We spent all afternoon at MOI today. It takes much longer to have a conversation via an interpreter. About 3 times longer because of the translation time and the miss-communication time. After we talked to Anwar for a while, Gen. Yarmand came by and we spoke with him for another hour. He talked for a while about the history of Afghanistan, and what we need for the future to bring some stability to the country. His main point was that the U.S. needs to stick around for 20 years or so before stability will be achieved. I didn't know what to say to that. I said we'd probably be providing funding and training for that long, but that I didn't think the military would be this heavily engaged for that long. The point I was try to get across that started the discussion was to try and shift some of the MOI funding burden to USAID from the Military because I thought they'd be here longer. My proposal was kind of round-about but I think he understood in the end. We agreed to look at the actual funding requirements before we make a decision.
MAJ Perez blogged about the graduation the other day (at the behest of the PAO office). They put it up on the NTM-A website:
http://ntm-a.com/news/1-categorynews/237-afghan-biometric-systems-a-successWhen we got back to Eggers, this cute dog was sitting in the middle of the parking lot. He almost wouldn't get out of our way. We had to nudge him a little with the truck. Then when we parked he came over to us to ask for food. I petted him for a few minutes. He was so sweet. I was sad that we didn't have anything to give him. If the afghan kids had tried the puppy-dog-eyes technique on me yesterday I probably would have given them a bunch of money instead of just a pen.
No comments:
Post a Comment