Excepting in the Government workshops there are very few trades carried on in the country. . . . The bulk of the commerce of the country is confined to dried fruits, which are exported to India and Russia.
—Frank A. Martin, Under the Absolute Amir, 1907
Most villagers cannot believe that central governments, provincial governments or individual local and foreign technicians want to introduce permanent reforms. Previous attempts have generally been of short duration and abortive, for once the “modernization” teams leave, the villagers patch up the breaks in the “mud curtain” and revert to their old, group-reinforcing patterns. Most villages listed in governmental records of the developing world as “developed” have never been revisited or rechecked, and the “development” only exists on paper.
—Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 1997
As winter passed the rains tapered off, falling only once a week or so and then not at all. In fields and orchards buds of grapes and pomegranates flourished under the bright spring sunshine and winter wheat sprouted pale green stalks.
Once a week Mohammad Zahir and I would accompany the soldiers on their visits to villages. As spring advanced we saw farmers working outside, channeling water into fields that were divided into sections with small ridges of dirt. The chug of diesel pumps driving irrigation water filled the air. By late spring the farmers had begun to cut wheat by hand and feed it into small threshing machines that sputtered under the hot sun. Red Massey Ferguson 240 tractors carrying plows trundled by on the roads, preparing to sow the next crop.
One day we turned into the village of Nakadak, where Nazak had once confronted the Taliban. The village elder invited us into his white house. Made of mud bricks, it was the only one in the village that had been painted, and his white Toyota Corolla sat in the driveway. We sat on rugs in a small room with decorative curtains. A son of this elder served us dried fruit, nuts, and tea. We discussed the growing season and this year’s harvest. As ever, the elder complained that the farmers needed more water. Drought had come to Kandahar Province ten years earlier and stayed, and no real solution to the problem had been found.
Much of the irrigation water came from wells, supplemented by water from a lake north of the city. Water from Dahla Dam flowed through a complex and delicate network of canals that stretched across two districts before it reached Dand. Less water flowed than farmers needed, and the Americans and Canadians planned to spend $275 million to raise the dam and increase the draw.
Because many farmers pumped water from wells, they paid for a lot of fuel. The diesel pumps often cost more than the crops were worth, but the farmers needed the wheat to feed their families. Each pump cost up to $150 per month to operate, and only grapes and pomegranates made any real profit. The wheat was picturesque, but most of the farmers lost money by growing it, though they lacked the cash to buy wheat in the bazaar. Many fields outside the villages lay fallow.
The water discussion we had with the village elder was difficult. He asked us what we were doing about it. In truth neither the Americans nor the Afghan government could do anything except hope for more rain. The Canadians paid for some of the main irrigation canals to be dredged, but their outlay was not enough to help every village.
In this as in so many other things Afghanistan found itself betrayed by its history, geography, and inclinations. As a landlocked country, it has limited access to the outside world and thus poor access to the world’s markets. This isolation made Afghanistan poorer and far more likely to fail as a state.
Historically the rulers of Afghanistan had forbidden the building of railroads. They watched the British presence in India creep steadily closer, steadily annexing the land that is now Pakistan, pushing railroads up to the Afghan frontier, and even staging two major invasions into Afghanistan proper that lasted for years. The Afghans grew wary of more imperial ventures.
Without railroads Afghan exporters currently rely on the fragile road network. Many of the overloaded trucks head east toward the delay-ridden docks of Karachi in southern Pakistan and west to the border crossing into Iran.
Afghanistan is a nation of farmers. It lacks manufacturing, processing, and large-scale operations to exploit its rich seams of minerals and vast oil and gas fields. For centuries these resources were exploited poorly, if at all, with the Afghan rulers wary of being plundered by their neighbors. So Afghans rely on farming and trading, and the country’s fields and roads are its greatest assets. Years of war, followed by a drought, have hammered the farmers of Dand with a particularly harsh double whammy.
The Americans helped the farmers in some ways, but many other things were not being done. USAID and its partners relied on a limited number of tried and true methods of assisting the farmers, usually with mixed results. USAID distributed seed wheat, fertilizer, tractors, trees, and animals; it trained farmers, built demonstration farms, greenhouses, and so-called farm stores; it cleaned clogged canals and operated a microcredit program.
