issue. That, I think 

was the—I mean, I can take the frustration of dealing with 

the Afghans—the “you promised me this, you promised 

me that,” that kind of thing, and their little intertribal and 

interregional intrigues and stuff. I love that stuff. That’s 

fascinating for me. But it’s, I guess, the lack of imagination, 

skills, and resources on how to execute reconstruction at 

the tactical level so that it’s more effective. That’s the first 

thing. That’s the first lesson or recommendation I have.

The second would be that it is all fine and dandy for 

there to be a plan in Kabul on how to execute things like 

counternarcotics, Alternative Livelihoods, etc., but if you’re 

not physically involved or empowering somebody at the 

tactical level to implement the plan at the tactical level, it is 

not going to happen. If you don’t maintain positive control 

and actively influence the program from start to finish, from 

strategic level to the tactical level, it’s not going to happen 

on the ground the way you thought it was going to happen. 

It’s not going to get the effect that you want, and it’s very 

frustrating to have directions through the military chain 
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of what you’re supposed to do and not have any linkage 

in the other agencies and to see them lack the ability to 

influence their own programs at the lowest levels. I mean, 

there is no coordination of these efforts, and a lot of that 

happens—when you give a contractor money to go execute 

something—let’s say it’s Alternative Livelihoods; that’s the 

best example I can think of, the most vivid example I can 

think of—and he’s not even working in areas that, one, you 

need him to work in to support the military campaign, 

or you need him to work in because it actually affects the 

narcotic program, then why are we giving this guy money if 

he’s not going to do it? And if nobody is monitoring him, he 

has no incentive to try and meet the goals of the program, 

but rather to just keep the program and their contract going 

and going forever. These guys are off on their—I mean, they 

get this big bag of money, and then they send their guys 

out, and they’re not—we’re just not making any progress. 

We’re spinning our wheels because nobody is watching, 

and I find that very frustrating. I mean, it’s easy to sit back 

and be critical, Monday morning quarterback it, but it’s an 

attention thing and it’s a supervision thing that I think—and 

it’s an imagination thing—that we are kind of falling short 

on. The lack of attention, manpower, and supervision is just 

going to drag this thing on and on. It’s not going to be short, 

anyway. Even if we were executing perfectly, it wouldn’t be 

a short-term issue.

And then the last thing I would say—the very last, I 

promise—is that this is not an Afghan issue. This is a regional 

issue, and the only people this border makes a difference 

to is us and the Pakistani government, for some strange 

reason, because the whole Taliban/al Qaeda issue is not 

going to be solved until we figure out that this is not a fight 

here and here [indicating the border area of Afghanistan 

and Pakistan on a map], it’s a fight here [indicating the 

entire map], and we have to attack—I mean, we have to 

attack it as a unit, not as two separate issues, which we’re 

doing now, and if we can enable our Coalition partners in 

Afghanistan—you know, the Afghan National Police and 

units for the Ministry of Interior—why can’t we enable 

units of the Ministry of Interior of Pakistan to do the same 

thing? I’m very frustrated by that, and I know other people 

who are as well, but it’s just ... anyway, those are the things 

I learned.

And I also learned something else. I have a great respect for 

the National Guard that I really didn’t have before. I did not 

have high hopes for the people that I worked with, but they 

totally changed my opinion 180 degrees. I mean, the Texas 

National Guard guys were fantastic. And I can’t say that my 

impression was the same of the reserve augmentees that I 

had, but the National Guard guys were great, and the Air 

Force and Navy guys that I worked with really were great, 

too. They had a great attitude. They stepped into something 
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they never expected, never wanted to do, and really were 

motivated and got the job done and did a good job. I mean, 

I’d worked joint before, but that was really a great joint 

experience.

DR. MUNDEY: So where did you go after Tarin Kowt?

LT. COL. FONTES: Here, to the War College. I’m just marking the days until I 

can get back either to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Well, thank you very much for coming and speaking 

with us. I think that your insights are going to help our 

projects tremendously. Thank you very much.

Lt. Col. Anthony J. Hunter (USAR) served as Commander, Gardiz Provincial Reconstruction Team, one of the earliest provincial reconstruction teams, from May 2003 to early 2004. 

He was interviewed by Lisa Mundey at the U.S. Army Center of Military History on 27 

February 2007. Colonel Hunter volunteered to go to Afghanistan with the 321st Civil Affairs 

Brigade at the time that the provincial reconstruction team was being established. He describes the terrain around Gardiz, the tribal factions and warlords that held influence in the 

region, the component parts of his team, its command structure, and U.S. Special Operations 

Forces and Coalition troops operating in the immediate area. After Colonel Hunter arrived, 

the team continued to oversee projects that started before his arrival, including schools, wells, 

medical clinics, and bridge reconstruction, and he explains his interactions with the local 

populace, who expected the Americans to come with lots of money, and his struggles with a 

corrupt local government. The interview concludes with Colonel Hunter’s assessments of the 

team’s accomplishments and his thoughts about the Afghan people.

DR. MUNDEY: This is Dr. Lisa Mundey interviewing Lt. Col. Anthony 

Hunter regarding his time as commander of the Gardiz 

Provincial Reconstruction Team [PRT]. It is 27 February 

2007. The interview is being conducted at the Center of 

Military History. Sir, are you sitting for the interview 

voluntarily?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Yes. 

DR. MUNDEY: Do you have any objections to the interviewing being 

used by historians or researchers with the understanding 

that you will be quoted or cited accurately?

LT. COL. HUNTER: No.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Thank you. Well, let’s start at the very beginning of 

the story. When did you learn you were going to deploy 

to Afghanistan?
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LT. COL. HUNTER: At the time, I was beginning to complete my command 

time with the 448th Civil Affairs Battalion at Fort Lewis, 

Washington, and contacted a friend of mine, who was the 

S-3 [staff officer for operations] at the 321st Civil Affairs 

Brigade, and found out that they were getting ready to 

deploy to Afghanistan. At that time, I volunteered, when 

my command tenure was over, within February of 2003, to 

transfer over to the 321st down in San Antonio to deploy 

with them in whatever capacity that they would need me. 

So, that’s how that started. Basically, I was a volunteer 

looking for an opportunity. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Given that a lot of the people who have gone to 

Afghanistan have been individual augmentees, or bits and 

pieces, did the entire 321st Brigade go to Afghanistan, or 

just parts of it?

LT. COL. HUNTER: It was the same type of thing—the situation existed with 

the 321st. One of their subordinate battalions was slated 

to go, and then the brigade headquarters, to form the [C]

JCMOTF, which was the Coalition [Combined] Joint CivilMilitary Operations Task Force, to form that organization. 

The brigade commander, Colonel [Mackey K.] Hancock, 

would form that headquarters and be the CJCMOTF 

commander, and then there were other soldiers that were 

pulled from other civil affairs battalions, 1st of the 407th 

up in the northern part of the United States, and some 

other places. So, it was the same type of conditions that 

existed for the deployment of this particular organization 

because there were too few and far between, stretched out 

with 38-Alphas [military occupational specialty for civil 

affairs specialist].

DR. MUNDEY: Sure. About how many folks actually deployed? Just a 

round estimate.

LT. COL. HUNTER: I want to say, roughly, about 250, I think. Something like 

that, but I’m not exactly sure, really.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. What was your awareness of the situation in 

Afghanistan before you actually got there?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Other than what I had read in open-source materials, I 

wasn’t prepping for the deployment at the time. We didn’t 

know the opportunity was arising. However, we knew that 

the situation was still somewhat volatile, especially in the 

south, and that there was still Taliban remnants running 

around. There were warlords usurping their authority and 

gaining control of areas again, as they had done prior to 

the Taliban’s existence. And so, we knew that the threat 

level was a medium-to-high threat level in the south, and 

pretty much benign in the north and in the west. We had 

an idea where these PRTs were going to be established and 
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that we were going to be responsible for manning those 

organizations, also, as we deployed.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, what guidance were you given about what these 

PRTs were about? 

LT. COL. HUNTER: We really didn’t have a lot of information on what the 

structure was going to be like, other than the fact that we 

knew where they were going to be located. We were trying 

to determine, based on commander’s bios, their military 

experience, their civilian skill set, where we were going to 

actually place these commanders in these particular areas, 

whether it was a volatile area down in the south, or whether 

it was a more quiet and benign area in the north and the east. 

So, we spent a lot of time as a staff, not only coming up and 

developing somewhat of a campaign plan to try to attack 

this problem in Phase IV, in reconstruction and stability 

ops, but we were also looking at what really was the mission 

of the PRT and how was this organization made up as an 

ad hoc organization, as we understood at the time. So, there 

was really an issue of trying to find out from somebody, 

you know, what this animal was like, and that was pretty 

difficult at the time. We were talking to some of the staff 

that were already over there manning the [Combined Joint] 

Civil-Military Operations Task Force and giving us some 

basic information on the structure of the organization, but 

it was a very fluid and flexible concept. It could change, 

even while we were en route.

DR. MUNDEY: Did these PRTs have any relationship with the earlier 

Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Some of those cells, I think were ... at least at the locations 

where those cells were deployed. The PRTs were growing 

out of some of those locations, if they were strategic 

enough, if they were set up to be adjacent to a UNAMA 

[United Nations Assistance Mission-Afghanistan] office, 

which I think was the original design. There were five, I 

think, original UNAMA offices out there in Afghanistan, so 

they decided to collocate these teams near those sites, and 

then build upon them as they developed the PRT concept. 

But most of these teams, at the time, were supporting [C]

JSOTF, the [Combined] Joint Special Operations Task 

Force, at that particular time, and they were essentially 

assigned or attached to them and not necessarily part of a 

CMO, or civil-military operations, structure, or civil affairs 

structure, at the time.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Was there any particular training that you guys 

went through before you deployed or that you put the 

soldiers through before you deployed?

LT. COL. HUNTER: We concentrated primarily on force protection operations—

not only individual soldier skills and tradecraft, but also 
Colonel Hunter (far left) briefs General Richard B. Myers (U.S. Air Force), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 

(second from the right), and others on the activities of Provincial Reconstruction Team Gardiz, 30 July 2003.

Security and Assistance

485

convoy operations, because we knew we’d be going out and 

conducting long-range assessment into the hinterland, and 

that meant that we needed to know how to communicate; 

we needed to know how to use weapons; we needed to 

know how to drive vehicles—you know, right-hand drive 

vehicles, manual transmissions, these type of things, which 

a lot of the young soldiers didn’t know how to. They didn’t 

grow up that way, so a lot of the older officers were actually 

driving in a lot of the vehicles once we got in country until 

we could teach young soldiers how to drive those. So, we 

focused on those, primarily. We didn’t have—one of the 

things that, had I known then what I know now about what 

we could have trained on, we would have definitely focused 

on contracting; on basic horizontal engineering concepts; 

statements of work; these type of things that are all involved 

in this process—the funding; understanding OHDACA, 

the Overseas Humanitarian, Disaster and Civic Aid funds; 

understanding what CERP, Commander’s Emergency 

Response [Program] fund, could do for us. We didn’t 

have any idea, really, what these funds were and how they 

were available, because most of our training back at home 

station centered on supporting that war fighting division 

that we were attached to, or assigned to, and we had that 

command relationship with. Primarily, we were responsible 

for manning the civil-military operations center, collocated 

with our division TOC [tactical operations center] and then 

have teams, Civil Affairs Teams-Alpha, going out and doing 

their thing. So, that was a gap for us. It was a training gap for 
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us. So, we had to learn on the ground, kind of an on-the-job 

process. It was painful to try to understand that, especially 

with the difficulties and the legalities that are involved in 

contracting, which was new to a lot of us. We had a lot of 

guys that were in law enforcement that can handle the force 

protection aspect of it very well, and I think that was what 

helped us stay safe in the environment. I didn’t lose any 

soldiers going into there and coming out. But, we did have 

a lot of catching up to do on the other aspect, on the primary 

aspect of, you know, these reconstruction projects.

DR. MUNDEY: When did you find out your specific job and your specific 

location?

LT. COL. HUNTER: That was juggled around a couple of times. Because I was 

brand new to the unit, nobody knew me, other than my 

bio and my ORB, officer record brief, I provided to the 

command element, so I had to kind of interject myself 

into the process and say, “Look, these are the skill sets I am 

bringing.” I was a law enforcement officer at the time as my 

civilian occupation. So, I had to basically sell myself and 

said, “Look, I want you to put me into the hottest area you 

can find. I think that is where I think could do my best.” 

Originally, they had me slated to go to Bamian. Then that 

shifted to Herat, and then finally, to Gardiz. Once I got on 

the ground, I did get to do a site visit to Bamian, when at 

that particular time I was still going to be going to that PRT, 

and then at the last minute, the command group decided 

to change and shift some personnel based on—and, in 

fact, there were other officers that were earmarked to man 

these PRTs that were also new to the brigade, brought in 

from other units, that they had to get a good feel on what 

their capabilities were—not only what they look like on 

paper, but how they interacted and how they worked in the 

environment. So, that led to a lot of the changes in decision 

making that was going on on the ground when we first got 

there.

DR. MUNDEY: Could you describe your arrival in Afghanistan? When 

did you arrive? What was in-processing like? When did 

you eventually get to Gardiz?

LT. COL. HUNTER: We flew into ... well, we transited from here, from Fort 

Bragg, on C–17 over to Frankfurt, Rhein-Main Air Base, 

to refuel there, and then we continued on into country 

and landed on May third, 2003, in blackout conditions. 

The entire camp at Bagram was blacked out, and just 

kind of corkscrewed our way down in the tactical landing 

approach. Got out in pitch-black darkness. Was led into 

their in-processing center, which, we essentially got some 

basic emergency contact information for us, and then 

started moving us out into the tents that they had set up in 

a temporary holding area for us. The following day, then we 

were moved over—well, actually, the following day the staff 
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was moved over to their building where the CJCMOTF 

was set up and started doing the coordination with the 

individuals that they were going to replace. We started, 

as time moved on—a couple of days, we got used to the 

environment, self-acclimating to the atmospherics of what 

was going on there. At Bagram, we were starting to link 

up with our counterparts at the PRTs. That was dependent 

upon the security situation, depending on the weather, 

those type of things. It was May, so we didn’t have too many 

issues with weather, but transportation issues, especially out 

in Herat and Bamian, which were far off, and Konduz, for 

that matter. Those officers and commanders and CA [civil 

affairs] teams had to wait a couple of more weeks before 

they could get out to their locations. Some of them, I think 

it was longer than a month. I was on the ground at Bagram, 

I believe, for about—it was about almost two weeks, and 

then I linked up with my counterparts at Gardiz and loaded 

up and went down. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Could you describe Gardiz to me, to someone who 

has never seen it, as much detail as you can?

 

LT. COL. HUNTER: It takes about four hours’ drive from Bagram to Gardiz. 

And about an hour south, you go into Kabul, so you have 

to wind through. There’s no pass around Kabul, so you have 

to wind through the congestion there, and the extremely 

heavy traffic and mass confusion and chaos. And then once 

you get through there, you are back on the rural roads again, 

moving at quite a high rate of speed, as fast as you can safely 

to avoid any small-arms fire or possible IEDs [improvised 

explosive devices]. The trip, other than just being 

overwhelmed with the terrain, was pretty uneventful, and 

the terrain varied from craggy cliffs and rock cut-outs, you 

know, the narrow passageways to just flat-out open desert 

in some areas, with very minimal vegetation. But, always 

surrounded by some kind of mountain range somewhere, 

ranging in size from nine thousand to fourteen thousand, 

fifteen thousand feet in elevation. We maintained—in Kabul, 

I think the elevation around there is about two thousand 

feet, and then once we started heading south, the elevation 

increased. When we got over the last pass, mountain pass, 

into Gardiz, we were about 7,500-foot elevation in Gardiz 

itself. So, you come through a mountain pass, and then it 

starts opening up again, and you see another mountain 

range to the south, and in between the pass mountain range 

and to the south was where Gardiz city is actually located 

in kind of a wide valley—kind of a Wild West type of town. 

You know, just kind of out there in the middle of nowhere. 

There are some trees and vegetation in the area, especially 

around the towns and villages that are in the area, because 

of the irrigation control that is being done for the crops. So, 

anywhere you see any kind of vegetation that is taller than 

five or ten feet, you will know that there is a village that’s 

pretty close by in those areas. Other than that, it’s pretty 
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barren. But there were two small mountains on the other 

side of Gardiz in between the southern mountain range 

that I described, and the PRT is a compound that basically 

sits off a paved road that leads out to Khowst. So, as you go 

through Gardiz and you approach and cross the last bridge 

over the river ... it is basically a dry riverbed through 

Gardiz. You will go about another mile, and then on the 

right will be the PRT compound. And the first compound 

you will see is the [C]JSOTF compound, the one where the 

predominant forces flew out of for [Operation] Anaconda, 

and right behind that is another with four towers, and that’s 

the actual PRT compound itself. That’s basically the setup 

of the two compounds themselves, and then you have got 

the perimeter—Hescos and barriers around it, with a pretty 

good standoff, about two hundred to three hundred meters, 

in some places.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. And ethnically, what were the people in that 

particular area?

LT. COL. HUNTER: All Pashtun, because that’s the entire Pashtun belt through 

that area. So, we’re talking about, predominantly, Ghilzai, 

the major tribe group, Mangal, Jani Khel, Zadran, these 

types of tribes in the area. There’s many, many more. I 

can’t really recall. But, predominantly, that mix of rural, 

agrarian society—you know, pretty simple farmers, mostly 

uneducated, illiterate population. The individuals that 

we dealt with that actually worked for us—obviously, 

the interpreters, and some of the representatives for the 

government, the provincial government—were educated 

and spoke English quite well.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. And in terms of the security situation, which 

groups were more active in that area? Al Qaeda? Taliban? 

HIG [Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin]?

LT. COL. HUNTER: The majority of our problems, really, concerned one of 

the major warlords in the area, in the pass heading toward 

Khowst, which is Pacha Khan Zadran. He is actually now 

a member, I believe, of the lower house now, but he was 

creating a lot of problems with the old ANSF [Afghan 

National Security Forces] corps commander that was 

there at the time. There was this constant rivalry was going 

on between the two. So, that really occupied most of our 

time, as far as the security situation was concerned. There 

were some Taliban remnants in the area, and we couldn’t 

specifically identify, or we didn’t receive much information, 

about al Qaeda and how they were operating. But every now 

and then, you would hear of IEDs, or firefights of a small 

nature, or small-scale ambushes, hit-and-run-type tactics. 

Other than that, the ODAs that went out, the Operational 

Detachment-Alphas, the Special Forces teams, probably got 

hit much more often than we did. We only had maybe one 

or two instances at all of close calls of anything happening 
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to us, and they were small-arms incidents. There were no 

IEDs that struck any of our vehicles. However, within hours 

of passing, typically coming from Bagram back down to 

Gardiz, we would pass an area about an hour later, and 

the [C]JSOTF guys would pass through, and they would 

get hit by an IED. Now, they wouldn’t suffer any casualties, 

but they were definitely targeted. And I think a lot of that 

was attributed to the way we—and I don’t want to put this 

the wrong way, but the way we conducted ourselves on the 

ground, the way we were dressed, the way we traveled—we 

didn’t have the beards. We didn’t have sterile uniforms. We 

were clean shaven. We were visibly marked with patches. 

I think the locals started identifying the USACAPOC 

[U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations 

Command] patch with the sword and the two lightning 

bolts as people that were going out and doing reconstruction 

operations and doing assessments and meeting with local 

leaders and this type of thing, and meeting with local shuras. 

That, I think, separated us, for the most part, with what [C]

JSOTF was doing, and therefore, we weren’t targeted nearly 

as much as they were. But, for the most part, the security 

situation was pretty benign, even in the south, for us. We 

could freely move about and cover a lot of ground without, 

really, any fear of any attacks or anything like that. I mean, 

it was amazing. My predecessor, Col. Chris Allen at the 

time, had already traversed almost the entire five-province 

area that we were responsible for, and then took me back 

out to these areas to introduce me to the major tribal 

groups as part of my right-seat ride, indoctrination, and 

train-up to take over the PRT. So, he had already kind of 

set the groundwork for a lot of these areas, but we still had 

areas to cover, out to the far west and Paktika and Ghazni 

to continue more assessments in those areas. And, like I 

said, other than weather problems or vehicle breakdowns, 

we didn’t have any issues with the locals or with any Taliban 

elements. In fact, we stayed in a lot of the ANSF, Afghan 

National Security Forces, compounds that they had spread 

out all over the country. We sheltered with them when we 

were on long-range overnight patrols.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. And what were those five provinces that you were 

in charge of?

LT. COL. HUNTER: I was responsible for a five-province area roughly the size of 

South Carolina, is what I can equate it to. It was a lot of area 

to cover. It was obviously Paktia, which was—the seat was 

Gardiz; Paktika to the southwest; and then, to the west, was 

Ghazni. We also were responsible for Khowst Province and 

the southern part of Lowgar. Now, I had one civil affairs 

team, down at Shkin in Paktika; one team was in Khowst, at 

Chapman Air Base there, adjacent to [Forward Operating 

Base] Salerno; and then the other three teams I had were 

at Gardiz and would go out and do their assessments from 

that location.
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DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Now, it is my understanding that each PRT is 

somewhat unique in the way that they are organized. 

Could you describe your PRT—the components of it, 

and, kind of, your internal organization?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Yeah. I think our PRT was probably the one that was 

most ... I mean, if you could see a doctrinal document 

outlining the structure of what at that time everyone 

believed a PRT should look like, I think we were it. We 

had a headquarters element. We had the civil affairs 

teams. I had five civil affairs teams at the time. We also 

had a base defense element, consisting of troops from 

the 82d Airborne initially on, and that changed later 

on to a cav unit from the 10th Mountain, and to a field 

artillery unit. And then we had civilian representation, 

civilian augmentees into the PRT, which consisted of a 

representative from USAID [U.S. Agency for International 

Development], a representative from the U.S. Department 

of Agriculture, a Department of State representative, and 

then, later on, about the latter half of my tenure there, 

we received an MOI [Afghan Ministry of Interior] rep, 

basically a general from the Afghan National Police, who 

stayed inside the compound with us. So, roughly, we had 

about 150 troops on the ground there, to include all parts 

of the organization.

DR. MUNDEY: And whom did you report to?

LT. COL. HUNTER: I reported directly to the [C]JCMOTF commander, and 

that was pretty much on a daily basis through e-mails at 

the time. We had kind of a rudimentary e-mail system and 

weren’t up on the SIPR [Secure Internet Protocol Router] 

system yet. We didn’t have that available, so we were 

communicating basically on a commercial broadband net 

and had our own satellite there at the PRT.

DR. MUNDEY: Other than the PRT, were there other Coalition or 

American units operating in that area?

LT. COL. HUNTER: The only other U.S. units that were operating in the area at 

the time were [C]JSOTF. They were essentially hot-bunking 

it out of the next compound over. I mean, whenever there 

was a particular mission that was going on, you’d see more 

of those elements come down, whether they were Navy 

SEALs or Ranger elements or Special Forces teams from 

both the active component and National Guard. They’d 

come in and conduct missions for a few days, and they’d be 

gone. So, it was constantly changing. But no other Coalition 

forces in the area. However, when I first arrived, we had two 

Italian officers that were embedded with the PRT. One was 

an operations officer—actually, he was an artillery officer, I 

believe—and the other was carabiniere, the Italian police. 

So, they stayed with us, and at the same time that Col. 

Chris Allen was taking me out and kind of showing me the 
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area, the two Italians would go with us. They were basically 

determining, you know, what role could the Italians take in 

a PRT in the future, and consequently, now they have the 

Herat PRT.

DR. MUNDEY: So, what did you learn in that handover transition time 

about your area and about what you were going to do?

LT. COL. HUNTER: I had a pretty good idea of the major tribal leaders in the 

area that I had to deal with, of course, the governor and 

some of the district subgovernors. We obviously didn’t get to 

cover all the ground, because we only had about two weeks, 

but we were out on the road constantly for that entire time. 

Got introduced to the poppy trade and the growing season 

because the poppies were in bloom at that time. In fact, 

they were being harvested. We could walk right down to the 

fields. So, that was quite beneficial, to be able to get out and 

see what area that I was dealing with and the different types 

of terrain and those challenges that—especially coming in 

the winter months that were to come, and what challenge 

we would face. So, that predominantly took the most of the 

two weeks, just getting comfortable with what was on the 

ground. And then after that, we were basically left to our 

own devices to take on the projects that were already being 

initiated, which was—I think there was roughly about sixty 

to seventy projects that were already initiated in the area. 

Now, most of these were low-level projects—you know, the 

foundations of schools being built, wells, and some medical 

clinics—the typical, the top three types of projects that you 

would see funded by OHDACA. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Is there anything that would approximate a typical 

day at a PRT?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Yeah, there was a lot involved in the maintenance of the 

facility. One of the things I focused on coming into the 

PRT was basically improving the quality of life. I mean, I 

think every commander coming in was eventually doing 

that. So, that took a lot of our time. I tasked my NCOIC 

[noncommissioned officer in charge] to work on that, 

along with my XO [executive officer], Maj. Andy Mazerik. 

So, he was responsible for basically coordinating with my 

chief groundskeeper, who was a local Afghan, who actually 

went into Kabul and bought us supplies and did this kind of 

thing for us—anything we couldn’t get through the military 

supply system—and basically kept the camp running for 

us.

We would cook breakfast in the morning. We had Army 

cooks there. There were three to four Army cooks assigned 

at any given time. So, we would cook the breakfast meal. We 

would have an MRE [Meal, Ready to Eat] or just whatever 

we could lay out for lunch, and then a cooked meal in the 

evening. Most of the day, in the morning time, roughly 
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about nine-thirty to ten, the civil-military operations 

center, which was another one of my majors, led his team 

out to man the CMOC, which was located in the governor’s 

compound in Gardiz, and that was their place of duty from 

basically ten until about four in the afternoon. They would 

handle anything that came in, any locals. Once they got 

established and word started getting out, individuals would 

come into them and use them as a conduit through the 

governor; or, if they had any other particular needs, or if 

there is collateral damage or anything else that they thought 

they could submit a claim to the government, they would 

come to the CMOC. Back at the PRT, our other teams were 

going out on assessments—either, one, they were going 

out on assessments; or they were going out and QA and 

QC, which is quality assurance/quality control on existing 

projects that were already being built. They were going out 

and inspecting those sites and making sure that they were 

staying within the standards that we wanted to have, based 

on the contract that we had agreed upon, and basically 

making payments to the contractor so he could pay his 

workers on an intermittent basis. Then, also, continued 

on with more route reconnaissance, looking for our ODA. 

