J. R. Lonsway

I had never been to Africa when I deployed to Liberia in August 2005. The country is on the west side of the continent and lies just at the point where the head of the great land mass takes a turn south and bends back east towards its middle. The western border of Libe...

 When I read the news about the controversy over the name change of Macedonia to North Macedonia it brought back a Christmas Day memory.

I worked in Kosovo for eighteen months as a police advisor with the State Department, seconded to the United Nations in its effort to...

(This is the tenth in a series about overseas policing).

I did my first tour of duty in Liberia from August 2005-06. I had never served in Africa prior to this (I would serve in South Sudan in 2012 and go back to Liberia in 2013 for a second tour). I fell in love with t...

(This is the ninth in a series of postings about overseas police work, more commonly referred to as mission work in a position as police advisor).

I recognize a loser when I see one, and a few months in Afghanistan was enough for me to deduce that the efforts being made...

(This story is a continuation of a series about overseas civilian policing assignments).

I was surprised when I was tasked with an assignment as advisor to General Mohammed Daoud Daoud, who was in charge of Counter-Narcotics for the Afghan National Police.

My exper...

The reason for the presence of the American advisors, as I mentioned previously, was to work hand-in-hand with the Ministry of Interior to professionalize the Afghanistan National Police (ANP) and build them up from a force of 15,000 officers to 35,000. In the process...

The city had been brutalized by the fighting that took place between warring factions during the various battles and sieges of Kabul in the 1990's and into the early 21st century (the ten year war with the USSR from 1979-89 left the capital relatively unscathed). The d...

I arrived in Afghanistan in late September 2004. I was part of a group of three sent to work with the Ministry of Interior for the purpose of instituting democratic policing principles into the Afghan National Police (ANP), and build them up from a force of 15,000 to 3...

(This is the fifth in a series about overseas policing assignments).

The investigator I described in the previous post as an immature, cocky, obnoxious, profane individual, one of three Americans in the Special Investigations Unit of the War Crimes section, became the c...

(This is the fourth in a series about overseas civilian police assignments).

In 1999 UNMIK, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, was formed from a conglomeration of international civilian, military, and police brought together under U.N. Resolution 1244 to bring peace,...