Back from Afghanistan

I am just back from Afghanistan and intend to start blogging again. I have many impressions to share about the war, Afghanistan, and the "interagency". Civ-Mil cooperation, as it is called, is certainly a focus, though the actual effect of what cooperation there is is difficult to assess.

My first blog, however, must be a description of my work in Afghanistan to provide context.

Imagine a rectangle with a 1.25 mile perimeter. Fill the rectangle with generators, 16-person tents, some brick 2-story barracks, tons of large-grade grey gravel and a brick gymnasium and you now are imagining the headquarters where I and my NATO colleagues toiled for 16 or more hours a day, every day with only a few hours off every week. (A visitor to the compound once stopped me and asked me "Is the dining facility the building next to the prison?" My reply: "The prison? OH! That's not a prison, it's our command building--that's where everyone works!") The ISAF Joint Command, a newly-formed operational command hums and clicks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The dream child of a select group of officers, IJC (as the ISAF Joint Command is called) has a fabulously novel and famously complex structure that breaks military convention, for good reason. Instead of a normal structure where all the people who deal with transportation sit together in an isolated office, and all the people who make military plans sit in another isolated office, and all the intelligence officers sit behind several layers of barbed wire and chain link fence, the IJC has four teams of people drawn from each specialty area who work together. The four groups are planning teams that are organized according to a time horizon: Current operations, the group that monitors and makes plans on ongoing operations; Future Operations (where I worked) that planned for near-term operations; Future Operations that planned long-term operations; and then the Information Dominance Center that collected and analyzed information and fed the other three teams. (Here's an article about the structure and the Information Dominance Center: http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/Signal_Article_Template.asp?articleid=2250&zoneid=292 )

The beauty of the system is that I (a "stability planner" or Civil Affairs planner) was able to interact with the military planners, transportation planners and intelligence officers day in and day out in order to better understand the complex context of our operations. It is an incredibly information-rich and productive structure. Many officers, particularly the senior officers, have significant trouble understanding their role in this 'new' structure because it break down the rank-authority barriers to a large degree. I enjoyed this facet of the structure because it allowed me to participate more fully.

I worked on two topic areas: building sub-national governance and then at the end of my time working with the western and northern regional commands to support their governance and development operations. It was extremely fulfilling, complicated, important, and frustrating work. I loved my time there. As one of my bosses, COL Wayne Grigsby, would say "This is God's work." Amen to that.

I published an information piece in the Small Wars Journal on the subnational-governance-building piece of my work: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/489-fisher.pdf
I'm writing a follow-on piece about this program.

I'm glad to be home--the air here is clean and cool, fall is just starting, there are no generators, no dust, no rocket attacks. The land here is fertile and sustaining, our lifestyles so rich and so easy. I am thankful to be an American and proud to have served with so many dedicated, determined, intelligent and thoughtful officers. I have learned to be a better person from them and the Afghans I worked with, as well as a better military officer.