Elmont Online

Frank Hoare

Partner, Featherstonhaugh, Wiley & Clyne

What he does: In his private law practice, Hoare focuses on election and government relations work. But since graduating from Albany Law School in 1985, he has served as a JAG lawyer in the Army Reserve, recently returning from a six-month deployment to Afghanistan, where he advised the Afghan Army on how to run a military court system from a base outside the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. He is a lieutenant colonel.

How he got here: The son of Irish immigrants, Hoare attended the University at Albany and Albany Law after growing up in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood. After a stint in private practice, Hoare linked up with Assemblyman Denny Farrell, D-Harlem, and served as his counsel for 10 years in both government work and political (Farrell was the longtime chairman of the Manhattan Democratic Party) matters. Hoare worked as an aide to then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for a little over a year before joining Featherstonhaugh's firm in August of 2008.

Personal: A divorced father of three, Hoare, 51, lives in Rensselaer with his companion Cathy Calhoun, an aide to Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. He enjoys running and boxing at a gym in Delmar with his 10-year-old son, Stephen.

What is life like in Afghanistan?

Kabul is a little smaller than Albany, and there are shops and cafes and it's reasonably secure. But when you get out of the city, it's mostly small villages where people are living basically the same way they have for centuries. There's not much formal government, most authority is centered around a spiritual leader or elder who makes decisions and statements based on the Koran. We went out to one area that Alexander the Great came through in 330 B.C., a valley where he rested his shoulders. Someone told me we were looking at pretty much what he saw: small, one-story, mud-packed structures, camels and a few livestock. A child will be born and raised there and probably never leave, except maybe for a trip to Kabul.

You were deployed to Germany and Bosnia during the 1990s and, more recently, to Iraq in 2003. What were the differences?

The big difference is you're creating social institutions from scratch, whereas in Iraq, it was a much more secular country where they had hundreds of years of experience with government rule different from our government, certainly not Western democracy,- but they had functioning bureaucracies and they have a tradition of providing services. You don't have that in Afghanistan. For example, in the Afghan army, there were illiteracy rates as high as 70 percent. But I would say decision-making is much more collaborative, and it's very slow. You have village elders, but it's not one person making decisions. You see that in the army, too, where there was a difference in style between Soviet-trained officers and those who came out of the Mujahideen, which was much less formal in structure. Sometimes for our fast-paced, Western, "Just do it now," it was something to get used to.

Our job wasn't to tell them how to do their job, but just to help them as advisers.

Now you're back in Albany. What has the last six months taught you?

What I bring home from my time in Afghanistan is a fuller appreciation for our country, though not perfect, a place of unequaled freedom and opportunity. Secondly, Americans should be very proud of their service members -- men and women from every background and state, serving with courage and honor in a challenging environment.

-- Jimmy Vielkind