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Former U.S. Ambassadors on Lessons Learned from Afghanistan

Category: A Comprehensive Approach to National Security - a Whole of Government Approach one year ago

The article below offers some interesting comments by former U.S. Ambassadors Ryan Crocker and Ron Neumann.  They focus on lack of State-DoD coordination and shortcomings in public diplomacy efforts.

"The tone of these experienced diplomats was quiet anger about the decision to pull out of Afghanistan, which they attributed to the last two administrations.  And grim pessimism about a true reckoning that might prepare the U.S. for future crises."

"Lessons from Afghanistan - Two Ambassadors Speak" - Public Diplomacy Council

https://www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/2021/12/14/lessons-from-afghanistan-two-ambassadors-speak/

  • Re: Former U.S. Ambassadors on Lessons Learned from Afghanistan

    by » one year ago

    Interesting comment about better use of the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Teams (DART) concept. I led a few of our DART teams back in my day so am pretty familiar with what they do. Even led Ron Neumann on one occasion to visit our DART team in Bosnia (pre-Afghanistan). Perhaps he’s the one who mentioned it.  

    S/CRS was originally stood up to perform the work mentioned as needed, but unfortunately wasn’t recognized as the solution for Afghanistan and Iraq post 9/11. USAID’s OTI teams have also been given good reviews in crisis response situations.   

    The comments reviewed institutional relationships but didn’t address the real problems of in-country crisis assessment practices oriented toward solving the problems of governance to isolate and defeat the Taliban. So we failed. As I’ve frequently said in our work we fail to build local leadership effectively – we tend to do our own thing within our own institutions. The recent articles I circulated said the Afghan government failed to gain the confidence and support of the Afghan population in the rural areas and the international community assistance programs did little to build that over the years. I’ve seen very little on how crisis assessment was conducted on the ground. 

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