Arrival
The transition into the position at Camp Arifjan wasn’t horrible, but the atmosphere of the place was interesting. To keep it simple, there were strong negative feelings across the office among several different people. And really, the atmosphere hasn’t changed that much even to this day. Maybe it’s a side effect of too many high ranking individuals in a small town. The atmosphere at my regular job at UnitedHealth Group does seem a lot more collaborative.
There was certainly a lot of information even beyond what I learned at DFAS Indianapolis related to the job. There are a multitude of organizations within the government running projects and pilots across the Theater. Included in this list would be PRTs, Threat Finance Cells, USAID, the Department of State, the TFBSO, the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, DFAS, and various factions within the military, Finance being one and Contracting another.
Also, the actual financial infrastructure has many differences between the Commercial Bank/Savings and Loan/Credit Union structure we’re used to in the United States. For instance, there is a hawala system across much of the Middle East, including Aghanistan, which is about half of a millennium old. Basically hawaladars (people who run “branches”) are sworn into the career, and allow people to send money through their system for a fee. It’s basically a low tech system to wire funds where the different hawaladars meet occasionally to settle their books. Otherwise, the vast majority of people in Afghanistan carry the money they have, and are suspicious of the local banks.
Of course, all of that information doesn’t matter if we can’t in some way act on it. The goal of my organization is to prevent the loss of US funds entrusted to Army Financial Management Companies and promote US goals, such as strengthening the financial infrastructure of host nations.
So, that’s the general gist of what I’m up to over here at Camp Arifjan. I suppose I’ll start posting updates a little more specific to current events now that the baseline is established.
