International Security Assistance Force

You

know, I recall when, you know, Secretary Gates in Afghanistan and he would say, OK, you know, ISAF is, I think I have the numbers right, you know, 23 breaks on one accelerator.

23 breaks is everybody other than the one accelerator, which is America.

And oh, by the way, we were doing the bulk of the fighting.

Um, you know, for me, the part that resonates is, um, uh, y- y- y- as you put it, you go back to business, and ultimately you recommend to your chain of command that this-- it's probably just actually cleaner and better to pay Ahmed, um, uh, that there's just gonna be more trouble, uh, more trouble than it's worth to try to cut him out, 'cause as you-- as he told you, I mean, he's just gonna take a tax if you try to circumvent him.

Um, I remember in Afghanistan just being constantly Confused really is the word by efforts from whether it was, uh, ISAF forces, um, or, or from, you know, in theory elements of the Afghan government to go to war against corruption where I was.

And I just didn't understand.

I was like, the, I, based on what I was seeing.

And then the second aircraft hit, and then we all knew that it was deliberate, that this was terrorism on a mass scale, that the world was now changing, and we had no idea what that meant.

And what that actually meant was three months later, I was a colonel in Kabul, chief of staff of the headquarters of the embryonic International Security Assistance Force.

At that time, the Taliban had left.

The Northern Alliance dominated Kabul, and President Karzai was in the wings.

And we kind of, my company, Second in Command, actually told me months later when I saw him that later that day, our electronic warfare guys had picked up insurgent communications.

um saying that they killed the local isaf commander and so they kind of they knew what they were doing yeah yeah you know they obviously did a good job yeah thankfully they didn't kill me but they got pretty close

and you were as you said earlier you you were induced into a coma

Yeah, so my, so whereas luckily I didn't lose any limbs, mine was all down the right hand side of my body.

The practice of Bachabazi prompted the U.S. Department of Defense to hire social scientist Anna Maria Cardinale to investigate the problem.

As ISAF, or the International Security Assistance Force, which was a multinational military mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, those soldiers often passed older men while on patrol, walking hand-in-hand with young boys and children.

Those coalition soldiers often found that the young Afghan men were, quote, trying to touch and fondle them, end quote, which the soldiers did not understand.

Now, according to a report published in June 2017 by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which was a U.S.-appointed organization, role, the DoD had received 5,753 vetting requests of Afghan security forces, some of which related to sexual abuse.

But Rumsfeld was very against the idea of nation building.

He didn't want ISAF, the International Assistance Force, to go even outside of Kabul.

And so something changed.

But I mean, the big footprint doesn't really work for a lot of reasons.

So that was something that only the task force could do.

And so in a lot of ways, you know, over the years, conventional forces were kind of neutered in a certain way to the point where special operations forces were playing offense for the broader, you know, the broader ISAF counterinsurgency mission, as opposed to doing, you know, kind of narrower counterterrorism.

In a way that I think was, you know, deleterious for the conventional forces to to kind of have that the ability to hit back taken away from them and and given to somebody else who who often didn't understand really the the battle space.

Can we talk about the – or go back to the metrics part for a second? Because I think that's the other component of this where, you know, especially on the conventional side, you have commanders who are, you know, struggling to find – one, struggling to get after the mission that they deployed for, but also trying to justify their existence and their future and their career because those two things are interlinked.