First U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War

[vertnyc]

Here are my two cents after having briefly worked with Matt.

Overall, I thought of him to be a go-getter type of guy.

He left...my first impression: so what, the mission still continues.

Zabul is hard...organizational issues between the Romanians and American Task Force and its headquarters in Kandahar. It's the poorest province in Afghanistan. What district or province isn't hard? No easy button in Afghanistan...sorry.

Most of us at Task Force Stryker cover both Kandahar and Zabul and all the headaches that generate from that. Governance, Reconstruction, Development and all that other jazz.

In conclusion- we are fine. Other people have stepped up to fill the roles. In fact I've never even seen heard of the media attention until I signed up for this forum today...so maybe it's a case of armchair generals and reporters overanalyzing things.

P.S. Building a girl's school is dumb, especially in a place like Zabul. Z-PRT has been assessed to not move too far away from HWY1.

[Pol-Mil FSO]

There seems to be a competition for bragging rights as the poorest province in Afghanistan. Bagdhis Province in RC-West has also claimed the title. I imagine that a few other provinces could also make a good case. I don't know if there are credible statistics to establish a winner.

Early last year at KAF I heard a U.S. SOF officer say the following: "God bless the Romanians, their hearts are in the right place but when you talk COIN and look into their eyes you can see that it is way over their heads."

I was at Camp Atterbury in June as an interagency OC/T for the MRX of the 12 U.S. PRTs getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan. Our lane was the elections scenario that included Afghan role players playing the provincial governor, provincial Chief of Police, UNAMA official, and UNDP official. The PRT Zabul team that came through our lane made quite an impression because it was led by a USAF FAO who spoke better Pashto than all of the Afghan role players (who spoke Dari as their first language). In fact, this FAO and a woman FSO who was formerly assigned as the DOS PRT Officer in Kunar are the only U.S. officers whom I have met that are competent Pashto speakers.