When Mark Milley first led a US training mission 14 years ago, he was ordered to school an Afghan unit on Soviet-era weapons at a military installation that was little more than dirty ground. Most of the recruits didn’t have bank accounts to cash their paychecks, and colleagues remember that Milley had to haggle with Afghan contractors just to get American troops fed.
“We went into a parking lot behind a warehouse, we looked around, and we said, ‘This looks like a pretty good place to establish a base camp,’” Milley recalled in a 2007 interview. “And there was nothing but trash, but that was what we did.”
