While in Afghanistan in September, I spent some time with an Embedded Training Team from A Company of the 1^st Battalion, 121^st Regiment, 48^th Brigade Combat Team, part of the Georgia National Guard, to observe the training and mentoring of the Afghan Army at the operational level out in the field.

My longer-form piece about the embed is out in the November issue of DTI, and it features some interviews with Afghan Army officers, a perspective that is missing from too much of our domestic debate about the war. This is an Afghan war—I would even say an Afghan civil war—and it has to be fought by Afghans. In order for the NATO alliance to have a reasoned and well-informed debate about the way forward in Afghanistan, we first have to understand what the Afghans want, and to do that we have to listen to them, as opposed to arguing among ourselves at think tank conferences in the comfortable capital cities of the West. I’m not nearly self-involved enough to think that this piece answers those questions—far from it—but it can serve as a look into the hard work American and Afghan troops are doing on the ground. The whole piece is available here, and here’s a snippet:

Sitting in his room at Camp Wilderness, a small outpost shared by soldiers from the U.S. Army and Afghan National Army (ANA) tucked away in Afghanistan's mountainous Khost province, Capt. Gada Mohamad of the ANA's 2/1 Kandak (battalion), talked about what his troops bring to the fight against the Taliban. "We know how to act with the people," he says. "The Afghan people are uneducated. We can explain to them that we're here for their security. Most importantly, we can read the people" in ways the Americans cannot.

Mohamad takes the pragmatic approach of a man who is ready to fight, but recognizes that fighting isn't always necessary. "If we get hit from a village," he continues, "we won't attack the village; our enemy is the Taliban. We will set a perimeter of security and apologize to the villagers, telling them this is our job, and we're trying to protect the people."

As part of the effort to train and increase the size of the ANA, Mohamad's unit is mentored by Alpha Co. of the 1st Btn., 121st Infantry Regt., 48th Brig. of the Georgia National Guard, which has been hammering away at lessons like this for months. The ANA is resourced pretty thin, fielding 87,000 soldiers, with plans to increase to 134,000 in the near term.

Reaching out to the population, Mohamad says, includes explaining to them that the Taliban is funded by Pakistan, and "Pakistan doesn't like Afghanistan. They don't want the Afghans to be educated, to be on the same level as them."

The rest is here.