Just the Usual Day With Some Unusual Requests

Day to day life while I was working at ISAF Joint Command was pretty standard boring staff work. There was little that would, or even could, disrupt the IJC battle rhythm...well an attack on the base could disrupt things. Anyway, I knew my schedule would have little change to it and honestly made my deployed life go by fairly quickly and smoothly, unlike the chaos of my 2009-10 deployment. Sometimes chaos is good, but for my fourth deployment I just wanted simple and uncomplicated.


Every once in awhile something would throw my schedule off. Usually it was a meeting of some kind and most times they were stupid/ridiculous. The best example of this was one day when my section was asked to have a "hush hush" meeting with some random lieutenant colonel who wanted to talk to us about our targets (our targets being the "kill list"). We basically went into the meeting blind because all we were told was that it was a special program the lieutenant colonel was working on and we weren't "read on" for it.


I'm going to back up a tad here and try not to cross any classified lines that I shouldn't. In Afghanistan, the military has come up with special programs that are designed to find certain individuals, disrupt insurgent network attacks, or disrupt insurgent supply operations. These programs are pretty clandestine and to know about the individual programs you have to be "read on" to them, basically give up your first born if you talk about them.


So in the meeting the colonel tells my section that he's working on a special project and needs some input from us. He wanted us to provide a list of some of our Tier 1 targets that would best meet the criteria for targeting in this program. Because he was just one person he didn't have the time to sort through all the Tier 1 targets and needed our assistance in nominating individuals for his program. The problem? He couldn't give us any details on what they were doing. I would have been mad about this guy wasting my time, but it was just so absurd.


What was our solution? We picked half a dozen or so targets and emailed him the names. Did it do anything? I highly doubt it. But that's what I feel like a lot of the Afghan war has been. Tossing some darts at a board and seeing what sticks.


This is no way to fight a war.