Scott Taylor: FAIL

Y'know, I'd be a lot more inclined to respect Scott Taylor's opinions if he could master the basics of making a coherent argument. But he just has FAIL written all over his work.

Just look at today's article on the SAT-A:

In brief, this was a team of Canadian officers established to mentor the government of Hamid Karzai and "build capacity" within the fledgling democratic administration. The bilateral arrangement was drafted between none other than Karzai and former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier in 2004. The normal tour of duty for team members was a full year, and although they were all serving military personnel, in the course of their duties, they wore civilian clothes. [Babbler's emphasis]

Actually, Scotty, they weren't all uniformed personnel. The majority were indeed CF officers, but there were civilians on the team as well:

With about 15 military and civilian members, the SAT‑A includes:

• a small command and support element,


• two teams of strategic planners,


• a defence analyst,


• a strategic communications advisor, and


• a development expert.

The composition, size and capabilities of the team are adjusted to meet current and emerging needs.

Accuracy on basic facts? FAIL.

What everyone failed to realize in the heat of the moment was that the team was never meant to be a permanent fixture. In those first early days of the Karzai regime, there certainly was a vacuum of expertise that needed to be filled. Like a paramedic arriving on the scene to find a patient near death, the team was meant to monitor the vital signs until more qualified assistance could be given. No one expected the team to fully rehabilitate the Afghan government. As competent as they may be within their trades in the Canadian Forces, the team members could not possibly have been expected to effectively mentor Afghan ministers in the management of entire government departments — especially since the Canadians assigned did not speak either Dari or Pashto and all their experience has been in a G8 nation in the Western Hemisphere. Even experienced senior bureaucrats from Canada would have a difficult job trying to adapt their administrative skills to coach their counterparts in an impoverished, wartorn, Islamic, central Asian nation.

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the team's role was. While Taylor's correct that the SAT-A was never meant to be a permanent fixture, the idea was always basic planning capacity-building, not specific coaching on agriculture or rural development or any such thing. How do you attack a problem in a systematic way? What information do you need to formulate a plan? How to you write it up, support it, develop contingency plans, and hand it over to decision-makers in a format they can act upon? These were the skills SAT-A was teaching.

In other words, the stuff staff officers do every day.

The idea that you needed specific third-world experience, or experience in a specific civilian specialty in order to teach basic planning skills is highly questionable.

Comprehension of his subject matter? FAIL.

The fact remains that the Karzai government — even with all its foreign mentoring — is one of the most impotent, corrupt and hated regimes on the planet. No matter how much some of my colleagues wish to bay at the moon in defence of the team, the Afghan government’s woeful track record is the Strategic Advisory Team’s legacy.

In looking at where the Afghan government is now in comparison to Western standards on potency and corruption, Taylor is asking the wrong question (and as far as the "most hated" assertion is concerned, read the polls yourself and tell me whether you can say that with a straight face). The real determinant of the SAT-A's effectiveness is where the Afghan government would have been in terms of planning skills without the mentorship of the SAT-A. In other words, what's the delta between where they started and where they are now?

*crickets*

Understanding basic performance metrics? FAIL.

While I will deal with Foreign Affairs ineptitude in Afghanistan in a separate column, I hardly think that they were jealous of the team’s success, given that their efforts were in fact a dismal failure.

So Taylor "hardly think[s] that [DFAIT, etc] were jealous of the team's success." OK, let's discount the opinions of just about everyone at DND - civilian and military - who have put forth that opinion. And I've spoken to more than a few, none of whom will say anything different off the record. Let's ignore the fact that DFAIT and CIDA are trying to put together their own mentorship team - with civilian contractors, since they can't get enough volunteers from their own ranks. If it was so unsuccessful, would they be clamouring to put together their own version?

Even without that evidence, Taylor should listen to the opinion of Dr. Nipa Banerjee, a civilian with extensive experience in delivering aid in Afghanistan:

Before SAT could prove if it would leave a permanent imprint on the building of sustainable capacity, its life was cut short as the Canadian government took the decision to replace the DND SAT with a civilian crew. While there is the potential of the inclusion of a few of our CF colleagues in the new team, the strength of a well-disciplined commander-led team will be missed. The value added of a DND team lay in the deployment of disciplined teams, well-trained and supervised to deliver at the operational levels. Based on my personal experience, such high standards are not expected from civil servants or contracted civilian personnel, and even less encouraged.

Read the rest: she seems to think SAT-A was a damned good idea. She seems to think it was extremely effective. She seems to think civilianizing it is a mistake.

But I guess she's just one of those "cheerleaders" or "Colonel Blimps" Taylor dismisses so disdainfully.

Ability to learn from the expertise of others? FAIL.

Scott Taylor: taking FAIL to a whole new level.

Up-in-his-face-date: From the comments, we find that retired Colonel and first commander of the SAT-A, Mike Capstick, and uber-colonel George Petrolekas have responded to Taylor's piece:

...only last month, NATO sent a large reconnaissance team to the SAT to capture lessons learned in the hope of erecting a team on similar lines as Canada’s SAT. General Egon Ramm’s, NATO’s Operational Level Commander was effusive in his praise in a letter to the Supreme Allied Commander, and NATO’s Deputy Chairman of the Military Committee (Lt-Gen Karl Eikenberry - and formerly commander of all US Forces in Afghanistan) wrote about how much this team had been able to accomplish, was needed and admired, and that it was a shame that it was being disbanded. Both had visited this team. And their words have a little more credibility than Mr. Taylor’s single visit over a year and half ago.

But probably the most important word belongs to that of Afghan's themselves, unless Mr Taylor believes they are so manifestly corrupt and incompetent that we should never listen to a word of what they have to say about their own country. Time and time again, Afghan Ministers have pleaded with the Canadian government to reconsider its position through the auspices of the Canadian Embassy in Kabul. In a recent book on state – building, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank economist, a prominent Afghan reformer and the Minister of Finance in the first Karzai government, describes SAT-A as one of the very few effective international contributions to capacity building within the Afghan Government.

Read the whole thing. They say it so much better than I did.