Teach a man to fish...

I wish we were hearing more about the Operational Mentor Liason Teams (shortened to OMLT, pronounced "omlette"), but Christie Blatchford, as always, delivers the goods:

When this rotation of the OMLT arrived last February, it was mentoring less than 20 per cent of soldiers from the ANA's 205 (or Hero) Brigade; as Lt.-Col. Eyre's group departed southern Afghanistan this week, it was mentoring more than 80 per cent. In February, the 2nd Kandak (or battalion) was using its medical platoon to man a checkpoint, with medics still being regularly pressed into service as extra riflemen; now, medics are treating wounded. In February, ANA soldiers were still scrounging for equipment and supplies wherever they could, as they had learned to do; now, they get them through the ANA's own logistics kandak.

But more important, Lt.-Col. Eyre says, is that at the kandak level - the 2nd Kandak, which operates in the volatile Zhari-Panwaii area just west of Kandahar city, is the battalion with which the OMLT has worked most closely - ANA commanders are planning operations.

"Up to that point," Lt.-Col. Eyre says, "it was all coalition-led [the International Security Assistance Force, commanded in the south by multinational NATO forces]. The battle group would say, 'We think we need an operation here, we'd like you to participate.'... Now, they're [the ANA] at the stage where their kandak commander would say, 'We think we need to go into this area and this is what I'd like to do, and this is what I need the battle group to provide me, whether a quick reaction force or artillery.' "

It's called building capacity, and it's not just the focus of Canadian efforts here, it's also the only way, Lt.-Col. Eyre believes, for the ANA and ultimately for Afghanistan to succeed.

I'm tempted to just reprint the whole damn thing, since there's just so much fantastic stuff in there - about trust and OPSEC, about how mentoring is a two-way learning process, about the ANA as an instrument of national unity. Go read it.