[NYTr] Loren Stoddard and the Poppies of Afghanistan

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 13, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley10132007.html

The Flat Drug World

Loren Stoddard and the Poppies of Afghanistan

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Ever heard of Mr Loren Stoddard? I'm tempted to advise you to Stay That
Way, but to give an illustration of how absurd and disastrous are
Washington's policies in Afghanistan it is of interest to consider his
performance. Bush of Washington sets an example by being ignorant of
many things, and Stoddard of Kabul follows him by being magnificently
uninformed about Afghanistan.

In spite of his lack of knowledge of the country and its customs and
culture Mr Stoddard has been made Director of USAID's Afghanistan
program. Before this he "helped Wal-Mart move into Central America"
when he was USAID Supremo in that unfortunate region. So of course he
is superbly qualified to direct American aid projects in a country of
which he is profoundly ignorant. Stand by, Wal-Mart, for a leg-up from
your devoted admirer.

With tongue firmly in cheek, David Rohde of the New York Times reported
that "On Wednesday [August 21], Mr. Stoddard and Rory Donohoe, the
director of the American development agency's Alternative Livelihoods
program in southern Afghanistan, attended the first 'Helmand
Agricultural Festival.' The $300,000 American-financed gathering in
Lashkar Gah [population 45,000] was an odd cross between a Midwestern
county fair and a Central Asian bazaar, devised to show Afghans an
alternative to [growing] poppies."

[See the story here:
Another Record High: Huge Increase in Afghan Poppy Crop for 2nd Year
Running - NY Times, Aug 26, 2007
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20070820/067142.html
-NY Transfer]

Helmand is a disaster area in which British soldiers are sacrificing
their lives for nothing. And I feel strongly about this because
soldiers and officers of my old Regiment have died for no reason. If
they had been killed destroying poppy fields that produce heroin which
then kills thousands of young British drug addicts, perhaps I might be
able to understand and even support the British presence in
Afghanistan. But these soldiers aren't there to stop drug production.
In fact nobody's quite sure why they are there at all, least of all the
soldiers, one of whom emailed recently to say exactly that.

So we must remember that Mr Stoddard is not alone, because London
declares that "The UK assumed control of the Province Reconstruction
Team in Lashkar Gah in May 2006. Despite difficult working conditions
in the toughest of environments Foreign and Commonwealth Office and
Department for International Development in Helmand province to provide
a seamless package of reconstruction assistance. The UK is delivering
reconstruction, recovery and development activity to a part of
Afghanistan that the Afghan Government and the international community
is committed to helping succeed." I won't describe the rest of the
British Foreign and Commonwealth Office's ungrammatical PR pomposity
about Helmand, save to say that rarely have I read such piddling tripe.
A "seamless package" ? . . . "delivering recovery activity" ? - you
couldn't parody this twaddle without being accused of overkill.

But if Mr Stoddard is in charge in Helmand, can it be presumed that
Britain has not "assumed control"? After all, the UK was supposed to
take the lead in combating drug production in Afghanistan.

The head of the UN's anti-drugs office, Mr Antonio Maria Costa, said
recently that "Helmand province is on the verge of becoming the world's
biggest drug supplier, with the dubious distinction of cultivating more
drugs than entire countries such as Myanmar, Morocco or even Colombia."
But never fear, Mr Antonio Maria Costa : the USAID Batman has arrived,
cape flying, eyes agleam, with Robin Donohoe in tow, to bring
Washington's anti-poppy culture to the admiring citizens of Lashkar
Gah. He might even have a seamless package to deliver recovery activity.

The fatuous duo of Stoddard and Donohoe "arrived [and] walked through
the festival surrounded by a three-man British and Australian security
team armed with assault rifles. 'Who won the cow? Who won the cow?'
shouted Mr. Stoddard, 38, a burly former food broker from Provo, Utah.
'Was it a girl or a guy?' After Afghans began dancing to traditional
drum and flute music, Mr. Donohoe, 29, from San Francisco, briefly
joined them." (Knowing a little bit about the tribes in the region I
can just imagine their reaction to that little bit of cross-cultural
activity.

The phrase "was it a girl or a guy" used by the sophisticated Mr
Stoddard is only one indication of his profound ignorance of the
country in which he heads an agency responsible for billions of dollars
of US taxpayers' money, of which he wasted 300,000 on a futile jamboree.

