Page 8 - Steve Everett News Today

in bio metrics and youll probably read about that now, how do we reset and establish a good background way to determine who should be armed and who should be in uniform over ere and who shouldnt be and thats some of the things we were doing. corruption is very real. but its acceptable. we dont like it but in afghanistan, people accept corruption as a way of life. so another challenge was how do we change the mind set, how did we make people realize its not right to do the kind of thing...

come in and not that it was necessarily wrong, but it was different. so from the afghan perspective, incredibly frustrating to understand where they are going and what they need to be doing and what is right and what is wrong. so in closing if someone were to ask me from 2010 to where were at now, is there hope i would say, yes, there is. as we stand down our combat forces and shift to an advisory and a training role i think were going to be able to take our lessons lerbed -- learned a...

and as we go into all those discussions today you will see best practices applied during the 10 years from those fires. i have the pleasure of working for administrator fuget in fema headquarters. femas role is to coordinate response between state and local governments and his focus, his direction to us really comes down it 3 things. he asks us to always plan for the worst case, the maximum of the maximums and its go to see the department of defense is incorporating this within the cat...

made it all the way down to that teacher or that principal or that district supervisor for schools. and one thing we did which hadnt been done since 1978 before the invasion of the soviets was we actually brought down the ministry of education to southwest afghanistan. it had been 35 years since that happened. it was too dangerous, way too dangerous. so currently ill give you a snapshot. in 2007 there were no girls in school in southwest afghanistan. the taliban ran the medrossas, thos...

systems that were used by the military to collect information and organize it appropriately so that we were able to respond and interact with the civilian agencies. so for the take aways, it provided us an opportunity for real exchange and interaction. the military has a lot of capability and sometimes we dont always know how best to modify that in an appropriate response and being able to get together and practice the situation allowed us to understand each other better. the lessons l...

accept corruption as a way of life. so another challenge was how do we change the mind set, how did we make people realize its not right to do the kind of things they were doing which was grafting, taking money and being a corrupt society, taking money from people just to move throughout their town. one of the ways we did that was trying to be sure we took people and spent time with the police officers themselves. we probably spent way too much -- too much emphasis on contractors early...

afghans but it gave them the ability to prg on a daily basis. so the other frustration was the coalition effort. there was a lot of people with great intentions willing to help shared by many different countries. the frustration was many different countries, theres many different ways of doing things. so we would be out there telling the afghans, this is how you conduct police operations, this is how we do police training, this is how you hold your weapon and engage the enemy, and then...

not right to do the kind of things they were doing which was grafting, taking money and being a corrupt society, taking money from people just to move throughout their town. one of the ways we did that was trying to be sure we took people and spent time with the police officers themselves. we probably spent way too much -- too much emphasis on contractors early on and the problem with that was we would send our contractor force out, they may have been the only people out there doing th...

its acceptable. we dont like it but in afghanistan, people accept corruption as a way of life. so another challenge was how do we change the mind set, how did we make people realize its not right to do the kind of things they were doing which was grafting, taking money and being a corrupt society, taking money from people just to move throughout their town. one of the ways we did that was trying to be sure we took people and spent time with the police officers themselves. we probably s...

necessarily wrong, but it was different. so from the afghan perspective, incredibly frustrating to understand where they are going and what they need to be doing and what is right and what is wrong. so in closing if someone were to ask me from 2010 to where were at now, is there hope i would say, yes, there is. as we stand down our combat forces and shift to an advisory and a training role i think were going to be able to take our lessons lerbed -- learned and ensure that we can contin...