Page 16 - Steve Everett News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

accept corruption as a way of life. so another challenge was how do we change the mind set, how did we make people realize it's 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 on...

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, there's 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 several weeks later another force would come in and not that it was necessarily wrong, but it was ...

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 the training, and what would happen when the threat increase took place, the contractors would remain ...

it's acceptable. we don't 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 it's 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 w...

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 we're 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 we're going to be able to take our lessons lerbed -- learned and ensure that we can continue to build on what we've done. there were some great success stories. one of the things we worked...