We had one ODA team that was located in the PRT. It was 

a National Guard team, and they would go out and do 

basically split-base operations. They would have one team 

would go out and recon a route to a particular area that 

we wanted to go out and do an assessment on. They would 

plug all that information into their GPS, come back, back 

brief us on the routes and everything and whom they stayed 

with and all that. They made arrangements with the Afghan 

National Security Force in the area, district subgovernors, 

whoever they could talk to about places for us to stay along 

the way. And then, we would take another team out with 

the other half of the ODA and go out. Again, they would 

provide security for us at the time. The base defense guys 

would remain at the PRT because they couldn’t exceed a 

ten-kilometer radius outside the PRT That was their fence, 

basically. And then, we would take the ODA out and go out 

on these long-range patrols and conduct assessments.

Periodically, I would meet once a week with the governor. 

That was typically on a Monday or a Tuesday, to try to set, 

basically, what priorities we had in mind and what the central 

government was looking at and trying to coordinate those 

things. We identified some of the issues that he was dealing 

with on a day-to-day basis, which there were a myriad of 

those. And, along with that, we would also meet typically 

on Wednesday or Thursday, with the local UNAMA office, 

United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, right 

there in Gardiz. I can tell you, we had a fantastic relationship 

with that organization, with the people that worked there, 

because through establishing that relationship, we were to 

gain information on the other NGOs [nongovernmental 

organizations] and what they were doing out on the ground, 
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because typically they would not associate with us, would 

not talk to us, for obvious reasons, and the only way we 

could get information on their projects and what they were 

working on so we could de-conflict these things and not 

have any redundancy was to go through the UNAMA office 

and have a good relationship with them.

Toward the end of the day, teams started coming in, and 

typically we would have a meeting around 1800 or 1900 at 

night. It was a daily staff meeting, and we would do that in 

the mess hall, and we would go over basically everything 

that happened during the day—anything that the governor 

had brought up, any other priorities that we might have—

and each representative, all my civilian counterparts, would 

give their part of it; my civil affairs teams that were out on 

the ground and recon and did their assessments, brought 

back their findings; and then, the CMOC, what they had 

dealt with during the day and so on. So, that worked very 

well. We had a pretty good situational awareness and 

understanding of what was going on.

The big issue, though, at the time, was, we didn’t have any 

money. CERP was not available to us. I had lobbied for 

nine months at the time I was there on the ground to get 

CERP funds for the PRTs. Just prior to my redeployment, 

CERP money was authorized and approved for the PRTs. 

Typically, it was available to maneuver commanders and for 

black operations, or OGA [other governmental agencies], 

whoever else was operating out there. They had that money 

any time they wanted it. But it didn’t make any sense for 

us. We had very limited funds in OHDACA at the time 

allocated to us, and so we were reliant on some other source 

of funding that we could use, and CERP was it, and there 

wasn’t any reason in my mind at why the PRT couldn’t have 

this money and use it because there were many times when 

we would get out to areas and need this type of funding 

to put in a well—especially wells, more than anything else. 

A $3,500 to $5,000 well was typically what you would put 

in with CERP money or repairing some infrastructure that 

critical infrastructure that needed it in the town that was 

destroyed or damaged. So, that was probably one of our 

biggest challenges initially.

DR. MUNDEY: Did the USAID representative have access to funds at 

this time?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Very limited access. A lot of these funds were still tied up 

in whatever litigation they were tied up in or how they were 

going to disperse them throughout the country. We weren’t 

seeing much of that, other than the projects we were already 

managing that had been established. Again, those were 

not CERP funds. They were OHDACA-funded projects, 

through USAID. So, there was a lot of further assessment 

going on, setting priorities, trying to figure out what areas 
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we could go to next, and then identifying those needs out 

there and then kind of setting ourselves up for “Okay, we’re 

gonna wait for this bucket to turn over and all this money 

starts flowing to us.” That did not happen until—about the 

same time the CERP approval came down, these funds 

called Economic Support Funds were funneled down, and 

at the time, it was going to be upwards of $60 million that 

was going to be funneled throughout Afghanistan and we 

were going to get our lion’s share of that in Gardiz, based 

on the success we had with the projects in the areas that we 

had assigned priorities to back then. If I would have stayed 

another six months, you know, or another year, I could have 

really seen a lot more progress, I think, with the inclusion 

of those particular funds to really do something in a timely 

manner. It was very frustrating for us to go through, and I 

mentioned earlier about the painfulness of this contracting 

process—to understand it and the slowness of how it 

worked and go through this. And once you looked at the 

timeline you would typically have six months within the 

time that you identified a project and the time that it was 

completed. That was anything from a well to a one-story 

school—something that was pretty rudimentary. Structures 

and they were—once people got on the ground and started 

working, you could complete them pretty quickly. But 

the funding process and the inspections and the bidding, 

everything that went along with that just took an inordinate 

amount of time, especially with the contract itself and the 

legalities of the contract, making sure it was exactly right. 

One of the things that I kept expressing to the [C]JCMOTF 

commander when we would go up once a quarter for our 

PRT meetings up in Bagram was “You know, we’re trying 

to apply a twenty-first century template to a country that 

is two hundred years behind us, and we have to adjust.” 

Understanding we are dealing with funds and we have to 

be accountable for those funds, but we have to adjust for 

those things, and, you know, in that environment, to speed 

up the process, because one of the biggest challenges I had 

there was managing expectations of the local populace. You 

know, when you go out there and you talk to them, they 

expect a lot from you. The Americans have all the money, 

and they expect you to deliver. If you say anything—“I’m 

going to go back and check on this. I’ll get back with you”—

everything becomes a promise to them. So, when you come 

back, they don’t expect an answer from the first question 

they gave you in the first meeting. They expect you to 

bring money and have guys behind you ready to build, and 

they thought the Army was going to do that. So, we had 

to really make them understand; and also, legitimize the 

district subgovernors, who were typically appointed and 

not necessarily from the area, as a voice and as somewhat 

part of the central government influence and authority that 

would come down and provide them these assets so that 

we could put an Afghan face on everything we did. That 

was a huge challenge. Not having the funds to do that made 
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it very frustrating on the ground to deal with, especially 

when you go back and second and third time to deal with 

these large tribal groups, you know, that we are doing all 

the right things, that we are eradicating poppy, that we are 

ensuring stability in their areas, and you couldn’t provide 

them anything tangible. It was very, very difficult and very 

hard to swallow.

DR. MUNDEY: You mentioned difficulties with the contracting process. 

Did you find any problems dealing with an uneducated 

population with regard to that?

LT. COL. HUNTER: No, but with the typical graft and corruption that goes 

along with any kind of business transactions you could 

do in the country. We had to be careful of that because 

when we had the bidding process, guys would change. 

They would submit bids for projects under a different 

name, which would be a relative of the original person 

that would submit another bid. So, it took us a little bit 

to kind of catch these things. But once we identified 

who these people were and, through representatives 

that we had in the government working for us, too, then 

we could understand who was not playing equitably 

and who was trying to cheat the system. At times, we 

would go out, and clearly they would not meet the 

construction requirements. Now, obviously, Afghan 

construction requirements are not anywhere close to 

what we have here in the United States—I mean, that is 

understandable—but you can hold them to some kind 

of standard based on the materials that are available to 

them and the technologies available to them at the time. 

A lot of these guys would try to get away with some real 

shoddy work and then plead ignorance and this type of 

thing, and you could literally push some of that, and my 

guys were pretty tenacious. My civil affairs team leaders 

that would go down there were—and my engineer that 

I had assigned to me, too; he was an Army engineer. 

They’d go out there and just literally push down walls 

in schools and explain to these guys, “This is not the 

kind of quality we are needing.” You know, the bricks 

that they fired or the cinderblock bricks that they made 

up were just crumbling in our hands, and we saw that on 

more than one occasion, that we had to literally just tear 

down entire walls and foundations and just start from 

scratch. So, those type of things just ended up costing 

more money. They knew what they were doing. They 

were pretty good business people. They are shrewd. But 

the graft is part of the process. I mean, it is natural, there 

are kickbacks involved. Everybody gets paid off one way 

or the other. We just had to really watch that part of it 

and keep control of it. I mean, there was no way we were 

going to stop it. We knew that was just a way of life there. 

But to limit it to something reasonable in that process 

was helpful.
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Where we dealt with uneducated people—when we got into 

some of the deep rural areas doing our assessments, we had 

some—it was frustrating at times trying to explain to them 

this process. I mean, we couldn’t just show up with money 

and a guy and a truck and a digging outfit and start going 

at it and dig this tube well. It was more complicated than 

that. I think they realized some of that. But it goes back 

to managing those expectations and understanding and 

explaining to this population, this uneducated population 

that, you know, “This is what we can do for you, but it is 

going to take some time, you know? Don’t expect it right 

away. And, we need your help, too, in this respect, to find 

individuals that could be in part of the bidding process, 

local contractors that you know, guys that do building, a 

guy that you trust. Send them to us. Get them involved in 

the process, and we’ll get this project going.” So, I think 

once they understood a lot of that process, they were 

understanding—not necessarily patient, but they were at 

least understanding in what we were going through.

DR. MUNDEY: How far out were your CA assessment teams able to go, 

since you said you had an area about the size of South 

Carolina?

LT. COL. HUNTER: I mean, typical trips went up to—when we started out from 

the east, we would go up to the border area in Khowst and 

up in the northern part of Khowst. We were required once 

a month to go—and this is a requirement that was levied 

to us by CJTF-180 [Combined Joint Task Force-180]—to 

coordinate with the Pakistani border guards, and we did a 

couple of visits up there, just basically to see what was going 

on, the issues and problems they had and report back. But 

on the way, we’d do assessments all the way to the border in 

those areas, and those trips typically took about six hours 

one way, and you are talking about only sixty kilometers, 

seventy kilometers, but an inordinate amount of time 

to traverse the terrain because it was so difficult, and the 

elevations involved. Out to the south, we went down as 

far as about three-quarters of the way down into Paktika, 

out in the middle of just absolute barren desert. We didn’t 

see it fruitful to go much farther because, at that particular 

time, there were fuel issues that we were dealing with, 

issues of security. We didn’t know exactly what the security 

situation was down there. We were kind of vulnerable in 

that position. We did have communications and the ODA 

that was with us, but we were a small group, and we could 

have easily been interdicted and our guys could have gotten 

hurt if we would have pushed it too hard. We did cover a lot 

of ground in a lot of the northern and central part of that 

province.

Then, on to Ghazni, we established a good relationship—

and Chris Allen can be attributed to a lot of this; he really 

established a strong relationship with the governors in the 
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area. Asad Ullah Khalid was the governor in Ghazni at the 

time, who is now the governor of Kandahar. He was very 

pro-Karzai, pro-American, could speak English, educated. 

He assisted us and actually took us out to areas, far areas, 

out in the southwestern part of Ghazni that we surveyed. 

We had to cut one of those trips off short. What made it 

difficult after the new regime came in, I should say, after 

some of the—before the transition to CJTF-76 [Combined 

Joint Task Force-76], when General [Lt. Gen. David W.] 

Barno got on the ground, they started tightening up our 

span of influence. We were restricted to a ten-kilometer 

area, just like the base defense guys were, and that really 

threw up a red flag for us because we had projects that were 

outside of this area that we could no longer touch unless we 

went through—and then we had to go through a normal 

CONOP [contingency operation] process to get approvals 

for our convoy operations that were going out and how long 

they were and everything else. Well, when you have got 

operations like Dragon Fury going on, we were basically 

shut down. We were, you know, “Stay in the camp. Don’t 

go anywhere until this is over with. And then, if anything 

breaks, you guys are going to go out and fix it.” So, that really 

limited us and what we could do. Well, that kind of carried 

on after that operation, and that really never got resolved, 

even until the day I left, of trying to expand this influence 

again, because at that time they were looking at forming 

additional PRTs above the five that they had, established in 

those locations that we already were. And also, for me, to 

go out and recon a location in Ghazni, which I established 

the PRT in Ghazni, also. So, that really, really put kind of a 

crimp in our operations at the time, and I don’t know if we 

ever got around that. There was a lot more control over and 

a lot more visibility with the maneuver commanders on 

the ground when they started these regional development 

zones, of where we could go and what we could do. And 

then our team started getting split up to man these new 

PRT locations. So, that really changed the whole dynamic 

of things. So, a lot of the contacts I have made and a lot of 

the outreach that I had made and all the assessments I had 

made in these far areas, I could no longer touch for quite 

some time. It was now going to be the responsibility of the 

new PRTs, once they got established and established their 

rings of influence to go out and do that.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, given the fact that you had restrictions on 

funding and then literally restrictions on the geographic 

location that you could go out to, what would you say 

were the biggest projects that you ended up doing while 

you were there? 

LT. COL. HUNTER: A couple of the largest projects we had—two of them right 

there in Gardiz, actually. The large, high-dollar projects 

were focused in the provincial capital in Gardiz, and the 

teacher training institute was one of them. It was a large 
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498

project funded, over $100,000; and then there was about 

$200,000, I think, that was put into the all-girls school, 

basically, an all-female, very large school that was built 

in the town there. Basically, we got an old Soviet building 

that we refurbished. This wasn’t a ground-up build like the 

teacher training institute, which was a ground-up build. We 

had the only central government–sanctioned, U.S.-funded 

girls school that was there. I had a good relationship with 

the teacher training institute. They would supply those 

female teachers to go and occupy that school and train 

there. So, those were the two major projects. Everything 

else was smaller projects, schools and clinics in the area. 

There were some bridges. There were a couple of projects, 

roughly in the $40,000 to $60,000 range, that were bridge 

reconstruction projects. They were already identified 

and ongoing when we assumed the PRT, and those were 

OHDACA-funded USAID projects that we still had the 

responsibility for monitoring and reporting back. Those 

reports would be conducted and written up by the USAID 

rep to provide that information. So, we kind of managed 

them and we were kind of the transportation for him to 

get out and look at these sites, but he would provide those 

reports back. When we were developing the economic 

support funds or earmarking priorities for those, we were 

looking at ... and we were really kind of left up to our own 

devices, the PRT commanders, to determine where was the 

best place, in conjunction with rural reconstruction and 

development programs that were coming out of Kabul and 

what the central government wanted us to do, but we were 

really focusing and left to our own devices on coming up 

with priorities in our AOs [areas of operations]. I focused 

predominantly on district infrastructure. We had about, I 

think, about $50 million, of which we were probably going 

to get $10 million to $15 million of that for our area, and 

I was going to focus that almost entirely on building up 

that district infrastructure—the judicial system and the 

court system, part of that in Gardiz, some of the provincial 

structure there, but predominantly to the districts; building 

up the police stations, building up the district centers, the 

local judicial systems right there in the districts because 

in my mind, at that time, I thought, “If we lose districts 

out here, we lose that connection. We are going to lose the 

country and it will remain unstable because that influence 

has to extend out, and we have to give that power to that 

provincial government to be able to do that.” And then it 

was focusing on district structures and focusing on the 

immediate impact needs—the wells, these type of things, 

survival. I should say that was first in the districts. And 

then after that was the roads, the feeder roads that came off 

of Ring Road and connected everything together.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. What was the status of the Afghan National 

Police and Afghan National Army [ANA] at the time 

you were there?
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Security and Assistance

LT. COL. HUNTER: In fact, we maintained a close relationship. One of the 

Afghan security force commanders was there. He was one 

of the corrupt commanders that was dealing with Pacha 

Khan Zadran, the two that were infighting together. 

Eventually, Kabul relieved him and sent him away and got 

rid of the police chief. These two guys were in cahoots, 

basically, and got rid of these two guys and sent a new 

governor down, and a new chief of police. These two guys 

came in with a whole new idea of how they were going 

to resolve issues. The governor was very keen on having 

the tribes resolve their own issues, empowering the police 

to enforce. But the biggest problem with the police—and 

this is how we got involved, because a lot of my guys were 

law enforcement guys, and so they had a propensity to 

gravitate toward the police and help them with their issues 

and problems. One of the major projects we were funding 

in town for them was the police headquarters building, 

which needed about $90,000 worth of reconstruction, 

and then just outfitting them with equipment, weapons, 

belts—with everything they needed, transportation, 

trucks. The German government was providing a lot of 

the transportation of the vehicles for them through the 

Law and Order Trust Fund. But we established a good, 

strong relationship with those guys, and they basically 

provided security in the town itself. During the voter 

registration process, which we got involved with, with 

DDR [disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of 

militias], that process, we were very close in coordinating 

with the local police on those issues. So, we had a good, 

strong relationship with the chief of police and his guys.

With the ANA, during the latter part of my tenure there, 

the kandak battalion was moved into the Gardiz PRT 

area, between the two compounds. So, at any one time 

we had roughly a company-minus or so of ANA guys out 

patrolling, and they would predominantly do operations 

with [C]JSOTF. Now, prior to this, I would take—I had 

fifty Afghan security force guys that we were employing 

for just basically base defense, outside the wire, basically, 

maintaining the two access points coming in on the paved 

road that was running alongside the PRT compound going 

from Gardiz to Khowst. These guys, we would take out on 

patrols with us for extra security. I stopped that when the 

ANA got on the ground, and I started pulling ANA squads 

and sticking those guys with us because they were the true, 

legitimate representative of the government’s new fledgling 

army. That worked out very well, because now, especially 

in the rural areas, the remote areas, people would say, you 

know, “Who are these guys with the different uniforms? 

Who are they?” “Well, this is your army. This is the Afghan 

National Army.” “Oh, I didn’t know we had an army.” So, we 

made amazing inways into these tribal structures and into 

these local government structures by showing them that 

“The central government is there, and they’re out here to 
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help you.” So, we got those guys very closely involved. And, 

again, the police would have the inner cordon, basically, of 

voter registration processes; and then DDR processes, the 

same thing; and then the Afghan National Army we had 

available—whoever was available at the time would do the 

outer cordon for these areas, and the PRT would function 

in the liaison capacity and observe and report on the whole 

process and what was going on. So, it worked out very well. 

We were very close-knit with both those organizations.

DR. MUNDEY: Were there any other Coalition groups that you worked 

with?

LT. COL. HUNTER: No. When I made a couple of my trips out to Khowst, I 

went over to Salerno and I met with the Task Force Nibbio 

commander and talked to him. Basically, I told him who 

I was. You know, he knows I had a team down there in 

Chapman operating adjacent to OGA and the Special 

Forces guys there, and so we established that relationship, 

and anything they needed, and vice versa. But it just so 

happened that they concentrated predominantly in that 

area. We provided them information on what we found out 

there through our assessments—tribal rivalries, whom you 

could trust, whom you couldn’t, who was going to give you 

trouble, what were the areas they could focus on. So, we 

provided them information in that respect that they didn’t 

really have on the ground for when they were conducting 

their operations. So, that part was good. But as far as the 

reconstruction side of the house, they had their own funds. 

We coordinated these things and we were aware, and so 

we could de-conflict, but they had their own funds that 

they were using to work on projects there. We used them 

as a liaison to the small UN field office that was out there 

to gain more information on what they were funding and 

what UN was funding and that type of thing. That was 

probably the most fruitful part of that particular meeting. 

But other than that, they were never in—you know, they 

never moved farther to the west into our area. They mostly 

stayed in Khowst.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Now, you had mentioned the poppy fields before. 

Was there anything that you did for counternarcotics? I 

know that that had always been kind of a sticky situation 

of “What are we going to do, what we are not going to do, 

with that?”

LT. COL. HUNTER: The Brits really have the charter for counternarcotics. 

Ours was mostly of awareness and reporting of where 

these patches and where these fields were, where the 

predominant growth was. The Department of State rep that 

I had with me was keenly interested in it, as most of the 

ambassadors at the time coming through there, especially 

Ambassador [William B.] Taylor. Originally, Chris Allen 

took Ambassador Taylor out to these locations, showed 
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him the fields and what was going on, and then also showed 

him the tribes that were not involved in the poppy growing 

and that “Here is where we have an opportunity to provide 

reconstruction funding. Provide projects to these tribes 

and show the other tribes that ‘Hey, if you cooperate with 

the government and you eradicate poppy and you keep the 

place stable and provide your own security, this is what you 

are going to get.’” That is kind of the—you know, the carrotand-stick kind of approach we took to this thing. So, in 

the area in Gardiz, around northern part of Gardiz, it was 

mostly hashish that was growing in those areas, and not so 

much poppy. You would see poppy in the valleys heading 

out toward Khowst and all through that area, and then 

you’d see some more in Ghazni, but more hashish in Ghazni 

than anything else that I saw. We were also privy—and just 

because of my law enforcement guys were interested in this 

type of stuff, too—we were privy to those seizures that were 

made by the local police because we had already established 

that close relationship with them. We knew what they were 

taking and how much of it they were taking and providing 

that information back, and because we were in the loop of 

identifying and were aware of these things, we could report 

that up. That was reported to the central government, 

into MOI, so they were aware of it, too, so that hopefully 

nothing was missing between the time this was confiscated 

and the time it was sent back to Kabul to be destroyed. So, 

that was two people reporting on it. It was not only the 

local police through their chain of command, but we were 

also putting pressure on MOI to say, “Hey, this is what we 

saw down there. Your guys did a great job, and make sure 

it gets up to Kabul and gets taken care of.” But we weren’t 

really involved in it, necessarily, I mean, we didn’t touch at 

all any kind of eradication process. It was just a twinkle in 

somebody’s eye at the time, I think, at that particular time, 

someone wrestling with the idea of how they were going 

to deal with this. The way we dealt with it was typically by, 

you know, co-opting those tribes that were not part of that 

process, who were not involved, with appealing to their 

Islamic faith—you know, the tenets of the faith and not to 

get involved with drugs, not only consuming it, but altering 

the mind and all this kind of stuff from a religious aspect, 

and then providing reconstruction that way. So, that part 

of it worked. Specifically, the Mangal tribe is one of the 

larger tribes in the area, influence of about four districts. 

I had control of four districts, and I influenced about four 

more, and there wasn’t any poppy in any of those districts. 

You could see a line between that district and the next tribe 

over where poppy was growing where we focused a lot of 

our efforts. But, then again, the frustrating part came in ... 

I could talk the talk a lot of that, but I couldn’t back it up 

with funding at the time, a lot of funding, so things kind of 

trickled in. So, we really had to keep those guys close and 

then kind of feed them as much as we could to keep them 

on the line so we could get projects to them, so we could 
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502

keep their interest and patience as they continued on with 

keeping the poppies out of the area. A lot of it was growing 

there.

DR. MUNDEY: Were you involved in any of the combat operations in the 

area?

LT. COL. HUNTER: No. We had to interject ourselves into [C]JSOTF and what 

was going on with their operations because we never knew, 

and we wanted to make sure we weren’t crossing over each 

other at the time. We went through the CONOP approval 

process. So, it was two different requests going up to 

headquarters, you know, through the [C]JSOTF chain and 

through the conventional chain, but sometimes—and there 

was some de-confliction that went on there, but we never 

really knew what was going on and where they were at, so, 

daily, we would meet with those guys and they would brief 

us on what they were doing, after we established some of 

this relationship and kind of broke the trust barrier kind 

of thing. We had some difficulties with that early on, but 

kind of got through that and worked it out. Then they were 

able to share a little more information, and they knew 

that we were a force multiplier for them because, if they 

ended up destroying something through collateral damage, 

they would have to turn to us to fix it. No longer did they 

have their civil affairs teams, those original teams we were 

talking about, associated with them anymore. Those were 

all farmed out to the PRTs and to the new PRTs that were 

setting up and expanding, so they had to look to those 

PRTs to provide what I called “soothing operations,” where 

we would go out and if there was—in fact, we had two 

incidents that occurred, one of them in Ghazni, and one 

of them in the east, where an A–10 strike on two different 

compounds had killed some family members. And so, we 

had to go out and start the process of payments and offering 

humanitarian assistance and supplies to these families, you 

know, and talk to the tribes about our regret in these type of 

actions and everything else and try to basically soothe their 

minds. That worked very well, and they started to depend 

on us some more and more to do that. I think they, at the 

same time, became more cognizant of the impact of some of 

these operations and what they had done to the populace to 

lead them against what they were doing. I mean, if anybody 

are professionals of counterinsurgency, they are, but they 

also like to break a lot of things, and then we always had to 

go in and fix a lot of those things, too. So, kind of maintain 

those close relationships that we had with the tribes.

DR. MUNDEY: So, you would characterize your relationship with the 

Afghan people as fairly good?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Oh, yeah, I think so. You know, when we got into the south 

of Paktika, you could tell the Taliban flavor, even in the 

provincial government in Sharan. You could tell one day 
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they were Taliban, and one day they were progovernment, 

depending on who was arriving at their doorstep and who 

was putting pressure on them—no open hostility, but you 

knew that there was that part of them that existed. But for 

the most part, everywhere we went—and this is part of 

Pashtunwali and part of understanding the culture—they 

accepted you into their homes; they fed you; they lodged 

you for the evening; they provided security for you, doing 

all these things knowing that, you know, you come there 

in goodwill. But it boiled down to three things: respect, 

respect, and respect. If you would give that to them, show 

them their worth and you were there to help them, I 

mean, they would just about give the shirt off their back, 

not only in providing you with the things I mentioned, 

but also providing you with information on what was 

going on, not just telling you what you wanted to hear. 

That was part of building this relationship. It was critically 

important to be able to get that trust out so that we could 

get verifiable information from them and not just what we 

wanted to hear. I had a THT, a Tactical HUMINT [human 

intelligence] Team that was also assigned, attached from 

[C]JSOTF—assigned to [C]JSOTF, but attached to me on 

the ground working. So, I had a good relationship with 

these guys. They were out, obviously taking their taskings 

from their operational maneuver element in Bagram, but 

we also communicated on a daily basis. They back-briefed 

me on some of their sources and operations that were going 

on so that we could provide them the latitude where they 

could operate, but also supplement, and we had some of 

their guys also man the CMOC. As people came in, they 

would provide information. They would interview them 

and stuff like that.

And then we had tactical PSYOPS [psychological 

operations] team on the ground, also with us that was on 

loan from [C]JSOTF, and I would use them to coordinate 

and produce small and low-level leaflets, communications. 

One in particular that came to mind was the children in 

town were buying a lot of the toy guns that were made 

in China. They looked like little miniature AKs and little 

machine guns. They were black. I mean pistols, too, and 

they would run out in the streets and stuff and they would, 

you know, “bang, bang, bang” and they would point them 

at us. Well, our guys were getting kind of nervous because 

you never knew when one of these kids was actually going 

to haul out a real weapon. So, we had to communicate 

with the governor in this respect and also put out leaflets 

and distribute those out to the parents and everybody else 

that “Hey, this is dangerous for your children.” Finally, the 

governor took it upon himself just basically to make the 

store owners take all these products out of their stores and 

not sell them at all. I mean, it was either black or white. 

There wasn’t nothing in between. I mean, that’s the way 

he was, and that’s the way he would do things—to our 
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benefit, in that particular case. But that worked very well. 

And they would also, at times, during the voter registration 

process or during DDR, they could use their loudspeaker to 

provide information. We would put an interpreter in there 

with them and provide any information for crowd control 

and anything else they would get involved with. So, they 

were very valuable in that respect. So, they were part of that 

structure, too, that I talked about earlier. I failed to mention 

those two critical aspects of it. 

