Major Matt Harnly is a dear friend of mine and is within days of completing his one year tour here as an Afghan advisor. He wrote this great article summarizing his experience, so I hope you like it as I did. Thanks Matt for sacrificing another year away from your wife and family to serve your country.
“Heading Home” Article and photos, by Matt Harnly
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This week we flipped over another month on the calendar hanging in our barracks. To my team, it meant one month closer to redeployment – to me, it marked my twelfth and final month in Afghanistan.
I’ve experienced no more memorable assignment than my past year to Afghanistan. As a logistics, military advisor, the ability to develop personal relationships with nearly three score of Afghan soldiers and to stand beside their leaders as they achieved new and progressive successes, provided a deep feeling of satisfaction. There were disappointments, of-course, such as not being able to discourage obviously bad decisions or uncovering purposefully misleading lies, but overall, building one-on-one rapport, experiencing the natural beauty of Afghanistan, and being embedded in a new and unique culture, carried a lot of weight towards making this a favorable experience.
Many military advisors leave this country worn out and soured. I’d like to think I’m not one, but their frustrations are understandable. Grievances and Afghanistan go hand-in-hand: Reducing some of our self-imposed sufferings would not be a wasted effort.
You may have heard the expression that we haven’t fought 8-years of war in Afghanistan, but have fought eight, 1-year wars. This is a criticism of both the military’s high personnel turnover rate and the continuity inefficiencies it creates.
Continuity programs are practiced in Afghanistan and typically involve a five to fifteen day overlap between the inbound and outbound persons. The weakness in this program is its assumption that the incumbent fully understands his/her job and can effectively conduct a turnover. I’ve witnessed one key set of positions at my base change four times in seven months – at some point, both the old and the new persons could do very little to avoid the poor turnover that was going to happen.
To become proficient with any job, takes time. To become proficient in a job you’ve never done before takes even more time. As a military advisor, you need to become proficient in a job you’ve probably never done, work with a people whose language you probably don’t speak, whose culture probably differs from yours, and whose true business occurs within a social network of which you’ve very little understanding and less access. Proficiencies in this role begin to manifest between the third and fourth months of a deployment – unfortunately, at the 6-month point, many military either redeploy or are transferred to another duty.
My senior ranking non-commissioned officer liked to say he spent more time educating coalition forces (i.e., advisors) on Afghan processes than he did mentoring Afghans. This quip is humorous, but it is not far from the truth. When a local coalition unit swapped out or when key members in our higher command changed, we spent a lot of time rehashing current Afghan processes and prevalent issues.
It served us well to ensure our coalition partners understood the intricacies of the Afghan logistics system, but so much time was spent either training (or learning) fundamental knowledge, that relevant issues could take months to solve, if only because so few people understood the dynamics within the Afghan structure to affect change.
My team spent six days a week with our Afghan counterparts. Some of this time was working side-by- side with our Afghans during daily operations, but much was conversing over various issues or topics: these ranged from weekly projects, to operational constraints; from resolving military pay problems, to discipline limitations; and, of-course, there was the mandatory chai and discussions about family or health.
What I learned through these hours of bouncing conversation was there was a lot I didn’t know about the men with whom we worked and the social networks they navigated to conduct business. The fact that we didn’t fully understand these people and their systems (those processes not documented in policy) created a lot of frustration on our behalf. Coupled with our heavy reliance on translators, circular fact-finding discussions, and culture gaps, identifying root causes for benign issues was problematic. Finding answers to complicated problems was near impossible.
For months my team had the words, “To Understand,” drafted at the top of the whiteboard we used to track our weekly agenda. It was an ever-present reminder that before we offered advice, we needed some confirmation we really understood the problem. With high turnover rates and coalition forces perpetually in the learning phase, our ability “to understand” was paramount, if we were to help resolve the important issues.
Further, effectively working with the Afghan army required more than understanding the differences between our cultures – it required an “acceptance” of those differences. Our pre-deployment training did a fair job teaching the academic differences between our cultures, but knowledge doesn’t assure compliance.
Small achievements don’t garner decorations or promotions and are often by-passed by the novice mentor for the prospects of “great reward through great project.” This is a symptom of our own recognition system and it afflicts not only the novice mentor, but often leadership. Big projects are necessary, but we cannot under value the success of small victories.
Socks, for example. Many Afghans wear sandals with their daily attire and don’t wear socks, but when you’re in uniform, you wear boots and not sandals – since you don’t wear socks with sandals, why would you wear socks with boots?
Some days, our significant accomplishment is educating soldiers on the importance of wearing socks with boots.
Funny? Perhaps. But what are the implications of not wearing socks in boots? Hygiene? Blisters? Did you know that soldiers frequently soak their boots in water to wash out the foot odor? Often, this results in a higher wear out rates on the boots – seams failing – soles pealing – canvas tearing. When the Ministry of Defense projects annual requirements for a 134,000 soldiers, they budget accordingly. They are not pleased when your platoon or battalion goes through twice as many boots, because the soldiers in that unit were repeatedly washing the stink out of their boots due to not wearing socks.
Advisors who individually focus on completing big projects are predestine to failure. Turnovers, varying Afghan support, and “emergency” projects levied from leadership sidetrack and kill many major projects. Big projects are absolutely necessary, but we need to culturally accept and employ bite-sized projects – you get them to wear socks and I’ll teach them how to maintain their boots – together, we’ll keep them inline with the annual budget plan. Little victories.
Lastly, I cannot stress enough the importance of employing and enforcing the concept of “Afghan solutions for Afghan problems.” Because it is politically unpopular to let Afghans fail, we routinely employ the “just fix it” technique of problem resolution for the Afghan military. This begets a practice where the coalition develops more and more solutions to Afghan problems and the Afghans rely (or expect) more and more on coalition support.
Aside from the intuitive implications of this practice (i.e. how can we withdraw from Afghanistan if we are always a crutch), I have witnessed multiple occasions where the Afghan Army refused to solve an issue they were capable of solving. In the end, we (coalition) solved the problem – much, I presume, as was expected by the Afghans.
We had a second quote posted on our whiteboard, “It’s amazing how fast the Afghans will solve a problem, when it’s important to the Afghans.” I believe this through and through. With few exceptions, the Afghans are a very capable people, and can (and will) solve problems when it is important enough. I believe we hurt ourselves through the copious application of “just fix it,” and we as a military, and as supportive public, need to accept more Afghan-based solutions, even if it implies some failure.
I realize this article doesn’t address any profound or revolutionary issues, but these few areas do create significant stressors for advisors and their leadership. Fixing turnover problems and changing mindsets are not easy challenges to resolve, but any problem can be fixed with time and persistence. I have seen some progress in these areas over the past year, but I’d certainly like to see more.
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Matt Harnly is a Major in the US Air Force. He is a resident of Fairfax County and is currently deployed to Afghanistan.
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