Afghan Police Kill a U.S. Special Operations Captain “To Make a Statement”

Army photo / Sgt. Ken Scar

U.S. Army soldiers and their Afghan army partners set up a traffic checkpoint in March in Paktika province, where Captain Greg Escobar found training Afghan troops to be a challenging task.

Army Major Greg Escobar served as an operations officer in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, training Afghan police in Kunar province for the first half of his deployment, and Afghan troops in Paktika province for the second half.
He is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, as he makes clear in this July interview recently posted by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Yet he believes his final mission – training Afghan troops to defend their border with Pakistan and keep terrorists out — remains “doable.” Excerpts:
In my opinion, pre-deployment training was a bit lacking. The things we focused on were language training and cultural awareness training. Although very important, the language that we were trained on was not the language for the area that we were deploying into, so it was a waste of time…
We were trained in Dari, which is in my opinion what the United States is pushing on the country as a national language, which is why we were taught it, versus what the people along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are speaking, which is multiple languages, primarily Pashtu…

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