Time is the enemy in Afghans’ training

Standing on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport, Rod Melzer of the US air force reflects on the difficulty of training Afghans to fly helicopters in combat operations against the Taliban.

“When I came over here six months ago I had high expectations of what we could achieve, but they weren’t realistic,” he says. “In the US we want to get things done, we say ‘let’s go’. But here time does seem to have a wholly different meaning for people.”