Building Professional and Personal Relationships in COIN Environments

Building Professional and Personal Relationships in Counterinsurgency Environments

by Colonel Gary Anderson

Download the full article: Building Professional and Personal Relationships in Counterinsurgency Environments

A recent Washington Post article describes a meeting between a U.S. Army Captain and an Afghan village elder in Afghanistan that failed badly. The meeting could have been in Iraq, Lebanon, or Somalia. The result was largely predetermined before the first words were spoken. The Afghan elder asks the Captain why he is coming to speak at that time having not attended any of the local Shura (elders’ meetings) in months. The captain replies that the meetings are useless, and that they only talk about goats. Not surprisingly, the meeting goes badly from there. This experience is depressingly familiar to many who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq. After nearly a decade of war in traditional Muslim societies, many of our soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers simply cannot develop the long term professional relationships of mutual confidence .In these societies all professional relationships are also personal as well, and that does require building an atmosphere of mutual confidence.

I use the tem mutual confidence, because trust is too strong a word to use in defining many of these relationships. Mutual confidence calls for mutual respect and a two way expectation of promises kept. Real trust is a much more special thing, and most often takes longer to build than the usual seven to twelve month in-country tour. Too many Americans take the byzantine patterns of relationships in traditional Muslim societies personally. We are not in these counterinsurgency situations to gratify our personal egos.

Every culture and region is slightly different; Iraq is not Afghanistan and Lebanon is different than both. After a quarter of a century dealing off and on with Muslim societies built on largely tribal cultures, I’ve probably made every mistake in the book, but I’ve found some things that I think hold true across the board.

Download the full article: Building Professional and Personal Relationships in Counterinsurgency Environments

The author, a retired Marine Corps colonel, recently finished a tour with the State Department as the Senior Governance Advisor with an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in Iraq.