Major John Tabb deployed from January 2007 until January 2008 as both a border police transition team (BPTT) chief and an Afghan National Army (ANA) embedded training team (ETT) chief in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan - a deployment he discusses in two separate interviews. An armor officer, Tabb operated in Farah Province in southwestern Afghanistan. His area of operations belonged to non-US International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) nations like Italy and Spain and had no US, British or Canadian forces. After volunteering for the mission, Tabb began training under Fort Riley's relatively new program in October 2006, where he felt they should have received a much more extensive block of instruction on marksmanship with the AK47. In Afghanistan, his team was stationed about 25 miles away from the regional headquarters at Camp Stone, located just outside or Herat. His team advised the 6th Afghan Border Police Brigade, which had responsibility for the entire Iranian border from Nimruz Province in the south, to the Turkmenistan border in the north. The brigade consisted of three battalions, known as kandak, which primarily operated out of border checkpoints. As an advisor, he spent extensive time interfacing with the brigade's commander and the various agencies in the area, including an experienced provincial reconstruction team (PRT) leader. He highlighted corruption and mismanagement as his biggest challenges. The police would sell about a third of the opium that they confiscated. Also, the police abused their logistics system by either hoarding the logistics at the brigade level or selling the supplies, especially fuel, that actually made it to checkpoint level. He also criticized DynCorp for "sucking up money and not contributing much to the fight." His biggest success was getting the police more active in interagency operations along the border. They became a "very active agent of interdiction on the border, and they hadn't been before." Four months into the mission, he was reassigned to be an ETT chief for the 1st Kandak, 1st Brigade of the 207th Corps located at Farah, near the village of Musa Qal'eh in Helmand Province. Eventually, he commanded a team of approximately 21 officers and NCOs. Enemy activity in the area was very intense and the unit conducted numerous combat operations. He assesses the training level of the kandak as having been mixed, with two companies being particularly strong, while the others suffered from morale and corruption problems. At one point in time, they conducted a complex ambush against about 400 insurgents who had moved into Farah. The kandak lost 24 ANA soldiers during that running battle. Overall, he observes that corruption, including that involved with the opium trade, was his biggest problem. He also says that logistics were a challenge for the ANA and getting logistics support from multinational partners could also prove to be very difficult. The biggest shortcoming, in his opinion, of the advisor mission in Afghanistan is that it needs to be significantly expanded to properly support the ANA and the police.

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