Sorry, our MI unit is too busy to give you a briefing that might save soldiers’ lives!

Someone
passed to me an e-mail in which a senior Army military intelligence officer
declined a request to brief another unit on the "green on blue" threat
presented by Afghan soldiers and police.

"I respectfully
decline the offer for Dr. Bordin to conduct an OPD," Col. Sharon Hamilton wrote
last May to Lt. Col. Frank Tank. (I know, that name may sound odd, but it is
real -- Tank is a Knowlton Award-winning officer who has written for the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin.) Col. Hamilton
explained that Bordin "must remain focused on Brigade mission requirements."

She
wasn't being completely candid. But Hamilton's real problem with Bordin giving
a briefing was that the Army at that time was unhappy with a controversial
report Bordin had just produced on "green-on-blue" killings of American
soldiers by Afghan army and police personnel. That report, "A Crisis of Trust and Cultural
Incompatibility,"
subsequently became very well known.

But when
Bordin first distributed his findings, he got in hot water. A coalition
spokesman, Lt. Cdr. Collette Murphy, told the Wall Street
Journal that, "The findings are not consistent with our assessment." Murphy charged
that the study was "systematically flawed, and suffered from generalizations,
narrow sample sets, unprofessional rhetoric, and sensationalism." As a
Stars & Stripes article put it, "His prescient analysis was quickly and publicly ridiculed by
military officials, and Bordin was removed from his post as a research team
leader."

But a
year later, after a sharp escalation in green-on-blue killings, the Army embraced his
findings.

I tried
to e-mail Col. Hamilton, her old boss, as well as Dr. Bordin and Lt. Col. Tank,
in order to request comment and get additional information, but was unable to
reach any of them, or at least hear back from them.

Don't
you just love military bureaucracy?