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Afghan surge takes a fruitful twist
By Philip Smucker
ASADABAD, Afghanistan - The slight Californian agronomist who traded in his
dreadlocks for a beard before leaving for his first deployment in a military
zone is often mistaken by American soldiers he works around as a "terp" - short
for interpreter. He wryly notes that "terp" in the local Pashtu language also
means radish, a vegetable that grows well here in eastern Afghanistan.
"Only once have I been mistaken for a US Special Forces fighter," joked Pedro
Torrez, 35, who is one in a small but expanding army of experts that the Barack
Obama administration hopes can help defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliated jihadi
groups.
Torrez (pictured at right) and other experts like him represent the
"soft power", also known as "smart power", that the administration believes can
alter the outlooks of young Afghans who join forces with hardcore insurgents.
It is a strategy that defies the tried and futile logic of what the George W
Bush administration set out to do here in 2001: eradicate one "bad guy" at a
time in a zero-sum game still glorified on a T-shirt sold on American bases
here that reads "The Taliban Hunt Club".
More likely to undermine the insurgents than the thousands of fresh US troops
on their way to Afghanistan are experts like Torrez, say diplomats and
soldiers. Torrez's best weapons? Eggplants, walnuts, pomegranates, grapes and -
not to be overlooked - beehives and radishes.
Torrez, who has also shared his expertise with American Indian tribes in
California, believes that poor Afghan villagers are the key to peace and
stability in Afghanistan.
"I think it shows a positive evolution when the Pentagon recognizes that
helping people grow more food is an answer to settling military action," said
Torrez, who advises Afghan farmers and implements irrigation and
erosion-control projects.
Counter-insurgency, the US military has learned the hard way, has more to do
with separating the broader population from the enemy than killing insurgents
one at a time. As chairmen Mao Zedong knew in China, guerrillas "swim like fish
in the sea of the people". Dry up the sea, and a guerrilla movement will
wither. This can be accomplished - in no easy manner - by giving young Afghans
better and more exciting opportunities than those on offer from the Taliban and
its al-Qaeda military advisors.
The Obama administration has ordered a "surge" of civilian experts into
Afghanistan, providing no specific numbers but suggesting the number will be in
the "hundreds". Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed the initiative on
Tuesday as nations gathered at The Hague Afghan conference, saying that
diplomacy and military action must be packaged with civilian development.
Whether Washington's cumbersome, security-conscious bureaucracy can actually
make its new strategy work is another matter. Experts of all stripes have been
in demand for several years here to fight poverty and create more support for
the local government.
Deteriorating security - gun battles, roadside bombs and kidnappings - has
prevented most development workers from even setting foot in Pashtun-dominated
provinces of Afghanistan, particularly along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
No Western aid workers are to be found in Kunar or neighboring Nuristan, apart
from a handful of US government development and agricultural experts living on
US military bases. All of them work under harsh security restraints and rarely
make it to the remotest regions.
A senior US State Department official here, Dereck Hogan, said that Torrez and
experts like him in economic development and good governance were the keys to
an American exit strategy. Indeed, the resurgence of the Taliban has created
alarm among Afghan officials this spring.
"This is a hard time for us because small-scale development assistance has
slowed to a trickle, but it is a good time for the Taliban because they have
signed ‘peace deals' in Pakistan," said Kunar governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahidi
in an interview.
American officials insist they are aware of hold-ups in foreign assistance as
well as the Taliban's expected offensive.
"We've seen the amount of fighting and the number of insurgents infiltrating
from Pakistan rise significantly here in the east," said Hogan, who recently
signed on as a special assistant to Afghanistan and Pakistan's special envoy
Richard Holbrooke.
The administration's new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, unveiled last
week, makes it clear that the Obama administration is ready to move forward
with what Hogan described in detail as a new "village-by-village" approach to
counter-insurgency. On the one hand, thousands of "maneuver forces" are being
brought into Afghanistan's Pashtun regions in the east and south of the country
to hold the line at the border, he said.
"Forces like the 10th Mountain Division are part of a major push to stem the
infiltration of insurgents from Pakistan," said Hogan. "Their work is creating
space for our big push for economic development from experts like Mr Torrez."
Nearly a dozen Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Eastern and Southern
Afghanistan are already attempting to appeal to Afghans who would fight the
Americans for economic reasons. In Kunar province alone, which has less than
500,000 residents, the US government is trying to spend over US$100 million on
development assistance this year, but much of that money is taken up by large
infrastructure projects that do not focus on village or agricultural
development. Half the districts in the province are virtually off-limits to the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization-run Provincial Reconstruction Team.
"We have got to make the shift now. We are trying to integrate teams of outside
experts into Afghan community teams to work in remote districts," said Hogan,
acknowledging that the effort would not be easy.
In the late 1960s, the United States initiated a similar, military-coordinated
development effort in South Vietnam, but the effort eventually failed when
fighting intensified and US public support dwindled. Western military powers
have a poor record of trying and failing to implement rural development schemes
in the Third World.
"Our fundamental goal should be to convince locals to resist the insurgents -
village by village, valley by valley," said Hogan. "In that regard, Afghanistan
is nothing like Iraq."
Torrez, a cigar-smoking Puerto Rican-Columbian and the son of a Vietnam
veteran, has always viewed life as an adventure. It comes as no surprise to his
friends at an American military base here that he plans to ride a motorbike
from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Lhasa, Tibet, during his first 10 days of work leave.
But he is already frustrated by some of the financial and security obstacles he
faces in his first month of work in Afghanistan.
"Right now, I'm still looking at Afghan fruit markets through the three-inch
thick, bullet-proof glass of a US Humvee," said Torrez, who is writing an
agrarian plan of action for Kunar province and has plans to link up with
rough-and-ready platoons of 10th Mountain Division fighters to get out to some
of Afghanistan's remotest districts. "The US government's current priorities
are still roads and bridges, not smaller-scale development."
The expert "soil conservationist" already knew a bit about how Afghan gardens
grow - even before he arrived this year. He owns a 10-hectare (25-acre) farm in
Aguanga, a small town in Southern Riverside County, California, in the
mountains between Palm Springs and San Diego. His farm sits at almost the same
latitude and altitude - about 1,100 meters - as many of the farms here in the
tiny province of Kunar. While working as a soil conservationist for the US
Department of Agriculture, he also grows apples, grapes, tomatoes, squash and
melons and dabbles in the honey bee business, poultry and goats.
Torrez wants to help Afghans jump-start an age-old dried fruit business. "In
the 1930s, Afghanistan was one of the world's biggest exporters of dried
apricots and it has the potential to recover some of this market, but much of
the expertise has been lost in the years of conflict," he said.
The staple crop in eastern Afghanistan is wheat, which grows on terraced
mountainsides.
"Like California, this is semi-arid land, but there are diverse micro-climates
within an hour's walk due to extreme changes in elevation," said Torrez. "That
means you can grow oranges in the valley but have to switch to apples when you
get higher up."
Torrez wants to encourage local Afghan farmers to grow a diverse set of crops,
including nuts, fruits and wheat.
"It is not that there is a lack of food here, but what we are seeing is better
described as malnutrition because diets are not always as diverse as they
should be."
Philip Smucker is a commentator and journalist based in South Asia and
the Middle East. He is the author of Al-Qaeda's Great Escape: The
Military and the Media on Terror's Trail (2004). He is currently writing
My Brother, My Enemy, a book about America and the battle of ideas in the
Islamic world.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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