Some ideas were spectacular successes, such as improving roads and a few canal dredgings. Most were political successes, which drew people to the district center but provided limited economic benefits over the medium term. Others failed both economically and politically. People didn’t care if they received the project benefits or not (beyond the money received for attending daily training sessions). Once the training or project ended, the impact or legacy disappeared with barely a trace.
Some things that could have been done inexpensively and sustainably were not brought to fruition, such as introducing new crops, developing new sectors of agribusiness, or assigning NGOs to coordinate those efforts and thus boost farm exports. Eventually in late 2012 USAID diverted an existing program into improving the processing and marketing of produce, an effort that was a bit late given that this was the province’s major activity.
The task of boosting farmers’ output, opening new lines of production, and improving their access to markets was not easy, especially because farmers resisted change and clung to outdated methods. Farmers were generally taught what they would easily accept, such as pruning techniques, which offered marginal benefits to farmers who had pruned trees for generations.
But teaching other basic techniques, fundamental but outside the experience of the average Afghan, could have gained the greatest results. For instance, farmers irrigated by completely flooding their fields, which wasted water and was very expensive given the cost of running irrigation pumps. Soil that was overwatered became rock hard and salty when minerals leached out of the ground, a situation that grew worse every year, unbeknown to the average farmer.
Afghan farmers were also unaware of the dangers of tilling twice a year and failing to preserve the structure of the soil. They would take their small tractors out into the fields and plow up the soil for planting. After the harvest they collected the straw from the wheatfields and took it home to burn, leaving the field untouched until planting began a few months later. Little emphasis was placed on teaching farmers to help the soil to maintain its structure with organic material, as American farmers had learned to do. With careful preservation of the organic material in the soil, the ground retained pockets of air and crops could grow better. Instead the Afghan fields baked and hardened under the sun, and rain packed the soil down even harder, which in turn led the farmer to overwater the next crop.
USAID training didn’t attempt to teach these simple tricks because farmers resisted, insisting, “My father did it this way.” USAID and USDA and the other agencies never really tried to sell the new methods. Good ideas need selling, especially in rural societies with ancient traditions. The district’s Afghan agriculture staff often made the problem worse; they sometimes displayed woeful ignorance, making the job of selling new ideas even harder. Even so, there was almost no effort to train them on new techniques rather than minor incremental improvements to old ones. In the end no one came up with a plan to popularize new techniques; whether this was due to cultural chauvinism, a lack of time, or a sense of hopelessness about changing historical practices we never knew.
USAID did distribute seed wheat and fertilizer while demanding a small copayment from the farmer. The USAID contractor handed out two thousand of these packets at a time in Dand. This distribution was meant to raise yields across the district, because now farmers would use better grades of seed and fertilizer. It was impossible to tell if this effort worked because two thousand was too low a number to produce measurable impact in a district of seventy-five thousand people. It certainly lowered the market price of seed wheat. The political effects proved tremendously positive, although the economic ones were more doubtful.
Some ideas cooked up at KAF were hard to fathom. U.S. officials spent most of 2011 working to send agricultural exports to Dubai by an air bridge out of the civil airport co-located at KAF. USAID would subsidize the costs of transport to make the shipments economical as the idea got under way. The concept slowly got off the ground, with a handful of shipments from Spin Boldak District being flown to Dubai in 2011 and several more in 2012. One major issue was whether the transport would prove to be too costly when the American subsidies ended in 2014. In 2012 the United States doubled down on the idea and built a cold-storage facility at the airport. We hoped that a previous report by a U.S. agricultural expert, which detailed how the building of cold-storage facilities by donors had turned out to be an expensive failure across Afghanistan, would be wrong in this instance.
KAF planners also tried to bring processing plants to KAF or Kandahar City, which would allow grapes and pomegranates to be processed and packaged for export. But this idea saw delay after delay, well into 2012. The related idea of a juice factory eventually faded entirely, while the raisin plant struggled to open all through 2012. Even by late 2014 the idea had still not worked because problems with assuring a consistent supply of electricity and the inability to find investors overwhelmed the initiative.1
Mobile processing “plants” were also tried on a limited scale but with the same result. Each mobile plant cost $75,000 and was built inside a tent. The idea of such plants was thought up at KAF and pushed into the districts. Few of these top-down ideas worked very well in practice. As a result of these shortcomings, the big-picture ideas from KAF never had any impact on farmers in Dand.
