A Brand-New U.S. Military Headquarters in Afghanistan. And Nobody to Use It. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post.
The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning.
Everything, that is, except troops.
The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now are in the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility…
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Classic. A similar thing happened when we built a base for Afghan forces in the south. The Afghan base was actually constructed to be better than OUR base. All the buildings and walls were made from reinforced concrete - all we had were plywood and HESCOs. The commander refused to move in unless we installed air conditioning in each of the buildings (with generators regularly topped off by gas bought by the Army, of course). He got his base and his air conditioning, courtesy of our paycheck deductions. As if that wasn't enough, the Kandak had free sewage, water, and trash removal. So the Afghan soldiers took their dumps in comfortable hardstand buildings with air conditioning and prompt s*** removal, thanks to our money. It wouldn't rub me so wrong if their commanders didn't plot to kill us on a regular basis and work directly with the Taliban whenever it tickled their fancy. Well that, and the fact that we're leaving in a year and the Afghans will probably run out of resrouces to maintain it in short time. That's 3 million dollars - wasted, in my humble opinion. And that's just one example of dozens of bases built by the Army throughout Afghanistan in the last 2-3 years. I believe most will be useless in 2-3 more.
Of course, the budget cutting, while needed, is likely to be done in the most inefficient way, things that need to stay will be cut, things that need to go will be kept, and those that did the hardest work and fighting asked to sacrifice while the most glittering will salvage positions, jobs, programs.
That's it, isn't it?
I don't have any answers. If I were to finally put time aside to write up something proper and submit it somewhere or go back to blogging I might consider the working title, "The Education of a Civilian."
What an education too.
I've linked the following before but will re-link for discussion's sake, if nothing else. I don't know if any of it is "so" or not, so many things are written:
<blockquote>CUSAP had one big name on its original eight-person board: Milton Bearden, a former CIA official whose name carries weight on Afghanistan because he helped run the war there against the Soviets in the 1980s. When Bearden testified about Afghanistan before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the fall, John Kerry called him a "legendary former CIA case officer." But in his testimony Bearden did not advertise his ties to Wardak or to the company's Defense Department contracts; Bearden is on the advisory board of NCL, a firm with millions of dollars at stake in Afghanistan. ("Aram," he said when I reached him on his mobile phone, "I don't have anything to talk to you about, so go ahead and do your story." Then he hung up.) Another former board member, Hedieh Mirahmadi, a prominent expert on Islamic radicalization, told me she had never been to a CUSAP board meeting. "I don't actually know what they did," she told me.</blockquote>
www.thenation.com/article/afghan-lobby-scam#ixzz2YkTBIbrs
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A commenter at Best Defense claims:
<blockquote>Part of the issue is that doctrine writing is one of the areas that has been largely handed over to contractors. In the early years of TRADOC, GEN Dupuy sought officers of intellectual heft to both formulate the doctrine the Army needed and write it. Now, the Army does not decide who actually does the writing, Booz Allen (which has an office just outside the gate at Ft. Leavenworth, in part for this function) or another contractor does. Outsourcing a function is an indication that it is not considered a core competency. In this case, outsourcing indicates that what ought to be a key intellectual function for TRADOC and the Army is in fact something that can be farmed out.</blockquote>
http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/11/whatever_happened_to_tr…
Robin Raphel's resume made her a strong candidate to oversee more than a billion dollars in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan.
<blockquote>The retired foreign service veteran had decades of experience, much of it involving Pakistan and South Asia. President Bill Clinton tapped Raphel to be his point person on South Asia policy. Later, during the Bush administration, she monitored federal spending in Iraq.
But there was one credential the State Department has downplayed since hiring her. For two years, Raphel had been working as a lobbyist for Cassidy & Associates. One of her clients: Pakistan. She lobbied Congress and the State Department for the country on issues such as Afghan policy, Pakistan's relations with India, judicial independence and U.S. perceptions and congressional views of the Pakistan government.</blockquote>
http://www.law.com/jsp/law/international/LawArticleIntl.jsp?id=12024394…
No one interviewing Vali Nasr on his latest book asked a thing about this sort of stuff, as far as I can see.
And on and on, you all know more than me about this, especially retired military and intelligence and "South Asia" -- and its constituency in DC which has been written about more than once in DC Beltway oriented journals. More on the Af in AfPak than the other side for some reason, but Harvard's Belfer Center is pretty good about rounding it all out.
I was so naive when I first started commenting here I couldn't understand why analysts ignored data. But advocates and ideologues are not interested in contradictory data.
No despair, though. The larger public better understands these issues so there is always hope. It's either that attitude or the following:
<blockquote>Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French writer and existentialist philosopher. He was born in Algeria, then a colony of France, which gave him a unique perspective on the life of the outsider. Camus is widely acknowledged as the greatest of the philosophers of ‘the absurd’. His idea is simple: Human beings are caught in a constant attempt to derive meaning from a meaningless world. This is the ‘paradox of the absurd’.</blockquote>
http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/camus-authenticity-…
No wonder Brookner's "sysiphean" supposedly middle-brow efforts over the years fascinates me....
I originally had a comment about the wealthiest counties in DC but I edited it. You can figure out the gist of it.
PS: Maybe it's good that I did since the contract went to a British company from the article?
Can we have an honest talk about coalition warfare (no, this is not an anti-British rant, believe you me I am sympathetic to British unhappiness with following-the-Americans around) and what it means to build alliances for something like a nation building project? Or even an "anti-terrorist" coalition effort?
If working with partners is going to be the "thing" in the future, then it won't just be the DOD, it will be every nation's bureaucracy that is being managed, the whole global contracting business running its numbers.
So, we have to do it. I get it. How to balance effectiveness of outcome with consensus management?
PPS: "His assessment went unheeded." From the article. This is the real heart of the article, I suppose, and I went off on one of my tangents instead....