The Dearing Dialogue

Last week, President Clinton and Scottish philanthropist, Sir Tom Hunter, visited Malawi to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the people of Malawi through President Bingu wa Mutharika.  The MOU is designed to provide private money for rural development projects.  The unique quality of this MOU is that it keeps power and decisions in the hands of locals in the community, as opposed to outsiders with little understanding of local needs.

 

Too often in the past, development aid initiatives had been disconnected from the participation and fundamental ownership of the people at grass root level who were the ones heavily affected by poverty,” said Clinton.

Speaking with locals in Malawi, I learned that many programs failed to fund the needest people because of a lack of both local and cultural understanding.  While the intent of international donors may be noble and altruistic, they often fail to meet the needs at hand due to misunderstandings and a lack of local control.  This program looks like it can solve many of the past shortcomings, and will be one which researchers of development should follow.

See Video of Clinton visit: Clinton Foundation

Packer writes a bit on the use of Human Terrain Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan in his New Yorker blog on July 20th.  He sees a growing relationship between social scientists and soldiers, a mixture typically considered taboo in the past.  The professionalization of both sides of the spectrum, coupled with theoretical and practical “antagonisms” led to what Packer explains as “isolated American sub-culutres”. 

This year, the Army is actually deploying teams of social scientists with units in Baghdad and Afghanistan (…) The best soldiers I met in Iraq were eager to share critical views with professors and journalists. This past spring, when McMaster led a group of officials and private citizens to Iraq to assess progress there, he picked as one member an anti-war British political-science professor who happens to know a great deal about the country. Desperate times breed desperate measures. 

While the disconnect between American culture and military culture has often caused the military to be shunned from college campuses in the past, and created contempt amongst the military community (as international relations professor Andrew Bacevich often writes about), the divisions are becoming less prominent.  Both sides are beginning to realize the utiliy of the other and that moral and political compromises are essential towards forging a coherent plan of success in US foreign policy.  Packer is indeed correct when he ends: 

But a superpower can hardly afford to have its thinkers and its warriors despise and avoid one another.

Also see:  DNI Conference

From NY Times, Sunday, July 22:

(…) when asked how the United States would respond if Al Qaeda were to plot a successful attack on the United States from the tribal areas (Pakistan), the answer from one intelligence officials was direct: “We’d go in and flatten it.”

“Malawi cannot feed its present population of 13 million - and every year its soils become more degraded and yields steadily fewer crops.

By 2050, the UN forecasts that it will have almost 32 million people - more than twice as many as today. Population growth on this scale will almost certainly leave Malawi permanently dependent on international food aid to keep millions of its people alive. (Telegraph online)”

These are harrowing statistics.  While urbanization is an important factor towards economic development, it is also dependent upon an industrial economy - in the demographic sense, an asset Malawi lacks.  Malawi’s chief exports are tobacco and maize, not cars and computers.  Farming exports typically grow GdP at a slower rate since the price of these products, especially tobacco, are typically weak in a marketplace dominated by international buyers with greater influence and options then the weak and powerless growers. 

Malawi’s cities are lacking in development focused on future population growth.  What is growing are the amount of slums in Malawi.  Currently 1.8 out of a 13 million Malawian population live in slums.  Trash is typically burnt on the city streets, power cuts are a daily occurrance, water is rationed for a few hours a day.  Transportation is painfully lacking.  Mini-buses clog the crowded streets, their exhaust spewing black fog on every corner.  Foot-traffic blocks the roadway and the news of a pedestrian being hit by a car or bus is a daily occurance.  Most city streets remain in the dark as pedestrians come within inches of passing cars as sidewalks are either lacking or blocked by makeshift vendors. 

Unemployment is rampant as more people arrive from the villages in hopes of capturing some of the riches they hear of from outside the tribal community.  The reality is that rural areas are increasingly unable to support the amount of people living there (UN Habitat).  Environmental disasters such as drought and the degradation of land from farming and deforestation has made life less habitable.  While the small amount of money they may earn as servants, vendors, or day-laborers help the home village, it also creates a reliance upon outside income, bringing more people from the rural areas to the city. 

The condition of Malawian health is at risk as well.  With a growth in urban slums, the opportunity for diseases like HIV  spreading is increased.  According to the UN, malnutrition, hunger, and disease are increasing in the urban slums such as Ndirande township in Blantyre, or Area 19 in Lilongwe.  With such growth in urban population, Malawi and development institutions will face difficult obstacles and critical decisions as economic and social problems persist. 

See State of World Population 2007

Jon Lee Anderson writes a brilliant piece in the New Yorker on opium farming in Afghanistan.  Anderson travels to Oruzgan Province (red area on map) with the Afghan Eradication Force (AEF) and US DEA counternarcotics agent Douglas Wankel, who is overseeing the eradication process. 

Opium has now become a major counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Since last year, the production of opium has increased in Afghanistan by 60%.   The Taliban, who once considered opium harvesting unholy, now uses it as a means to control the population in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan - areas of greatest Taliban influence.  The coalition is at odds in how to deal with a product that is both sustaining the power of the Taliban and the livelihood of local residents.  Dutch forces are using a stand-off approach focused on making the Taliban an irrelevant presence and an unpopular choice for residents by promoting alternative crops.  DEA agent, Wankel is apprehensive:

“Most or all Europeans are opposed to eradication—they’re into winning hearts and minds,” he said. “But it’s our view that it isn’t going to work. There has to be a measured, balanced use of force along with hearts and minds.” He conceded, however, that the Uruzgan operation fell squarely on the use-of-force side of the scale. Later, he told me, aid, seed, and fertilizer would be offered to the farmers around Tirin Kot, but not yet. Other Americans were frankly contemptuous of the Dutch policy, which they regarded as softheaded.”

Of course, when alternatives don’t exist, the farmers will fall back on what they know best and what has supported them in the past.  Opium will give them over $500 an acre of harvest, while wheat may net $50 an acre.  At the same time, development from the Kabul is unequal and often corrupt.  It is based on tribal loyalties according to one local Afghan in Anderson’s article:

“The Karzai government doesn’t give the money to poor farmers growing poppy. It gives it only to its friends who grow it”—corrupt officials and landowners with political influence. (Many of the farmers were sharecroppers.) “We would be happy to stop growing opium if they would give us some help, and stop giving the money meant for us to thieves.” Instead of receiving aid from government officials, Ahmad said, “if they tell us to break the poppies, we must pay them not to.”

At the same time, areas where the Taliban are strongest tend to go untouched in the eradication process.  Whereas, areas with the greatest influence from the central government are hit hard and tend to alienate the local residents. 

It has also proven virtually impossible to conduct in districts where the Taliban are relatively strong, thereby inevitably penalizing farmers in pro-government districts.”

And corruption is enemic within the central government.  In a previous entry, I explained how one governor was arrested for holding tons of opium in his provincial office.  In Anderson’s article, he finds the AEF police providing security are working with sticky hands:

I walked past one of the jeeps where some of Qassem’s policemen, dressed in robes and sparkly skullcaps, were laughing and talking with the opium growers. I caught a whiff of something burning as I passed. They were smoking hashish.

The opium harvest is a linchpin that must be addressed in the broader context of the Taliban insurgency.  We must focus on alternatives for local farmers and provide those as incentives to steer residents away from Taliban influence.  Understanding the human terrain of Oruzgan and other provinces is the only way to ensure we quell insurgent complicity, but to prevent it from perpetuating itself.