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, how did you end up in Ghazni?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Well, Ghazni was—obviously, because it was part of our 

responsibility, but as they were looking at expanding the 

number of PRTs on the ground, basically we were charged 

with conducting a reconnaissance of an area to place 

the PRT, and that is really all it was. In conjunction and 

coordination with the governor there—who we already 

had a great relationship with—he took us out one day 

and gave us about five different options of where we could 

site the actual facility. And then, finally we settled on one 

location that was pretty close to the Ring Road that was 

being built there, and that is where it stands today. So, 

we had the incoming teams that were coming in with the 

364th Civil Affairs Brigade that replaced us. Some of their 

teams were already being earmarked to go down and man 

that PRT, so they were actually building and assessing and 

doing everything at the same time. So, they really had a big 

project ahead of them, but we kind of laid the groundwork 

in the facility and set up the contracting and that type of 

stuff, and getting the funding to provide the support they 

needed to get that place built up to some kind of living 

standard and conditions, and the force protection that went 

along with it. The PRT was also established in Khowst, at 

a different location, I think, out—I think it was a different 

location outside of Chapman. But I let my guys determine 

where they wanted to site that because they had a good 

relationship with the Italians over there and with any other 

U.S. forces that were operating at Chapman. And then the 

team in Shkin—we never got far enough to where we were 

going to establish—there was talk about establishing a PRT 

in Sharan in Paktika, but that never materialized while I 

was there. It is now. It is existing now there, but they would 

have been the team that was responsible for setting that up. 

We had already established some communication with the 

provincial government there, but they were very weak and 

very prone to Taliban influence at the time. They were kind 

of the people we didn’t put a lot of emphasis with, and we 

told them that. You know, it was like, “You know, you are 

not doing enough to stabilize your area. There are a lot of 

issues about corruption and these type of things that we 

are aware of, and we are not going to provide you anything 

until we can get more cooperation.” We went down there 

to visit a hospital one time, and they nearly kicked us out 
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of there. I mean, they just didn’t want us there at all, and so 

we really felt something going on there that was not right. 

So, we kind of pushed them off and forgot them, left them 

off to the side for a while. And then, I think there was also 

talk about establishing a PRT up in Lowghar area, or in 

Wardak, and I think there is one now being established in 

Wardak, north of us and south of Kabul. All those had an 

impact on how many of my guys were starting to be taken 

away from me to man these other PRTs before we were 

redeployed because there was a lag time between a couple 

of the teams that I received from a different battalion and 

they stayed a little bit longer after I left, as new teams came 

in, because they weren’t originally part of the 321st or the 

1st Brigade. They were outside from another brigade, so 

their deployment times were just a little bit different, off 

about thirty to forty days. 

DR. MUNDEY: At what point did you leave? What date?

LT. COL. HUNTER: It was ... let me see ... right around the twelfth of February, 

I think it was. Right around that time frame, the twelfth or 

fourteenth of February, we redeployed.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. So, as you were leaving, what was the state of 

affairs? What was still left to do?

LT. COL. HUNTER: Well, it was actually a good news story. We had a lot of 

the areas already assessed. Even though we were, kind of, 

were still restricted, you know, as far as our movement 

was concerned, we had the assessments out. The projects 

were already there being built. Now we had the economic 

support funds coming down, being approved. We had a 

CERP that was being approved, so the funding was there. 

So, the new commander was basically set up to go ahead and 

run with that, and the priorities were already established 

in conjunction with the minister of rural reconstruction 

and development on what we were going to do for the 

districts and go forward. So, everything was looking very 

well. Camp improvements, by far, were going a lot stronger. 

We had built we had an old tent, an old GP Medium tent 

there, where we had our gym inside, and we built a new 

hard facility inside the compound itself where we were 

going to house our new gym. And then next to that, we 

were going to build an identical facility where we could 

have just for briefings and our meetings and all the visitors 

that were coming in because we knew that we were still 

located where we were located and there were still going 

to be more people coming out to visit us. Along with our 

hardstand mess hall that we had built previously, digging 

another well into the compound itself. So, all those plans 

were coming to fruition—building harder structures with 

the base defense guys who were just located outside the 

PRT building itself, improving their living conditions and 

their security and their force protection, constant camp 
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improvements. I think by the time that our replacements 

came in we conducted about two weeks of right-seat ride 

and prepared them very well for what we knew of the 

existing situation at the time and what we had to focus on. 

Now, equally as important, force protection as it was, and 

the contracting aspect and all the things we learned there. 

And what our engineer had done, and, by the way, who 

had developed three basically standing drafting templates 

for us to use for small, medium, and large schools, where 

none existed before, where we could go right in and apply 

this particular template to it. We knew how much it cost, 

and we knew how much materials were involved in it and 

how much time it would take, so it really streamlined the 

process, and everything was already preapproved and ready 

to go. So, kudos to my engineer for doing that and trying to 

streamline this agonizing process. So, a lot of those things 

helped set up the new guys for success, I think.

DR. MUNDEY: Great. You had mentioned earlier that you detected a 

change when General Barno arrived. Could you just talk 

a little bit more of what your understanding of echelons 

above you, what was going on? What the priorities 

were?

LT. COL. HUNTER: I think his main priority was establishing of the 

redevelopment zones, establishing these brigade sectors. 

He also knew that there was going to be expansion of the 

PRTs. So, now he had the challenge of trying to determine 

where these bodies were coming from that were going 

to man these PRTs because the civil affairs units were 

basically tapped out. Iraq was starting up now. A lot of 

the civil affairs units were earmarked for Iraq and brought 

into that picture, so we kind of had to figure out the system 

of robbing Peter to pay Paul. So, the PRTs—essentially 

existing PRTs, the U.S. ones, were starting to be gutted of 

teams. When it came down to leaving one team left with me 

physically on the ground, where I had five before, who were 

going out to man these other locations? And then, trying 

to determine back at CONUS, USACAPOC was pulling 

their hair out, trying to determine where we are going to 

get these individual augmentees that we talked about at 

the very beginning to man these organizations. And then, 

now that whole system has changed into sister services, you 

know, actually conducting PRT missions now to support 

the lack of civil affairs guys that were available. But, so, I 

think his focus really was—I mean, obviously you had a 

force protection issue that he had to deal with. The situation 

was getting a little bit more tenuous, at least in the east, 

based on Mountain Lion and those type of operations 

that were getting ready to go on and were ongoing. So, at 

that time the south was fairly quiet. There was not a whole 

lot going on there. The east was where a lot of trouble was 

going on, and Khowst was always volatile, with a lot of the 

cross-border moves and cross-border attacks that were 
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going on there. So, that is—I think he focused more on the 

operational aspect of that. And then, you know, the PRT 

was a side note. So, we were kind of restricted on where 

we could go and what we could do in that time frame. So, 

not having that money was available to us, and then being 

restricted in that respect, really kind of shut down some 

operations. Over the last few months that we were there, 

it was pretty tough, and it really kind of shut down a lot of 

things that we were doing, but there are reasons for all that. 

I don’t fault the higher headquarters for any of that. I mean, 

the money situation, the funding was all happening back 

here. Those issues had to be resolved. They were complex 

issues that had to be resolved. We know that funding and 

getting that money in takes time. So, we were just in that 

particular time, you know, that it—there, where we just had 

that gap, and we had to deal with it. We had to do the best 

we could with what we had.

DR. MUNDEY: Right. Okay. Do you have a funny story about when you 

were in Afghanistan?

LT. COL. HUNTER: The only one I could really ... well, there are probably 

quite a few, but, I mean, they are probably something you 

wouldn’t want to publish. Probably the one that was just 

most ironic to me was, you know, we had touted with a lot 

of the visitors that came that the area was pretty stable and 

quiet, and we had basically unfettered access all over our 

five-province AOR—you know, freedom of movement. It 

was great. We had great relationships with the tribes and all 

that stuff. Well, we took, I think it was, an ABC News team 

out to one of our schools that was right there in Gardiz. 

It was probably about twelve kilometers from the PRT 

compound. Everything was going great, and they were out 

there looking at the school site, and all of a sudden, they 

took on some small-arms fire. Somebody was pot-shotting 

at the school itself, and our guys that were out there. It was 

so ironic because nothing had happened to us for such a 

long time that we thought that the press might have had 

something to do with it and set it up just to make it look 

good for TV because it was so boring for them just to see 

this school being built. But, so that was kind of a local 

joke amongst us in the compound was, they had some 

hand in paying some guys off: “Hey, take some pot shots 

in our direction. Don’t shoot at us, but just make it look 

like it.” But there were rounds that were impacting around 

the schoolhouse, and we knew that we were being fired 

upon. So, in that particular case, more of my guys earned 

the combat action badge in that particular incident. So, 

that was kind of funny, if you can think of it being funny. 

I mean, nobody was hurt, thank God, in that respect, but 

it was just really ironic that it just so happened the timing 

was just perfect at that time. So, it gave them a good story, 

you know? Here’s the guys out here, building a school right 

in the middle of a firefight [laughs]. So, good on them. But, 
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yeah, that was probably the most significant thing that I 

thought.

We did get rocketed a few times while we were out there, 

but it was almost comical to see that their lack of aim and 

discipline in that respect. I mean, they usually remotely 

fired anyway, and it was just like shooting bottle rockets and 

where they go is where they go. But we did have one that 

impacted the compound, the ANA compound, about two 

hundred meters out from our walls where the [inaudible] 

company had left the night prior to that. They had been 

occupying that particular tent that was hit. There would 

have been some casualties. So, we were very, very fortunate 

in that respect. But that was really the only anecdotal thing 

I could think of that was kind of funny. 

DR. MUNDEY: So, what do you want people to know about Afghanistan 

about the time that you were there, about your 

experience?

LT. COL. HUNTER: You know, the PRT is a proven concept. If there is anything 

I can say, the PRT is a proven concept. It works. As long 

as you provide the resources for it and give them the 

latitude to move around to conduct their assessments, 

to establish those relationships, you know, with the local 

government representatives and the tribal representatives 

that are out there, the concept works, and we need to 

continue to develop that into doctrine. We need to fund 

these PRTs and the organizations, whether it is through the 

State Department—get them involved heavily in Phase IV 

operations and the planning of that. Now that they are taking 

part in manning that is a great thing, too, because along 

with them and USAID—you know, they know how to take 

that into the next step as to building and reconstruction, 

which is a lot more becoming an Army function, but we 

are not necessarily really good at that. So, that is a way to do 

that. That is a means to an end, I think.

And the country itself more than anything is ... you know, we 

have got these canned briefings about the culture and what 

we should—the dos and don’ts about Arab culture and all 

this stuff, but you don’t really know any of that until you get 

on the ground and you start establishing these relationships 

and start talking to people and understanding where they 

are coming from and finding out that they are a lot like you. 

But having respect for them and understanding the culture 

from that ground perspective and being immersed in it is 

what really makes the difference and what really makes us a 

better organization to be able to deal with future events like 

these. The country is absolutely beautiful. It has been—it is 

war torn, you know, twenty years over. I mean, it is really 

unfortunate, but it has a lot of potential. And I think the 

people want it to go as long as we can produce for it. You 

know, part of it is managing those expectations, but you 
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need to be able to produce and provide that security and 

provide that reconstruction and those projects for them. 

And I think you will win them over. It is just going to take 

a while, and that is the key that, I think, a lot of people 

didn’t understand is, this is definitely not going to happen 

overnight. This is a long-term process. It is going to take a 

while.

There is a phrase that we like to use a lot. It was on the 

bottom of all my briefings, was “influence without 

occupation”—you know, do as much as we can to influence 

the situation there without physically being in their space is 

what we wanted to do, and that is kind of what we did in the 

PRT concept. We went out and we affected what we could, 

but when it was time to get out of their way and let them 

do, let them bring up and rebuild. That is what we did, and 

let them put their face on the situation. Great experience. I 

would do it again in a heartbeat. I really would.

DR. MUNDEY: Okay. Anything else you would like to say?

LT. COL. HUNTER: No, I think that is it. Thank you for giving me the 

opportunity.

DR. MUNDEY: Thank you very much. Your insights are going to help 

our study, without a doubt. Well, thank you, and this 

concludes our interview.

Mr. Raphael Carland, a former U.S. Army officer, served as the Department of State’s political adviser in the Farah Provincial Reconstruction Team from August to October 2005 and 

the Tarin Kowt Provincial Reconstruction Team from October 2005 to February 2006. He 

was interviewed at the U.S. Army Center of Military History by Christopher Koontz and 

Lisa Mundey on 20 December 2006. Raphael Carland discusses his educational and military 

experience before joining the Department of State and his decision to volunteer for provincial reconstruction team work in early 2005. After assignment to the Tarin Kowt Provincial 

Reconstruction Team and deploying to Kabul, he was diverted to Farah in August 2005 to 

assist with the impending parliamentary election. Mr. Carland provides a description of the 

team’s organization and its command relationships with Combined Joint Task Force-76 and 

the International Security Assistance Force. He also explains his duties as a civilian political 

adviser and the roles of other civilians in the team. Mr. Carland served as an election monitor during the election of September 2005, and he mentions the security measures and voting 

methods used by the Afghans for the election and arrives at a favorable evaluation of the 

election process. Farah was a relatively peaceful province, and Mr. Carland describes the ethnic customs and economic development of the local populace. After the election, Mr. Carland 

moved on to his original assignment in Tarin Kowt. The local government there was corrupt, the economy was primitive, and insurgents operated with greater frequency in Oruzgan 

Province than in Farah. In comparison to the low-level counternarcotics efforts in Farah, the 

Alternative Livelihoods Program was in place in Tarin Kowt, and the team worked with local 

government and mullahs to discourage poppy cultivation. At the conclusion of the interview, 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

510

Mr. Carland comments on the difficulty of evaluating the success of provincial reconstruction 

team missions and suggests changes to improve training and operations. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. This is Christopher Koontz of the U.S. Army 

Center of Military History. Today is the twentieth of 

December 2006. We are at the Center of Military History 

[CMH], and I’m interviewing Raphael Carland, who was 

a member of the provincial reconstruction teams [PRTs] 

in Farah and Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan, between August 

of 2005 and February of 2006. Also sitting in the room 

is Dr. Lisa Mundey, also of CMH. First of all, sir, are you 

sitting for this interview voluntarily?

MR. CARLAND: Yes.

DR. KOONTZ: All right. And do you have an objection with our using 

the material in this interview, as long as you’re cited 

correctly?

MR. CARLAND: No.

DR. KOONTZ: Thank you. Okay, what I’d like to have you do to start the 

interview is briefly discuss your professional background. 

How was it that you got into the PRT business?

MR. CARLAND: Originally, at the State Department, they had been interested 

and made an open Afghan desk in what had been South 

Asia Bureau, which is now the South Central Asia Bureau. 

They had let the word go out that they were looking for 

candidates to fill the PRTs at the State Department political 

officer position, and since then there were many positions 

that were relatively new and they were kind of out of sync 

with—they were one-year assignments. They were out of 

sync with the two-year bid process for the foreign service 

officers. They were struggling to react to this, and they 

weren’t, I think, completely sure what kind of folks they were 

looking for at the time. So, they put out the word they were 

really interested in former military, and they were looking 

for people to come in and fill as much time as they could. So, 

I, as a civil servant, as part of this Presidential Management 

Fellows Program, which allows me to move about for about 

two years in the federal government, was uniquely available 

for this, and they were particularly looking for people with 

former military experience. They had viewed that some of 

the internal workings of a PRT were as important as the 

external, so an understanding and then the ability to get 

along with the military was valued; and, the willingness to 

go into situations that were less permissive than usual for 

the State Department.

So, I went down, and I was interviewed by the deputy director 

of the Afghan desk, who vetted all of the assignments. I 

think at that time—this was in the fall of 2004—the PRTs 
Raphael Carland, Department of 

State representative to Provincial 

Reconstruction Team Tarin Kowt

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511

were still fairly young, only a year or two old, and still very 

personal recruiting. It wasn’t seen or foreseen as a regular 

or yearly move that had gradually expanded in Afghanistan, 

and then greatly expanded in Iraq, so there was still just 

a basic interview process. I think they were comfortable 

with my military experience and my willingness to go, 

and the fact that I said I would go anywhere. They named 

a couple of the provinces that I might eventually go to—

Oruzgan, Zabol, or Konar; all of which, they said, were less 

permissive than most—and I said I was comfortable doing 

those, and at that point, we started going through just the 

basic paperwork to get me there.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned you had former military experience. Tell 

me about that.

MR. CARLAND: Basically, I was an ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training 

Corps] officer. I came out of Georgetown University ROTC 

program, and I spent four years in the U.S. Army. I was 

a Signal Corps officer, and I had served in Germany with 

signal and intelligence units in V Corps. And then, I had 

also served as a partnership officer with the German Army, 

which I think was the most intriguing and interesting 

part relevant to my military experience—just an interest 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

512

and ability to work with a different group—although 

no comparison between the Germans and the Afghans 

[laughs], but just a willingness and ability to interact with 

those folks. And then following the Army, I had gone to 

graduate school at Tufts University, where I had gotten a 

master’s in international security and diplomatic studies—a 

medley of development, human rights, transitional justice. 

I mean, when I heard about the PRT from someone—

actually, one of the first PRT guys—while I was in graduate 

school, I knew this was it. This was the ideal job for what I 

was studying and what I was interested in, in working with 

the government.

DR. KOONTZ: And then, secondly, what were you doing with the State 

Department at the time when you applied for the PRT 

opening?

MR. CARLAND: I was working in the European Bureau in the Office of 

European Political and Security Affairs, which is usually the 

NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], and to a lesser 

extent, the EU [European Union] Military Office, because in 

Europe, all security is initially NATO. I had been working on 

a number of civil-military issues in terms of getting civilian 

assets in NATO geared toward supporting the military, and 

reverse; and I had been working on, at the time—this is 

coming up—stability and reconstruction, S&R, and trying 

to get them to gear their military more towards it. Although 

NATO had done a lot of that in Bosnia and Kosovo, that had 

been more peacekeeping, and the permissive environment 

had allowed a different—had a lot of the two, civilian and 

military, with one another, but as it was clearly becoming 

an insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan, that 

was no longer acceptable. Definitely, as it became clear, 

the military couldn’t depend on NGOs [nongovernmental 

organizations] and international organizations to operate 

in these areas, and they had to start looking for their own 

people. So, definitely I was interested in it professionally, 

and I had been in on some of the Afghanistan policy, as 

well.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, you’ve applied for the PRT job. You’re told that 

you get the job. Did you take any kind of preparation, or 

did you get yourself, I guess, you know, kind of mentally 

ready?

MR. CARLAND: Yes. First of all, I just—at the time, again, the program 

was very early. I mean, now there’re a number of different 

courses they’re trying to teach here at NDU [National 

Defense University] and AID [U.S. Agency for International 

Development] and the military, the State Department. They 

were all doing a number of things, but at the time it was 

pretty nascent. So, I just found as many former PRTs as I 

could, talked to them. I got in touch with the guy that I was 

replacing. I went around and talked to many Afghan policy 
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people in the Joint Staff, the Office of Secretary of Defense, 

the Army Corps of Engineers, USAID.

And then, I also signed up for early-morning Pashto. It 

took about four or five months of about an hour every 

morning, and that was helpful, to an extent—more just the 

fact that they had four different Pashto instructors who 

would come in at various times in the morning, all led by 

this one gentlemen who was actually a formal royalist army 

officer. So, it was sort of useful—some basic vocabulary 

and speaking pointers. It was useful in getting some of the 

cultural introduction to what Afghanistan was going to be 

like, and that was helpful. More language would have been 

more helpful [laughs].

DR. KOONTZ: Going into this job, what was your state of knowledge 

about Afghanistan at that time?

MR. CARLAND: I think in terms of U.S. policy and activity there, I think fairly 

extensive. I think I had good access. People were very willing to talk to what was going on, and through my office and 

their working with ISAF [NATO International Security Assistance Force] and OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom], 

I had good access to documents. My office was right next 

to the main action officer on NATO and Afghanistan, so he 

definitely just tossed me everything that he was seeing. 

In terms of Afghanistan, culturally, I read a lot, which 

was helpful, to an extent. I found, actually, in some cases, 

everyone focuses on the influence of wars and Charlie 

Wilson’s War, but once I got there, I actually, in some ways, 

found some of the books that I read about nineteenth 

century and beyond, and earlier than that in history, 

seemed to be a little more helpful in understanding sort of 

the tribal differences and the ethnic differences. We have a 

very short memory, as Americans, as I’m sure you guys are 

painfully aware of as people trash documents and get rid of 

stuff. Definitely, we saw everything sometimes in the lens of 

the Soviets and radical Islam. When I was there, it was very 

useful to know about the two tribal confederations, the 

Durani and the Ghilzai, and the fact that these two parties 

have been struggling. The Taliban actually gets to do some 

of this grand stuff. To most average Afghans—definitely, 

to the leadership—they are hard-core radicals from what 

I can see, but to the foot soldiers, this is a way of kind of 

excluding tribes who have been marginalized in three 

hundred or so years of Durani rule, who were now getting 

a chance to act through the Taliban and kind of overthrow 

the Karzais and the kings and the Populzai tribe that had 

ruled for three hundred years because, prior to that, the 

Ghilzai had ruled for about three hundred or four hundred 

years. That was interesting to know because, then once you 

started to see the districts that were the most restive, they 

were usually majority Ghilzai districts. From what we could 
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see, from the people we captured and interrogated and 

stuff, they were usually from that confederation of tribes. 

That was interesting, and something that I sometimes wish 

we just had a better handle on and a better grip on because 

I think parties get associated with the tribes they support. 

They don’t see us as representing the Afghan government, 

but they see us representing, advocating, a tribe. I wish we 

understood that better. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, you got the job, and you’re doing your research. Let’s 

head to Afghanistan. Tell me about the deployment 

process that got you there.

MR. CARLAND: It’s all commercial flights. You go from Washington to 

Frankfurt to Dubai, and then from Dubai, you take—at 

the time, I took the UN Humanitarian Air. Then you come 

into Kabul. Got picked up, usually with a random group 

of other embassy folks. They take you to the embassy, you 

get temporary housing at what they call ”the Hooch.” That’s 

basically just a, you know, CONEX [container express] 

with, you know, a very nice little bathroom, a desk, a bed. 

Sometimes, it’s just difficult getting out to the field. At the 

time, PRT Air, the USAID-contracted air service, was 

down. I spent a little a longer in Kabul than would have 

been normal. I guess I spent about almost two weeks there. 

Usually, they like you to come in for about a week, make the 

rounds of consultations in the embassy, USAID, the Afghan 

Reconstruction Group, the pol section, the econ section, all 

those folks. Go around the corner down to Camp Eggers, 

where CFC-A, Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, 

was. I tried to talk to some of their folks. Then I made trips. 

Because I was there longer, I went over to ISAF headquarters 

and talked with a number of those folks. Originally, from 

the moment I arrived, I knew I was going to Tarin Kowt. 

On the day that I arrived I was told, “There’s a gap for the 

election. We need you to go to Farah first. The guy that 

you’re replacing has agreed to extend, and we don’t have 

anybody out to Farah, so you need to go there.”

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. So, you were originally slated to go to Tarin Kowt, 

and Farah was a diversion?

MR. CARLAND: Yes. And so I tried to find out as much as I could about 

Farah. Luckily, I was in e-mail contact with a guy who had 

been there who moved around and is sort of a legend in the 

service. His name is Mike Metrinko. He was in Tehran. He’s 

one of the few guys who could speak fluent Dari, and he 

had been moving all about the west, so he was an excellent 

guy to talk to. And then, as I said, working with ISAF, just 

trying to get an idea of what they were doing and what their 

link was, because right then, NATO had just expanded into 

the west, and so actually the PRT in Farah was only the U.S. 

force under ISAF command at that point. While they were 

under ISAF, it wasn’t clear what their chain of command—
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it wasn’t clear what any of the PRTs’ relationships were, 

because at the time, they had what they called regional area 

coordinators, which have now since been transferred to 

regional commanders.

So, I just talked to as many people as possible and tried to 

get connections, because I definitely saw from what folks 

who had been PRT people had said, one of your key abilities 

as a State Department rep is to understand the process in 

Kabul and understand the process in Washington, and have 

connections that you can reach back to. By being a civilian, 

there is a much flatter chain of command and easier access, 

whereas military have to go up to their commander, and 

then they get funneled into a staff section, and then the 

ability to get to where they need to go is often restricted 

by their chain of command, whereas a civilian can just call 

somebody up and say, “Hi. I’m down in Farah and trying to 

set up a chamber of commerce. Will you work on this?” That 

was useful, so that’s what I tried to do—get as many e-mails 

and contacts and, you know, sitting in somebody’s office, 

shaking their hand and talking to them for about twenty 

minutes will make a huge difference towards getting help 

when you e-mail or call them in the field. When I made it 

out there—I had gone up there, actually, briefly to Farah 

with the ambassador who was doing a visit, like about half 

way through.

DR. KOONTZ: Ambassador [Ronald E.] Neumann?

MR. CARLAND: Yes. And so, I had an idea of where I was going, and I briefly 

met everyone and saw the area. I actually deployed out there 

in August and was in Farah until the middle of October.

DR. KOONTZ: So, you’re finally getting out of Kabul, and you get to 

Farah. Tell me about the PRT that was stationed there. 

First of all, tell me precisely what’s your position, and 

what are your duties or tasks in this position?

MR. CARLAND: Well, talking about the PRT would be a lot easier than 

talking about my position [laughs]. PRTs were funny. They 

were right out of a John Wayne movie—Fort Apache, four 

walls, four towers, flag in the middle. The PRTs all had kind 

of a model, a basic model. Some guys, basically a platoon of 

National Guard—at the time it was Texas National Guard—

were infantry; and then a civil affairs team; usually, a small 

ANP [Afghan National Police] team; medical; and then the 

rest was basically services—cooks, mechanics, and all that. 

So, it came to be about ninety-five to a hundred personnel. 

And then, usually what they had with civilians—State 

Department, USAID, and, sometimes, some kind of 

contract agent for the UN office, and maybe, sometimes, 

a police mentor of some sort—although when I arrived, 

I was the only civilian there, which is one of the reasons 

they wanted me. With the election coming up, they wanted 
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a civilian, someone there, to be an election monitor. As it 

turned out, I was the only international election monitor in 

Farah [laughs].

When I arrived, it had been—it was interesting because 

I think the positions were still very much evolving. I had 

replaced a very senior, very knowledgeable Central Asia 

hand. I had a different set of skills. He spoke fluent Dari. He 

knew the governor. He had been very good friends with the 

governor’s father in the seventies, when he served in Kabul. 

So, it was a completely different relationship. Because of 

this, he often could go out on his own and could do things 

on his own because he didn’t need translators. At the time, 

the situation was permissive enough—relatively so—that 

there was a State Department SUV, and he’d jump in that 

with some of the others. I think the police would meet him 

at the PRT gate, and he’d go downtown on his own, and 

you would never hear what he did. Of course, I couldn’t do 

that—not the least of which was that what little Pashto I 

learned was pretty useless in a Dari-majority environment. 

