“NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

The United States is running into resistance from Pakistan when it comes to securing the border between that country and Afghanistan.

“Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side,” said Owari Ghani, the governor of North-West Frontier Province, who is also President Pervez Musharraf’s representative in charge of the neighboring tribal areas.

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

“Pakistan is a sovereign state,” he said. “NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

The US and NATO regularly target Taliban forces on either side of the border:

On Wednesday night, the United States fired its fourth Predator missile strike since January, the most visible symbol of the American push for a freer hand to pursue militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban who use Pakistan’s tribal areas as a base to attack Afghanistan and plot terrorist attacks abroad. In Afghanistan, cross-border attacks have doubled over the same month last year and present an increasingly lethal challenge to American and NATO efforts to wind down the war and deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a sanctuary.

In an unusual step during a visit to Pakistan in March, Adm. Eric T. Olson, the commander of United States Special Operations Command, held a round-table discussion with a group of civilian Pakistani leaders to sound them out on the possibility of cross-border raids by American forces. He was told in no uncertain terms that from the Pakistani point of view it was a bad idea, said one of the participants.

Instead, Pakistani officials are trying to restore calm to their country, which was rattled by a record number of suicide attacks last year. Within days, they are expected to strike a peace accord with Pakistan’s own militants that makes no mention of stopping the infiltrations. In fact, Pakistani counterinsurgency operations have stopped during the new government’s negotiations with the militants.

[SNIP]

American officials in Washington said the Predator strike on Wednesday killed a handful of Qaeda militants, including one they described as a “significant leader.” The strike indicated that the C.I.A. retained some freedom to operate in the tribal areas. But as the gap between Pakistani and American policies widens, United States officials are pushing harder for still more latitude.

During his visit to North-West Frontier Province, Admiral Olson was taken to the military headquarters of the 14th Division of the Pakistani Army in Dera Ismail Khan, an area just outside the tribal region, where he was struck by the extent of the anti-Taliban sentiment, Pakistani officials said.

Still, in the talks, which were organized by the United States Consulate here in late March, the civilian leaders said they advised the Americans against fighting in Pakistani territory populated by Pashtuns. Pakistan’s government has long been wary of nationalist and separatist strains among the Pashtuns, whose population straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border.

“I said it would be extremely dangerous,” Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of North-West Frontier Province, said he told Admiral Olson. “It would increase the number of militants, it would be a war of liberation for the Pashtuns. They would say: ‘We are being slaughtered. Our enemy is the United States.’"

Map-languages and regions of Afghanistan

Within Pakistan, there are indications that the coalition government is coming apart:

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif pulled his party out of Pakistan's six-week-old coalition government on Monday, plunging the volatile Muslim nation back into political uncertainty.

Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) was the second-largest member of a four party alliance, made the announcement after failing to break a deadlock with its main coalition partner over the reinstatement of dismissed judges.

Sharif made the restoration of 60 judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf in November the main condition for joining the coalition led by the party of Asif Ali Zardari, the widower and political successor of the late Benazir Bhutto.

Three days of talks in London between Sharif and Zardari, whose Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leads the coalition, ended on Sunday without any breakthrough.

"Our ministers will meet the prime minister tomorrow and will submit their resignations," Sharif told a news conference.

Nine of the 24 ministers in Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's cabinet belong to the PML-N, including Finance Minister Ishaq Dar.

Sharif said his party would continue to support the PPP government despite quitting the cabinet.

"For the time being, we'll not sit in opposition."

Despite the possibility of the collapse of the Pakistani government, however, the New York Times says that the US is stepping up its rhetoric:

Last week John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, used perhaps the strongest language yet against Pakistan, saying that the United States found it “unacceptable” that extremists used the tribal areas to plan attacks against Afghanistan, the rest of the world and Pakistan itself.

“We will not be satisfied until the violent extremism emanating from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is brought under control,” Mr. Negroponte told the National Endowment for Democracy.

Earlier this month, Afrasiab Khattak and Asfandyar Wali Khan, the leaders of the Awami National Party, which leads the government in the North-West Frontier Province, met with Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and Mr. Negroponte in Washington.

In their meetings, Mr. Khattak said, it was hard to deter the Americans from the notion of launching their own operations into Pakistan. The topic came up “again and again,” he said.

