Capt. Tamara Gonzales, USA
NTM-A
Wednesday, 26 May 2010 The Afghan National Army (ANA) Infrastructure Management Department’s director’s goal is to bring together ANA soldiers from across Afghanistan dedicating time to learn and develop engineering skills.
“For skilled workers, we need to provide these schools,” said Brig. Gen. “Engineer” Habibullah. “When workers are skilled and learn their work they will come towards government, by working with their hands they will have pure living and prevent corruption.”
Left, Brig. Gen. “Engineer” Habibullah, Afghan National Army Infrastructure Management Department director, discusses future plans for an Afghan engineer school with ANA and NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan U.S. servicemembers, May 16. Afghans from across the country will come together at this school learning valuable skills and how to maintain their own facilities.
Without having trained Afghan facility engineers and Department of Public Work employees, the Afghans will not be able to
Currently, the potential engineers are attending smaller schools near their military duty location where only sixteen students train at a time, the new school will train 60 students at a time. The students will come from the seven ANA corps across the country.
This school will not only train more students, but will also provide them an environment to focus strictly on their studies without administrative distracters. In this new environment, the soldiers’ mission will be to learn everything they can about engineering.
During the six month course, students will become knowledgeable in seven key trades including electrical; carpentry; plumbing; heating; masonry and painting; ventilation and air conditioning, welding and sheet metal. Teachers with knowledge and expertise in these fields will be dedicated to each of these trades.
They will also learn Afghan culture, English, Dari and ADIS computer skills. ADIS is a server internet based system new to Afghanistan enabling them to independently process and track engineer plans, work requests and establish trends pertaining to facility repair requirements possibly showing underlying problems.
The Dari class will improve students’ reading ability so they can better understand different engineer equipment instruction manuals.
Each Afghan regional command has an engineer facility consisting of ANA soldiers and department of public works civilians. The first six-month class will consist of 20 Afghan Department of Public Works potential engineers then expanding to 60 students, fifty percent ANA soldiers and the rest DPW employees.
There is a critical shortage of engineers across the ANA, the Afghan National Police and for Afghan citizens. However, this school will help overcome these challenges as it will invite all these populations to gain engineering skills helping lead Afghans on the road to self-sufficiency in maintaining their own facilities.
“Ultimately a man has to maintain his own home,” said Habibullah. “When our soldiers have advanced facilities in which to live they will fight very strongly. We’ll need to keep these Afghan facilities active with Afghans taking pride in doing their own work and working for their country.”
Stumble It!