If Mr Stoddard imagines for one second that women in Lashkar Gah in
Helmand Province (or anywhere else in Afghanistan) can own cows, he is
a fool. If he thinks that a woman could enter a raffle to win a cow ("a
generator, cow and goat were raffled off") he is demonstrating a
staggering lack of knowledge of regional custom for which he can be
offered only deep sympathy. There were no women at Mr Stoddard's absurd
'Festival'. Women don't go to social gatherings in Afghanistan. Mr
Stoddard obviously doesn't know that even the wife of the President of
Afghanistan, a medical doctor, does not appear in public.

And it isn't just Mr Stoddard's ignorance of national customs that is
so laughable. He "cited American-financed agricultural fairs, the
introduction of high-paying legal crops and the planned construction of
a new industrial park and airport as evidence that alternatives [to
poppy growing] were being created."

The man is in cloud-cuckoo land. An industrial park? - In a province
where electricity is a rarity and there is no commercial infrastructure
of any description? One could be forgiven for imagining that Mr
Stoddard might have been inhaling products inducing a high credibility
threshold.

There are no "high-paying" legal crops in Helmand province. Some nuts
are exported to the Gulf, but generally people grow enough plants
(wheat, barley, fruit, vegetables) for their own sustenance and to sell
a bit to their neighbors ­ and use most of their fields to grow poppy
because the warlords and the criminals ­ many of both being government
ministers ­ pay reasonably well.

Sure, some cash ends up in the hands of the evil and disgusting Taliban
religious fanatics who move between Pakistan and Afghanistan, killing
at whim the while and blowing themselves up in murderous futility; but
drug money isn't nearly the insurrectionist problem the would-be
mind-benders would have us believe. The billions of dollars (not just
millions; we're talking real money here) created from Afghanistan's
poppies go to thuggish Afghan warlords and Afghan army generals; to
many members of President Karzai's own government (some of whom are
thuggish warlords and generals) ; to Uzbek, Pakistani, Iranian, Tajik,
Turkmen and, increasingly, Han Chinese middle-men in the west of the
PRC (big problem on the rise there for China); to Pakistani tribals who
have been smuggling drugs since time was invented; to freelance
ruffians of all descriptions, and, above all and most lucratively, to
Western criminals who appear immune to the efforts of US and British
law-enforcement agencies to put them behind bars.

Within Afghanistan the stink of drug corruption is as obvious and
calamitous as it is in London or New York.

Here's Declan Walsh of the UK's Guardian newspaper, a fine reporter
from one of the two British newspapers having an objective view on
world events. He is " . . . a few streets from Mr Karzai's presidential
palace in Sherpur, a gleaming new neighborhood in central Kabul [where]
dozens of giant gaudy mansions squeeze into small plots. Pink or green
windows, towering Roman columns and mirrored cupolas peek over high
walls and concrete blast barriers. A giant stone eagle perches on one
roof. The British embassy stands across the road. A property agent
stood on the roof of one glass-walled mansion, pointing at the
neighbors and naming the owners. 'General in the army. General.
Minister. Warlord,' he said."

You would think that such a report might raise an eyebrow among the
hundreds of diplomats, anti-drug experts, spooks and international
advisers who sit in well-guarded compounds in Kabul and a few other
places in Afghanistan. Not a hope. All these people know very well that
Afghan army generals are paid only a few hundred dollars a month - a
generous salary in Afghanistan, to be sure (their soldiers get $80 a
month), but they also know that such an amount isn't enough to live in
luxury. Government ministers earn even less, but have even more opulent
lifestyles. It would take only a few days to present evidence of
corruption that would convict the known criminals.

But nobody is going to rock the sleaze boat in Afghanistan.

The anti-drug effort in Afghanistan is a farce. There is talk at the
moment of aerial spraying to eradicate the crop in Spring next year. Of
course that would play right into the hands of the insurgents who have
already convinced much of Afghanistan's population that occupation by
foreign forces is simply a rerun of the years when troops of the former
Soviet Union went round blitzing villages.

If the nations with troops in Afghanistan are serious about eradicating
the drug trade they would combine their best brains (which
automatically excludes Mr Stoddard) and produce a workable plan (not a
fatuous "seamless package") to wipe out poppy, jail the drug thugs and
introduce controlled compensation. Mind you, it's all very well to
blame the Afghans for producing poppies, opium and heroin. What they
are doing is meeting market demand. After all, there would be no drug
production in Afghanistan if there wasn't a welcoming market in the
drug-loving prosperous West. The drug world is very flat indeed.

[Brian Cloughley is a former army officer who writes on political and
military affairs. His website is www.briancloughley.com ]