The Americans specifically mentioned their concern that Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas were preparing an attack on the United States, he said.

“We told them physical intervention into the tribal areas by the United States would be a blunder,” Mr. Khattak said. “It would create an atmosphere in which the terrorists would rally” popular support.

Should the United States and its NATO allies be focused on operations along the Pakistani border at all? According to researcher Sarah Meyer, the Afghan people are facing starvation and famine due to a particularly harsh winter, coupled with ongoing war in their country:

Among the resources compiled by Meyer, this article highlights the need to take care of the Afghan people:

If instead of the fields of poppies there were expanses of wheat, 18 million Afghans who today suffer from hunger would have enough food. With these statements - which appear a bit naive - the experts of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have declared that by better using international funds, the development of new irrigation and technology systems for agriculture could be realised. But the most difficult thing is convincing Afghan farmers to change their extensive opium cultivation to the production of wheat, fruit, and vegetables.

According to data supplied by the UN, Afghanistan uses 193,000 hectares of land for the cultivation of poppy, and produces more than 90% of the opium in circulation. The estimates reveal that by the end of 2008, the country will produce more than 8,200 tonnes of raw opium.

According to some experts, the world economic crisis and the dizzying rise in food prices everywhere could prompt farmers to convert their poppy fields to wheat. In fact, the price of wheat has risen from 157 dollars per tonne in January to 500 dollars in April of this year.

Tekeste Ghebray Tekie, the FAO representative in Afghanistan, is certain that by growing wheat with the appropriate irrigation systems, more than two and a half tons per hectare could be produced. "If you use this land for high cash crops like vegetables, fruit or cotton", Tekeste says, "then the contribution to food security will be enormous".

Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan had much more irrigated land, but the irrigation systems were destroyed during the war. After the United States military intervention in the country, begun in October of 2001, 15 billion dollars in international aid was invested. But according to Oxfam, only 300 million of this has been earmarked for agriculture.

Photo: Dara, Afghanistan

Herschel Smith at The Captain's Journal highlights efforts by the US Department of Agriculture to assist Counterinsurgency Operations in Afghanistan:

Body armor is not in [Jeff] Knowles’ typical wardrobe as an employee of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). But then again, working with farmers in Afghanistan to help rebuild their agricultural system isn’t his typical work either.

Knowles, who now lives in Hawaii, spent six months in the war-scarred nation talking with farmers about what they grow and what their needs are. He was honored last week by USDA secretary Ed Schafer for his service in Afghanistan in 2005-06.

“I think it’s one of the best things we’re doing in the country,” Knowles said via a phone interview from his USDA office in Hawaii. “If we can help improve quality of life for farmers — and 95 percent of the Afghan people are farmers — we’re doing something real.”

Living conditions are rough. And most farmers are subsistence farmers, growing crops like wheat, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, apricots, apples and almonds.

But getting enough water for crops is a major issue …

It was in Hawaii that Knowles decided to volunteer for a six-month stint in Afghanistan.

“It was really intriguing to me — they were facing problems with erosion, heavy and widespread, and a lot of their irrigation system was destroyed,” he said. “It seemed that my entire career was pointing to this. The things I’d been working with for close to 30 years were the things they needed in Afghanistan.”

Successful Counterinsurgency Begins With the Family Farm

[Photo: Poppies in Afghanistan, Livestock in Iraq]

Did you know that one of the few areas where we had any success at all in Vietnam came from the policy of land reform--that is, we helped local farmers gain ownership over the plots of land that they had farmed for generations?

Sadly, we see nothing but obstacles ahead for Iraq and Afghanistan:

A provincial reconstruction team surveyed a dairy farm in a community south of Baghdad to determine its technical and financial needs.

Floyd Wood with the U.S. Department of Agriculture accompanied an area PRT to talk with local farm managers and workers to see what the farm needed to reach its full production goals.

Wood and the PRT team determined the irrigation system couldn't support the farm's full capacity following a meeting with local veterinarians and feed specialists.

The farm was designed to sustain about 8,000 cattle, but irrigation problems depleted that to around 1,000 dairy cows, the Multi-National Forces-Iraq reported.

Wood said the farm needed to have 50,000 gallons of water a week shipped in to supply the cows with drinking water, general maintenance and to irrigate the 3,500 acres of farmland.

