It's been a busy couple of weeks. Brought in a whole new crop of students and, by next week, all the students that were here when I arrived in Adraskan will have graduated.
I've been spending most of my time designing an advanced firearms course, from scratch: building a curriculum, creating training materials, teaching aides, and evaluation forms. These students really need it. As of right now their firearms training is woefully inadequate. This particular type of national security force has the highest death rate in the first year of graduation. But even still, this course may never be implemented because the larger NATO "partner" force that we are working with on this base seems to have no real interest in it. I spend the rest of my time fighting them for time on the schedule to implement the course. At this point I've qualified several of the Afghan instructors to teach it and handed over all the materials that they would need. I'm hoping that we'll get a chance to work with them on fine-tuning it, but they may just have to do it on their own after we've (NATO) left. But it's been a lot of fun working with the Afghan instructors. It's funny, they warned us that it could be extremely frustrating working in a training mission. They just failed to warn us that the frustration would largely be because of our allies rather than the Afghans we were trying to teach.
I've been spending most of my time designing an advanced firearms course, from scratch: building a curriculum, creating training materials, teaching aides, and evaluation forms. These students really need it. As of right now their firearms training is woefully inadequate. This particular type of national security force has the highest death rate in the first year of graduation. But even still, this course may never be implemented because the larger NATO "partner" force that we are working with on this base seems to have no real interest in it. I spend the rest of my time fighting them for time on the schedule to implement the course. At this point I've qualified several of the Afghan instructors to teach it and handed over all the materials that they would need. I'm hoping that we'll get a chance to work with them on fine-tuning it, but they may just have to do it on their own after we've (NATO) left. But it's been a lot of fun working with the Afghan instructors. It's funny, they warned us that it could be extremely frustrating working in a training mission. They just failed to warn us that the frustration would largely be because of our allies rather than the Afghans we were trying to teach.
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I am no expert in the intricacies of the region but have some first hand experience from a billion years ago when there was a superpower trying to make its stamp on the area and it wasn't us. I'm still unclear on much of the reasoning around what went down and I'm still not okay with a lot of it, but I made it through and in all seriousness that's something I am proud of.
I am pleased to hear that there are attempts to screen out warlord aparatchiks, because those guys are bad news. Steer well clear of that stuff, if you'll take the advice of an old hand.
Thanks again and best wishes.