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flight—Afghanistan’s national carrier, Ariana, was considered too risky for U.S. government personnel—after about two weeks of rudimentary training in Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan.
    He had a week of orientation at the embassy, and then they tried to figure out how to get him down to Ghazni. Much like USAID, the embassy had not completely figured out how to support its personnel in isolated parts of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Mongan went to the embassy’s political section to try to get information on Ghazni. The people there could not really help him, saying, “None of us have been down there in a while.” The deputy chief of mission’s sole advice to Mongan was, “Don’t try to be a player out there.”
    Like their USAID counterparts, State Department PRT team members were orphans within the bureaucracy. James Hunter, another Foreign Service officer who served on the Asadabad PRT at roughly the same time as Mongan, described the experience thus: “When you walked out of the Kabul embassy, you dropped off the face of the earth.” At the time, the embassy’s PRT section had only two officers who supported the field staff, and both had to juggle that responsibility with other embassy jobs.
    Eventually, Mongan managed to get a lift to Ghazni, a two-hour drive from Kabul, with the deputy chief of mission. The DCM was new to Afghanistan; he had never traveled outside the capital, and wanted to see a PRT. By hitching a ride with the senior diplomat, Mongan felt a little bit like a kid being dropped off at college. But it had its advantages. “It probably gave the PRT and the battalion head a completely mistaken sense of the influence and heft I happened to have back in Kabul,” he later recalled. “I guess in the first few weeks that helped.”
    Over the next few weeks, Mongan settled into his new situation. The base at PRT Ghazni was manned by soldiers of the Virginia National Guard. The Provincial Reconstruction Team had only a small civilian contingent: a USAID representative who had been there since earlier in the spring and a U.S. Department of Agriculture officer. The State Department had sent a retired Foreign Service officer to Ghazni, but he had lasted only two months.
    The DCM’s advice to Mongan was repeated by others who worked on the PRTs. In essence, it meant “Keep your head down.” The primary function of the diplomats on the PRT was to observe and report back to the embassy, nothing more. They would keep an eye on the local situation, as well as on what the other U.S. agencies were up to. They were not there to influence local decisionmaking or contribute to the larger effort being led by the military.
    Diplomats did not fit neatly into the military organization. They were not on the same rotational schedule, and they reported through a different chain of command. And there was a serious communications problem. The military maintains its own classified networks, but the State Department had not provided for secure communications outside the embassy. The entire time Mongan was posted to Ghazni, he had to use a Hotmail account to communicate with his superiors in Kabul. That meant he had to send an unclassified version of his reports, with sensitive information stripped out. If he needed to relay something classified, he would add it to a summary report that the Provincial Reconstruction Team’s military staff typed up and sent nightly to their brigade headquarters. A State Department officer assigned to the brigade was supposed to pass on any relevant information on the situation in Ghazni to the embassy in Kabul.
    Or so went the theory. Mongan assumed that his State Department counterpart would pass the reports on to the embassy in Kabul and that someone in the embassy would bother to read them. Neither, it turned out, actually happened, even though one of Mongan’s main responsibilities was keeping tabs on the