Beetle made a big point:

"None-the-less it can be a educational experience to examine a train wreck...why in fact did the train leave the rails and where were the rails headed towards? How would have Mahatma Gandhi's ideas about "decentralized political and economic structures rooted in India's rural villages..." benefited the population as compared to Nehru's socialist ideas or Patel's capitalist ideas? Who filled the comparable roles for Afghanistan?"

My big dumb idea (probably shared by a lot of other folks on the ground at different times but always lost in a dust storm) is that we have a huge advantage over locals in being able to see what's going on around their country, and source out and re-target resources and, under some billets, getting a chance to synchronize some of this stuff for their benefit.

I always thought that, for stabilization and reconstruction, somebody needs to be sitting at the big table (mil/foreign affairs) whose sole purpose is to be an advocate for the civilians (not just the politicians and made men). A properly developed civilian advocacy process (or maybe a bypass loop between them), from the top down to locals, is the only way to take what we know and do, and use it to create propulsion for the locals to find their next level of stability.

Finding a productive job for your son, or shoes for baby, or a meal and some water is the key to S & R, and defeating bad influences.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of disconnected elements, programs and activities that, when you add them up, go nowhere, to help real folks put things back together.

A big problem in these conflict zones is that, by the time we all get there, it's not just the impact of our arrival, but, usually, a twenty year pattern of disruptions and conflict that sowed the seeds of why we had to go in the first place. With lesser life spans than us and not a lot of written records and repositories of collective wisdom, 20-30 years between "how things used to work OK" and today is an impenetrable gap for locals trapped in a conflict zone.

They don't necessarily know, for example, that ancient regional irrigation canal systems existed, but had to be maintained by organized work parties coordinated on a regional basis to deliver sustainable wheat production (despite droughts). They only know about local, recent and immediate things.

Sure, our imagery can detect the systems, and map them, and, with a D9, we could probably reopen them in a heartbeat. But, in most circumstances, we don't have a process geared to identifying them, developing strategies, or work with them to create a process for reopening and sustainable maintenance.

In April 2008, I attended a US Conference at Al Faw where folks from around the country were trying to identify the old canal systems in order to develop piecemeal work projects, but they didn't know where they were. Fortunately, we had just located them in older map sources, and could make them available. But that was in year six....

Not to denigrate the folks that were trying, but look at the system failures that got us to that point (short term assignments, constant rotation, Tower-of-Babel like silos and stovepipes, and disconnected programs operating without an overall strategy or coordination.

I sit in all these "Lessons Learned" symposia that the think tanks in DC are putting on, and all they talk about is the inter-agency turfwars, budget fights, contract disputes, and Inside the Beltway bureaucratic fights---but they never focus on the big picture: coordinating our efforts to deliver solutions to the local population, and effective implementation of those solutions. How is this stuff going to get done? Who is doing it in Afghanistan (for Afghans)?

That's my rant for the day. Good question, Beetle.

Steve