Kirkland’s eyes in Afghanistan: Q&A with foreign service officer Juha Salin

Supporting the so-called ‘War on Terror’ isn’t exactly the focus of suburban Kirkland.

May 7, 2008 12:00 pm
Juha Salin stands with border police chiefs at the “Peace Bridge” from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. It is the same bridge used by the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and exit in 1989.
Juha Salin stands with border police chiefs at the “Peace Bridge” from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. It is the same bridge used by the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan in 1979 and exit in 1989.

A Q&A with Juha Salin, U.S. foreign service officer

Supporting the so-called ‘War on Terror’ isn’t exactly the focus of suburban Kirkland.

But a former resident who still calls it home is leading an important component of the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Juha Salin, 42, is a U.S. State Department Foreign Service Officer stationed in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan. He’s assigned to a Swedish Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) at a base run by the Swedish military and NATO. Several years ago Salin and his young family settled down in a home here while he worked for Microsoft and Seattle-based RealNetworks in marketing, program management and general management. Instead of returning to Kirkland after earning a degree from Harvard Business School, he joined the State Department and has worked in Ethiopia, Sweden and Washington, D.C.

Following a congressional report last month that was critical of the PRTs — derisively calling the program a “pickup game” — the U.S. officials asked Salin to contact the Kirkland Reporter and share his view from Afghanistan. The interview is reported in a question and answer format.

Reporter: What are the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs)?

Juha Salin: They were invented by the U.S. military. It’s basically the reconstruction part of the military … Our mission has evolved over time into a joint balanced relationship between the military and the State Department (to provide local and regional planning for security, governance and infrastructure).

R: Where are you based and what is it like?

JS: The PRT I assist is based at Camp Northern Lights, run by the Swedish Military. It’s just outside of Mazar-e Sharif, a city of somewhere between 400,000 to 600,000 people.

R: What is your job, exactly?

JS: Well, I’m advising a Swedish PRT. I’m an American guest of theirs … I’m actually the only State Department Officer in Northwest Afghanistan. My role here is that of a Political Reporting Officer. Afghanistan is an incredibly diverse country of different cultures, ethnicities, languages and religions. You see this big map of the country and assume that it’s all similar but there are huge differences in each area. There are a lot of other religions here besides Islam, for example, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were here. My job is to advise the U.S. Ambassador (William B. Wood) and make sure the State Department and the embassy understands the differences.

R: What are the problems Afghanistan is facing?

JS: What’s keeping me up at night is the economic side. The prices of food are rising here, but people don’t understand that it’s a global problem and are blaming it on us. We’re trying to figure out what the cause is here and fix it … The economic situation and political work in developing companies is very intertwined … You just don’t have numbers for anything. If you asked, ‘How much profit did you make last year?’, no one can give you an answer. That makes development difficult, hard to predict … The problem I’m working on is economic development. Unemployment and underemployment will be the biggest problem in the coming year. The only way to solve that here is private sector development … We’re more involved with the small-scale economic development. We have a lot of the traditional industry here. Carpets and textiles. On the bright side, this area will be poppy-free for two years (a raw material in the manufacture of Heroin) this year. Neighboring provinces are also being declared poppy-free through an incentive program.