Wood said the farm was once one of the largest distributors of milk to south-central Iraq and Baghdad, but noted now about 25 cows a month are slaughtered due to malnutrition.

The lack of milk supply means the Baghdad community has to import more products from Kuwait and Jordan, driving prices up and having a ripple effect on the local economy.

And Afghanistan:

In 2004, Afghanistan produced 87% of the world's heroin, according to UN data. Just three years later, that same group will report in September that the number is now 95%.
Between 2005 and 2006, Afghanistan increased its opium yield by 49%. In 2005, the yield was 4,100 metric tons. In 2006, it was 6,100 metric tons.

Today, that number is getting worse and worse.

The work of USAID in both Afghanistan and Iraq has been very difficult, but they are able to talk about some tentative accomplishments since the start of the war five years ago. USAID is one of the best things going for us--it is the ultimate "hearts and minds" program. This gives you some background on why this is important in Iraq:

Agriculture is Iraq's largest employer, the second largest contributor to GDP, and an effective engine for promoting stability through private sector development, poverty reduction, and food security. The revival of a dynamic, market-driven agricultural sector will strengthen private business, increase income and employment opportunities, and help meet the food requirements of the Iraqi people. From 2003 through the fall of 2006, USAID's Agriculture Reconstruction and Development Program for Iraq (ARDI) restored veterinary clinics, introduced improved cereal grain varieties, repaired agricultural equipment, and trained farmers and ministry staff. USAID recently initiated a new agriculture program, Inma. The new program will extend the production improvements made by ARDI by working at the provincial level to support the development of agribusinesses and agricultural markets, improving farmer livelihoods. Inma will Complement USAID's other economic growth programs.

And Afghanistan:

USAID ASSISTANCE
INFRASTRUCTURE
USAID is funding the construction and rehabilitation of infrastructure critical for further economic development and national integration. The primary focus is roads, including a major portion of the Kabul-Kandahar-Herat Highway and approximately 1,000 km of provincial, district and rural roads. USAID is also investing in the construction and rehabilitation of power plants, transmission lines, dams, irrigation and flood control systems, industrial parks, bridges, universities, schools, and clinics.

ALTERNATIVE LIVELIHOODS PROGRAM
The Alternative Livelihoods Program (ALP) provides Afghans with opportunities to participate in the licit economy in key poppy growing areas. In meeting immediate needs to provide economic opportunity, ALP supports labor-intensive cash-for-work projects to build or rehabilitate productive infrastructure, and funds income generation and training efforts for vulnerable households as part of Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics strategy.

Some history on why USAID is an effective means of combating terrorist insurgencies:

Mike Korin spent nearly seven years in Vietnam, from 1967 to 1973, working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture on loan to USAID. He spent two years in the city of Tam Ky in Quang Tin Province, where he shared an office with USAID civilian doctors and construction experts, U.S. military civic affairs specialists and a Vietnamese professional and support staff.

Korin worked there on a wide range of development activities, including rice production, and fisheries, forestry and irrigation systems development. "My work was with Vietnamese government officials," he said in an interview, "representing different agencies and providing USAID resources to help fund those activities."

Korin said the experience was, in most respects, a positive one. "It was exciting. We felt a sense of accomplishment," he said. "But there was also a certain degree of frustration because there was a lot of fighting going on in the province, including attacks on the provincial capital." The main problem in Korin's area was the large number of refugees. "It made things difficult," he said. "People were constantly being routed out of their villages and their villages were being burned down either by the bad guys or the good guys. People were put into refugee camps. It was very difficult for the people."

Korin was based in Saigon during his last four years in Vietnam. He was among nearly 200 USAID agricultural experts in the country at the time. His Saigon office was made up of about two dozen American USAID agriculture professionals involved in land-reform programs. Korin traveled throughout the country working on the Montagnard land reform and land-to-the-tiller programs, which paid landlords to give land to peasant farmers.

Seven years in a war zone is long enough to become an expert; contrast that with the youthful and inexperienced people who are going [yes, kudos to them in any event] and the people at places like the State Department who refuse to go at all.

The USAID involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq is vital for rebuilding those countries (or bringing them out of poverty and neglect) and serves as a bastion of what is good about America. The fact that we send people and money to do mundane things like build schools, hospitals and roads and to teach people how to improve their farming methods is a basic tenet of American foreign policy.

