Lecture

This morning we had a meeting with LTG Yarman, the head of CID. He's a very good leader - I think I've mentioned him before in my blog. We were talking with him about the process for investigating biometric matches. It was a long conversation, mostly because of translations. After a couple of hours, when our business was concluded, LTG Yarmand wanted to talk about a really nasty incident where NATO forces killed some civilians.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-troops-accused-of-coverup-over-womens-killings-20100405-rn44.html

Min. Atmar had sent him down to investigate and he gave us a detailed account of what happened. He drew a diagram on the whiteboard and showed us what happened where and at what time. The incident was so bad because the soldiers involved knew they made a mistake and apparently tried to cover it up. Yarmand's point as he went though this was not to point out how screwed up the operation was, but to show at each step how the failure was likely related to a misunderstanding of the Afghan culture, and that the onus is on us to understand their culture if we are going to be performing such dangerous operations.

I've known about that incident for a while, but fortunately it hasn't hit the mainstream media hard. Stuff like that makes our job so much harder. Things are bad enough with nearly every person I know distrusting Karzai and his intentions. It is true that tensions are building between many Coalition Forces and afghan politicians. At the my level relations are good because we've because we've built personal relationships with our afghan counterparts. Yarmand for example knows how hard we are working to improve their capabilities and appreciates our efforts. I don't know what's going on at the head-of-state level that is causing things to sour. Except the fraudulent election. That has almost every American I know upset.