Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, July 13, 2009

Mentoring the Afghan Army

By Fester:


Bruce R at Flit has an illuminating post on the problems of training and mentoring Afghan National Army battalions.  The entire thing is well worth several reads, but here are a few excerpts:



Synopsis: the current approach to operational mentoring has some inherent flaws, and poses limitations on all our other military operations, that we're having difficulty recognizing for what they are....


In 2008-09 in Kandahar Province, as soon as we on the ANA mentoring side heard someone talking about "Afghan faces", we knew we could safely assume ANSF capacity-building, meaning the effort to bring them closer to the day when they won't need us anymore, had long ceased to be a deliverable of the operation in question.....


by now most Western units have Afghan civilian interpreters down to the company level, but it would be hard given the number of available Afghan anglophones to go below that: so the relationship for all the soldiers on both sides of this relationship will facilitated through only one or two key Afghan staff, who can never in any case be very far from the company commander's side. One can see how the most likely partnering scenario will be an Afghan platoon, commanded by a junior lieutenant, going along for the ride with a Marine company commander, giving him his Afghan face, sure, but not much else...


(The other thing worth knowing here is the American ETTs, NATO OMLTs, etc., aren't staffed to provide mentoring teams below the ANA tolai (company) level. So any mentoring that Afghan platoon commanders and NCOs get will be either ad hoc, and/or provided out of a partnering Western battalion's ranks by soldiers without much prior preparation.



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