But one thing I did try and do was kind of sync up.

The PRT military often didn’t really know what the State 

Department and the USAID guys were doing, and so one of 

the things I thought—one of my real duties right off was to 

make that better so that the military would see the civilians 

as an asset not only in and of themselves, but what they could 

bring from Kabul—which, it was particularly hard for the 

State Department person, because USAID guy arrives with 

money. He has the quick impact funds, as well, he can tap 

into these large, national programs. He can build buildings. 

So, the military’s carting him around and providing security 

and so on and so forth because they’re getting something 

out of it, whereas for the State Department, it’s a little 

harder at first. Having been a military guy, I understood, 

“You don’t command troops. You don’t have equipment. 

You don’t have money. What use are you to me?” But 

I think within a few weeks, I was definitely a part of the 

command team, and I would spend several hours a day in 

the commander’s office talking with him, talking through 

programs. He gave me, basically, veto power over his CERP 

[Commander’s Emergency Response Program funds]. 

When he was going over the CERP programs, he said, “No, 

the State Department guy has to sit there.” I suggested a few 

programs, and I nixed a few programs, just for a broader 

idea, you know? Just, “Well, let’s think through some of this. 

You want to do volunteer center? Well, that works in the 

U.S., because we have a volunteer culture. We have a culture 

outside of the government in society. But, you know, in an 

Islamic, Afghan, culture, there’s really nothing that exists 

like that. It’s a statist system. So, if you create a building 

that no one owns, then all it is is a piece of concrete that a 

bunch of squatters will live in. And if that’s what you want 

to do, that’s great; but if that’s not, a ministry has to own it. 
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Somebody has to own it; they have to take care of it; they 

have to build a wall around it.” We hated spending extra 

money on the wall, but to an Afghan, it’s like giving them 

a chair with no legs on it and saying, “Well, you can put 

the legs on yourself,” if you build a building with no wall, 

because to them, it’s “Oh! They’ll be able to see my women. 

They’ll be able to see us and what we’re doing. They’ll see 

how rich or how poor we are.” You know, it’s just little 

things like that that sometimes I think folks didn’t always 

appreciate.

So, that’s what you bring. You try and bring some expertise; 

sort of an outside view; an understanding some of the 

politics that, you know, a lieutenant colonel or a major out 

in the field just doesn’t have access to. Not that they—had 

they had access, they could make these decisions without 

me, but the fact is, they didn’t. They worked from the PRT 

to the regional command; regional commander went to 

Bagram; Bagram went to CFC-A; and then, you can go over 

to the embassy, which by that time, you know, that’s kind of 

just too hard to do. 

DR. KOONTZ: Who was your commander then? Do you remember his 

name?

MR. CARLAND: Yes, it was Dave Wylie. He’s a civil affairs officer.

DR. KOONTZ: What rank was he at the time?

MR. CARLAND: He was a lieutenant colonel.

DR. MUNDEY: Can I just interrupt? Did you know the exact chain of 

command for Lieutenant Colonel Wylie? Whom did he 

actually report to? We’re a little bit confused with that 

one.

MR. CARLAND: This was the problem in Farah. Because it was under ISAF 

command, technically, he directly reported ... he was 

OPCON [placed under operational control] to ISAF, but 

he was ADCON [placed under administrative control] 

to [Combined Joint] Task Force-76, and therefore, RC 

[Regional Command] South in Kandahar. All his logistics 

came through Kandahar. We did not rely on the—because, 

you know, in NATO, each country more or less is responsible 

for its own logistics. This was actually something evolved, 

even in the short time that I was there. There was Brigadier 

General [Umberto] Rossi, an Italian, who was working 

out of Herat. He came down several times, and there were 

sometimes some awkward conversations with him because 

both Dave and I were both very open: “We want guidance. 

We work for you.” He said, “Well, it’s very difficult for me to 

coordinate it. It’s very difficult for me, as ISAF. We’re always 

afraid, as in all these missions, if we give an order to the 

Americans and they don’t follow it, then I can never give 
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you an order again, you know? So, I have to be very careful 

about what I tell you to do because if you don’t do it; or 

if you’re always looking over your shoulder ...” This is a 

perennial NATO problem. But, we raised some issues with 

him, and he worked very hard.

At the time, the Italians commanded ISAF, and Lieutenant 

General [Mauro] del Vecchio also came out to visit us, and 

actually followed the chief of defense, Admiral [Giampaolo] 

Di Paola. The Italians were very good about reacting to our 

concerns. Farah is out in very much the fringe. There are 

many fringe places in Afghanistan, but it’s definitely—we 

were hours from Herat, hours from Kandahar, so we were 

very worried about MEDEVACs [medical evacuations]. So, 

we wanted to work out of Herat. We were concerned about 

close air support. We were concerned about QRF [quick 

reaction force] issues. Who would come rescue us if we 

were in trouble? Actually, it worked. Just in the time that I 

was there, they ran a couple of exercises with us, and they 

sent people down to develop that relationship. But, yeah, it 

was complicated. After I left, I think General Rossi became 

a regional commander, and then at that point, definitely for 

operational issues, we would fall directly under him. 

DR. KOONTZ: You’re a former military officer, and you’ve mentioned 

that in your previous experience, you had worked in V 

Corps, and you’d worked with the political assistance 

office. Did that give you any kind of help in dealing with 

ISAF?

MR. CARLAND: I think so. Especially working at NATO, I definitely had a 

better understanding of the way ISAF worked, of just the 

way NATO worked, and some of the reporting and the 

things that we can access to. I think it helped to explain 

away some of the problems, so that far from being, you 

know, malicious intent on the parts of these feckless, 

nefarious Europeans, you’d understand that this is the way 

NATO works, and this is what people will be looking for, 

and these are the problems. There’s a lot of concern over 

the ROE [rules of engagement], but you can actually get a 

copy of it, and you’ll go through it, and actually, the ROE is 

almost virtually the same between ISAF and OEF. That’s not 

the issue. The issue is how you choose to use your troops 

because an ROE it’s purely reactive. That was something 

that they didn’t understand. Oftentimes, they were very 

worried that “We won’t be able to shoot if we were shot at,” 

and that sort of thing. So, it was good to be able to know 

that it’ll be okay.

I think, militarywise, I definitely was able to talk with them 

and get them to talk with some people at ISAF. I wouldn’t 

say I was a primary figure in this, but I think I was able to 

help get into the office with some folks and to send a couple 

of messages to the embassy, which made it across ISAF. 
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Security and Assistance

We did get very quick action. I mean, we had the brigadier 

general come down one week; the very next week, we had a 

three-star; just randomly enough, we had a four-star come 

in after that. I think that helped.

On the civilian side, though, it was a little more difficult. 

I actually had a very good relationship with the Italian 

POLAD [political adviser], but even then, it was a struggle. 

NATO is a primarily military organization, and so, over 

time, there is a chain of command; but on the civilian side 

of PRTs, there’s no real chain of command within ISAF. 

You report up to your embassy; your embassy reports it to 

the capital; maybe, the capital shares it with Brussels, and 

maybe it doesn’t. We had these sort of voluntary reports we 

could send in, but it’s not—that’s just information sharing. 

There’s no sense of what are the objectives, or whatever. 

The military and USAID would get out this is, you know, 

“These are our objectives for development. We’re going to 

build new roads, irrigation, and utilities.” Those were the 

priorities for USAID. And similar for the CERP programs, 

but with a greater interest in the training or employment 

issues. On the European side, nobody really coordinates 

that. So, from province to province, the Afghans are often 

concerned who’s in their province, what do they do, and 

what are their priorities? That’s a problem right there. 

DR. KOONTZ: All right. Did you get any civilian add-ons to the PRT 

after you showed up?

MR. CARLAND: Yes. There was a USAID person assigned there. He had 

been on leave, and then he injured himself, I think, moving 

his daughter into college. He dropped something heavy on 

his foot, so he was out for like a couple of months—so, the 

entire time I was there. And then, we did get an engineer 

from one of the USAID implementing partners, which in 

that province was the International Office of Migration. 

We got an Australian contractor, who lived downtown at 

the UN compound. He was sort of our quality assurance/

quality control for our projects, which was really very 

useful for the construction projects. And then in time, I 

think some police mentors were assigned there. 

DR. KOONTZ: So, on these construction projects, these are the soldiers 

in the PRT that are doing that work? Those Texas Guard 

guys? 

MR. CARLAND: No. The civil affairs guys would go out and—I think they 

would look for programs and projects, and then we would 

make it known that we were interested in it. And we also tried 

to work closely with the local Ministry of Reconstruction 

and Rural Development [RRD]. We worked with the RRD 

ministry; there was an irrigation ministry; there was a 

Ministry of Public Works. It all depended on the particular 

region. It was very patronage based, so it just depended on 
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520

who happened to be the minister. Some were very helpful, 

and some were not very helpful at all. They would go out 

and identify projects against a budget, sort of a notional 

budget, that was sent down from Bagram, and they would 

try and identify it. It was a little more difficult in Farah 

because it’s the fourth-largest province. It’s stretched out. 

It’s a very long province, with mountains, deserts, and very 

little international presence. The PRT was collocated—in an 

adjacent compound was an ANA [Afghan National Army] 

battalion, a kandak, with an ETT, an embedded training 

team, of national guardsmen, and that was it pretty much 

for the international. So, for us to do projects, it was a little 

more difficult.

But I will say that while I was there, the primary concern 

of the PRT was planning of the election security plan, 

which we were concerned—the parliamentary elections, 

which were held in late September ‘05—that this would 

be, A, logistically very difficult; and B, this would be an 

opportunity, given how spread out everything was, for the 

Taliban to cause a lot of trouble. So, we basically focused on 

that, and that was definitely an IO [information operation] 

because it really gives you a sense of how much, at the 

provincial level, the government is struggling to exist.

DR. KOONTZ: Obviously, this is one of the more of the important 

things, so let’s go and talk about that. You were talking 

about the geographical challenges that the size of Farah 

posed. What were the other challenges in getting the 

election carried off?

MR. CARLAND: Mainly for our part, security. There was an UN OPS office—

you know, Office of Project Service—but they were doing 

most of the election. I had a former Australian military guy 

who had done these sorts of elections before, who’d worked 

on the presidential election. Actually, on the election side 

the Afghans were fairly skilled. They’d run the presidential 

election the previous fall. They used all the same methods. 

There were lots of concerns over the ballots and transporting 

the ballots, and what have you, but actually, it all went off 

relatively well, and it seemed like it would.

The biggest concern was just security. There just was 

no security in huge spots of the province. The Afghan 

National Army had a kandak there, and they were mostly 

northerners—not necessarily not Pashtun, but just not 

from around. That’s where the biggest problem was. They 

didn’t know the province, and they were a military unit. 

You tell them where the bad guys are and they’ll go get 

them, but they weren’t police, which is what you really 

need to provide area security. So, we were dependent on the 

Afghan National Police located in the province, and they 

were a rough lot, at best—mostly focused in the provincial 

capital, very corrupt, poorly trained, and poorly equipped. 
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The previous commander was fired. He just picked up all 

the equipment and took most of the best-trained, bestequipped police and moved them to his next job, which 

was another police job [laughs]—and that’s the way it 

works all the way throughout the country. So, they were in 

a pretty bedraggled state, and so we were concerned about 

that—just trying to get them organized, and trying to get 

them to actually make sure that there were guards at each 

of the police stations.

But on election day, I went out and about, and visited a 

number of, in the Farah area and outside of Farah, polling 

sites, and they had it under control. Luckily, there was no 

reason for the police to act because, in the end, I think they 

just had to hire a lot of local guys with weapons and use 

them for the day, which is not how you would ideally like 

to see security provided, but ... 

DR. KOONTZ: When you did that election monitoring duty on election 

day, what were you doing? What were you looking for?

MR. CARLAND: We had a checklist. Election monitoring is a well-trodden 

path since the 1990s, so we had a checklist. I forget, but 

it had like twenty things that we had to check on. We 

had gotten a little bit of a briefing before I had left for the 

elections from an elections expert. Basically, I just talked 

to a few people in line: “How long have you been waiting? 

Do you know who the candidates are?” And then, to make 

sure of the process, how are they going to check their IDs 

against the voter rolls? Are they being marked off, and are 

there people around? Are there party members—there were 

a few parties—are they allowed to witness this? because 

we didn’t have a whole pile of people in there. So, I think 

the rules were to bring them in [one] at a time. And then, 

were the people provided with the proper place to do it? I 

think so. I went down to a number—not the least of which 

was “Did they check your ID?” It was interesting. Only 

the women’s poll checked my ID [laughs]. They were very 

unhappy about that, but we were told to go check at least 

one women’s polling center.

And so, that was mainly it. It wasn’t very interesting because 

everyone was there. I’m not really sure—everyone wanted 

to vote, but I’m not really sure they knew what they were 

voting for. In fact, I witnessed a number of times—you 

know, some old guy comes in; gets his ballot; looks at it; 

comes back, and says, “What am I supposed to do?” and 

everybody’s looking over at me [laughs]. I’m just like, “You 

guys go ahead,” and the polling officer said, “Well, you 

vote for one who’s the best.” And the old guy said, “Well, 

who’s the best? Where’s [President Hamid] Karzai? Where 

can I vote for him?” “No, you can’t really do that.” They 

had a little picture, and then each candidate was randomly 

given a little symbol, like a lamp, to a book, to a wheel, or 
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something, and then, a picture as well. Some of the rolls 

were pretty huge because there were no parties, so you 

have, like—I think there were like thirty-some people in 

Farah running for, I think, ten or eleven provincial seats. 

And then, everything’s tallied up to see whoever won. So, 

it was interesting, too, because it means people who won 

might collectively have actually won like less than a third 

or a quarter of the vote, simply because they had the most. 

In fact, one of our interpreters was quite angry afterwards. 

Somebody won, I think, with like three thousand votes. 

He’s like, “Well, I have three thousand relatives. I should’ve 

run! I could’ve won!” [Laughs.] 

DR. KOONTZ: I’ve actually seen the figures for Farah, and, like you 

said, it was just a few thousand, and not even pluralities. 

I mean, they were, you know, 6 percent, 7 percent. I think 

the leading vote getter got something like 13 percent or 

something like that.

MR. CARLAND: Yeah. So, that was interesting, but actually looking at it, 

they did mostly represent, I would say, the power distribution, if not the actual demographics of the ballots. But 

sometimes, in some ways, that’s more realistic. I actually 

never met with the provincial council or anything because 

I left. I departed before the elections results were reported. 

DR. KOONTZ: And you mentioned that you weren’t sure what people 

were voting for. I’m not sure that people in America 

necessarily know what they’re voting for, either.

MR. CARLAND: Yeah, though this was a whole new thing because at least 

you can vote Democrat or Republican, and you know there’s 

a bucket of issues that are there. With no parties, there was 

definitely an interesting look.

DR. KOONTZ: Yeah. There’s no slate that you can say, “Well, I bet this 

guy is probably on my side.”

MR. CARLAND: Exactly. So, it’s all by individuals. We were all very frustrated 

by that, but I think it definitely reflected Afghan history. 

It’s just, political parties to them are the Communist Party 

and the Islamic parties—all the people who destroyed the 

country in the Russian invasion and the civil war. So, there’s 

a very big suspicion of political parties.

DR. KOONTZ: As you said, the election went relatively well, as you 

described it. It had, I want to say, something like 195,000 

people registered, and had an over 50 percent turnout. I 

wish that could happen in the United States. That would 

be, you know, certainly seen as very successful. What do 

you attribute the success of the election to?

MR. CARLAND: I’d say, in terms of just coming off, experience. They had 

the relatively recent experience of the Afghan presidential 
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election, so that really helped—that you could do one or the 

other. People were relatively experienced. And, although 

it’s different teams, there were a lot of plans left over on the 

security side that the military was able to follow: “This is 

what happens when the ballots need to be exported; this 

is where some of the issues were; this is how we want to 

run security for the counting place.” So, I think a lot of that 

helped.

And I think for the elections, in terms of security—I 

don’t know what happened as much as in the east and in 

the south, but in Farah, I don’t think the Taliban was well 

organized at that point. I don’t think there was a real, even 

then, a complete understanding that this was something 

that they would want to stop. Maybe now, if you had an 

election, you’d get a different reaction because they know 

these elections can confer a certain amount of legitimacy 

that is maintained. 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. There’s two ways that we can go from here. I guess, 

you had mentioned in the beginning, or a couple times, 

the kind of opposition that you were getting, and that 

Farah was relatively permissive environment. What 

level of opposition were you getting it from; and, more 

importantly, whom were you getting it from? Is it just 

Taliban, or is it— 

MR. CARLAND: No, that’s the key thing in Afghanistan, which the 

authorities in Kabul, both ours and theirs, were just 

starting to get a handle on. It’s interesting that Farah, from 

a military standpoint, was a green to yellow province, to 

use the stoplight charts that everyone is very happy with. 

There was very little Taliban activity. But then you look 

at—I think it was ANSO, the Afghan Nongovernmental 

Security Organization, just this sort of info-sharing body. 

They would rate Farah as actually fairly dangerous, as a 

red province, for civilians. I think there was a disconnect 

between security and safety and insurgent activity—that 

not having insurgent activity does not make the region safe. 

In fact, in some ways, it made it less safe.

If you were an Afghan civilian, at least in that time period, and 

you’re on the eastern border in the south, you were actually 

safe, because there were a lot of troops—international, ANA, 

ANP—patrolling the roads out there. In some respects, as 

long as you weren’t in any way associated with people on a 

prescribed Taliban list, you were safe; whereas, when you 

went out to the west and to the north, there was very little 

Taliban activity, but it was just lawless. It was like the Wild 

West. I mean, that was a big problem in Farah. People were 

very afraid to travel on the Ring Road. They were very afraid 

to travel on roads. It was just a security vacuum. I mean, the 

departure of the previous police chief had a lot to do with 

that. Apparently, he was quite a vicious guy, by all accounts, 
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524

but he understood law and order. He understood: “Nobody 

hurts the NGOs or the Westerners because they bring the 

money,” and when he was replaced by a weaker—to my 

mind, less competent, more rapacious—individual who just 

wanted to make money, then suddenly it just became ... 

you know, right off the Ring Road, they called it something 

like “the Mountain of Death,” where they were just robbing 

people on the Ring Road and killing them.

This definitely had an impact because the NGOs start to 

bleed away because they can’t operate, and a lot of the 

NGOs can’t afford the level of security, which is, I think, 

something we didn’t fully grip. When we say a village or 

an area is secured, that means we have defeated all of the 

Taliban. But there’s always a disconnect: “Have you asked 

an NGO or an Afghan citizen? Do they feel safe? Does an 

Afghan health official feel safe driving in a pickup truck 

with a rifle across his knees? Is that safe enough for him?” 

And if he says “no,” then that village is not secure, that 

district is not secure. It’s not safe. Whereas, I think we 

drive around in Humvees, and we say, “Oh, no one shot at 

us. This place is secure.”

DR. KOONTZ: So, this is kind of brigandage that’s going on on these 

roads? This is just generic Afghan criminality. It’s not 

politically oriented?

MR. CARLAND: I think you would see some connections, but it’s not 

organized. There was a kidnapping of a contract worker, 

a British citizen, who, as it came out, had been robbed; 

and then, once they had them, they were like, “Well, what 

do we do with him?” So, they took him to their mountain 

hideout, and then they started calling their buddies and 

trying to communicate and trying to find out “What do we 

do with this guy?” And so, then you say, “Well, whom are 

they connected to?” They obviously have personal family 

connections with various insurgent groups, but are they 

insurgents? They were clearly just after the money, you 

know? But then this gets racked up as a Taliban event, and 

it’s hard to count. They ended up killing the guy. So, yeah, 

that stuff was of issue.

Especially where there’s a level of brigandage, having police 

on the road and taking money from you is one thing. Most 

of the people see it—it’s actually a fee-for-service economy. 

There are no real taxes, and most Afghans don’t want to 

pay taxes. But if you’re driving on the road and the Afghan 

National Police, the Afghan Highway Police, are out there, 

and they shake you down for a little bit—actually, I found 

a lot of people didn’t mind that because it meant that that 

they were out on the road, and “Yeah, why wouldn’t you 

pay them? They gotta feed their families.” But it’s when they 

take you out and they shoot you and they steal your truck—

to an Afghan that’s just too far, you know? So, they were a 
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little more comfortable with that, but that was a big deal in 

Farah. It was just a very dangerous province for civilians, 

and right when I was there, the last NGO, this German 

NGO, departed. They were down to closing out the last 

of their projects with us, and they would only come down 

once a week from Herat because it was too dangerous. That 

was sometimes frustrating because it was something that 

slipped beneath our radar. We were so focused on the bad 

guys that we weren’t seeing a sort of disintegration of law 

and order at the district level. 

DR. KOONTZ: One of the things that I was curious about is how would 

you describe the people of Farah? You know, who are 

these people that you’re trying to help out? What’s the 

level of their economy? What’s the level of development 

in Farah?

MR. CARLAND: Farah was much more developed than Oruzgan. Farah’s an 

old trading city. It was very political. I got the sense that 

it was about—I wouldn’t say it was two-thirds Tajik and 

one-third Pashtun. I got the sense it was more half and half 

because a lot of people were Pashtuns. But women, by and 

large, would just wear scarves around their hair, which is 

much more closely related to Iran, to the West. Literacy, at 

least amongst the officials and the people that I met, was 

general. Their needs were—they were interested in trade. 

They had just set up a chamber of commerce, and I worked 

with them to try and get them linked into the national 

chamber of commerce. They were thinking, certainly, at a 

higher level. They were working on getting the generators 

in the town up and going. I think, actually, just recently, 

they got it up with the help of Iranians—which is great—to 

supply electricity. But their expectations were “We want 

lights. We want air conditioning,” and these are things that 

I think most people—like, there are a lot of generators. At 

night, you can see light through the city. A lot of people 

could afford this, so it was a different area. Once you went 

outside of town, it was rural Afghanistan—very poor; very 

dry; a huge poppy-growing province. 

DR. KOONTZ: We had spoken with somebody else who was in one of the 

eastern PRTs who had described it as, you know, coming 

straight out of 1359.

MR. CARLAND: Yeah, absolutely. Most of what I’m talking about right 

now is Farah, but once I got out to Oruzgan, it was very, 

very different. It was different, and just much more 

entrepreneurial. I think the security situation allowed a lot 

of really interesting ideas—you know, developing a cattle 

market; they were building fruit juice factories—fruit is a 

big deal in Farah; and really into trying to build a road to 

link up an Iranian road that went right up to the border and 

stopped, and then it was just sort of a smuggler’s trail from 

there. And definitely, guys understood that all these goods 
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come in to Persian Gulf ports in Iran, and you then they have 

to go all the way up and cross over to go to Herat. So, these 

guys are like, “Well, if we could get a border crossing there, 

and another road, we can cut off hundreds of miles.” There 

was just definitely a broader understanding of economics, 

supply and demand, and this sort of thing, and trying to 

get into the Iranian market, where they could undersell the 

local Iranians with their fruit products and whatnot. So, 

that was good. I definitely felt like the education level and 

the ability to sort of visualize was a lot better. 

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about that chamber of commerce and how that 

facilitated that sort of economic development.

MR. CARLAND: I only met with them once. I got more involved once I got 

to Oruzgan with theirs, but they had a business association. 

They had just gotten accredited. They had gotten their 

letter of accreditation from Kabul. They were trying to 

figure out what they wanted to do. They were talking about 

dues. They were talking about building a building. Of 

course, they were very interested in us building a building 

and us providing this and that, and we said, “No, no, no. 

Actually, this is precisely what a business is supposed to do. 

You build your own building.” Actually, they went to one 

of the senior, wealthier business provider that had, sort of 

like, a hall—you know, like a VFW [Veterans of Foreign 

Wars hall] or something—where they would meet and 

discuss. One of their big ideas was trying to get the cattle 

industry started and experimenting—you know, a couple 

of businessmen were experimenting, trying to get Iranian 

or some Pakistani cows. The problem is, it’s just hot. It’s 130 

to 140 degrees. It’s a desert basically out in Farah, and they 

were trying to import cows that could survive that kind of 

heat.

That was interesting, and it wasn’t as sophisticated. I talked 

to them a lot about the new government, and they really 

had no relationship at all with the elected government. 

So, I was trying to unleash lobbyism on these poor, 

unsuspecting Afghans. I’d say, “You know, you have these 

elected officials, and these guys can advocate for you. You 

know you want money for a road. You should know that 

the U.S. government is not going to build a road to Iran, 

I’ll tell you that much. But if these are things that you want, 

then you need to advocate for them, and you need to be 

connected to these people, and to the provincial council, as 

well. These guys are even closer to you,” although it wasn’t 

really what their role was, so I wasn’t able to explain that as 

easily. But there were a lot of complaints about having to 

go up to Herat or all the way to Kabul to get documents, 

like business licenses and things like that. They felt like they 

had to pay a lot of bribes, and they had to tip all the time. I 

said, “Well, you know, then, you want the Ministry of Trade 

to set up an office in Farah. How do you do that? You get 
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your people up in the meshrano jirga [House of Elders, the 

upper house of the Afghan National Assembly] to make 

this happen for you.” They were like, “Oh, yeah!” 

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Did you do any liaison work with the GOA 

[Government of Afghanistan] or the provincial 

government?

MR. CARLAND: Absolutely. That was one of my primary duties. I worked a 

good bit with mostly with the governor, since it was just me. 

The civil affairs team was broken up into two teams—a CAT 

[Civil Affairs Team]-A and a CAT-B. The CAT-B, I think, 

was also called the CMOC, the civil-military operations 

center. They, because they had more people, worked a lot 

with the ministries and tried to get a survey of who the 

ministries are, what they were supposed to do, and what 

were their resources. And then, I worked more directly with 

the governor and with the police chief. One of the things I 

was trying to do was also to set up weekly meetings, like a 

weekly security meeting, or at least just weekly meetings 

together where we could sit and talk. Because I think the 

PRT commander and I had both come in fairly recently—

the PRT commander had taken over just a few weeks 

before I arrived—so I was like, “This is haphazard. You 

need to set up these regular meetings, interactions, with 

these guys and start like a reconstruction and development 

weekly meeting, a security weekly meeting.” We had been 

doing this for the elections, but I was saying, “This needs to 

continue, where you get the police chief, the army chief, the 

government chairs, the NDS”—the National Directorate of 

Security; basically, their FBI and KGB. They’re all like the 

KGB guys; at least, the good guys were—“to discuss what’s 

going on in the province, to communicate.” I think our 

interagency process is that some of these guys just don’t 

talk, and they just do things. And then, also to get them to 

start focusing on outside of Farah, because it became very 

Farah-centric, because that’s what was directly in front of 

them. Some of these districts were just, you know, on the 

edge of civilization, and you can get a lot of loyalty from 

them with very little, in some of these district seats, by just 

building them something—anything—to show that the 

government was there.

