@trevore - great to see you on the thread! There are a lot of questions raised here that are hard to answer, but I can share a troubling observation. Of all the US personnel I have met in Afghanistan, fewer than a handful were engineers, makers, creators rather than enforcers, money dispensers, or supervisors. Sure, the military has its own engineers, but very few are outside the wire interacting with people. Where are the civil communication, construction, mechanical, etc. engineers? I think there is a larger role in global peer to peer diplomacy for such a cadre. I've got more stories to tell, so does @trevore, some of them are posted jalalagood.com/ --> more will come out guided by the questions you ask.