Opium Season (2 of 5 free samples)

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Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein. Copyright 2007 by Joel Hafvenstein.
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PART ONE: PLANTING

LITTLE AMERICA

LASHKARGAH, HELMAND--NOVEMBER 27, 2004

"You know, they used to call this place Little America."

The night sky was cloudless, but the moon had already set. Ray and I were walking by starlight through the dusty back streets of Lashkargah. Far away, a single lightbulb burned above the closed wooden shutters of a fruits and spices vendor. The earth-walled compounds on either side of the road were silent and dark. We had been in town for two days and had no idea who lived on the other side of those walls. Last night, we had walked back by a slightly different route to throw off anyone tracking us--a gesture at the basic security precautions we had chosen to ignore by traveling on foot, in the dark, through an unfamiliar bit of Afghanistan.

"Americans built this whole city," Ray explained. "Back in the 1950s. It was where the Morrison-Knudsen engineers lived while they were working on the canals. People remember that here. They basically like us."

Ray Baum always varied his route, and he always walked. He didn't like to keep the Afghan drivers around after the end of the work day, so whenever he worked late he would dismiss them and walk home. Even on evenings when we all finished work at six or seven o'clock, the rest of us would pile into our rented Toyota Land Cruisers in front of our Lashkargah office, while Ray handed one of us his laptop bag and struck out on foot. The drivers couldn't believe it; for the first two or three blocks outside the office, they cruised alongside Ray while he waved them away and did his best to ignore them. They didn't speak English, and none of us spoke Pashto, so it was beyond us to explain what possessed this grizzled American to walk home through the lightless alleys of Lashkargah.

"It's not like in Jalalabad. The whole of eastern Afghanistan was under Russian influence back in the '50s and '60s. Up there, the Russians built the roads and bridges and dams, and everyone went to study in Russia. Americans are still unpopular up there even today. But in Helmand, we were the good guys."

I had begun joining Ray on his walks home--not always, but usually on nights when we both stayed late at the office. I didn't like keeping the drivers waiting at night any more than he did, and I thought I understood a few other reasons why he chose to walk. Ray liked to know the places where he worked, to explore the geography and understand the people. Every day, he walked up the street, bought a pomegranate at the fruit stand, and ate it at meticulous length while conversing with the locals in fragments of English, Dari, and Pashto. Yet even though virtually no one was on the streets after dark, Ray made a point of always walking home at night. Another crucial principle was at stake: show no fear. Ray was a hardy man, spending his holidays on hunting expeditions in remote bits of his native Alaska, and he didn't want anyone to mistake him for a mere development bureaucrat.
More importantly, Ray knew what he represented in Helmand province--America, development, the new Afghan order--and he didn't believe we could succeed if we were held back by fear of possible disaster.

"I think this is going to be a really good project, Joel. We've just got to get things approved and started quickly. We can adjust them later if we need to. We can't get scared or let things get bogged down."

Ray spoke at a deliberate pace, his eyes intense and searching beneath furrowed brows. He had a thick-tongued voice, a weathered, crumpled face, close-cropped gray hair, and a mustache. He was more a practical than an intellectual man, his conversation circling unadorned around whatever was most on his mind; when he came across an idea or phrase that resonated with him, he would bring it up verbatim and often. Yet Ray was the canniest development swashbuckler I knew. Back in the 1980s he had figured out how to get aid to areas of Nicaragua and Honduras dominated by anti-Communist guerrillas, and when the fighting was over, he helped talk the guerrillas down out of the hills. For that accomplishment, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded Ray its highest honor. He won it again, later, for his deft management of a counter-narcotics project in Bolivia.

I had worked with Ray before in Afghanistan, on my previous short trips to the country. I had seen him lead a team and handle the ever-shifting demands of the USAID mission in Kabul, and I admired his judgment and gruff diplomacy. In mid-2004 he had left Afghanistan, resigning from a long-term position to spend more time with his family. My boss had pleaded with Ray to come back for one month to lead the start-up team on our most challenging project yet.

We were working for Chemonics International, USAID's largest private contractor. A few weeks earlier, USAID had given Chemonics an urgent assignment: to create tens of thousands of jobs in remote southern Afghanistan. Our target area was Helmand province, which was both an oasis of relative calm in the heart of the Taliban resistance and the foremost drug-producing region in the country. The Afghan government had promised to eradicate the opium poppy fields of Helmand this year. USAID had promised to create enough temporary, cash-paying work to cushion the economic damage. Chemonics had promised to make it happen with eighteen million dollars.

Of course, all that money was in Washington, and we weren't sure how we were going to get it to Helmand. There were no banks in Lashkargah, the provincial capital. We had no staff yet, no reliable phone or Internet connections, no radios or project vehicles. All we had was the start-up Go Team, an all-star ensemble of the most relevant experts from Chemonics headquarters. Plus me.

I had been working with Chemonics for a year and a half, helping to "backstop" its existing Afghan agriculture projects. That is, I provided administrative support from the Washington office: getting visas for our consultants, buying plane tickets, handling the USAID paperwork. I had flown out to Afghanistan a couple of times, but those trips didn't really qualify me to help launch a project deep in Taliban country. What they did give me was the Afghanistan bug. I was captivated by the arid, serrated mountains and green valleys, the ruins left by foreign armies from Genghis Khan to Gorbachev, the generosity and resilience of my Afghan friends. I made sure my bosses knew that I would take any Afghan field assignment--even a one-year assignment to a dusty provincial center that made Kabul look like a cosmopolitan paradise.

As it turned out, my most important qualification was the willingness to stay longer than Christmas. We were launching this project on unusually short notice and the all-star team all wanted to be home for the holidays. The only other member of the start-up group who was in for the long haul was our government liaison, Yaqub Roshan, an affable Afghan-American with a vaguely defined job. If Chemonics couldn't replace Ray and the other Go Team members in the next few weeks, by Christmas Day it would just be Yaqub and me.

I was nervous--but mostly about my own ability to do the job. I had no idea I would end up as the de facto second-in-command, or that our project would succeed beyond our wildest dreams, employing thousands of men in some of the farthest corners of Helmand province. The Afghan friends who would make it happen--Habibullah, Khair, Raz, Ehsan, and dozens of others who would join us to struggle against problems both petty and lethal--were still strangers to me. And I didn't really understand that our success might make us a target. That night, as I followed Ray through the alleys of Lashkargah, I believed him when he said we shouldn't be afraid. Like him, I was more preoccupied with the seemingly impossible goal that had brought us to Helmand.

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