As the Dust Devils Danced
“God, Pashtun Honor, Opium and Stability in Uruzgan, Afghanistan”
by
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I held the the pod that had oozed the dark opium paste, which had since been scraped and packed away. The special tool with the mutiple razor sharp blades had left the unique diagonal parallel line cut marks. As I turned the pod I saw four more areas where the same diagonal cut had been made. Stewart, our PRT agricultural advisor, took the pod from me and told me it had been a good harvest of opium this year. While we poured millions of dollars into the region, Uruzgan had become a center of the world wide illiciet opium trade. It is the foundation of the their economy. Everything and everyone is tied to it. I looked west over the mountain toward the town of Deh Rawud where Mullah Omar, the spiritiual leader of the Taliban, grew up under the harsh hand of his uncle who was also his step-father. He would leave there for Kandahar and later bring the Taliban movement back to Uruzgan and all of Afghanistan. Though the Taliban would at first outlaw the opium trade they would later embrace it as no other export of Afghanistan brings in so much money to this extremely underdeveloped country. Whoever is in power, locally and nationally, must control it or others will expolit the wealth it brings and take their place. In the heat of the day several dust devils spiralling hundreds of feet into the air were dancing across the sprawling dusty landscape between my perch on Camp Ripley and the green irrigated farm lands just outside the Uruzgan provincial capital of Tarin Kowt. The “nesh”, the poppy harvest, was over and the fighting season in Afghanistan had begun its deadly yearly cycle. The opium these poppy plants produced was oppossed by the international forces because it was a money source for the now insurgent Taliban forces. However, with over ten thousand hectres under cultivation in Uruzgan I knew everyone of consequence in the region had a hand in the trade, especially the local warlord and soon to be Provincial Chief of Police, Matiullah Khan. As the rule of law advisor for the Uruzgan Provincial Reconstruction Team I was faced with the challenge of creating a sustainable justice system where it was unavoidable that Matiullah, who was hated by many tribes in the region, needed to be central to that system. In the chaos of conflict there can be no justice without security. I kept Niebuhur’s prayer attached to my email correspondence as a daily reminder of the limits I would encounter. This is a piece of the story of a region of the world where massive armies have waxed and waned across its landscape as the people, just like the dust devils, performed their timeless swirling dance positioning themselves to use the invaders power to their advantage until the inevitable withdrawal occurred.
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About the Book
I held the pod that had oozed the dark opium paste, which had since been scraped and packed away. The special tool with the multiple razor-sharp blades had left the unique diagonal parallel line cut marks. As I turned the pod, I saw four more areas where the same diagonal cut had been made. Stewart, our PRT agricultural advisor, took the pod from me and told me it had been a good harvest of opium this year. While we poured millions of dollars into the region, Uruzgan had become a center of the worldwide illicit opium trade. It is the foundation of their economy. Everything and everyone is tied to it. I looked west over the mountain toward the town of Deh Rawud, where Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taliban, grew up under the harsh hand of his uncle, who was also his stepfather. He would leave there for Kandahar and later bring the Taliban movement back to Uruzgan and all of Afghanistan. Though the Taliban would at first outlaw the opium trade, they would later embrace it as no other export of Afghanistan brings in so much money to this extremely underdeveloped country. Whoever is in power, locally and nationally, must control it or others will exploit the wealth it brings and take their place. In the heat of the day, several dust devils spiraling hundreds of feet into the air were dancing across the sprawling dusty landscape between my perch on Camp Ripley and the green irrigated farmlands just outside the Uruzgan provincial capital of Tarin Kowt. The nesh, the poppy harvest, was over and the fighting season in Afghanistan had begun its deadly yearly cycle. The opium these poppy plants produced was opposed by the international forces because it was a money source for the now insurgent Taliban forces. However, with over ten thousand hectares under cultivation in Uruzgan, I knew everyone of consequence in the region had a hand in the trade.
About the Author
Growing up in a generation raised by WWII veterans, I always had a keen desire to read all I could about conflicts, especially those of the eastern Native American tribes against the push of the European populations into the Americas and WWII. In 1968, while most of my peers were protesting the Vietnam War, I enlisted into the USMC. During my four years of active service, I was stationed in Vietnam and Japan for the most part. Having attended a Vietnamese language course while stationed at MCAS, El Toro, California, when I arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam, part of my duties required working with the local population. When transferred to Okinawa, Japan I immersed myself in the local culture there. Thus started my lifelong interest in other cultures. After Vietnam, I went on to receive my BS in criminal justice, cum laude, and juris doctor from the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. After practicing both criminal and civil law in the Toledo area from 1982 until 2003, I moved to Denmark where I taught legal argumentation to moot court students at the University of Copenhagen, as well as working for Aperian Global, a company that deals in cross-cultural conflict resolutions within business settings. Returning to the United States in 2007, I set out on a different career course, taking my military, cross-cultural, and legal experience to both Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior rule of law advisor with the US Department of State. I served in that capacity in the rural tribal areas north of Baghdad from 2008 to 2010 and in the rural mountains of Southern Afghanistan from 2010 until 2013. Both regions were strongholds of what we considered to be insurgents of the governments. In Iraq, Al-Qaida, and in Afghanistan, the Taliban. In both regions, I used a cultural approach to establish the legal systems within the regions’ cultural norms.