At the height of the Vietnam War, one of the most effective methods of reducing the insurgency was to give people title to the land that they lived on:

...MACV advisors did work closely with 900,000 local GVN officials in a well-organized pacification program called CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development.) It stressed technical aid, local self government, and land distribution to peasant farmers. A majority of tenant farmers received title to their own land in one of the most successful transfer projects in any nation. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of peasants entered squalid refugee camps when CORDS moved them out of villages that could not be protected. In the Phoenix Program (part of CORDS with a strong CIA component) GVN police identified and arrested (and sometimes killed) the NLF secret police agents engaged in assassination.

Given the atrocious example of displacement of people in Iraq and the explosion of poppy growing in Afghanistan, how is it that the lessons learned in Vietnam failed to carry over?

AFGHANISTAN: Agricultural development in most of RC East proved necessary for long-term economic viability. United States Department of Agriculture officers provided development advice to the IRoA, the CTF, and, to a lesser extent, cooperatives and individual farmers. Although not present in most RC East PRTs, USUSDA officers worked on the staffs of three key posts (task force headquarters and the Ghazni and Jalalabad PRTs) for much of CTF Devil’s tenure. These officers breathed life into USAID’s alternative livelihood programs. They provided advice on which crops to substitute for the opium poppy and focused on implementing agricultural programs like micro-credit for farmers. They also helped devise high-impact but simple projects that enhanced the value of crops grown by desperately poor farmers. That said, the relatively limited USUSDA presence in RC East prevented the task force from making the most of its agricultural development programs. ["Combating a Modern Insurgency: Combined Task Force Devil in Afghanistan, Donahue & Frenzel, March-April 2008, Military Review]

IRAQ: Another example is the agricultural facet of the Iraqi economy. Our estimate was that the area around Baghdad, if resourced and irrigated, could easily feed all of Iraq. But the antiquated farming methods were only providing for 25 percent of the country’s needs, forcing imports of most foodstuffs. Although the $18.4 billion Iraqi supplemental did not provide for any agricultural improvements, we were able to import, through reprogrammed funding, over 2,000 tons of grain, fertilizer, and feed. Immunizations, coupled with rejuvenating the irrigation apparatus around Baghdad, created conditions for economic independence. [Winning the Peace The Requirement for Full-Spectrum Operations,Chiarelli & Michaelis, May-June 2005, Military Review]

From the Asia Times:

...But now Iraqi farmers struggle to get water to their crops. There is severe lack of electricity to run pumps and fuel to run generators.

"The water is there and the rivers have not dried up, but the problem lies in how to get it to our dying plantations," said Jabbar Ahmed, a farmer from Latifiya south of Baghdad. "It is a shame that we, our animals and our plants are thirsty in a country that has the two great rivers."

Iraq now imports most agricultural products because of lack of irrigation.

"I used to sell 50 tonnes of tomatoes every year, but now I go to the market to buy my daily needs," said Numan Majid, from the Abu Ghraib area just west of Baghdad. "I tried hard to cope with the situation, but in vain. One cannot grow crops in Iraq anymore with this water shortage."

So the proven tactic of agricultural reforms--and the assistance of people at USAID--could have a positive impact on what we're doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. It could help us reduce the number of people who take up arms against us AND improve their quality of life. And how do we approach it? We started off by short-changing them and focusing on their oil and on using critical resources to build the largest Embassy ever out of shit and cardboard that we can't even use.

When they write the books about Afghanistan and Iraq, and do the scholarly studies, the word "folly" comes to mind. And we could have avoided that folly if we had just remembered thousands of years of human history--farmers typically pacify and improve areas beset by violence. But here we have a perfect example of short-sightedness--it would go a long ways towards getting Iraq back on track if we could just keep a dairy farm operating. And we can't even do that. It would go a long ways towards helping people in Afghanistan grow food instead of poppies. And we haven't made a dent in that problem yet.

Is it too late to expect USAID to improve the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq? It probably is, and the symbol of that is a malnourished cow and a field of poppy plants. It's never too late to appreciate the wisdom of using a different approach from carpet bombing people from high altitudes and blowing up their homes, but five years into this war in Iraq and over six years since going into Afghanistan, it's hard to see much progress.