With much attention shifting to Afghanistan, our blog entry today comes from COL John Ferrari, NATO Training Mission Afghanistan/Combined Security Assistance Command Afghanistan. In his entry, COL Ferrari talks about building capacity and changing the Afghan society for the better. He compares what the Marshall Plan did to change Europe to what they are doing to education and build in Afghanistan.
Read an excerpt from his post below:
63 years ago this week, George Marshall gave a speech that altered the course of the 20th Century. His post-WW II vision for aiding a war-torn Europe set the conditions of growth, prosperity, and democracy which in the immediate aftermath of the war, was not a foregone conclusion. Many look back to this vision and ask why we don’t have a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan, a country that has been in a constant state of war for over thirty years. Having been in Afghanistan now for several months, I realize that we do have an equivalent program — it is the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan/Combined Security Assistance Command Afghanistan.
NTM-A/CSTC-A’s official mission is to generate and sustain the security forces of Afghanistan in order to enable the Afghan Government to assume responsibility for its security. In reality however, the impact of this mission is much greater, in that we are transforming an entire generation of Afghan society’s human and physical capital, much in the same way that World War II transformed the US and Europe.
The generation of Americans who left the farms to fight World War II joined an Army that provided them with technical and leadership skills, basic health care, and a world view that included tolerance, compassion, and the ability to work across racial, ethnic, and social classes. The human capital of America was transformed and became known as the Greatest Generation.
In Afghanistan, NTM-A/CSTC-A is doing something similar. We are educating and training a generation of Afghan society that has known nothing but thirty years of civil war, a rigid top down hierarchical governance, and limited to no formal education. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans are joining the Army and Police and we are providing them basic hygiene and health care, literacy training, and integrating them into Army units that have mixes of tribal and ethnic backgrounds. We are providing them marketable skills such as leadership, planning, logistics, maintenance, computers, medical, law enforcement, and engineering. To the Afghans of this generation, this is a new way of life. Some will leave the security forces early, some may stay until the war is over, while some will remain in the security forces for life, but all of them will have uplifted their skills and now have higher expectations for the future. These soldiers and police can be the Afghan version of our Greatest Generation.
To view COL Ferrari’s entire post and to learn more about the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, visit http://www.ntm-a.com/.