We grew frustrated in Dand. Planners did not facilitate practical and achievable goals, such as clearing away red tape to enable traders to massively increase their exports to India, a traditional market for Afghan produce. The Pakistanis refused transshipment of goods across their country that would allow Afghan traders access to New Delhi. Solving this puzzle over the space of a decade would have boosted farm incomes immediately. Instead the planners messed around with costly air bridges to Dubai. In July 2012 the Afghan commerce and industry minister noted that Afghanistan’s exports to India were “insignificant.” He too sounded frustrated.2
As all these ideas percolated, 2011 turned into 2012, and we encountered major problems with the economy in Dand. We faced a black hole in terms of funding. The drawdown of money from USAID projects loomed, with nothing to replace the funds that fueled Nazak’s political system.
We would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every month when the main USAID agricultural program, S-RAD, came to an end in mid-2012. This program affected most of the villages. The maliks, elders, and farmers wanted to work with the government to receive free seed and fertilizer and to build roads and culverts.
To compensate for the scheduled end of the S-RAD program we needed to make real gains in the economy. It would bolster the political system if, when we departed, we could point to initiatives that continued to bring benefits to more than a handful of villages. The construction of many roads helped, but we needed something more. Agribusinesses would fit the bill perfectly to shore up the political system. Meaningful farm training that would have a positive impact on inputs and output, such as teaching techniques to substantially cut the use of irrigation water, would also demonstrate value.
We repeatedly pointed out this looming shortfall of money, and the KAF planners identified a solution. The senior USAID advisor at KAF duly told us we should fill the shortfall by applying for U.S. embassy grants for Dand.
Grants from the embassy are like grants from any other organization. You identify a need. You help an organization that wants to address the need. The organization writes a proposal and applies for the money. You wait. The proposal might be approved, or it might not.
Grants required time, an outside organization (which we lacked because no NGOs worked in Dand) to implement the idea, and the idea itself. This combination made grants suitable for a very small number of villages, if the money came through.
Consequently the suggestion to substitute a massive program like S-RAD with grant applications lacked credibility. The previous summer a woman working for a Kandahar City–based NGO had been killed in Dand, and the effect was chilling. Even if there had been NGOs operating in Dand, the number of projects that could be approved was relatively tiny and the grants themselves not very large. The notion of grants replacing the pool of USAID-S-RAD funding was a nonstarter on the grounds of scale alone.
To substitute for the loss of USAID money, what would be needed was a funding stream from the Afghan government’s upcoming budget. That was unlikely to happen until well past the spring of 2012, if at all. Grants would certainly not compensate for either S-RAD’s end or the Afghan government’s failure to push its funds through official channels.
As 2011 turned into 2012 we heard a great deal from KAF about developments designed to help the Afghan farmers, but S-RAD had been one of the few programs that actually delivered. The other schemes would have little or no impact in Dand throughout 2012.
In the end there was no answer for this problem of evaporating funds. It simply happened. It was like watching two vehicles approaching a crossroad at top speed. The crash inevitably occurred, and one could not turn away from the ghastly sight.
By the time we identified the problem, in late 2011, it was too late anyway. USAID works at a glacial pace. Short of boosting the army’s funding, interim funding could not be acquired in time to make a difference. The system could not respond quickly.
So the S-RAD program would conclude in Dand. There would be no near-term follow-up to fill a substantial gap in funding that would last until official Afghan money came online. The political system would come under even greater strain. District Governor Nazak would avoid the stress of this problem and begin to search for another job. Even at the critical moment when S-RAD ground to a halt in the summer and the flow of money stopped almost completely, Nazak took a month off to vacation in Germany. A new USAID program would kick in months later, but at a much reduced level.
When Governor Nazak returned from Germany his largest task was to keep his political system functioning with fewer resources, a problem we had identified a year before and had worked to solve. Had we done enough to keep the engine running? Or had too many opportunities been squandered, thus digging the hole too deep? The jury was out on whether he would succeed or fail.