What is Afghanistan’s ‘brand’?
Posted: Friday, January 16, 2009 9:55 AM
Filed Under:
Kabul, Afghanistan
Reporter's Notebook
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – It took us an hour to get past the heavily-armed guards and bomb-sniffing dogs and through the gate of the U.S. Embassy. A few days earlier, a suicide bomber had blown up himself and his car, killing at least two civilians, only 50 yards from the building.
But now we were inside the embassy and interviewing Loren Stoddard, a top official at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). It was a surreal time and place to be talking about pomegranates.
"You see this?" asked the sharp, jovial Stoddard, reaching for a ruby red fruit the size of a grapefruit. "You know the one main thing that's been lacking in Afghanistan is hope. Hope in a successful, productive, prosperous future. Well, this pomegranate represents hope to all Afghan farmers."
Stoddard explained how this traditional Afghan fruit – so popular these days in the U.S. and Europe for its elixir-like effects – was skyrocketing in price and capable of even replacing opium poppy as Afghanistan's chief cash crop.
Then he held up an even bigger, and ruddier, fruit. "And this is the ‘Kandahari’ from Kandahar, one of the best pomegranates in the world. At least in this part of the world, it's its own brand name.''
A light went off in my mind: A brand name? Just what Afghanistan needs.
Whirlwind tour
We had just spent two weeks with Gen. John Nicholson, the new U.S. commander in southern Afghanistan tasked to help turn around the 7-year-old war:
· We had fly-on-the-wall access to classified security briefs, and meetings with NATO commanders, Afghan leaders, Western diplomats and State Department officials.
· We embedded with over-stretched U.S. soldiers trying to protect a key highway known as "IED Alley."
· We visited Afghan schoolgirls who had acid sprayed in their faces by extremists on motorbikes because they insisted on getting an education.
· We met an
Italian orthopedist in Kabul who spent every minute of his waking life giving life – and limbs – to others.
· We followed street kids through Kabul's back alleys, running to their mud houses to give their families the 40 cents or so they'd earned that day selling plastic shopping bags in the market.
· I took notes as a young U.S. Army captain, who was about to fly home at the end of his 15-month tour, shared the collective frustration – and angst – of his 13-man unit, the only foreign troops near a Taliban safe haven along the border with Pakistan.
· And then there was the USAID farmer from Minnesota who was so low-profile he even looked Afghan and was coping with bad roads, thieves, kidnappings, Taliban attacks and U.S. friendly fire. Yet he too saw a future in Afghan pomegranates – and loved the "Kandaharis."
At the end of this whirlwind tour – through four provinces controlled largely by the Taliban – it now struck me that the story here was a lot about a brand name.
A "Kandhari" pomegranate had one. But does Afghanistan? What is "Afghanistan?"
Different perceptions
To some, the "Afghanistan" brand evokes a safe haven for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks – for al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists. It represents a kind of Middle Earth – always beyond the reach of civilization – so primitive and dangerous that even members of the same tribe kill each other.
For others it's the land of the remote and exotic, where hippies went during the 1960's on their way to India's ashrams, hitching rides through deep valleys and majestic passes.
For many Americans "Afghanistan" is just the "other" or "forgotten" war.
But, for some commanders on the ground, the brand represents a sea change in U.S. foreign policy this year. One, they believe, that will combine a "surge" of U.S. forces, with smart reconstruction, good governance and regional diplomacy. In a word: winning.
"A ‘surge’ suggests a limited presence," said Gen. Nicholson, Deputy Commander of Stabilization. "What we need now is an increased presence over a long enough period of time to adequately secure the population. Once we do that we'll be able to achieve the other effects, connect the government to the people, and enable this government and Afghan security forces to stand on their own."
It's an ambitious plan, and one that, unfortunately, runs right into a branding issue.
Here's the problem: While the U.S. and some NATO countries, like Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands, see "Afghanistan" as a country at war and themselves as peacemakers, most NATO members signed onto their missions here as peaceKEEPERS. "Afghanistan" to them means a nation that needs law, not war. And that difference in perception has led to increasing headaches for U.S. commanders.
‘Peacemakers’ or ‘peacekeepers?’
Take the war on drugs. In the South, Helmand Province remains the world's opium-producing capital. So NATO ministers recently agreed to beef up their rules of engagement to allow their soldiers to take on the drug labs, drug lords and smugglers who drive both the heroin trade and the insurgency.
Plans were drawn up for NATO-led operations against specific targets, those that showed a nexus between the poppy and the Taliban. But those plans are now largely stalled.
Why? Because some NATO countries, like Canada, balked at joining any military mission that might kill "non-combatants," even drug lords. Some NATO commanders even fear their soldiers might be charged with murder.
Again – a "branding" issue: is Afghanistan a country at war...or not? Even the allies can't decide.
"Being part of a NATO [force] here lends great legitimacy to our mission," explained Nicholson. "But there's a price of admission. It’s difficult when you work together with many different nations, each with their own national will, expressed through their governments. It impacts on the armies here, and there's gonna be some friction with that."
What is the mission?
There are currently five major reviews of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. All are freshly written and on the table, to be synthesized by CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus, and handed to President-elect Barack Obama sometime in February.
Obama is expected to formulate a plan "for success" in Afghanistan. We saw the outlines of that plan during our trip to southern Afghanistan. It entails an influx of U.S. troops – at least three, maybe four, combat brigades with air and intelligence assets, who'll deploy to the hottest of Afghanistan's hotspots.
They'll engage the Taliban in their mountainous safe havens – inside Afghanistan – while simultaneously funding district and provincial-level councils, the Afghan faces of new local government, and try to win over moderate Taliban fighters to their side.
NATO nations, even those unwilling to fight, will be pressured to provide more police mentors and Afghan army trainers. There will certainly be more heavy fighting – and more casualties on all sides. But by the end of 2009, enough spots with relative security should emerge across Afghanistan’s volatile south and east to allow for good governance and stability to grow.
That's the outline. But each step is fraught with mine fields and uncertainties. What if good governors don't emerge? Or are killed by suicide bombers? What if the Taliban scares off a generation of students and teachers? What if the Kabul government collapses, not by insurgents, but corruption? And what if the pomegranate doesn't turn out to be the silver bullet of counter-narcotics?
"All the nations of NATO – not just the U.S. – really need to look at what they have here," said Capt. Dan Leard, the officer at the airport about to fly home. "And really decide on just how important this mission is to the world."
In other words, before a plan for Afghanistan, Western officials still need to agree on their definition of "Afghanistan."
Jim Maceda is an NBC News Correspondent based in London who has covered Afghanistan for two decades.
