An individual augmentee on a two-month rotation between February and May 2005 with the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan, Major Brent Novak - at the time the chief of West Point's Leader Development Branch - was tasked with helping to stand up the National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA). Although he spent much of his time trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, Novak said that what eventually seemed to be most useful was for him to "hang out with the [Afghan] commandant of cadets" and "listen to the problems they were having and relate it back to how West Point would deal with similar issues." He relates a generally unhelpful predeployment training experience at the CONUS Replacement Center, most problematically the near total lack of cultural awareness instruction. Novak then says that he and other officers from West Point in Afghanistan on short tours felt a degree of animosity from those there for yearlong deployments, and that this was reflected in awards among other things. Novak also discusses the interpreter situation, the appreciative nature and willingness to learn he saw in the Afghan people, concerns that were present with respect to the location of the military academy, the problems caused by a "hated" Turkish colonel, and also the buzkashi game he witnessed: the popular Afghan sport involving a dead goat and riders on horseback. In closing, Novak chastises the media for not covering all the positive developments he saw in Afghanistan and also shares his view of the country (and the US role in it) going forward. "We need to give the proper resources to the mission," he said. "My perception was that the Afghan people wanted to succeed. They had the motivation to succeed; they just needed the help to do it. If we continue treating it as an economy of force or handing things off to NATO, we may lose that."

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