So, I worked with the governor. The governor was an 

interesting individual—he was an actually an American—

Ezatollah Wasefi. His father had been a minister in the 

Daoud government, I believe, and had been very close to 

the Karzais, but he had fled when the Russians invaded, 

so he’d actually grown up, for the most part, in the U.S., 

which made him, in some respects, very easy to deal with, 

because he spoke very good English. I was trying to get a 

little bit on him to get a little organized. I definitely think 

he improved, because this is a big jump for a lot of these 

Afghan-Americans. They’re educated; they’re patriotic; 
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they want to go out there; but it’s a big jump from running 

a business in America, where there are rules and laws, and 

then coming to this deeply tribal politics. I was trying to 

get him to work more with the police. He brought a police 

chief with him, but, really, the deputy police chief ran it, 

because he was from a family in Farah and was connected. 

He had relatives up in the Ministry of the Interior.

I guess the big issue, really, became the Afghan National 

Police. We were always trying to work with them—you 

know, “You need to reorganize. You have too many officers, 

to start with, and too many of them are in Farah. Very few 

of them are trained. Too many of your district police chiefs 

are in Farah. They should be out in the districts. Equipment 

seems to end up in the headquarters—all of the trucks, and 

the weapons, and the radios. It’s all in the headquarters, 

and this stuff is designed for people far out.” And then, 

accountability: “We give you stuff. What happens to the 

stuff?” So, that sort of problems. The police, I think, were at 

below 50 percent of their authorized strength, and I think 

very few of them had been trained. The main training facility 

was up in Herat, and to send a bunch of guys up there, it 

was hard for them to get up there, and it was unsafe, even 

for a group of ten policemen, to travel on the road all the 

way up. So, that was an issue.

That was probably the main issue we just kind of harped on 

because the election security stuff really brought it painfully 

to our attention. This was the main problem. It wasn’t a huge 

Taliban issue. It was just very lawless and dangerous in this 

province, and people were very unhappy about it. It was all 

the businessmen would talk about. Briefly, for the election, 

they sent in about three hundred to four hundred police 

from Kabul who were disciplined, were all in uniform, all 

had new weapons, and it made a big impression on the 

locals because they didn’t steal. They weren’t harassing the 

locals. Off the bat, all of the locals were like, “We want new 

police! We want trained police! We want the police not 

from the province! We want! We want!” 

DR. KOONTZ: So, could you do anything other than just bring these 

issues up with the local government that they needed to 

do, or could you ...

MR. CARLAND: You acted as an advocate up in Kabul. In the short time 

that I was there, I basically just sent—I just did a lot of 

looking around, and then I basically made one report to 

Kabul. It was just an unclassified discussion of the police, 

and then just basically the problem in Oruzgan. Pretty 

much everything—all development, the governance, the 

progress—hinges on the police. I think right after I left, we 

did get bumped up on priority to get some police mentors 

and to get a little more love from Kabul. They’re looking 

at an open insurgency in some of the other provinces, so 
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it was always hard to get attention to the provinces where 

there weren’t any problems. We used to joke, “All we need is 

one good Taliban attack, and then we’ll get some love from 

the capital!” [Laughs.]

DR. KOONTZ: How influential were the mullahs in that particular 

province?

MR. CARLAND: I don’t know, having only been there for a little bit. I assume 

they were. They were fairly influential in a different way 

than they were, necessarily, in the really deeply Pashtun 

belt. For instance, women would walk around with just a 

head scarf. Very few people wore burqas, and I think they 

were mostly Pashtun. On several occasions, some officials 

kind of said, “Those are poor, rural folk who had just moved 

to the big city.” So, there was that. I’d assume so, because 

all Afghans are very religious. I think that’s something we 

miss, sometimes—you know, when we say “The Taliban are 

religious extremists,” you get sort of a nonplussed response: 

“We’re all religious extremists. We’re Afghans. This is our 

religion. This means everything to us.” 

DR. KOONTZ: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but we’re trying 

to establish, kind of, similarities and variances between 

the individual PRTs, and this other PRT person we had 

spoken with mentioned that one of the things that she 

had identified as a problem was that the PRT structure 

doesn’t necessarily work with core competencies—that 

you have military people doing civilian things, and then 

civilian people get bled over into military aspects. Did 

you notice that, or have a problem with that?

MR. CARLAND: Yeah. I didn’t ... I mean, it was just the reality of the 

situation. What are you going to do? The military, maybe, 

at the strategic level, say, “Oh, we don’t do this. We do this.” 

But we’ve trained these captains and majors and colonels 

too well. If something needs doing, then they’ll do it, which 

does cause problems. You put three airborne infantrymen 

in charge of setting up a provincial medical program, they 

will come up with—the military is about process. They will 

design a provincial medical program. They will be careful, 

but they will design it, because, hey, they were told to do 

it, and they’ll do it. That’s sometimes a problem. Definitely 

you would see—you know, you scratch your head, and 

just, “Oh, what were the assumptions that went into this?” 

From their military background, they didn’t come up with 

the assumptions. Definitely, like training the police—we 

heavily militarized the training of the police. We’re basically 

training light infantry, paramilitary light infantry, which 

is what the military knows how to do, and it’s what that 

they need, I suppose, but they’re not police. And then, 

there’s all this crime and there’s problems with the judicial 

system and whatnot. Well, these are all, you know, formed 

units. They’ll go out and fight the Taliban, but they’re not 
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patrolling downtown because they’re not being trained to 

be a police force. You can see that as, sort of, the runoff.

I don’t know. I mean, the military’s there, and the job needs 

doing, you know? I think it’s unfortunate because—and 

again, this is just my personal opinion—we have come 

up with that concept of unity of effort instead of unity of 

command. To my mind, this doesn’t put to the best uses—

it just involves a lot of coordinating and just telling other 

people what you’re doing and going ahead and doing it. 

Well, that doesn’t really help, and it doesn’t integrate. At 

the tactical, operational, level, the military’s doing a lot of 

things; but at the strategic level, they don’t want to share 

out this—I mean, a lot of this stuff just has to be under the 

military, because the military has the infrastructure; they 

have the people; they have the helicopters; they have the 

equipment; the life support; the force protection; and all the 

stuff that you need; but they just don’t have the expertise. 

Often, they look at advisers as advisers, not necessarily as 

implementers: “I’ll take your advice, so long as it doesn’t 

cost me anything or make me have to change things.” It’s 

institutional. Personally, you can do a lot, but that basically 

means the institution has failed.

DR. KOONTZ: I’ll tell you what. We’ve been going at this for about an 

hour and a half. I wanted to switch over from Farah 

over to Tarin Kowt. Why don’t we just take like a couple 

minutes’ break, and come back and we’ll do Tarin Kowt.

[Interruption to proceedings.] 

All right. We’re back interviewing Raphael Carland. Let’s 

get you out of Farah to Tarin Kowt. So, you’re finally 

going where you were supposed to go in the first place. 

What did you do there?

MR. CARLAND: I transitioned over. In this case, I replaced someone, Dan 

Green, who had been there since the spring. Tarin Kowt 

was a very different province, kind of more in the line of 

what you would expect. Where Farah had been more of 

a traditional peacekeeping mission, Tarin Kowt was the 

Afghanistan you read about. It was the home of the Taliban. 

Mullah Omar was from the province, and a number of 

his lieutenants were also from the province. A very, very 

conservative Pashtun area, and I think in the whole time 

I was there, maybe I saw one woman without a burqa on, 

and probably no more than a few dozen women at all, all 

in burqas. They were very conservative, religious. There 

was a very strong Taliban movement, obviously, up in the 

hills and some of the out-districts. A lot of drugs, a lot 

of warlordism and militias. Basically, where it had been 

lawless in Farah, in Oruzgan, it was organized. There was 

the governor, who had his militia; and there was a police 

chief from a different tribe, who had his own. Basically 
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through the DDR [disarmament, demobilization, and 

reintegration] process, the governor and the police had 

relaundered their militias. The governor had an Afghan 

Highway Police battalion, although there was no highway 

at all in Oruzgan Province, but he had some sort of deal 

with the interior ministry, and the police chief now had the 

Afghan National Police. That said, this was a good thing. 

Both of these militias were considerably smaller than the 

older militias. A lot of people thought this was a big failure 

of DDR. I thought procedurally, this was not a bad thing to 

go from having fifteen hundred armed men to having four 

hundred. That’s not a bad thing, and the government was 

not responsible for paying for four hundred of them. That’s 

not bad.

And then, there was also a much stronger Afghan National 

Army presence. There were two kandaks, and then there 

was a much more significant—well, not necessarily 

significant in size, but definitely in span—of U.S. There was 

the PRT in the central district. We were collocated with 

a Special Forces unit; and some Coalition SOF [special 

operations forces] units; and then an Afghan compound; 

and an airstrip, all surrounded by one big berm. There were 

also three fire bases out in the three most restive districts: 

Charchina, Deh Rawod, and Khaz Uruzgan. They also 

had their own small civil affairs team attached with the 

ODA [Special Forces Operational Detachment-A] teams, 

sort of working on the similar programs and projects. 

So, there was much more significant presence, which 

had a different impact. There was a lot more they could 

do in the province. The province is also geographically 

like a quarter of the size of Farah. Lots of mountains. 

Significantly, no paved roads. We had just recently paved 

the Tarin Kowt–Kandahar road, but that was a strip of 

maybe sixty kilometers leading out to the south of the 

province. The rest was all dirt roads.

And this province—this is also to give you a sense of it—was 

dominated by two tribes, the Popalzai and the Barakzai. 

The Popalzai are the tribe that Karzai comes from. There 

were definitely progovernment and antigovernment forces, 

although beneath it, there was definitely this constant 

tribal rivalry. Between the most dangerous districts, Deh 

Rawod and Charchina, there was a lot. They were majority 

Popalzai areas, which brought the most resistance. And 

then even within the Durani tribe, the Popalzai was the 

governmental side, and the Barakzai was the police chief ’s 

tribe, and there was fairly bitter infighting. Sometimes it 

was hard to tell when—you know, the comment “green-ongreen violence” was often used because any attack on the 

governor, the police, was, of course, Taliban based, and, you 

know, sometimes even if they were in relatively safe areas, 

you would not be wrong if you assumed perhaps somebody 

else was involved. So, that’s where we were.
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It was much different. Whereas Farah had electricity, paved 

roads, concrete buildings, like, sort of, a street grid, in Tarin 

Kowt, there was maybe a dozen concrete buildings and no 

paved roads—we paved them while I was there—mostly 

mud buildings, maybe four thousand or five thousand 

people in the village. There were a lot of villages right in the 

Tarin Valley. They were all connected, so there was probably, 

I would say, an overlay, of fifty thousand or one hundred 

thousand people in this one valley area. But it wasn’t at all 

like Farah. It was a very different environment.

The illiteracy ... I don’t know. I would go 95-plus percent, 

which definitely had a huge impact on how you could build 

capacity within the government, within the local economy, 

and the local city forces. For me, just as a personal comment, 

it gives you a sense of the impact of illiteracy. You think 

people who are illiterate are basically like yourself, only 

you can read and write, and it’s not like that at all. Your 

inability to read and write means you are unable to really 

conceptualize. You can’t really think about things beyond 

your immediate surroundings. So, you think of trying to 

plan into the future or plan multiple geographical areas—

like, the idea of running a battalion operation with multiple 

companies—you can’t do that if people are illiterate, or you 

can’t do it very well. Or, trying to run agricultural programs, 

and the minister of agriculture just remembers everything. 

It was hard to explain to people how difficult this made 

this. Every meeting, often, started much more in depth, just 

trying to explain, “What did we do last time? What have we 

been talking about? What money was...”—you know, there’s 

always this sort of “Oh, is it $5,000? Is it $6,000?”—which, 

you know, when we’re trying to keep accounts in books, it’s 

enormously difficult. So, that was the province.

The PRT had, really, just an outstanding PRT commander, 

[Lt.] Col. Robin Fontes. She had been in Kabul for a year in 

the political-military integration team, and then she’d come 

down to Tarin Kowt. Really ideal. She knew the minister; 

she knew Afghanistan; she’d lived out here in the region 

before, in a less intense environment just up in Tajikistan, 

during their civil war; and then, her own MP [military 

police] background—she definitely had an understanding 

of sort of paramilitary operations less than warfare, other 

than warfare, whatever the acronym was.

So, that helped, and also the physical locations. We had a 

single headquarters building. I shared an office with the 

USAID representative, which was very helpful. We were 

about one room over from the commander’s office and civil 

affairs team, which I felt integrated things. Just the physical 

localities had a lot to do with my influence and ability to 

have an impact, a positive impact, on the operations. The 

USAID representative there had been there for a long time. 

He ended up being there for two years. He was there when the 
Colonel Fontes and Carland at the Provincial Reconstruction Team Tarin 

Kowt office

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533

PRT started—an American ex-pat who is from Indonesia. 

He was out in East Timor and in Sumatra, building roads. 

So, he was a builder, so it was interesting. Again, it depends 

on whom you get. He was a tough guy. He was really good 

at running programs, getting them started, and he was a 

road builder—just a builder, basically. 

The program was much different, because it was a more well 

established PRT, because the Americans had been there 

much longer than Farah. There was much more familiarity 

with the province. Kerry Greene, the USAID, had been there 

for two years, so he knew his way around. I think there was 

much more familiarity and much more willingness to go 

out, even though the environment was not permissive. So, 

in that respect, a very different environment. In terms of 

going out, I’d probably go out almost every day, sometimes 

twice, in the morning and the afternoon. I’d try and get out 

of Tarin Kowt about once a week. Our meeting schedule 

was we’d run two staff meetings in Mondays, Wednesdays, 

and Thursdays, which allowed us more flexibility. Then we 

started also running a weekly reconstruction meeting and a 

weekly police meeting. So, in that respect, we tried to work 

on more of that.

In terms of force protection, whereas in Farah, you’d go 

down in, basically, the State Department SUV, and then 
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behind you, they’d be driving. You’d just need a shooter 

in the vehicle with you, and then behind you, there’d be 

a Humvee, one Humvee, that could go into town. Here, 

no unarmored vehicles left post. We worked with, usually, 

convoys of at least three Humvees. I always wore my body 

armor, at least in the convoy. When I got there, I’d take it 

off before I’d go into a meeting, but certainly once you got 

outside of the compound, you’d always wear it.

One of the other issues, too, is the level of isolation of the 

province. It was pretty much only—the western part of 

the province through the Helmand River had a little more 

contact. It was a great way to ship drugs. It was one of the 

primary drug-growing areas. For the central part of the 

province Tarin Kowt, there was one road that led down 

to Kandahar, and it was paved right as I arrived, but that 

was the main link. So, one of the missions that I saw was 

“Really, we need to work on the road and getting some 

more security down on the road,” which we were trying to 

do. We were trying to get the highway police, trying to get 

them involved and stationed down there. But also, trying 

to introduce one of those oil-spot strategies that folks talk 

about, trying to build up quality of life in Tarin Kowt, 

which involves safety. It involved bringing in electricity. 

I worked a bit to—I think it fell through as a security 

deteriorated after I left—but I got a number of cell phone 

operators from Kabul that started talking about setting up 

a tower.

One of the big dearths we had, because of the illiteracy, 

is there are very few trained engineers, trained doctors. 

People who are in Oruzgan are from Oruzgan, which really 

limited what you could do, and it really hurt in terms of 

the projects you may have bid out. After a while, we knew. 

You knew to look through a contract bid, and if so-and-so’s 

name wasn’t on it, you knew they had no trained engineers, 

so there was no way they were going to build the building, 

which definitely limited us. So, we started moving away 

from buildings right as I arrived because a lot of buildings 

were collapsing because they weren’t well built. Because 

there were just small CA teams and USAID officials, you 

can only QC the buildings so often. So, you had to limit, 

sometimes, your projects. The PRT commander and I 

definitely agreed a few well-done projects are much better 

than many half-done projects. I know on several occasions, 

we baffled our commanders by requesting less money than 

was available. They couldn’t understand: “Why don’t you 

want it?” “Unless you want us to give out gym bags full of 

cash ...” which we can do, and we have done, but in terms 

of actually doing something, there’s just no capacity. There’s 

an absorption rate in the province, which sometimes, 

again, people in Kabul didn’t fully understand. There’re 

only half a dozen trained engineers, and of them, only two 

are university trained, and they were both ministers. They 
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had administrative tasks, as well as that. So, that affected 

us.

And you always have to get what I always called, sort of, 

the vision problem. We build a building—a community 

center, or a multifunctional, judicial—you know, we can 

visualize what this will look like; but to an Afghan, it’s just 

a building with a roof. So, the police will move in, and it’s a 

police station. We’d say, “We also want the prosecutor and 

the judge.” “No, we really don’t want them to move in, and 

we have the weapons, so they won’t move in.” When you’re 

building projects, you definitely have to incorporate that. 

There’re so many things we take for granted inherently—

these invisible connections with different parts of society 

and issues that can tend to be unrealistic in doing some of 

these programs. I think the PRT commander, the USAID 

guy, and myself, we sat down and spent a lot of the time—

probably almost half of every day—just sitting, talking 

through some of the issues. We definitely wanted to focus 

more on tangible goods. Roads were a good thing for us.

And then, we also got this thing called the Alternative 

Livelihoods Program, which had many different functions. 

It was supposed to be this counternarcotics thing, but it got 

all tacked up, and the people running it didn’t want it to 

be a counternarcotics program. One part of it was really 

useful for us, called the cash-for-work program, which we 

used for irrigation programs. We’d just keep guys out there 

digging, digging out irrigation ditches. There are these 

things in Afghanistan called karezes, which are like sort of 

underground canals. The Russians, because the mujaheddin

had used them as tunnels, had gone around dropping 

dynamite down each one and had ruined the system, but 

the villagers were trying to get them back. Oftentimes, 

they’d be ten to fifteen meters under the ground, and they’d 

collapsed. So, they’d have to dig down, redo the roof, and 

then bury it back up. You’d have, like, these wells every 

hundred meters or so. So, this is a great program for getting 

people employed. It gives the villagers something they could 

work with. Oftentimes you build schools, you build clinics. 

Those are really things that capture our imagination, but 

you need nurses and doctors and teachers that they just 

don’t have them. So, it’s almost like you have to shoot a little 

bit lower.

DR. KOONTZ: You mentioned Colonel Fontes. Tell me about that PRT. 

Was it about the same size as the other one, or— 

MR. CARLAND: Yes, it was pretty much the same line. The commander 

of our force protection was a permanent National Guard 

guy from Texas. He was a company commander, so it was 

very comfortable, because he kind of stacked the deck. 

All of our squad leaders were E-7s [sergeants first class], 

and just the quality of the National Guard team there was 
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outstanding—really, really sharp guys. Squad leaders were 

E-7s. Team leaders were E-6s [staff sergeants], which, given 

the security situation in Oruzgan, was very warranted, but 

it helped a lot. I mean, a couple of these guys actually—

halfway through, they could speak pretty good pidgin 

Pashto, and they were actually very useful. When we were 

inside, they were talking with the kids, talking with local 

farmers. It was just a very impressive group.

An interesting observation, too, that some folks made in the 

difference between the Iowa National Guard and the Texas 

National Guard is sort of with the ethnic breakup. Whereas 

sometimes the Iowans—and I wasn’t there to see this, but 

I can see this—the Texans just got along with the Afghans 

a lot better. They were much more comfortable. When 

you see the makeup of the National Guard—you know, 

African-Americans, Latinos, white guys—they all kind of 

speak Spanglish, anyway, because they’re from Texas, so 

this step to another culture wasn’t as shocking. I felt like 

relationships were as good as you could get—you know, as 

you would get. They weren’t just, you know, kind of, knuckle 

draggers there to keep it safe. They were actually an active 

part of the team, and very good. After a few missions, I 

definitely started, at least, meeting the sergeant in charge 

of the force protection and kind of out-briefing when we 

got back: “This is what we’re doing. This is what we’ve got. 

This is what I’ve accomplished.” Or “We didn’t get anything 

accomplished today.” That was good to sort of build the 

bond because then you’re asking these guys to stand out in 

the heat for an extra couple hours while you’re eating lunch 

inside, and they’re standing out in the 110-degree heat, that 

sort of personal relationship counts. 

DR. KOONTZ: How about the civilian add-ons to the team? You 

mentioned there was you, and then there was the USAID 

guy.

MR. CARLAND: It was the USAID guy. We also had a UN engineer, who 

was contracted. He didn’t technically—they worked out 

some legal thing, because the UN didn’t want to put any 

personnel on the PRT. He was a Welshman, and he was 

the implementing partner for USAID. So, he would be 

our engineer for a lot of these programs. So, there was the 

three of us, and then we got a couple of police mentors. 

They were retired police—I think one was from Salt Lake 

City; the other was from Idaho—and they were there to 

mentor the police. Sometimes, there was a struggle. They 

were good guys and definitely good cops, but they were 

being brought in at a managerial level. They had not 

been managers, they had been police. The previous guy 

we had had to reschedule, Art Smith. He was actually 

the police chief of Hagerstown, Maryland, and he had 

been really good—in fact, apparently, they had sucked 

him up and put him as a mentor in the interior ministry 
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to a general. He’s the kind of person you want, which was 

unfortunate. We just never have enough of the people 

that we want, because, you know, someone who’s been a 

patrol sergeant could do a certain level, but when you’re 

putting him with an Afghan colonel who’s a provincial 

police chief, he didn’t necessarily have the experience. 

So, they’re kind of talking past one another. That was 

one of the things I really got involved in, because the 

police, again, one of the key things. So, I worked a lot 

with them.

The other interesting aspect of the PRT is we were also 

collocated with the Special Forces company headquarters 

and a few ODAs, which was a good relationship. In some 

ways, I think the SOF guys were easier to work with, 

sometimes, than the conventional maneuver units. You’d 

hear horror stories from some of the others where PRTs 

were collocated with maneuver battalions and the maneuver 

battalion commander, of course, would take over, and all 

the Afghans would look to him because, of course, he had 

five hundred men under him, whereas the PRT had fifty 

armed men, and Afghans understand that ratio. The SOF 

guys definitely understood counterinsurgency, and they 

understood civil-military relations, and that was good. So, 

there was a lot of sharing and crossover in that respect.

We were also collocated, again, with an Afghan battalion, 

which had an ETT, which we would work with, although 

it’s a different dynamic with that ETT. Again, it’s just 

sometimes—the one in Farah—the commander, again, 

had been uniquely perfect. He had been the head of the 

Vermont National Guard’s partnership program with 

Macedonia. He’d spent a lot of time in Macedonia working 

with an underdeveloped military and underdeveloped 

system. He had a couple of Special Forces sergeants, 

so they definitely understood the FID, foreign internal 

defense, training. And these other ETT guys—they were 

all good guys, but they were tankers from Kentucky. You 

know, give them a tank and give them some bad guys, 

and they’d have run wild, but training light infantry in a 

potentially dangerous environment? They would go out 

with two or three of them with a squad, very unpredictable, 

going too far out. I don’t think there was a lot of trust 

between them and the ANA. That was something that 

was always frustrating—the training mission. This is the 

key, getting the ANA and the ANP to fight; sometimes it 

wasn’t the right match, while meanwhile, the SF guys—

this is what they’re really good at—they’re being tagged 

for these kill/capture missions, which, you know, they’re 

very good at, but we also need to do the FID mission, 

which I think they got turned to right as I was leaving.

Then there were Coalition special forces guys there, which 

also made for some interesting interaction. One of the unique 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

538

things, too, about Oruzgan Province was that it was actually 

a joint special—we fell under CJSOTF, the Combined Joint 

Special Operations Task Force, which had a very different 

dynamic than a lot of the other PRTs. We fell directly under 

a Special Forces group commander. There were two Special 

Forces battalions in the country, and then there was a PRT, 

and from my observation of the interaction, the group 

commander treated Colonel Fontes like one of his three 

maneuver commanders, which gave us a lot of access and 

a lot more help. From what I can understand, in RC East, 

they had a brigade commander, four battalions, nine PRTs. 

Three of the battalion commanders, he’s been working with 

for years. These are his infantry guys, and then you’ve got 

all these random PRT people doing stuff. I think a lot of the 

PRTs just got lost, especially trying to get up to Kabul. 

DR. KOONTZ: When you got there, you mentioned that there was a 

governor, and he had his own militia; and then, the 

police chief has his militia. The governor—that was Jan 

Muhammad Khan at that time, right?

MR. CARLAND: He was replaced right after I departed. I had met with the 

guy replacing him, and we thought it would be a good 

change. His claim to fame was, he had been a mujaheddin

leader of great skill and ability back in the eighties, but he’s 

an illiterate soldier and, to be honest, his soldiering skills 

were highly in doubt by the time we got out there. He didn’t 

go out on campaigns, and the one or two that he went on, 

I think, was described as piratical by some of our advisers. 

They said, “We didn’t see any Taliban. He just burnt and 

stole things.” So, there was a feeling of “Well, he’s got to go, 

because he’s just holding things up.” And, it was also sort 

of shocking—the level of corruption. Sometimes, he would 

find ways to not just siphon things off. He would take 

everything—not just some, not part, but all. At a certain 

point, you can’t do anything. So, a lot of the governance, the 

provision of services for the people, were really getting—I 

just don’t think he cared. I don’t think he understood. I mean, 

the guy was an illiterate farmer from a village: “I grew up 

without school. I grew up without having water. Everyone’s 

fine.” We definitely thought we needed something else.

But there was definitely an understanding, which I think 

had a lot to do with, just from my perspective—we urged 

with the governments for all the southern provinces, and 

there was a big turnover right in the winter time frame with 

the governors, from these sort of autocrats—these sort of 

warlord, strongman-based guys—to technocrats. But we 

saw a real dip in security, and we sort of saw that coming. 

If you replace these two key guys and then the militias, 

do they still stay in uniform? Do they still go out with the 

same alacrity that they had before? Probably not, and that 

seemed to be so, which is unfortunate, because while the 

police chief ’s militia—I don’t know. They just really didn’t 
539

Security and Assistance

do a whole lot, and they just basically kept to their inside 

areas, and so while he was considered a big Taliban fighter, 

I never saw him fight any Taliban when I was there. But the 

governor’s nephew, cousin—I don’t know—was commander 

of the highway police, and he was good. He was respected. 

He would go out and fight, and his militia definitely would 

go out and fight with our guys, and they really appreciated. 

But, you know, you get to the switch-off from the security 

situation to governance. They kept using the militia. We 

kept saying, “You need to use the ANA.” They said, “Well, 

the ANA don’t know the area as well. They’re not as good 

fighters.” “Well, maybe we need to train them a bit more, 

but you’re using the highway police as essentially a military 

force, so they’re not on the highways, guarding the Tarin 

Kowt–Kandahar highway,” which was the key link to the 

rest of the country. So, that was sometimes some of the 

civil-military friction. 

We really urged very strongly for the governor to fire all of 

these district police, which he did—which, again, caused 

some friction, because he was a good fighter. He would 

provide troops, but he was taking local businessmen to 

the main square and beating them until they gave up their 

businesses. So, you know, it’s that government or security—

which is more important? This district had been a safe, 

progovernment district, and now it’s Taliban crawling all 

over, you know? It’s because the local officials are horrific, 

and you’re driving people into the arms of the insurgents. 

