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...living in a small village, they may have been coerced or at least influenced by the insurgents. When you arrive, they are uncertain about you - they don't know you either. They are not automatically going to run out and embrace you, because, one, they have seen a lot of people come and go before. Many saw the Russians come and go. And so they are naturally cautious. And if they associate your arrival with damage and death, they are probably more cautious than that. So this is exceptionally complex stuff. It is not just as easy as being good...
...dropping compounds." Can you tell me more about this? What we have done is written a tactical directive. And it provides my intent on how we are going to execute operations in general [to be released soon]. But specifically, the use of deadly force. The reason I spent a lot of time personally writing that intent is because I wanted to make sure that before they went into the specific dos and don'ts, that they understood the framework and the concept behind it. And the concept behind it is that although you are still authorized to use close...
...serious. I am not saying catastrophic, but it is very serious, and it warrants a very serious effort. So that didn't shock me, but it reinforced things that I had been seeing. The other observation is that there has been a tremendous number of people here doing a lot of good work - and that means the ANSF, parts of the Afghanistan government, UNAMA [United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan], NGOs, doing a lot of good work - that said, I don't think it has been as well coordinated and unified as it needs to be successful...
...anecdotes to share? There have been an awful lot. Let me think ... There are a lot of them, and all teach me something different. Spring 2008, went to a FOB [forward-operating base], we had launched a raid, and our guys had been in combat at 5-m distance, so much so that one of the young sergeants had to pick up an enemy machine gun and keep fighting. Another had, although wounded, already picked up a hand grenade that came on his position and attempted to throw it back and lost half of his arm in the process...
...Will you be setting benchmarks? There are a lot of efforts to set benchmarks. I think we have to be careful in that, because if they are too brittle - if you say 60% of people must have running water or whatever - you run the risk of that not being a really accurate assessment of the situation. So it has to be a lot more subtle. But you do have to have a way of pulling these together and knowing when you are making progress...