Almost verbatim notes I took from this conversation for anyone wishing to use: 'Afghanistan is unique because it was the opening salvo (release of gunfire) in the global war on terror. The driving force was anti-terrorism, but after 2003 for the NATO alliance and for other ‘truth contributors’ it became a nation building exercise. Broad counterterrorism mandate with the 3 D’s: dismantle, disrupt, and defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda. US, according to Berdal, never really tried to separate the two groups, which they ought to have done earlier on, whereas NATO tended to focus increasingly from 2003 onwards on trying to STABILIZE the country and build, in their own words, a democratic and properly functioning Afghanistan. The tension between those two makes it unique. Valid lessons to draw in a general sense, according to Berdal, is to treat a country on its own terms , instead of imagining a western landscape; recognize it’s distinct historical, cultural, and political context; and also note how Afghanistan has already been shaped by decades of conflict, and a very important regional context that we simply cannot ignore. Kandahar has growing rather than shrinking difficulties, Canada thought they were going in after most of the fighting was over to peace build but actually, by the time they left, there was very little to show for Canada’s significant effort, the large number of human casualties (Canadian, Afghan, others). In Norway there seems to be a different approach. Matts said there was indeed over-optimism in the early days, but he thinks the fundamental problem wasn’t simply one of resources and institutional capacity, it was that we approached the exercise essentially as one of social reengineering, trying to create and transplant modern institutions to a very different and complex foreign setting. Berdal thinks that what we should have done, and this was made very difficult by the American focus on the three D’s mentioned earlier, was to prioritize some kind of political settlement. Berdal says that of course in 2001 it was going to be very difficult to include the Taliban or the Pashtuns, but there were many instances after them when this idea of having some kind of open or some kind of political dialog would have been critical. Frances Vendrell speaks of a situation where windows keep closing, and early on, Berdal thinks there was at least a moment where ‘you’ could have tried to reach out because interestingly, the Taliban wasn’t so much defeated in 2001 as simply melted away; and of course in the interest in prosecuting the war on terror, the Americans in particular, with their light footprint entered into alliances with local warlords who had no particular interest in building the kind of Afghan state ‘your or I’ are talking about; and this problem was inherited afterwards. So when you begin to extend NATO outside of Kabul and interests of Afghanistan, you’re dealing with local warlords who are, frankly, very exploitative and predatory. The war on terror may be unhelpful because it may be an abstraction, which is not likely to succeed; secondly, in a way it could not succeed. Military leaderships overestimate what they can achieve and wind up disappointing the political leadership, which tends to believe them, in spite of repeated episodes of over-optimistic military assessments dating back to Vietnam and all sorts of previous exercises. Berdal thinks a major problem in the way the war was prosecuted by the Americans, in particular because of this unhelpful focus on broad and permissive definition of terror, was that for example the whole command and control system Afghanistan giving special forces very broad leeway to do many things which directly undermined some of the stabilization activities of other countries and that became a very real problem as we enter into 2009/10. Because the Canadians and Norwegians felt differently about the counterterrorism mandate, very often these provincial reconstruction teams adopted their own distinctive approaches, and another problem with Afghanistan is it became a very fragmented missions; you had Germany doing its own things in the North, the Norwegians doing its things and this sort of lack of cohesion was a fundamental challenge throughout the missions.'

Your parfect

"The adventure continues for Afghans" Ridiculous and inappropriate thing to say