So, there were those sort of issues.

For my role, I definitely took on the governance role. I 

worked a lot with the provincial council. I met a lot with 

the president of the provincial council, who was also 

the chief mullah of the province. That goes back to my 

earlier comment, that definitely religion was much more 

significant. Most of the senior people, because they were 

educated, semieducated, they’d be mullahs often. 

And then, I had worked just from my—out of pure 

inexperience, the embassy had said, “We want more 

economic reporting.” I had really no background except 

for, you know, four semiattended econ classes I took as 

an undergraduate. So, I said, “Well, what do you mean 

by that?” “Well, this one guy, he’s on the chamber of 

commerce.” So, I had worked on chambers of commerce, 

and here, there really was nothing. The guy before me had 

kind of organized, at least, a meeting, and I was trying to 

follow this, trying to get them to organize into officials, but 

this was really beyond my ability. Getting them to meet was 

hard enough, and then there are all these arguments about 

who was president, who had been elected, and the fact that 

half the people in the room had weapons [laughs] ... maybe 

this wouldn’t work. So, I realized I couldn’t do this. So, I got 

in contact with some folks at the Commerce Department 
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540

back here in Washington, just for some connections and 

whatnot, and by a chain of events, they connected with 

this group called CIPE [Center for International Private 

Enterprise]. It’s loosely affiliated with the U.S. Chamber 

of Commerce, but, basically, it goes to the developing 

world and helps them set up chambers of commerce, both 

nationally and locally.

So, you know, I started working with the guy, and it 

turned out to be very good. This gentleman came down. 

He brought a senior official, who is also Karzai’s youngest 

brother—of course, in Oruzgan, the Karzai name is 

very big. I got them to sit down and talk with a lot of 

the businessmen, and it was exactly what they needed 

because this was all beyond my capacity. I couldn’t do 

this, but what I could do was, find this and bring it down 

to the province, which I thought was one of the important 

roles, was coordinating and facilitating, which are fairly 

weak words, but this was it. I brought these guys down, 

and we met several times. We got documents set up that 

they would officially establish something. Then, we also 

set up a six-month action plan where someone from the 

CIPE would come down once a month, and we’d get them 

started, and they started collecting dues and coming up 

with, sort of, community projects. One was just, I think, 

cleaning the gutters. There were these big, like, two-feet 

deep concrete gutters which just get filled with, you 

know, God knows what. But then, we told them, “When 

the rains will come in the winter, the entire downtown 

area will be flooded. You guys have to ...,” and they’re 

like, “Oh! Somebody else should be doing this! Why isn’t 

the government doing this?” “Well, they’re not, so you 

guys should do this,” and they kept ignoring us. This guy 

worked in Africa and he worked in Southeast Asia, and it 

was just the ideal experience of talking to them in a way 

that they understood, of how this will benefit and why 

they should do this. I think they set up some father-son 

training programs, some basic accounting, and some basic 

capital-amassing issues. That’s always an issue. There’s no 

banking system, so there’s no way to mass capital, which 

is always a big problem in a place like this. But at least, 

in one little area, you can start that. So, that was one of 

the things that I thought was good to bring a sense of 

economic governance.

He was very good. Like, one thing he did was, connect it 

between father and son. He said, “We want to focus on 

young men who will inherit from their fathers” because 

if you just trained a young man in something, he’ll go to 

Kabul. As soon as he has any skills that can get him the 

hell out of Oruzgan, he’s gone. So, you had to be sort of 

ruthless and focus on skill sets that will make them wealthy 

men in Oruzgan, but not outside Oruzgan, so they have to 

stay—which, you know, was kind of harsh. It’s a horrible 
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Security and Assistance

place. I know I was glad to leave. But, again, from a civilian 

aspect, it was really useful. 

And then, one of my personal efforts was to get a Roshan 

cell network down. I went through our econ section and 

got in touch with the Roshan people and started planning 

an interaction, and they eventually sent a team down. I 

think they had been there a year before, and the governor 

had demanded 50 percent of their profits, and they said, 

“Well, you need cell phones more than we need your 

business.” So, one of the things we did is we facilitated the 

governor before they met. The commander and I met with 

the governor, and we said, “This is a really big deal. We 

should make it as easy for them as possible to come down 

here,” and I think the governor got this sense that a lot of 

people in Kabul were watching this. I don’t know if it ever 

came off. It would’ve been good because one of the things 

we are always trying to do was give the people a sense of the 

outside world because the Taliban could always compete 

with us and say, “What have the Americans done for you? 

They blow up houses. They kill people. What do they 

do?” So, it was always very tangible. The Roshan network 

had been turned on in Farah right when I arrived, and 

it was amazing. A day after, everybody had a cell phone. 

People had bought cell phones months in advance. All the 

Afghans had cell phones, and they were all text messaging 

one another. It’s a huge symbol of modernity, of central 

government, and all that sort of stuff.

That was sometimes why Jan Muhammad was a little tough 

to work with because I don’t think he completely grasped 

how important that type of thing was. From what I heard, 

[Governor Maulavi Abdul Hakim] Munib has been a 

very good. He has cabinet meetings; notes are taken; he 

asks questions; and he demands follow-up, which is a big 

difference, because Jan Muhammad would just have these 

random conversations about the weather and about his 

days as a mujaheddin fighter. After a while, sometimes the 

governor wouldn’t even show up. It would just be basically 

his old war buddies sitting around talking. So, those are 

some of the good things. 

DR. KOONTZ: Tell me about the transition over to the Dutch taking 

control? How did that affect your operations?

MR. CARLAND: I was just there at the very beginning. There was definitely a 

lot of interest in how this was going to come about because 

the Dutch definitely had a preconceived notion. They 

definitely believed—because I stopped in The Hague on the 

way back and talked with some of them—one of the things 

we really wanted to do was to convince them to keep a State 

Department official there. They were very uncomfortable 

with that. They had not allowed, up in Bagram, a State 

Department person. They were more than willing to take 
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542

a USAID person because they provide you the money, but 

they were very uncomfortable with this. One of the things 

I was trying to say is, “You shouldn’t see this person as a 

U.S. spy in your area. You should see this as your personal 

liaison to the U.S. government, as someone who has the 

right contacts in the embassy, has the right contacts in 

Washington, and can tell you what the Americans are 

doing, because if you get rid of all the American people, 

that means you’ll have to work your own embassy, cross 

over to the U.S. embassy to find out what’s going on, and 

that may take time, and things may change on the ground.” 

I think I was able to convince them, so they did end up 

taking a State Department representative there.

They came in with a lot of preconceived notions. One, 

which is very common in continental Europe, is that a lot of 

this insurgent activity is caused by the U.S. presence—that 

we cause it by attacking, by stirring things up, by blowing 

things, by killing women and children. And, you know, 

we’ve always said, “The Taliban were there before we got 

there.” There are a lot of these tribal structures that they feel 

we’ve exacerbated. Well, they’ve been killing one another 

for two thousand or three thousand years. I think they’re 

quite able to do that with or without us. And their concept 

of force protection—they came in with way more troops. I 

think there were never more than about like four hundred 

Coalition troops, most of whom were American, but a few 

not. They brought in like a thousand, like an entire infantry 

battalion or artillery battery—Apache helicopters and all 

this sort of stuff. So, it was interesting how they were going 

to manage this massive—and of those four hundred, a lot 

of them are spread out in fire bases. So, in Tarin Kowt, 

there were maybe two hundred or three hundred Coalition 

people. They were going to bring in two thousand, so that 

was interesting how they go about doing that. How they 

saw interaction with the local government—they were very 

interested in tribal dynamics. One thing I was impressed 

by was they hired this one guy who lived and worked in 

Afghanistan for a long, long time, and he knew the region 

very well and was trying to focus on smaller projects, focus 

on village solidarity, which I thought was good. I mean, I 

wouldn’t say all the things that they were doing were good, 

but it was interesting.

As much problem as we have with civil-military, the 

Europeans are much far removed from, have much less 

mature understanding of, civil-military interaction. They’re 

very restricted in what they can do and how they can work 

with the military. In their military, their civil affairs guys, 

they’re not allowed—CERP is a very American concept. 

Very few other allies can do that sort of stuff where the 

military can do development and humanitarian assistance 

programs, which basically goes against, I think, the Oslo 

Declaration. It’s this UN understanding of what civilians 
543

Security and Assistance

and the military can do, and almost all the Europeans 

have signed on to the Oslo Declaration. And so, that’s 

troublesome, and the military can’t do it, but then their 

development people are very dependent on NGOs, as our 

USAID is. They basically contract everything out. But go to 

Oruzgan, there are not NGOs. There are no NGOs, which I 

think they really didn’t understand.

DR. KOONTZ: Just because of the security?

MR. CARLAND: Yeah. In places like this, I mean, you’re really out of luck for 

any sort of international support, which I don’t think the 

Dutch, again, really, completely understood. They thought 

it was because we don’t get along with NGOs. I think 

they’ve learned. They’re actually one of the primary people 

behind creating this CERP for southern Afghanistan. I 

think it’s something like €2.5 million for the military to 

actually spend after they wreck stuff in some of these big 

military campaigns. But, you know, there definitely wasn’t 

a—I think their sense of security was more reactive and 

very Bosnia, Kosovo related. You provide area security, and 

just the threat of your being there—which, in a postconflict 

context, you need humanitarian space that’s defended so 

NGOs and civilians can do all their stuff. But we were 

always concerned, and as it seems to have turned out in the 

south, that this is an act of insurgency. The enemy is very 

actively seeking to kill you and undermine you. Building a 

hospital or a school is not a neutral or apolitical act. That 

is extending the reach of the government, which is exactly 

counter to what the Taliban want.

DR. KOONTZ: When you left Tarin Kowt, were there any kind of 

noticeable changes that you could point to as a result of 

the PRT’s work?

MR. CARLAND: I felt that in Tarin Kowt, yes. There definitely was. We were 

paving the roads. There was definitely more commerce. The 

paving of the Tarin Kowt–Kandahar highway definitely 

was bringing more goods. The market was definitely full of 

goods—oftentimes out of reach because the security costs 

added to the costs, so it was definitely not something that 

peasants could afford. There was enough security. There 

was a newly set up little bus system that would go out to the 

villages, drop people off, and bring people back, so people 

were coming in. It was just a combination of—I’m not sure 

how much of an impact, just given the big offensive that 

the Taliban pulled. I haven’t been there since, so I’m not 

sure what the goal is, but this was always the problem the 

PRTs—metrics, metrics, metrics, metrics. How do you 

measure success? It was hard to see. That’s why I thought 

the roads, some of these more tangible programs; and selfstarted ones, like the chamber of commerce, like Roshan, 

like these bus programs, that were all run by the Afghans. 

This is all their business. You can’t undo a road when the 
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

544

road is built. I thought those were the projects we should 

focus on and that will have a lasting impact. It definitely felt 

like the schools, clinics—if the U.S. left tomorrow, I don’t 

know if the Taliban would take over, but a conservative band 

of Pashtuns would take over, and I think the schools would 

all go away; and, I think, a lot of the clinics, just for a lack 

of functions, supply system. A lot of the police would most 

revert back to just sort of a tribal militia. They’ll maintain 

order at the behest of the most powerful tribe. So, it’s a hard 

thing. It’s one of those things. You’ll know it when you see 

it, but you won’t know it when it’s happening. You’re trying 

to change the way people think and these folks have been 

doing their thing for a long time.

DR. KOONTZ: This is going to be kind of a touchy-feely question here to 

end this interview. If there is anything that you learned 

in Afghanistan, either about yourself or the way that 

international diplomacy works, or about human nature, 

or anything, that has changed in the way that you think 

in kind of broad terms? Is there one, you know, big lesson 

that you learned during your time in Afghanistan?

MR. CARLAND: I felt, to an extent, the United States, and the United States 

government, in particular ... we are fairly narcissistic 

navel-gazers. We spend an enormous amount of our time 

trying to do things internally. We assume that, basically, 

everything else is a reaction to either a failure to act or an 

act on our part, when a lot of these processes are going on 

before we arrived, after we arrived. We have an enormous—

obviously, because we’re wealthy and powerful—impact 

to influence things. I’m always frustrated when “The 

Taliban are resurging because we didn’t do this and this.” 

Well, they’re also resurging because they have their own 

process. Every winter after the summer campaign, they go 

and do their own AARs [after action reports] in Quetta or 

wherever in the Persian Gulf, and they say, “We need more 

money. You know what? We see these Iraqis. They’re using 

these IED [improvised explosive device] things. We should 

figure out how to do that. Obviously, the Americans they 

can’t do anything against them.” Or “Wow, NATO is taking 

over in the south. This is do-or-die time for us. If we can kill 

enough Brits and Canadians, the Europeans will go home, 

and the Americans aren’t coming back, so let’s do it.” We 

assume that the opponent is a ball of clay to be shaped by 

us, and, you know, when I was a lieutenant, we were always 

taught the enemy gets the vote, and the enemy has been 

voting quite a bit in all of this. That’s sometimes sort of 

frustrating.

And then, too, one of the other things is, sometimes—which 

is why I’m glad that you guys are doing this—I learned this 

quickly in regard to this policy, but it connects with the larger 

NATO thing that I’ve been working on. A lot of the world 

is very incremental in the changes you see, and you have 
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Security and Assistance

to have perspective to see the changes, to see where you’ve 

come and where you’re going. I’m just surprised by the 

constant turnover of personnel, both in Washington and in 

the field. We’re still talking about training Iraqi and Afghan 

military, whereas people have been talking about this for 

years. How is it that it’s so difficult to maneuver things? 

Personally, I think it’s just amazing. Even the military—we 

have a very consensus-based decision-making process, and 

if one group doesn’t want to do something there, we just 

don’t—in a lot of these senior documents, there are just 

very few implementing mechanisms: “You will do this, or 

you will lose your job. I will see to that.” I just wonder what 

Eisenhower or Roosevelt would think, seeing the way these 

institutions—you know, I feel the pain sometimes looking 

at this when I’m trying to work this. You just can’t get these 

institutions to do what you want them to do, what you’re 

telling them to do. I’m just a junior bureaucrat. I have no 

idea, and once I do, I’ll probably use it to foil people who are 

trying to do what they want [laughs]. It was pretty shocking 

to see war on a peacetime footing—even more so on the 

civilian agencies in the military, but even in the military.

DR. KOONTZ: Okay. Well, we’ve cooped you up for three hours in this 

room. We’ll go ahead and shut this down. On behalf of 

the Center, I want to thank you for taking the time to do 

this.

MR. CARLAND: Thank you so much. I do appreciate that.

DR. KOONTZ: We do really appreciate it, and once again, thanks for 

taking part in this. 

AAFES Army-Air Force Exchange Service

AAR after action report

ADA air defense artillery

ADC assistant division commander

ADC-O assistant division commander-operations

ADC-S assistant division commander-support

ADCON administrative control

ADVON advanced echelon

ALOC air line of communication

AMF Afghan Militia Forces

ANA Afghan National Army

ANG Afghan National Government

ANP Afghan National Police

ANSF Afghan National Security Forces

AO area of operations

AOR area of responsibility

ARCENT U.S. Army Central Command

ATO air tasking order

BCT brigade combat team

BCTP Battle Command Training Program

C2 command and control

CA civil affairs

CAC U.S. Army Combined Arms Center 

 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas)

CALL Center for Army Lessons Learned

CAS close air support

CASH combat surgical hospital

CAT civil affairs team

CENTCOM U.S. Central Command

CERP Commander’s Emergency Response Program

CEXC Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell

CFC-A Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan

CFLCC Coalition Forces Land Component 

 Command

CG commanding general

CGSC Command and General Staff College 

 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas)

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CJ-1, etc. See Staff Sections.

CJCMOTF Combined Joint Civil-Military 

 Operations Task Force

CJSOTF Combined Joint Special 

 Operations Task Force

CJTF combined joint task force

CMO civil-military operations

CMOC civil-military operations center

CMTC Combat Maneuver Training Center 

 (Graf-Hohenfels, Germany)

COAD campaign objective assessments board

Glossary
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COC command operations center

CODEL congressional delegation

COIN counterinsurgency

CONEX container express

CONOP contingency operation

CONUS continental United States

CP command post

CPX command post exercise

CRC Continental U.S. Replacement Center 

 (Fort Benning, Georgia)

CSS combat service support

CTC combat training center

DA Department of the Army

D.C. District of Columbia

DCG deputy commanding general

DCG-O deputy commanding general-operations

DCM deputy chief of mission (embassy)

DCU desert combat uniform

DDR disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration

DGMO Directorate General of Military Operations 

DIME diplomatic, information, military, economic 

 (elements of national power)

DIVARTY division artillery

DMAIN division main command post

DoD Department of Defense

DOS Department of State

DREAR division rear command post

DTAC division tactical command post

EA executive assistant

EBO effects-based operations

EIPG Embassy Interagency Planning Group

EOD explosive ordnance disposal

ETT embedded training team

EUCOM U.S. European Command

EW electronic warfare

EXSUM executive summary

FA	 	 field artillery

FAO	 	 foreign area officer

FATA Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Pakistan)

FDC	 	 fire direction center

FID foreign internal defense

FOB forward operating base

FSO	 	 fire support officer

FST	 	 field surgical team

GOA Government of Afghanistan

GOMO	 	 General Officer Management Office

Hesco Hesco Bastion Concertainer 

 (prefabricated container)

HIG Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin
Glossary

549

HUMINT human intelligence

HVT high-value target

IBA Interceptor body armor

ID infantry division

IED improvised explosive device

IG inspector general

IGO international governmental organization

IMO	 	 information management officer

INL U.S. Department of State Bureau 

 of International Narcotics and Law 

 Enforcement Affairs

INTSUM intelligence summary

IO information operations; international 

 organization

IRR Individual Ready Reserve

ISAF International Security Assistance Force (NATO)

ISI Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistan)

J-1, etc. See Staff Sections.

JAG judge advocate general

JDAM Joint Direct Attack Munition

JEMB United Nations Joint Electoral 

 Management Body

JFCOM U.S. Joint Forces Command

JMD joint manning document

JOC joint operations center

JRTC Joint Readiness Training Center 

 (Fort Polk, Louisiana)

JSOA Joint Special Operations Area

JTF joint task force

K2 Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan

kandak battalion-size unit of the Afghan National Army

KBR Kellogg, Brown & Root

KIA killed in action

LAV Light Armored Vehicle

LNO	 	 liaison officer

MASCAL mass casualty

MDMP military decision-making process

MEDCAP medical civil action program

MEDEVAC medical evacuation

MEF marine expeditionary force

METL mission essential task list

MEU marine expeditionary unit

MILVAN military van container

MOI Afghan Ministry of Interior

MOS military occupational specialty

MP military police

MPRI Military Professional Resources, Inc.

MRAP Mine Resistant Ambush Protected 

 (armored vehicle)
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MRE Meal, Ready to Eat

MRX mission rehearsal exercise

MSR main supply route

mujaheddin Muslim holy warrior

mullah Muslim religious leader

MWR morale, welfare, and recreation

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NDS Afghan National Directorate of Security

NDU National Defense University 

 (Fort McNair, D.C.)

NGO nongovernmental organization

NOFORN not releasable to foreign nationals 

NSDD national security decision directive

NTC National Training Center (Fort Irwin, California)

OD Special Forces Operational Detachment

ODA Special Forces Operational Detachment-A

ODB Special Forces Operational Detachment-B

ODC	 	 Office of Defense Cooperation

OEF Operation Enduring Freedom

OER	 	 officer evaluation report

OGA other governmental agency

OHDACA Overseas Humanitarian, Disaster and Civic Aid 

OIF Operation Iraqi Freedom

OMC-A	 	 Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan

OPCON operational control

OPFOR opposition force

OPSEC operations security

OSC-A	 	 Office of Security Cooperation-Afghanistan

OSD	 	 Office of the Secretary of Defense

P2 Paktika and Paktia provinces

P2K Paktika, Paktia, and Khowst provinces

PACOM	 	 U.S. Pacific Command

PAO	 	 public affairs officer

Pashtunwali Pashtun moral and ethical code

PCS permanent change of station

PDSS predeployment site survey

POI program of instruction

POL-MIL political-military

POLAD political adviser

PRT provincial reconstruction team

PSYOPS psychological operations

PT physical training

PTDO prepare to deploy order

PVO private volunteer organization

QA quality assurance

QC quality control

QRF quick reaction force

RC Regional Command

R&D reconstruction and development
Glossary

551

RDZ regional development zone

RFI request for information

ROE rules of engagement

RPG rocket propelled grenade

R&R rest and relaxation

RSOI reception, staging, and onward integration

SACEUR Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (NATO)

SAMS School of Advanced Military Studies 

 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas)

SCI sensitive compartmented information

SCIF sensitive compartmented information facility

SETAF Southern European Task Force (Airborne)

SF Special Forces

SGS secretary of the General Staff

shura Afghan local council

SIGINT signals intelligence

SIPR Secure Internet Protocol Router

SIPRNET Secure Internet Protocol Router Network

SITREP situation report

SJA staff judge advocate

SOCCENT Special Operations Component, U.S. Central 

 Command

SOF Special Operations Forces

SOP standard operating procedure

SSR security sector reform

Staff Sections:

S-1 Personnel

S-2 Intelligence

S-3 Operations

S-4 Logistics

S-5 Plans

S-6 Communications

S-7 Engineering

S-8 Comptroller

S-9 Civil-Military Affairs

STRATCOM strategic communications

SVBIED suicide vehicle-borne IED

TACON tactical control

TACSAT tactical satellite

TDA table of distribution and allowance

TOA transfer of authority

TOC tactical operations center

TO&E table of organization and equipment

TRADOC U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

TTP tactics, techniques, and procedures

UAV unmanned aerial vehicle

UE	 	 Unified Endeavor

U.K. United Kingdom

UN United Nations

UNAMA United Nations Assistance Mission-Afghanistan 

USA U.S. Army
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USACAPOC U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological 

 Operations Command

USAF U.S. Air Force

USAID U.S. Agency for International Development

USAR U.S. Army Reserve

USAREUR U.S. Army, Europe

USARPAC	 	 U.S. Army, Pacific

USDA U.S. Department of Agriculture

USMC U.S. Marine Corps

UW unconventional warfare

VETCAP veterinary civil action program

VTC video teleconference

XO	 	 executive officer
1st Battalion, 30th Field Artillery, 304

1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, 29th 

Infantry Division, 7

1st Battalion, 505th Infantry, 82d 

Airborne Division, 8

1st Battalion, 508th Infantry, 173d 

Airborne Brigade, 8, 399

1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th 

Mountain Division, 3, 10

1st Brigade Combat Team, 82d Airborne 

Division, 10

2d Battalion, 27th Infantry, 7

2d Battalion, 87th Infantry, 10th 

Mountain Division, 366, 370

2d Brigade Combat Team, 10th 

Mountain Division, 3, 4, 6

3d Battalion, 3d Marines, 7

3d Battalion, 4th Cavalry, 317, 397

3d Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, 342

3d Battalion, 7th Field Artillery, 25th 

Infantry Division, 339

3d Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry 

Regiment, 82d Airborne Division, 

164

3d Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry 

Division, 6, 261, 339. See also

Combined Task Force Bronco.

3d Infantry Division (Mechanized), 3

III Marine Expeditionary Force, 428, 

429

3d Special Forces Group, 4

3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 8, 322

4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 4

V Corps, 225, 511, 518

6th Marine Regiment, 366, 370, 373, 380

7th Special Forces Group, 415

10th Mountain Division (Light), 1, 4, 6, 

11, 273, 339, 370, 390

Barno on, 13, 14

lessons learned documented, 73

and media, 76

organization of, 48, 67, 68, 69, 71, 

196, 276, 370

See also Combined Joint Task 

Force-180 (CJTF-180).

12th Frontier Force (British), 96

17th Field Artillery Brigade, 304

XVIII Airborne Corps, 1, 3, 14, 42, 45, 

46, 47, 49, 50, 67, 68, 196. See also

Combined Joint Task Force-180 

(CJTF-180).

22d Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special 

Operations Capable), 8, 34, 251

25th Infantry Division (Light), 6, 8, 122, 

199, 217, 227, 340 

Barno on, 13, 50, 68, 69, 70, 71

Battle Command Training Program, 

268

brigades, 271

Lamm on, 128, 130, 131

in Oruzgan Province, 226

See also Combined Joint Task 

Force-76 (CJTF-76); Combined 

Task Force Bronco; Combined 

Task Force Thunder; Operation 

Mountain Storm; under 

individual commanders.

26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, 428

52d Sikh, 96

82d Airborne Division, 3, 46, 47, 120, 

195, 339, 364, 490. See also under 

individual commanders.

96th Civil Affairs Battalion, 462

173d Airborne Brigade, 130, 396, 404

as Combined Task Force Bayonet, 10

training, 225

183d Brigade Combat Team, 220

321st Brigade, 505

364th Civil Affairs Brigade, 504

448th Civil Affairs Battalion, 483

504th Infantry, 82d Airborne Division, 

120

A Battery, 1st Battalion, 36th Field 

Artillery, 304

Abizaid, General John P., 118, 144, 145, 

167, 210, 251 

briefings for, 56

CENTCOM commander, 5, 190, 191

and Coalition forces, 65

on staffs, 197

See also Barno, Lt. Gen. David W.

Abu Ghraib, 85, 86

Achakzai tribe, 462

Afghan Highway Police, 524, 531, 534, 

539

Afghan Militia Force (AMF), 374, 376

Afghan National Army (ANA), 19, 36, 

161, 221, 229, 241, 384 

command and control of, 262

and DDR, 21

and disaster relief, 386

Index
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554

Afghan National Army 

(ANA)—Continued

and “dual key” system, 35

equipping, 251–52

Faryab revolt quelled by, 6

in Ghazni, 419

in Herat, 21

and joint operations, 4, 335

missions of, 250

and presidential election, 325, 326

and Security Strategy South, 169

and Shindand airfield, 32–33

and Task Force Phoenix, 183, 184

training, 5, 11, 41, 56, 57, 164, 233, 

404, 408

and warlords, 20

See also Combined Task Force 

Bronco; Kandaks (Afghan 

National Army); under individual 

commanders.

Afghan National Development Plan, 443

Afghan National Directorate of Security, 

374, 476

Afghan National Police (ANP), 19, 88, 

231, 335, 384 

contractor training of, 175

and DDR program, 21

and Farah PRT, 515

and Ismail Khan’s removal, 138

training, 23, 53, 126, 130, 140, 414, 

528, 529

See also Germany; under individual 

commanders.

