Roughly six months after arriving at Allied Joint Force Command-Brunssum, Lieutenant Colonel Todd Guggisberg, in January 2004, deployed to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, Afghanistan, and began serving as the ISAF logistics operations and plans officer. As he explained, "NATO felt their relevance going away, so they felt the need to staff that headquarters in Kabul with people who were permanently assigned to NATO jobs. Our headquarters got that mission." In his position, Guggisberg primarily concerned himself with the fuel supplies to NATO forces, and to a lesser extent water and food - and even though he redeployed in May 2004, he remained at Brunssum until July 2006, thus retaining visibility on Afghanistan. In this interview, he discusses a wide variety of fuel problems, many of which stemmed from initially having only a single overland route of supply (from Pakistan) into the country. "The other challenges that kind of relate to this," Guggisberg said, "are that fuel in places like this is probably more valuable that cold hard cash and everybody wants a piece of it. You never really know the real reasons for the shipment delays or for destroyed or supposedly destroyed shipments." In this capacity, he worked with two major fuel companies, Shell and Supreme, as well as contractors. Food and water went "extremely well," Guggisberg said, but he offered several recommendations for how the fuel supply process could be made more efficient - because there were several instances where low supplies limited operations. "The first thing is to ensure you have multiple suppliers. Next," he added, "ensure you have multiple routes into the country. Finally, you need to utilize the technology that's out there," chief among which would be GPS tracking of all shipments. "That would certainly help," he insisted. Guggisberg then talks about the contributions of coalition partners, whose presence, he believes, certainly contributed to "winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people." What's more, he praises the coalition officers and NCOs he worked with at the tactical and operational levels, but says that at the strategic level is where problems would arise, mainly due to the different constraints placed on each NATO country. Guggisberg, in closing, speaks rather frankly about the strengths and weaknesses of various NATO members' militaries, shares his feelings on becoming part of a trans-national brotherhood of soldiers, and finally notes that, concerning the high operational tempo, "All the support structures - the fact that you can use the internet, the existence of the family readiness groups and all those other things are great, but it doesn't change the fact that you have soldiers who are not raising their children. You have soldiers who are not being husbands. No amount of morale, welfare and recreation or family readiness groups can change that."

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