Afstan: "Why isn't army-building working (pt. 2)?"

More from BruceR at Flit:

Lack of advisor continuity could be one reason that army mentoring in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq is not succeeding as we might have expected. I was the third mentor in my particular position that Afghan army staffers could remember; I was succeeded by a fourth, and he'll be coming home himself in a couple months to be succeeded again. Even if we were all of the same mind with all our successors and predecessors what needed to be done (and that's difficult due to the near-complete absence of official doctrine or advice to draw on), and we were fully committed to the task, the overall message we were sending by this sort of perpetual turnover is not one of commitment to the host nation. The effect on the Afghans must be similar to a Canadian workplace besieged by a perpetual stream of management consultants.

The success stories of indigenous army-building we all know and use as exemplars tended to have far fewer continuity breaks, and an almost unapproachable depth of experience in the principal leadership:

--T.E. Lawrence had been a Middle East archeologist who had practically lived in the Ottoman Empire for five years prior to his commissioning in 1914...

Part 1.