Afghan National Security Council, 455

Afghan National Security Forces 

(ANSF), 221, 488, 489

Afghan Nongovernmental Security 

Organization (ANSO), 523

Afghan Reconstruction Group (ARG), 

52, 139, 148, 201, 207, 514

Afghanistan (Dupree), 156

Afghans for a Civil Society, 395

Air tasking order (ATO), 278

Al Jazeera, 79

Al Qaeda, 3, 18, 142, 189, 240, 291, 488

Barno on, 28, 32, 39

in Bermel District, 408

Champoux on, 269, 273, 275, 278, 

281, 283, 296, 297, 301

Olson on, 250, 260

and voter registration, 38

Alam, Governor Sher, 233

Alexander, Christopher, 144

Alexander, Deborah, 134, 136, 147, 148

Alikozai tribe, 462

Allen, Col. Christopher, 489, 490, 

496–97, 500–501

Alternative Livelihoods Program

Augustine on, 438, 442, 451

Carland on, 509, 535

Fontes on, 480, 481

Gilchrist on, 105, 106

Amanullah Khan, 258, 317

arrest of, 336, 337

and Ismail Khan, 32, 148, 149, 250

Amend, Kurt E., 137

AP (Associated Press), 325

Arman, Governor, 233, 234

Army-Air Force Exchange Service 

(AAFES), 151

Arnault, Jean, 61, 112, 144, 162, 190, 

205, 206

Artillery

105-mm., 339

155-mm., 339, 353

Asadullah, Governor, 233, 234, 235

Atta, Muhammad, 139

Augustine, Lt. Col. Eugene M., 427–52

and III MEF, 429, 430

CERP uses, 443, 444

civil affairs, 446, 447

compound described by, 433–34

on Helmand Province, 441, 443, 

449, 450–51

human intelligence, 439, 450

humanitarian efforts, 437–38

interagency operations, 444–45, 

451, 452

on Iowa National Guard, 439, 440, 

452

on Lashkar Gah, 432, 437, 439, 441, 

443

military police, 439, 440

and NGOs, 446, 451

police force, 449, 450

poppies, 436, 437, 441, 450, 451

PRTs, 429, 430, 431, 435, 439, 442, 

444, 445, 447

reconstruction missions, 439, 442

State Department, 445, 447

transition, 432, 438

and USAID, 438, 439, 443, 444, 447, 

449, 452

and USDA, 445, 447, 452

Austin, Brig. Gen. Lloyd J., III, 166, 

196

10th Mountain Division 

commander, 3, 14, 197, 246, 248
Index

555

Barno on, 45, 48, 67, 68

and Operation Avalanche, 4

Australia, 289, 464, 465, 470, 520

combat operations of, 470, 471

and elections, 359, 520

Aviano, Italy, 405, 424

Badakhshan Province, 85

Badghis, Afghanistan, 328

Bagby, Brig. Gen. Byron S., 199

Baghdad, Iraq, 1, 5, 52, 124

Baghlan, Afghanistan, 161

Bagram Air Base, 42, 432, 440

Barno on, 44, 45

CJTF-76 at, 121, 280, 303

CJTF-180 at, 1, 7, 14

tripartite conference at, 20

Bahguchar Valley, 386

Bahlul, Governor, 233, 237

Bamain, Afghanistan, 17, 60, 486, 487

Barakzai tribe, 362, 462, 469, 531

Barno, Lt. Gen. David W., 5, 8, 11, 

13–93, 118, 151, 202 

and Abizaid, 15, 17, 19, 24, 34, 41, 

42, 44, 47, 53, 56

on airpower, 33, 89–90, 91

on CFC-Afghanistan, 5, 13, 201

chain of command of, 57–58

civil-military interdependence 

chart, 221–22, 256–57

on civilian casualties, 87, 88

collocates at U.S. Embassy, 23, 45

on counterinsurgency, 5, 13, 18, 24, 

25, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 92

and counternarcotics programs, 29, 

31, 105, 202

Five Pillars of, 5, 18, 19, 20, 24

on Khalilzad, 20, 38, 52, 82, 83, 84

on media, 75–79, 80

on provincial reconstruction teams, 

17, 18, 59, 60, 73

on rotation of units, 13, 72, 74–75

staff of, 42–43, 48–49, 50

on technology, 54–55, 56, 57

VTCs used by, 45, 117

on warlords, 17, 18, 20, 35

See also Combined Forces 

Command-Afghanistan (CFC-A); 

Counterinsurgency; Elections; 

Joint manning document (JMD); 

Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan; U.S. 

Embassy, Kabul.

Bartell, Brig. Gen. Arthur M., 199, 200

Baryalai, Nasarullah, 161

Battle Command Training Program 

(BCTP), 404

Battlefield update assessment (BUA), 

70

Battlefield update brief (BUP), 70

Bazaars, 114, 115, 417, 460

BBC, 76, 325, 338

Bell, General Burwell B., 219, 220

Bell, Jack, 53

Better War, A (Sorley), 122, 169, 273

Bin Laden, Osama, 1, 3, 22

Bismullah Khan, 140, 149

Black Hawks, 405

Black operations, 493

Blue Force Tracker, 271

Bomb dogs, 101

Bonn Agreement, 2, 4, 121, 158, 160

Bookert, Col. Phillip, 303–38 

25th Infantry Division, 310, 336

on Afghan National Army, 322, 323

and assessments, 309–10

on border issues, 332–33

and Champoux, 316, 317

on civil-military role, 308–11, 

313–14, 318, 319, 324, 338

on CJTF-76, 306, 307, 310, 320, 337

on DDR, 330, 333–34

on election, 325–26

on Jacoby, 308, 315, 317, 318

on narcotics traffic, 332

and NATO, 335–36

on Olson, 307, 317

on PRTs, 309, 310, 313–15, 319, 

330, 331, 333, 336

regional governor’s initiative 

established by, 328, 329

See also Combined Task Force 

Longhorn; Medical civil action 

program (MEDCAP); Regional 

Command West (RC West).

Border security zones, 114–15, 116

Brahimi, Lakhdar, 22, 61, 160, 162, 

190

Brennan, Maj. Gen. John T., USAF, 

130, 134, 147

Bridge, Col. Donald W., 186

British Department for International 

Development, 166

Brosnan, Capt. Andrew P., 383

Bureau of International Narcotics and 

Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). 

See U.S. Department of State.

Bush, George W., 3, 210

Bush, Laura, 151, 152
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C-SPAN, 78

Cagan, Debra, 44

Cahar Cineh, Afghanistan, 463, 470, 472

Camp Doha, 132

Camp Eggers, 185, 514

Camp Souter, 111

Campbell, Lt. Gen. James L., 244

Canada, 67, 133

Carabiniere (Italian), 490, 491

Cardinal, Col. Charles N., 149, 279

Carland, Raphael, 463, 509–45 

Afghan National Army, 520, 531, 537, 

539

Afghan National Police, 520, 524, 

528, 529, 537

on CERP expenditures, 516, 519, 542, 

543

on chamber of commerce in Farah, 

525, 526, 539

civil affairs teams, 527, 534

civilian add-ons, 519, 536

and economic development, 525, 

526

and elections, 520, 521–22, 523, 528

on Farah, 515, 520, 521, 522, 525, 

528, 530, 533

on Fontes, 532, 535, 538

illiteracy issues, 532, 534

on narcotics issues, 509, 530, 534, 535

NGOs, 524, 525

on PRTs, 512, 515, 516, 519, 520

on security measures, 520, 523, 

524–26

on State Department, 515, 516

on Tarin Kowt, 509, 514, 543–44

tribes, 513–14, 528, 531, 544

on USAID, 515, 516, 519, 532–33, 

534, 535, 536, 542, 543

warlords, 530, 538

See also Afghan Highway Police; 

Alternative Livelihoods Program; 

Center for International Private 

Enterprise (CIPE).

Caruso, Lt. Col. Jennifer A., 319, 320, 

321, 322

Casey, Lt. Gen. George W., 44, 72

Center for Army Lessons Learned 

(CALL), 219

Center for International Private 

Enterprise (CIPE), 540

Center for Strategic and International 

Studies (CSIS), 78

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 207

Çetin, Hikmet, 111

Chaghcharan, Afghanistan, 326, 327, 

328, 334

Champion, Brig. Gen. James G., 458

Champoux, Brig. Gen. Bernard S., 247, 

267–303, 342

and 10th Mountain Division, 277, 

278, 279, 301

and 22d MEU, 274, 295, 296

25th Infantry Division, 267, 268, 302

82d Airborne Division, 295–96, 301

on Afghan National Army, 267, 

273–74, 284, 288, 291–92, 294, 296

on Barno, 269, 273, 276, 277, 278, 302

on border issues, 297–98, 299, 302

CERP uses, 275, 285

CFC-A input, 269, 273, 282, 285, 294, 

295, 302

CJSOTF and, 279, 288, 289, 297

on CJTF-76, 267, 268, 276, 278, 279, 

280, 288, 295

on counterinsurgency, 267, 269–70, 

273–74, 275

on de-confliction, 290–91, 293

on effects-based operations, 282, 291

on elections, 267, 273, 274, 282–83, 

301

information operations, 283, 301

intelligence, 281, 291

on joint manning document, 276, 

301, 302

on NGOs, 274, 276, 282, 288, 292

on PRTs, 267, 274, 275, 285–86, 294, 

295

on Special Operations Forces, 267, 

269, 274, 278, 279, 288

transitioning, 267, 271, 275, 301

on United Nations, 274, 276, 282, 

283, 286, 288

Chapman Air Base, 489, 504

Charchina, Afghanistan, 531

Charlie Wilson’s War, 513

Cheek, Col. Gary H., 143, 153, 353, 354, 

355

Chemonics, 438

Chesney, Col. Michael A., 129

Chora, Afghanistan, 470, 479

CNN, 232, 336

Coalition, 1, 8, 54, 214 

and elections, 109, 387

initiatives of, 375

membership, 133–34, 154, 159–60, 

197

and PRTs, 17, 27, 61, 63, 484

See also Operation Anaconda.
Index

557

Coalition Forces Land Component 

Command (Forward) (CFLCC), 

1, 278

Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 52

Combat Support Hospital (CASH), 

466

Combat Training Centers (CTC), 

272

Combined Air Operations Center 

(CAOC), 252

Combined Arms Center (CAC), 269

Combined Forces CommandAfghanistan (CFC-A), 1, 8, 65 

and Afghan National Police 

training, 107

Barno on, 14–15, 27, 54, 73, 165

and interagency planning, 115

Lamm on, 119, 147

Mansager serves in, 154, 164–65, 

167

mission of, 99

relations with Afghan National 

Government, 207

Snukis and, 179, 197

See also under individual 

commanders.

Combined Forces Command-Central 

Asia, 5, 54, 192

Combined Joint Civil-Military 

Operations Task Force 

(CJCMOTF), 3, 4, 8, 207, 

483, 499, 538. See also under 

individual commanders.

Combined Joint Special Operations 

Task Force (CJSOTF), 3, 8, 57

Combined Joint Task Force-76 (CJTF76), 6–7, 8, 10, 11

Barno on, 57, 67, 84

in Farah, 517

Kamiya and, 219, 222

Lamm on, 118, 121, 126, 130, 138, 

142

Mansager on, 154, 199

mission of, 99

police training by, 140, 141

reconstruction and development 

activities of, 222

Combined Joint Task Force-180 

(CJTF-180), 1, 3, 4, 5

Austin leads, 14, 45

Barno on, 8, 42, 44, 46, 57, 67, 84

and CFC-A staff, 48

Mansager on, 161, 164, 165, 179

and PRT chain of command, 64

Snukis on, 197, 199, 200

Vines commands, 158, 183

Combined Security Training 

Command (CSTC), 130

Combined Task Force-82, 3, 14, 46

Combined Task Force Bayonet, 10

Combined Task Force Bobcat, 381

Combined Task Force Bronco, 7, 339, 

350, 352, 366, 442, 452, 438

Combined Task Force Devil, 10, 416

Combined Task Force Longhorn, 8, 

303, 322, 325, 326, 328, 334, 337

Combined Task Force Mountain, 3

Combined Task Force Peacemaker, 

323

Combined Task Force Saber, 317, 

319, 323

and Afghan National Army, 325

and Afghan National Police, 325

at Herat, 333

impact of, 334

Combined Task Force Steel, 339, 346, 

350

Combined Task Force Stonewall, 

380

Combined Task Force Thunder, 7, 10, 

320

Command post exercise (CPX), 136, 

137

Commander’s Emergency Response 

Program (CERP). See under 

individual commanders.

Continental U.S. Replacement Center 

(CRC), 120, 182

Contractors, 107, 413, 480, 481. See 

also Chemonics; DynCorp; 

Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR); 

Military Professional Resources, 

Inc. (MPRI).

Cooper, Maj. Gen. John, 54, 134, 136, 

209

Counterinsurgency, 11, 27–28, 66, 262 

Barno on, 6, 18, 25, 37, 77

British experience in, 65

campaign, 31, 40, 61–62, 83

See also under individual 

commanders.

Counternarcotics programs, 24, 29, 

202. See also Great Britain.

Counterterrorism, 18, 19, 24, 25

Country Handbook, 183

Country Team Kabul, 191

Crawford, Col. Cardon, 152
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Crocker, Ryan, 121

Cucolo, Brig. Gen. Anthony A., 199

Daley, Col. Eddye, 166

Daoud Muhammad Khan, 437

Davis, Capt. Steven, 197

Daykondi, Afghanistan, 457, 462, 471, 

472, 474

Defence Procurement Agency (Great 

Britain), 95

“Defense Is from Mars, State Is from 

Venus” (Rife), 173

Defense Language Institute Foreign 

Language Center, 154

Deh Rawod, Afghanistan, 460, 463, 

473, 531

Del Vecchio, Lt. Gen. Mauro, 518

Delawar, Asif, 161

DeLeon, Sgt. Jorge, 375, 377, 378

Detainees, 85–87, 103

Di Paolo, Adm. Giampaolo, 518

DIME (diplomatic, information, 

military, economic), 143, 201, 228, 

240, 241

Disarmament, demobilization, and 

reintegration (DDR), 21–22, 139, 

499

equipment of, 335–36

in Herat, 335

impact on narcotics traffic, 332

incentives in programs, 333

Japanese direct, 100, 127, 143, 150, 

157, 191

in Tarin Kowt, 531

Donahue, Col. Patrick J., 414

Donovan, Lt. Col. George T., 422

Dostum, Abdul Rashin, 139, 140, 

148–49, 153, 258

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 274

Drug trafficking, 297

Dupree, Louis, 122, 156

Durand, Sir Mortimer, 298

Durand Line, 297

Durani confederation, 469, 513, 531

Dutch participation, 474, 541, 543

DynCorp, 132–33, 185, 299, 463–64

Early Bird, 78

Economic Support Funds, 494

Eikenberry, Maj. Gen. Karl W., 115, 

161, 192, 228, 231, 237, 318

and CFC-A, 11

and EIPG, 172

Fontes on, 456

and OMC-A, 4, 42, 155, 157, 162, 

167, 187

Elections, 8, 130 

ballots, 386, 387–88

parliamentary, 11, 100, 101, 108–11, 

139, 150, 287

preliminary, 170

presidential, 29, 82, 85, 96, 99, 214, 

283

See also Voter registration.

Embassy Interagency Planning Group 

(EIPG), 126, 172, 209, 456

European Union (EU), 160, 171

European Union Military Office, 512

Evans, Cmdr. Kimberly S., 322

Fahim Khan, 21

Fakir, Colonel, 442, 450

“FAOs Unbound,” 178

Farah, Afghanistan, 326, 435 

chain of command in, 517

PRT, 322, 328

See also Carland, Raphael.

Faryab Province, 6

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 

274

Federally Administered Tribal Areas 

(FATA), 298

Feith, Douglas J., 114

Fifteen Points, 36, 88

Fine, Patrick, 134, 233

Fleischer, Cpl. Jacob R., 398

Fontes, Lt. Col. Robin L., 156, 176–77, 

453–81 

and Afghan National Army, 465, 

471, 472, 475–76

Afghan National Police, 475–76, 481

on Barno’s approach, 455, 456, 458

CERP uses, 457, 475–76

civil affairs teams, 462, 463, 465

on contractors, 480, 481

on Eikenberry’s approach, 455, 456, 

457, 476

on elections, 457, 470, 471–72

force protection of, 463, 464, 465, 

477

forward operating base assumed by, 

465, 466, 470

on Joint Special Operating Area 

Carolina, 462–63

medical unit of, 463, 466

on narcotic trade, 455, 460, 469, 

473–74, 480, 481

security issues of, 469–70, 475–76
Index

559

Tarin Kowt, 460, 462, 467, 468, 471, 

475, 476

and USAID, 463, 464, 465, 472, 474

on women, 461–62, 468

See also Alternative Livelihoods 

Program; Texas National Guard; 

Tripartite Border Commission.

Ford, Lt. Col. Steven J., 374, 376, 382

Fort Benning, Georgia, 48, 67, 122, 

123, 181, 182, 306

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 1, 133, 486

Fort Drum, New York, 345

Fort Eustis, Virginia, 180, 181

Fort Hood, Texas, 129

Fort Jackson, South Carolina, 5, 14, 41

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 36, 244, 269

Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, 159

Fort Lesley J. McNair, D.C., 13, 312

Fort Lewis, Washington, 483

Fort Polk, Louisiana, 71, 195, 218

Fort Riley, Kansas, 51

Fort Sill, Oklahoma, 303, 304, 305

Forward Operating Base Anaconda, 

383

Forward Operating Base Cobra, 389, 

390

Forward Operating Base Ripley, 381, 

396

MEU for, 379, 382

and Operation Asbury Park, 383

Forward Operating Base Salerno, 247, 

252, 412, 489

Four Factors of Prosperity, The, 224

Fragmentation of Afghanistan, The

(Rubin), 143

France, 54, 133, 197, 288, 334, 335

Afghan National Army trained by, 

30, 160

in OMC-A, 185

Special Forces of, 297

Franks, General Tommy R., 1, 5

Free Iraqi Forces, 5, 41, 81, 165

Frontier Corps, 264

Gall, Carlotta, 76

Ganci Air Base, Uzbekistan, 156

Gardiz, Afghanistan, 17, 60, 486, 487–

88, 489, 497–98

Garza, Col. David, 373, 374, 375, 379

General Officer Management Office 

(GOMO), 53

Geraci, Capt. Joseph C., 409

Gereshk, Afghanistan, 435

Germany, 133, 160, 210, 225, 310, 499

police training, 106, 158, 175, 191, 

284, 299

Ghazni, Afghanistan, 418, 489, 496, 501

air strike on, 502

Hunter on, 504

PRT in, 176, 497

Ghilzai confederation, 469, 488, 513

Ghowr, Afghanistan, 327, 330

Gilchrist, Maj. Gen. Peter, 54, 95–118, 

134

on Barno, 97, 98–99, 101, 107, 

114–16

on counterinsurgency campaign, 

97–98, 114, 115

on counternarcotics activities, 103–

05, 115, 116

and DDR, 101–02, 111

on inauguration, 101, 116

and Khalilzad, 98, 112, 114

on parliamentary elections, 108–11

reconciliation program formulated 

by, 100, 116

on United Nations, 112–13

and VTCs, 117–18

on warlords, 110, 115

Gliemeroth, General Goetz, 167, 168

Goldwater-Nichols Act, 40, 51

Graf-Hohenfels Multinational Training 

Center, 220, 223, 225

Grafenwoehr, Germany, 130, 404

Grandi, Filippo, 112

Granfield, Lt. Col. Lynda, 468

Grau, Lester W., 368, 391

Graves registration, 312–13

Great Britain, 66, 67, 133, 160

and Afghan National Army, 430

and counternarcotics, 97, 103–05, 

143, 145, 157, 191, 206, 442, 474, 

500

role in PRTs, 17, 60, 176

rotations of, 74, 163

Great Game, The, 156

Green, Dan, 530

Greene, Kerry, 463, 533

Grenada, 41, 121, 272, 378

Hagenbeck, Maj. Gen. Franklin L., 3

Hamidi, Mr., 477–78

Hancock, Col. Mackey K., 483

Hari Rud River, 324

Hashem, Engineer, 467

Hazarans, 100, 108, 284, 462

Headquarters, Department of the Army, 

5
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

560

Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 4, 18, 22, 28, 

250, 273. See also Hezb i Islami 

Gulbuddin (HIG).

Helmand Province, 233, 260, 427, 440

dam in, 432

drug issues, 297, 393, 436, 437, 474

order in, 450–51

Helmand River, 435, 473, 534

Helmly, Lt. Gen. James R., 313

Herat Province, 274, 294–95, 318, 332, 

333, 336 

elections in, 325, 326

infrastructure in, 315

Italians in, 322, 336, 517

NATO forces in, 26

police in, 140, 528

PRT in, 176, 314, 321, 326, 460

See also Ismail Khan.

Herat Burn Center, 139

Hesco barriers, 413, 460, 488

Hezb i Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), 28, 190, 

240, 278, 281, 283, 374, 375

Hillier, Lt. Gen. Rick J., 21

Hindu Kush Mountains, 4, 161, 297, 380

History of Afghanistan, A (Dupree), 122

Hohenfels, Germany, 404–05

Hoover Institution, 155, 172, 178

Howitzers, 105-mm., 339

Hughes, Lou, 53, 148

Human intelligence (HUMINT), 257, 

420

Hungary, 41, 81, 165

Hunter, Lt. Col. Anthony J., 482–509 

321st Civil Affairs Brigade, 482, 483, 

505

Afghan National Army, 499, 500

Afghan National Police, 499, 500

assessments, 485, 496

on Barno, 497, 506

CERP used by, 485, 493, 494, 505

contracting, 486, 494, 495, 496

DDR process, 500, 504

on force protection operations, 484–

85, 506

Gardiz PRT, 482, 488, 491–92, 494, 

498

narcotics issues, 491, 500, 501, 502

on PRTs, 484, 487, 490, 502, 504–06, 

507, 508

on tribal factions, 482, 488, 491, 500, 

501, 508

UNAMA, 484, 492, 493

USAID, 493, 498, 508

on warlords, 482, 483, 488–89

See also Overseas Humanitarian 

Disaster and Civil Aid (OHDACA); 

Voter registration.

Improvised explosive device (IED), 27, 

332, 361, 371, 391–92, 420, 487

drills and countermeasures for, 124, 

342, 406

Iraqi, 6

locals detonate, 418

and Pakistan, 32

vehicle borne, 457

Incirlik, Turkey, 344

India, 157, 330

Indian Army, 96

Individual augmentees, 181, 196, 211, 276, 

429, 463, 481

Barno on, 47, 48

headquarters, 72

Individual Ready Reserves (IRR), 47, 123, 

204

Intelligence. See Human intelligence 

(HUMINT); Signal intelligence 

(SIGINT).

Interagency process, 41, 115, 120, 121, 127

International governmental organization 

(IGO), 395

International Office of Migration, 519

International Rescue Committee, 174

International Security Assistance Force 

(ISAF), 5, 10, 21

Barno on, 14, 15, 17

deploys, 25, 26

in Farah, 517

NATO assumes, 25, 26

PRT participation by, 254

RC West controlled by, 10, 249

rotations, 27, 75

rules of engagement, 254

Iowa National Guard, 439, 536

Iran, 32, 39, 114, 332–33, 435, 525, 526

Iraq, 34, 40, 92, 268–69, 300, 301, 315

Civil Defense Corps, 401

mission in, 142

PRTs in, 285

and rotation policies, 72

Irish, Pat, 439

Islamabad, Pakistan, 20, 52, 263

Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, 32

Ismail Khan, 21, 33, 114, 130, 139, 163, 

281, 317, 333, 460

and Amanullah Khan, 32, 149

governor of Herat, 250

removal of, 138, 140, 148, 324, 325
Index

561

Italy, 68, 157, 504, 518, 519

in Herat, 176, 322, 327, 336

judicial reforms directed by, 191

Jacoby, Brig. Gen. Charles S., 247, 270, 

279, 280, 298

and border issues, 264

and detainee operations, 85, 86

predeployment site survey of, 272, 

278

Jalalabad, Afghanistan, 468

Jalali, Ali, 22, 106, 131, 135, 140, 144, 

148, 195

on national contingents, 26

and PRT Executive Committee, 112

Jammu, Pakistan, 19, 44

Jan, Abdul Raman, 437

Jan Muhammad Khan, 384–85, 470, 

472, 473, 538, 541

Jani Khel, 488

Japan, 101, 210, 311. See also

Disarmament, demobilization, 

and reintegration (DDR).

Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 

180

Joint Chiefs of Staff, 57, 171

Joint Elections Management Body, 108

Joint Forces Command. See U.S. Joint 

Forces Command (JFCOM).

Joint Forces Quarterly, 179

Joint Forces Staff College, 164, 180

Joint manning document (JMD), 15, 

51, 129, 186–87, 197, 205, 276, 277

Joint Narcotics Analysis Center, 

London, 104

Joint Operations Center (JOC), 55, 206, 

318

Joint Readiness Training Center 

(JRTC), 188, 219, 244, 272, 340, 

355, 368, 369

Joint Special Operations Area (JSOA), 

288

Joint Special Operating Area Carolina, 

462

Joint Staff, 5, 44, 49, 128, 129, 196, 197, 

199, 513

Joint Task Force Liberia, 400

Jones, General James L., 27, 167

Kabir, Engineer, 467

Kabul, Afghanistan, 25, 128, 149, 336, 

408, 438, 456, 475

and ISAF forces, 26, 254

loya jirga meets at, 4

and parliamentary elections, 109

security in, 124

tripartite conferences at, 20

Kabul Compound, 185

Kabul Women’s School for Education, 

150 

Kajaki, Afghanistan, 435

Kajaki Dam, 449

Kamiya, Maj. Gen. Jason K., 8, 70, 71, 

130, 217–43, 264, 336, 404

on 25th Infantry Division, 222, 228, 

231–32, 233, 242

and Afghan National Army, 221, 235, 

236, 241, 242

on Barno, 220, 221, 228, 232

commands CJTF-76, 217, 223, 242

completes MRXs, 221, 223, 224, 225

on counterinsurgency environments, 

240–42

and DIME approach, 228, 240, 241

on Eikenberry, 232, 234, 235

provincial governors and, 234–36

on PRTs, 234, 235, 236–37, 238–39

psychological operations, 230, 232

on training, 224–25, 242

Kandahar, 247, 260, 261, 339, 412, 497, 

517

border issue, 297

police academy at, 440

PRT in, 174–75, 176, 440

regional development zone at, 169

Kandahar-TK (Tarin Kowt) Road. See

Tarin Kowt–Kandahar Road.

