24 July

Osama's Tea House. He supposedly lived in this building on our base and planned 9/11 from here. I don't know if I posted a previous pic of another building and claimed the same thing, but now people are saying that this is the one.


Sleeping on the roof.



This is serious


What happens when 3 dudes work on the same row of blocks at once


Killing machine


Tropical living at one of the guard towers


Room with a view


Ditch Swimmers at it a again


I am sure these two are liscensed to drive on the highway


Tower overlooking HWY

The mobbing from 2 Weeks ago

More Mobbing Pics- note the boy third from the right giving the little girl an elbow to the face

This week was “normal.” Normal, meaning that I didn’t travel out of the area and don’t really have anything exciting to report. No new revelations or discoveries come to mind.

This week, there was a team of U.S. soldiers here to evaluate the progress of our ANA counterparts. They look at their ability to do their jobs and the degree to which they can do them without the help of the U.S. They are graded on a scale from 1 to 4. A 4 means the ANA guy is just a puppet and does only what the Americans tell him and unable to do anything on his own. A 1 means the team only relies on the Americans for some small things and could probably function OK on its own. This same team was here in early May, shortly after I arrived in country. My counterpart pretty much got 3s across the board on the first evaluation due to the fact that he was not here for most of the evaluation and his subordinates didn’t have a clue how things are run and the fact that some things were pretty jacked up. We will get the outbrief on Saturday, and it looks like he will get 1s in most areas and maybe some 2s. It has been a long, trying 2 months since the last evaluation, but we have covered a lot of ground. It is good to see some of the long term projects come to fruition. I enjoy the short term projects like construction or repairs of a security gate or check point, but to see the long term effects is really gratifying.
In other news, there is an AP story out there about an attack in my neighborhood. The long and the short of it is the enemy will continue to attack in an attempt to disrupt the peace and the elections. The country’s 2nd democratic presidential elections are approaching. The very right to vote and the fact that the government will be able to pull off such a “western” evolution enrages the enemy. They will do anything to destabilize the area in an attempt to illegitimize the AF govt and security forces. The people in this country are simple minded. Whoever can provide them security has their support. If the enemy can convince the population that the good guys cannot help, the population will side with the enemy. The truth of the matter is that they cannot and will not overpower us, but will be a thorn in the side trying. It is a waiting game. They have nothing but time, but we keep giving ourselves time tables and ultimatums. We have to stay here and keep doing good things. We have to stop doing stupid things that alienate the population and continue to train the AF forces and police to handle business themselves. I came here thinking that if enough people try hard enough, my kids won’t have to come here. After seeing, hearing, and reading some different things, my time table was a few decades off. Our forces are conducting advising operations in the Philippines today; we first had advisors in the PI in 1898. Look no further than today's headlines on foxnews.com for our allies reluctance to commit for the long haul. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534667,00.html?test=latestnews The last lines are: Australia, with about 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, lost its 11th soldier last week. Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston said Tuesday that a multilateral withdrawal would lead to civil war with "a very strong possibility the Taliban would prevail."

The hatred for the West that is bred in extremist Islamic schools across the world is hardly imaginable. It is going on in AF, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, the PI, Canada, Somalia, England, and of course, the U.S. There are more countries represented by jihadists than by the “Coalition of the Willing.” There are cells everywhere. Sometimes, a wife may not even know what her husband is up to. These guys are surprisingly organized, as well. They are financial wizards and frugal spenders. They are secretive and patient. It seems the most secretive people in America consider a secret kept if they speak on a condition of anonymity, and the powers at be want to bring soldiers home to appease the voters. I will conclude by saying we must continue to send men and women in uniform to far off lands to find and root these people out because terrorism and war are games in which you never want to have the home field advantage.
Have a safe weekend, and God Bless.

BMP