Given the challenges in Afghanistan, the progress that ISAF and their Afghan partners continue to make is monumental. This progress, however, is not widely reflected in much of the coverage we see about Afghanistan. In fact, most of the stories in the media highlight the instances of violence along with the dozens of other challenges ISAF, the ANSF and the people of Afghanistan face every day.
Afghanistan is always challenging. We continue to focus on the ongoing insurgency, the presence of terrorists across the border in Pakistan, and a persistent level of corruption.
Yet over the past few days, we've had a string of fairly positive developments.
I was speaking this past fall to a group of Cadets and Midshipmen, young college students bound for military careers. They asked me to talk a little about my career and what I’d learned along the way.
After pausing and thinking for a minute, I realized the three events that swam into focus were all moments of failure. Yet from each of them I learned something valuable that I still carry around in my mind.
The Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648 in the Rathaus of Muenster, Germany, ended one of Europe’s bloodiest periods: the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) fought mostly on German soil, and 80 years of war between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Today two nations that benefitted from that peace treaty, Germany and the Netherlands (it achieved its independence as a result), are the framework nations for a multinational NATO High Readiness Corps headquartered in Muenster.
Often, friction is the result of cultural collisions – disagreements stemming from differences in fundamental belief systems, well established processes, and patterns of execution.