Kandaks (Afghan National Army), 4, 

107, 322, 323, 374, 465

and Combined Task Force 

Longhorn, 8

and Combined Task Force Thunder, 

7

in Gardiz, 499

Karimi, Lt. Gen. Sher Muhammad, 140, 

190

Karshi Khanabad, Uzbekistan, 1, 148, 

431

Karzai, Hamid, 8, 17, 20, 21, 28, 117

on Afghan National Army, 4

on civilian casualties, 87, 88, 89–90

on elections, 109

on Ismail Khan, 324, 325, 337

on narcotics trade, 145, 441

tribe of, 237, 281, 384, 462

and United Nations, 112–13

Karzai, Qayum, 395, 540

Kashmir, Pakistan, 19, 44, 192
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

562

Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), 185, 

413, 434, 480

Khalik, Asad Ullah, 497

Khalilzad, Zalmay, 16, 112, 136, 162, 

191, 435

and Barno, 20, 37, 52, 144, 148, 207

and Laura Bush’s visit, 151, 152

Khan, Lt. Col. Asad, 383

Khas Oruzgan, 383, 463, 531

Khowst Province, 275, 294, 299, 488, 

489, 501

border issues in, 496, 506

drug issues, 501

Forward Operating Base Salerno, 

247

Killian, Col. Howard, 246

Konar, Afghanistan, 511

Konduz, Afghanistan, 17, 26, 60, 175, 

176, 315

Korea, 54, 252

Kyrgyzstan, 167, 373

Lafontaine, Col. William, 382, 385, 394, 

395

Lamb, Christina, 122

Lamm, Col. David W., 101, 118–53, 

212, 458 

and 82d Airborne Division, 120, 121

and Afghan National Army, 118, 

126, 138

on Barno, 119, 122, 125, 128, 132, 

133, 135, 138, 140, 144, 145, 153

command post exercises, 136, 137, 

148

on counterinsurgency, 131, 153

counternarcotics, 137, 140, 143, 144, 

145

on elections, 130, 137, 138, 140, 141, 

145, 148

inauguration ceremony, 138, 148

and interagency process, 134, 142, 

147, 153

on Khalilzad, 141, 144, 145, 147, 153

on warlords, 138, 142, 148, 149, 150

See also Ismail Khan.

Landstuhl, Germany, 149

Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, 427, 429, 

430, 431, 432

Law and Order Trust Fund, 499

Lawrence of Arabia, 122

Leadership Training Programs (LTPs), 

404

Liberia, 223

Long, Mary Beth, 137, 145

Lopey, John, 141

Lowgar Province, 489, 505

Loya jirga, 4, 6, 61, 121, 160, 170, 209, 

287

Luck, General Gary E. (Ret.), 128, 229, 

293

Lyles, Brig. Gen. Ian, 166, 203, 207

60 Minutes, 76

Mackenzie, Col. Frank, 296, 379, 383, 

389

Manas Air Base, Kyrgyzstan, 123, 156, 

184, 373, 424

Mangal, Gulab, 415, 416

Mangal tribe, 488, 501

Mansager, Col. Tucker B., 43, 122, 123, 

154–79, 196, 453

and Afghan National Army, 157, 160

on Barno, 165–66, 167, 168, 169, 172, 

176, 177, 179

duties of, 160, 161, 167–68

on PRTs, 175–76

on rotation policy, 16

and security sector reform, 154, 155, 

157

Masood, Ahmad Shah, 149, 237, 238

Maymaneh, Afghanistan, 111

Mayville, Col. William C., 130, 223, 224, 

264

Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, 20, 26, 123, 

140, 148, 315

British troops in, 17, 22, 111

PRT at, 22–23, 60, 176, 254

Mazerik, Maj. Andrew R., 491

McBride, Lt. Col. M. Scott, 390

McChrystal, Brig. Gen. Stanley A., 196

McGuire, Lt. Col. Timothy P., 399–425 

and Afghan National Army, 401, 409, 

410, 416, 418, 419, 421, 422

Bermel District, 399, 408, 410, 412, 

415, 416, 422

on block leave, 424–25

on border issues, 399, 408, 409, 414, 

417

counterinsurgency operations, 399, 

400, 403, 404, 407, 410, 411, 420, 

424

elections, 406, 415, 420–21

FOBs of, 422–23

information operations, 403, 411, 423

Orgun, 405, 407, 412, 413, 415, 423

Paktika Province, 399, 405, 407, 408, 

412, 414, 418, 423

and PRTs, 414, 420
Index

563

and Special Operations Forces, 399, 

408–09, 411, 415, 416, 418, 422

spring offensive, 410–11

training, 404–05, 406, 411, 419

United Nations, 409, 421

VCTs used by, 402, 414

See also Team Paktika.

McMahon, Lt. Col. Michael J., 143

McNeill, Lt. Gen. Dan K., 1, 2, 3, 46, 86, 

214, 300

Media, 75–79, 80, 141

Medical civil action program 

(MEDCAP), 310, 313, 383, 411–12, 

462, 471, 472

Médicins Sans Frontières [Doctors 

Without Borders], 256

Mentors, 30, 184, 187, 207

Meshrano jirga, 527

Metrinko, Mike, 514

Meyers, General Richard B., 210

Mikolashek, Lt. Gen. Paul T., 119, 121, 

122

Military History of Afghanistan from 

Alexander to the Present Day, The, 

156

Military Interdepartmental Purchase 

Request (MIRP), 127

Military Police (MP), 225, 414, 419

Military Professional Resources, Inc. 

(MPRI), 159, 185, 187

Militias, 13, 21, 102, 116, 150, 200

Milley, Col. Mark A., 188

Mine Resistant Ambush Protected 

(MRAP) armored vehicles, 266

Ministry of Defense (Afghan) (MOD), 

154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 455

Ministry of Health (Afghan), 139, 331

Ministry of Interior (Afghan) (MOI), 

34, 61, 299, 447, 448, 450, 481, 490

Ministry of Irrigation (Afghan), 467

Ministry of Public Works (Afghan), 519

Ministry of Reconstruction and Rural 

Development (Afghan) (RRD), 519

Ministry of Trade (Afghan), 526

Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Afghan), 

457

Mission Performance Plan (MPP), 82, 

144

Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRX), 221, 

223, 225, 244, 301

Mojadidi, Sibghatulla, 102

Mongolia, 30

Moore, Lt. Col. Joe, 158

Muhammad, Governor Sher, 437, 447

Mujaheddin, 281, 368, 541

Mullahs, 33, 73

Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), 72

Munib, Maulavi Abdul Hakim, 541

Nad Ali District, 438

Nangahar-Konar, 226

Nangahar Province, 239

National Defense University (NDU), 13, 

153, 212, 213, 512

National Directorate of Security, 138, 

527

National Guard, 158, 490 

and Afghan National Army training, 

157

and Afghan National Police training, 

107

See also under individual units.

National Health Service, 139

National Security Council (Afghan), 131

National Security Council (U.S.), 49

National Security Decision Directive 

(NSDD), 163–64

National Training Center, 194, 272

National War College, 118, 119, 121, 134

Near East-South Asia Center for 

Strategic Studies (NDU), 13, 64

Neason, Col. Clarence, Jr., 339–66 

10th Mountain Division, 339, 344, 

364

82d Airborne Division, 339, 364

155-mm. artillery of, 353, 354

and Afghan National Army, 339, 347, 

348–49, 350

on Afghan National Police, 339, 347

on artillery, 341, 344–45, 353, 356, 

357, 365

border actions, 353, 361

on combined operations, 357–58

command post described by, 350, 352

on elections, 359–60, 364, 365

at Kandahar, 343, 346, 347, 353, 359, 

360, 361, 362, 363, 365, 366

mission essential task list prepared 

by, 341, 342

on MPs, 346, 348

and Romanian forces, 339, 341, 346, 

347, 349

on Special Operations Forces, 346, 

353, 355, 357, 361

transition, 339, 342, 344, 345, 365

See also Combined Task Force Steel; 

Improvised explosive device (IED).

Neumann, Ronald E., 238, 515
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

564

New York Times, 76, 325, 338

New Zealand, 17, 60, 197, 288

Nimruz Province, 435

Nongovernmental organizations 

(NGOs), 105, 106, 112, 174, 190, 

274, 462, 512, 543

Nonsecure Internet Protocol Router 

Network (NIPRNET), 56, 379

Noorzai tribe, 469

Norland, Richard B., 233

North Atlantic Treaty Organization 

(NATO), 6, 8, 111, 112, 232, 249, 

335, 512 

and Afghan National Army, 4

and parliamentary elections, 108, 

109

and PRTs, 176

See also Combined Task Force 

Longhorn; International Security 

Assistance Force (ISAF).

Northern Alliance, 3, 17, 149, 237, 281

Northern Ireland, 65, 74, 101

Northwest Frontier, 96

Norton, Col. George, 111, 133, 143

Nowak, Col. Henry J., 156

O’Dowd, Col. John B., 134

Oakley, Robert B., 44

Office of Defense Cooperation (ODC), 

159

Office of European Political and 

Security Affairs, 512

Office of Military CooperationAfghanistan (OMC-A), 4, 14, 30, 

57, 118, 122, 169, 171, 217 

Barno at, 165

and CENTCOM, 183

challenges for, 163–64

core meeting of, 162

international participation in, 185

Mansager at, 154, 155

mission of, 157–58

staffing of, 158

recruiting teams, 193

relationship with Washington, 160

Snukis at, 179

staff of, 185–86

and Task Force Phoenix, 188

Office of the Secretary of Defense 

(OSD), 49, 57, 118, 136

Office of Security CooperationAfghanistan, 30–31, 233

Olson, Maj. Gen. Eric T., 222, 227, 233, 

243–67, 270, 279, 298

and 10th Mountain Division, 246, 

248

and 22d MEU, 251, 252

25th Infantry Division commander, 

243

and Afghan National Army, 251, 257, 

262

and Barno, 245, 249, 250, 251, 256, 

278

borders issues and, 263–64

headquarters of, 246, 248–49

on IEDs, 261, 266

and individual augmentees, 246, 252

on information operations, 265

intelligence and, 257, 259

and ISAF forces, 253–54

on Karzai, 258, 259, 264

on Khalilzad, 249, 255

NGO interaction, 254, 256

predeployment site survey of, 245, 

247–48, 272, 278

and UNAMA, 255–56, 259

Omar, Mullah Mohammad, 3, 22

Operation 1774, 422

Operation 1776, 422

Operation Anaconda, 3, 488

Operation Asbury Park, 383, 390, 391

Operation Asbury Park II, 383

Operation Avalanche, 4

Operation Bobcat Freedom, 388

Operation Bobcat Freedom II, 388

Operation Bobcat Freedom III, 388

Operation Cadillac Ranch, 383

Operation Corregidor, 422

Operation Desert Shield, 378, 399

Operation Desert Storm, 272, 378, 

399, 428

Operation Dragon Fury, 497

Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), 

3, 4, 11, 113, 154, 261, 304, 378, 399

Operation Interceptor, 422

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), 154, 

306, 368, 378

Operation Landgrab, 389

Operation Lightning Freedom, 8, 260

Operation Lightning Resolve, 8, 

259–60

Operation Mountain Blizzard, 4

Operation Mountain Lion, 19, 506

Operation Mountain Resolve, 4

Operation Mountain Storm, 4, 8

Operation Mountain Thrust, 85

Operation Mountain Viper, 4

Operation Neptune, 422
Index

565

Operation Omaha Beach, 422

Operation Outlaw, 390

Operation Plan Zulu, 385

Operation Silver Wake, 428

Operation Thunder Freedom, 260 

Operation Unified Strike, 422

Operation Verona, 422

Operation Winter Drive, 423

Oruzgan Province, 235, 296, 440, 457, 

470, 528, 530, 531

and elections, 386, 387

ethnic makeup of, 462, 534

narcotics issues in, 474

operations in, 34, 260

PRT in, 464

security in, 536

Taliban in, 469

Oslo Declaration, 542, 543

Other Governmental Agencies (OGA), 

173, 206, 274, 493

Overseas Humanitarian Disaster and 

Civil Aid (OHDACA), 485, 493, 

498

Owens, Col. Kevin C., 234, 404

Pace, General Peter, 85, 268

Pakistan, 39, 40, 44, 167, 170, 192, 380, 

416

border issues, 4, 6, 8, 13, 263, 294, 

364, 408, 496

Ministry of Interior, 481

refugees, 296, 297

and tripartite committee, 31, 32, 201, 

298

Paktia Province, 233, 489

Paktika Province, 85, 230, 380, 399, 489, 

496, 502

Panjshir Province, 233, 237, 458

Parameters, 26

Parmly, Michael E., 122

Paschal, Lt. Col. David G., 370, 373, 374

Pashtuns, 100, 108, 263, 274, 462, 488, 

529

dominate Afghan government, 237

and ethnic balance, 175, 208, 284, 525

insurgents, 264

Pashtunwali, 406, 410, 503

Petraeus, General David H., 179

Peace Corps, 432

Pedersen, Col. Richard E., 350, 352, 395, 

435, 439, 452

3d Brigade Combat Team 

commander, 261, 341, 379

and Neason, 353, 355

Pennsylvania National Guard, 186

Permanent Joint Headquarters, 97

Phase III, 34, 190, 193, 200

Phase IV, 34, 46, 190, 192, 197, 200, 

212, 484, 508

Piatt, Col. Walter E., 289, 402, 406

Pohakuloa Training Area, Hawaii, 

244, 371

Pol-e-Charki, 186

Poland, 154, 155, 157

Popalzai tribe, 362, 384, 462, 469, 

513, 531

Poppy culture, 105, 142, 469, 473, 

474

Prasek, Brig. Gen. F. Joseph, 164, 

188, 192

Predator, 55, 266

Presidential inauguration, 38, 97, 

99–100, 273, 283

Presidential Management Fellows 

Program, 510 Private volunteer organization (PVO), 174

Program Tachim e-Solh, 101, 102, 

116

Provincial Judicial Development 

Program, 475 Provincial reconstruction teams 

(PRTs), 6, 17, 60, 124–25, 217 

chain of command for, 63–64

counterinsurgency strategy, 27–28, 

261–62

expansion of, 170, 176

interagency participation in, 176

organization of, 33–34, 490

undermanned, 479–80

working group, 206

See also under individual 

commanders. Provincial Reconstruction Team 

Executive Steering Committee, 

112, 233

Psychological operations (PSYOPS), 

503–04

Py, General Jean-Louis, 111

Qal’eh-ye, 326

Rassoul, Zalmay, 131

Reconstruction operations, 6

Red Crescent, 256

Red Cross, 256

Regional Command East (RC East), 

7, 8, 10, 220, 249, 295, 332
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

566

Regional Command South (RC South), 

7, 8, 10, 220, 249, 226, 234, 295

border issues in, 297–98

Taliban in, 332

Regional Command West (RC West), 8, 

10, 249, 314, 327–28, 336

Bookert on, 338–39

command problems in, 318–19

narcotics traffic in, 332

NATO control of, 318

PRTs, 324, 326–27

reconnaissance in, 297

Taliban in, 318, 331–32

warlords in, 317, 324

Regional development zone, 174–75

Rhein-Main Air Base, 486

Rife, Brig. Gen. Rickey E., 172

Ring Road, 210, 418, 435, 504, 523, 524

Ritchey, Col. John P., 172

Rocket propelled grenades (RPG), 391

Rockets, 120-mm., 376

Rodriguez, Lt. Col. Tony, 166

Romania, 7, 185, 253

Rossi, Brig. Gen. Umberto, 517, 518

Rubin, Barnett R., 143

Rumsfeld, Donald H., 3, 15, 65, 155, 

161, 178, 271

SA–7s, 376

Saleh, Amanullah, 138

Saleh, Peter, 139

Salwar Kamesz, 461

Sampler, Donald L., 133

Sattler, Lt. Gen. John F., 300–301

Schmidt, Col. Rick, 157, 158, 187

School of Advanced Military Studies 

(SAMS), 50, 119, 126, 128, 166

Seabees, 158, 464

Secure Internet Protocol Router 

Network (SIPRNET), 56, 238, 342, 

271, 370, 413

Security Strategy South and East, 61, 

169, 171, 174–75, 176, 202, 205, 

206

Sedney, David S., 22, 162, 191

Sellers, Col. Terry L., 366–99 

and 22d MEU, 379, 380, 381

on 25th Infantry Division, 367, 380

82d Airborne Division, 396

and Afghan National Army, 382, 391, 

396

and Afghan National Police, 376, 386, 

387

casualties, 375, 377, 397

CERP used by, 376, 377, 384, 394

CJTF-76, 366, 380, 388, 396

detentions, 393–94

and Ghazni, 366, 374, 375, 376, 379, 

381, 382

letters to combat, 368, 371

on operations, 367, 384, 388, 389

in Oruzgan Province, 366–67, 379, 

380, 381, 384, 386, 389, 390, 393, 

395–96

and PRTs, 382, 392

reintegration process, 397, 398

Special Forces, 381, 396

Taliban, 392, 393, 394

on Tarin Kowt, 380, 381, 385–86, 

394

and UNAMA, 383, 386, 390

and USAID, 384, 394

See also Combined Task Force 

Bobcat; Deh Rawod, Afghanistan; 

Jan Muhammad Khan; Operation 

Asbury Park II; Voter registration.

Senior Appoints Committee (Great 

Britain), 95

Sensitive compartmented information 

facility (SCIF), 370

Senta-Pinter, Lt. Col. Andy, 322, 330

Sewing Circle of Herat, The (Lamb), 122

Shahidi Hassass, 463, 464, 470

Shapiro, Col. Barry, 453, 458

Sharan, Afghanistan, 407, 412, 502, 504

Sharp, Col. Robert, 134

Shindand airfield, 32, 33, 138, 317, 335, 

336, 337

Shirzai, Gul Agha, 163, 471

Shkin, Afghanistan, 489, 504

Shura, 234, 361, 362, 395, 416, 419, 443, 

489

Signal intelligence (SIGINT), 258

Small Wars Manual, 429

Smith, Art, 536

Smith, Col. Randy, 322–23, 324

Snukis, Col. Thomas J., 179–215

and 82d Airborne Division, 195

on Abizaid, 195, 202

on Afghan National Army, 186, 188

on Barno, 190, 191, 196, 197, 199, 

200, 203, 206, 207, 209–10

at CFC-A, 179, 189, 201, 207, 210, 

211

CJTF-180, 199, 200, 211

on Five Pillars, 179, 205–06, 213

an individual augumentee, 181, 203, 

204, 211
Index

567

and joint manning document, 186–

87, 196, 197, 199, 205

OMC-A chief of staff, 179, 181, 182, 

184, 185–86, 193

and Task Force Phoenix, 183, 184, 

185, 186

on VTCs, 204–05

Sorley, Lewis, 122, 169, 273

South Waziristan, 32

Southern European Task Force 

(Airborne) (SETAF), 8, 11, 68, 70, 

71, 130, 217, 218, 283, 336

Barno on, 13

transitioning, 227

Special Forces, 21, 33, 63, 76, 101, 142, 

148, 250

Special Forces Operational DetachmentAlpha (ODA), 462–63, 464, 471, 

531

Special Operations Component, U.S. 

Central Command (SOCCENT), 

300

Special Operations Forces, 1, 3, 200, 

274, 288, 339

Stammer, Lt. Col. Mark, 43, 165, 196, 

197

Stars and Stripes, 242

Stilwell and the American Experience in 

China (Tuchman), 156

Stopford, Col. James, 134

Strategic communications 

(STRATCOM), 202

Strmecki, Marin J., 144

Supreme Allied Commander, Europe 

(SACEUR), 167–68

Supreme Court of Afghanistan, 141

Tachim e-Solh. See Program Tachim 

e-Solh.

Tactical satellite communications 

(TACSAT), 413, 414

Tajikistan, 19, 44, 176, 458, 532

ethnic issues, 100, 175, 208, 525

U.S. Embassy in, 52

Taliban, 6, 11, 240, 247, 283, 285 

and al Qaeda, 1, 3, 481

and borders, 263, 264

defeat of, 25, 28, 202

and elections, 38, 58, 109, 136, 138, 

143, 148, 150

in Kandahar, 346, 364

leadership of, 22, 269, 281

operations, 18, 125, 142, 190, 259, 

299

in Oruzgan, 380, 390, 393, 469

in Paktika Province, 502, 503

in southern Afghanistan, 17, 32

See also Operation Asbury Park.

Tandberg video desk teleconference, 

56, 232

Taniwal, Governor, 233

Tarin Kowt, 236, 296, 379, 440, 

461, 532, 534. See also under 

individual commanders.

Tarin Kowt–Kandahar Road, 235, 296, 

381, 531, 539

Tarin Kowt River, 473

Task Force Omaha, 279, 288

Task Force Phoenix, 4, 154, 159, 179, 

192, 207 

and Afghan National Army 

training, 163

and OMC-A, 157, 158

Prasek commands, 164, 192

See also Snukis, Col. Thomas J.

Task Force Victory, 431

Taszar, Hungary, 5, 41

Taylor, William B., 500

Team Paktika, 420

Texas National Guard, 463, 464, 481, 

515, 536

Third Army, 121

“Three Wars in Afghanistan, The,” 142

Thuraya phones, 387

Timmons, Maj. Richard F., 197

Tirana, Albania, 428

Tripartite Border Commission, 20, 

31–32, 201, 298, 454

Tunnell, Lt. Col. Harry D., 400

Turkey, 4, 54, 111, 156, 159

Turkmenistan, 6

Tuz, Iraq, 399, 400

Unified Endeavor exercise, 270

United Nations, 1, 17, 58, 175, 274, 

310, 330, 455, 462

bombing in Baghdad, 133

and Bonn Agreement, 2, 121, 158, 

160

and DDR, 21

destruction of compound, 330

and elections, 28, 108, 112, 136, 

421

and International Security 

Assistance Force, 25

ordnance destroyed by, 376

production of maps, 62

rescue of staff in RC West, 324
Enduring Voices: Oral Histories of the U.S. Army Experience in Afghanistan, 2003–2005

568

United Nations—Continued

and Security Strategy South and East, 

206

trainers, 127

United Nations Afghan New Beginnings 

Program, 102

United Nations Assistance MissionAfghanistan (UNAMA), 133, 160, 

190, 255, 359, 383, 454

Coalition forces serve with, 5

and PRTs, 484

United Nations De-Mining program, 

132

United Nations Humanitarian Air, 514

United Nations Joint Electoral 

Management Body (JEMB), 136

United Nations Office of Project 

Services, 464, 520

University of Kabul, 309

University of Texas, Center for Agile 

Technology, 304

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), 266, 

466

U.S. Agency for International 

Development (USAID), 82, 134, 

168, 224, 231, 242, 294

cash for work project, 472, 475

and CERP projects, 394

and civilian experts, 8

and CJTF headquarters, 292

coordination of projects, 142, 202, 

206, 444, 519

at core group meetings, 207

funds, 127, 315, 384, 444, 493

has military planner, 98

at Kandahar, 175

Kandahar-TK Road, 235

and priorities, 225

and PRTs, 6, 34, 237, 239, 256, 285, 

286, 314, 490, 515

Ring Road construction, 210

and security, 209, 211

subcontractors, 438, 445

U.S. Air Force, 63, 185, 248, 252, 

269

and CJTF-76, 311

at OMC-A, 158

and PRTs, 237, 315

rotations of, 163, 203, 224

U.S. Army, Europe (USAREUR), 130, 

219, 223, 320

U.S. Army, Pacific (USARPAC), 244

U.S. Army Central Command-Kuwait 

(ARCENT-Kuwait), 118, 119

U.S. Army Civil Affairs and 

Psychological Operations 

Command (USACAPOC), 489

U.S. Army Command and General Staff 

College (CGSC), 50, 322

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 513

U.S. Army Personnel Command, 129

U.S. Army Training Center, 5, 41

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine 

Command (TRADOC), 180, 181, 

219

U.S. Army Training and Modernization 

Directorate, 181

U.S. Army Training and Support 

Command, 181

U.S. Army War College, 128, 129, 155, 

173

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), 

8, 14, 121, 250

Abizaid commands, 5

Afghan desk at, 177, 183

Afghan National Army formed, 5

Barno on, 5, 13, 14, 47, 48, 49, 50

and CFC-A, 46

Franks commands, 1

and OMC-A, 183

and staffing, 197

Zinni commands, 78

U.S. Central Command, U.S. Marine 

Corps Central Command 

(CENTCOM MARCENT), 431

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 540

U.S. Coast Guard, 244

U.S. Department of Agriculture, 8, 34, 

175, 231, 237, 256, 296, 314

U.S. Department of Commerce, 83

U.S. Department of Defense, 3, 5, 56, 80, 

82, 237

U.S. Department of Justice, 174

U.S. Department of State, 6, 8, 100, 

172–73, 285, 286, 385 

Barno on, 23, 31, 49, 80–82, 83

Bureau of International Narcotics and 

Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), 30, 

53, 144, 145

Kamiya on, 224, 225, 236, 242

and PRTs, 34, 239, 256, 294, 314 

U.S. Embassy, Kabul, 16, 43, 84, 207, 224

Barno and, 14, 23, 45, 65, 82, 91, 114, 

115, 146

and military planning support for, 

171–72

Mission Performance Plan of, 144

normalization of, 147
Index

569

OMC-A at, 4

operations of, 24, 45, 147

organization of, 52

staffing of, 48, 173–74

U.S. European Command (EUCOM), 

129, 301

U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), 

51, 128, 217, 221, 228, 270, 291

U.S. Marine Corps, 185, 244, 311, 315, 

382 

and counterinsurgency, 128

rotations, 163, 224

See also under individual units, 

commanders.

U.S. Military Academy at West Point, 

180, 267

U.S. Navy, 63, 185, 237, 252, 311, 

315

U.S. Pacific Command area of 

responsibility (PACOM AOR), 

367

U.S. Treasury Department, 83

Uzbekistan, 19, 44, 52, 167, 170, 344

Vermont National Guard, 537

Vicenza, Italy, 130

Video teleconferences (VTC), 45, 56, 

117–18, 201, 204–05. See also

under individual commanders.

Vines, Maj. Gen. John R., 163, 166, 

190, 191, 192–93, 196

and CJTF-82, 3, 46

CJTF-180 commander, 42, 158

Virginia National Guard, 7

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), 

56, 254

Voter registration, 286

Barno on, 16, 28, 38

Champoux on, 273, 274, 277, 278

Hunter on, 499, 500

Sellers on, 374, 383, 384, 386–87, 389, 

390

Snukis on, 170, 209

Walizadah, Maj. Gen. Abdul Wahahab, 

323

Wallace, Lt. Gen. William S., 269

Wardak, General Abdul Rahim, 106, 

140, 144, 187, 190, 207, 505

Warlords, 156, 208, 281, 459. See also

Barno, Lt. Gen. David W.; Gilchrist, 

Maj. Gen. Peter; Lamm, Col. 

David W.

Warsaw, Poland, 154

Wasefi, Ezatollah, 527

Waza Khwa, Afghanistan, 412, 416

Waziristan, 264, 299, 408

Webb, Lt. Col. Thomas D., 320, 322

Weston, Maj. Gen. Craig P., 169

Women, 36–37, 88, 139, 283, 529

World Food Program, 132

Wylie, Lt. Col. Dave, 517

Yanvary, Lt. Col. Ty, 429, 432

Zabol Province, 233, 234, 380, 383, 390, 

435, 511

Zadran, Pacha Khan, 488, 499

Zadran tribe, 488

Zarqawi, Abu Musab al-, 301

Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 22

Zinni, General Anthony C., 78, 79