In this second of two interviews regarding his Global War on Terrorism experiences, Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Stevenson Jr. discusses his November 2005 through August 2006 deployment to Afghanistan during which he served as chief of the Special Initiatives Group in Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan's CJ5 section. In this capacity, Stevenson was responsible for the planning and oversight, from a policy perspective, of several key programs, among which were: the partnership program with the Afghan National Army and Combined Joint Task Force-76; the Afghan National Police support program; reestablishing provincial coordination centers in the southern and eastern regions of the country, with the mission of coordinating, synchronizing and de-conflicting all provincial security and development operations by maintaining and promulgating a common operational picture of army, police, National Directorate of Security and development/reconstruction organization activities. He also worked in concert with members of the US Embassy staff and the Ministries of Defense, Interior and Finance on developing a comprehensive border management plan focused on security and revenue generation operations at key border crossing points, as well as joint planning and coordination with the Ministry of Defense and NATO International Security Assistance Force staff to synchronize and transition key campaign plan objectives and programs to ISAF as they prepared to take over security operations in the southern and eastern regions by year's end. What's more, in concert with Supreme Headquarters Allied Power Europe and Joint Force Command-Brunssum, Stevenson developed the training and transition plan for NATO training teams to assume a greater role in the tactical training of Afghan National Army units from US embedded training teams, as well as the plan to transition full sovereignty over all provincial operations to the Afghan government. Stevenson additionally discusses his working relationships with several top Afghan generals and ministry officials, comments on the problems (as he saw it) of differing tour lengths between the various US services, and his belief that the Afghanistan operation as a whole is under-resourced - which is all the more unfortunate because, in his estimation, Afghanistan has a greater potential for long-term success than Iraq.

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