Rings true to me | Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier

The Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier | Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier | Joel Hafvenstein

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	• Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier Joel Hafvenstein The Lyons Press, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

treacherous development

A very sad story, but simply and strongly written.
Mr Hafverstein worked in Afghanistan as part of a U.S. foreign assistance program to help in the development of this poor war-weary country. Mr. Hafverstein's book is written at the grass-roots level. He describes the tribulations and heart-aches of trying to accomplish development in Afghanistan. Part of the purpose of the project he was working on is to take Afghani's off the cultivation of opium and to grow `legal' crops - a difficult enough task in most countries. Their project hires people to pave roads, clean and renew irrigation canals. They employ engineers from Afghanistan and people from the local community for the manual labour. They travel far and wide through the Helmand province of Afghanistan observing many poppy fields. Eventually many internal antagonisms within the region lead to tragic consequences. As one reads - one wonders - who is using whom - are the drug lords happy that water is now reaching their poppy fields - but what about the labour that is being removed from the needed harvesting of the poppy fields.
It is not the role of the NATO forces to provide protection to civilian development groups like the one Mr. Hafverstein is working for. Therefore they need to hire protection - employing from the local police forces or the community, which is a miltia amalgam that has shifted alliances several times in the last years. This protection consists of AK-47's. grenade launchers,... Sometimes the areas where they work promise protection - they may or may not follow through.
Often these development groups do not want to be linked directly with foreign military forces, but in Afghanistan this can be a lethal Catch-22. There are so many opposing factions(the religious Taliban, the opium traffickers, the Pakistani secret police, competing family and regional alliances - which all leads to great complexity and corruption). It is difficult to know from day-to-day what tensions will erupt to the surface. Tension permeates the entire development process in Afghanistan. At one point hostages are taken and released in a local village but the vehicle is stolen. This simmers and festers for several months - the development groups move back to this troubled locality and stability reigns for a few months. Then there are murders of Afghan development workers.
It is wonderful and sad at the same time to see the friendship's grow between the Afghanistan people and the foreign development workers (not all of whom are American). These friendships and the will to improve the people of Afghanistan are impressive and genuine. After the tragic murders the development process is shattered and interrupted.
A country that has been invaded, had civil strife, had an intolerant religious dictatorship that outlawed basic education; will take several years to intense investment and development to progress close to anything resembling a `modern' state. As Mr. Hafverstein suggests this development will have to move beyond short term goals.
Through Mr. Hafverstein we also get a view of the people of Afghanistan. Religion(in this case Islam) is omni-present at all levels of society - it rules the relationship between people; particularly between man and woman. In Mr. Hafverstein's group there are no Afghanistan woman taking any decision making roles. Three are two burga-clad secretaries in the office - all the thousands of manual employees are male. Mr Hafverstein describes his day at a market where no women are encountered.
Obviously Afghanistan has a long and treacherous path on the road to development.

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Rings true to me

I just retired as a USAID Foreign Service Officer after 26 years of service. Although I didn't work in Afghanistan (I just spent the last 3 years in post tsunami Sri Lanka) I have the experience to critically consider Joel Hafvenstein's Opium Season and in my judgment it is an important contribution to development literature as a personal account. It is well written and hard to put down. He has woven into the chronological account his thoughts and emotions allowing the reader to understand the personal challenges and dangers of working in Afghanistan. He has also developed a clear understanding of deficiencies of programs to reduce poppy production through cash-for-work programs. His criticisms of USAID and its politically driven agenda set by State Department are on the mark. The basic problem is that any real progress will occur over a long period of time -- too slow for the bureaucrats -- with a carefully developed and implemented strategy. Meanwhile there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent quickly to meet targets that have little connection to real political or social progress. Throw into this mix contractors who see a major opportunity to make a tidy profit and everybody wins --- except the Afghan people -- and the contractor staff who are so exposed as Hafvenstein describes. I should also add that although he worked for a "for profit" contractor I would expect a "not-for-profit" organization to behave not much differently. Contractors do not establish strategy -- but rather implement the programs designed by the donors such as USAID.

Opium Season is an important contribution and should be read by anyone thinking about working in a post conflict country although the general public would also enjoy it. Hafvenstein has clearly demonstrated that although he wasn't a bad administrator in Afghanistan that he is a very talented writer.

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The Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier

Vivid, passionate writing.

Reveals through personal experience, the complexity of Afghan culture and the failing of US foreign policy.

jms

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Inside the world of development contractors and the dangerous world they work in

Joel Hafvenstein provides a detailed account of a year in Afghanistan trying to provide wage work for farmers who would otherwise certainly be growing opium poppies. But from the view of a former international development scholar, he also provides a close description of how the largest development contractor in the US works, circulates personnel, uses local expertise. Like the recent studies of Viktor Bout, armsdealer to absolutely anyone, and the expose of Blackwater contractors, Hafvenstein adds a page to the way both war and the supposed pursuit of peace and development are currently pursued. The tragic end is revealed in the introduction, so he is able to to spend much of the book focusing on the characters he lived and worked with. He and Fiona are back in Afghanistan. I worry about them and their neighbors every day. K. Jensen

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Massively more exciting than my college lectures, and lots more edifying than my other pleasure reading

Reading the Opium Season felt like reading a first-rate adventure novel starring a particularly likeable and honest protagonist. The great thing about the book though is that, by the time I finished, I had real insight into Afghanistan and into international development and counter-insurgency strategies.

The Opium Season is the story of a young development worker thrust into a role above his pay grade: the number two position on a "cash-for-work" program designed to immediately create many thousands of jobs, in an Afghani province, for workers displaced by drug eradication. The protagonist grows from a bumbling neophyte to an effective and often ingenious leader; the project flourishes and pushes into the most Taliban-infested corners of Helmand province. Then the enterprise collapses when some combination of drug lords, Taliban and tribal leaders targets the project for extinction. Mr. Hafvenstein and his colleagues run for their lives.

Maybe my favorite thing about the book is the fact that, over a relatively short period of time, Hafvenstein seemed to achieve a remarkable degree of intimacy with a broad range of Afghanis -- and that he fills the book with acute renderings of these different personalities. You start to see how Afghanis think about sex, religion, gender, the United States, and other issues. You also find yourself caring passionately about the well-being of Hafvenstein's co-workers, which makes the second half of the book even more exciting.

The other thing I particularly appreciated about the Opium Season is the fact that the author delivered his policy critiques in a way that I found easy to digest. Unlike some authors, he doesn't tack 50 pages of pompous scholarship onto the back-end of 200 pages of breezy memoir. Instead, he shares his policy ideas in bits and pieces throughout the book. Hafvenstein's ideas seem to make sense, and his approach makes the book feel like an escape rather than homework.

In short, I think the Opium Season is a terrific book, and I suspect that a broad range of readers will feel likewise.

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A young American working on the brutal fault line where the war on terror meets the war on drugs. Joel Hafvenstein signed up for a year in Afghanistan in the heart of the country's opium trade, running an American-funded aid program to help thousands of opium poppy farmers make a legal living, and to win hearts and minds away from the former Taliban government. The author was soon caught up in the deadly intrigues of Helmand's drug trafficking warlords. Click here to read the review in The New York Times or for more information on this title go to opiumseason.com.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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