From January through December 2005, Major James Schreiner served as a joint staff planner in the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan CJ7 engineer directorate. More specifically, in the first half of his tour, he was the lead engineer planner for CFC-A and then, for the remainder, was the CFC-A's chief of construction. In this second of two interviews regarding his Global War on Terrorism deployments, Schreiner begins by asserting that what was going on in Afghanistan during his tenure was not reconstruction but rather basic construction. "This country has been so devastated by three decades of civil war and Soviet occupation that there's nothing there. Basic services are nonexistent and there are a lot of challenges that are associated with that." Reflecting on this Afghan tour and contrasting it with his previous deployment to Iraq in 2003, Schreiner offers the following observation concerning the differences between the two countries: "the Iraqis had the expertise and resources internal to their country but just didn't know how to organize themselves to make it happen, whereas the Afghan people are extremely willing to sacrifice, wait things out and do everything they can towards the greater good, they just don't have the resources." About his time with CFC-A, Schreiner also discusses his visibility and involvement in what he calls the "strategic reconstruction of the road networks"; his thoughts on the need to standardize deployment lengths among the various branches of the US military; as well as his recommendation that the State Department more vigorously solicit support for Afghan reconstruction from the world's donor nations.

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