Outposts from The Small of America: Rain and Dust

It’s that time of year when wet is raw and the wind chokes on chaff. Seems one day it’s been raining for a week. Then by sunset the next afternoon, the west is orange and purple and beautiful as a childhood memory of a rusty dust cloud bigger than a combine augering beans into a red wagon.

It’s a time when the patient clockwork of seasons collides, like rain and dust, with sudden change. When the sun heads south, there’s always a little twitch of trepidation, the smell of deer running in corn, frost mashing ditch grass, the crack of a rifle across the valley somewhere, morning gutshot. It’s like, anything could happen.

A year ago next week, Steve Vance, a former colleague of mine at USAID Zaire, was brutally murdered, together with his driver, on his way to work in Peshawar, Pakistan. Steve left behind a wife and  5 children. He was a contractor – not a defense or security contractor like we’ve heard so much about since the War on Terror began – a development aid contractor working on a $750-million job-creation project in Pakistan’s tribal regions, presumably to provide under-employed workers an economic alternative to joining the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Last week, Taliban fighters attacked a U.N. guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan and killed 12 people, including 6 election workers for a runoff presidential vote that never took place. In June, just ahead of the now-discredited election, a bomb went off in Jalalabad, destroying a minibus carrying Afghan election workers, women and children, leaving 2 women dead and 13 others injured.

Fortunately for Hamid Karzai, he survived allegations of fraud, corruption and vote-rigging to be re-elected, by default, as President of Afghanistan. It remains to be seen if Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, allegedly a central Asian drug traffic kingpin, will remain on the CIA payroll.

Paying the enemy appears to be in vogue this season of rain and dust, an alternative to, say, economic development, seen as a legitimate tool of war that forestalls peace. On the Afghanistan menu of options, President Obama is reportedly considering paying for the loyalty of Taliban – call them “good Taliban”. Paying the enemy apparently worked for NATO partner Italy, keeping its troops safe from enemy hostility. The compensation scheme quickly unraveled however when France took over Italy’s post in eastern Afghanistan last year. Payoffs ended and 10 French soldiers were killed.

Buying loyalty in war is not new in the War on Terror. In 2008, prior to the much-ballyhooed putative-success of “The Surge”, the U.S. military claimed victory in Iraq’s Anbar province thanks to the Sons of Iraq. The so-called Iraq Awakening strategy relied on paying Sunni insurgents to stop shooting at Americans and start shooting at Al Qaeda in Iraq. General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq at the time, and of course architect of The Surge, told Congressional committee members that paying the enemy actually saved taxpayers some money. “ The savings and vehicles not lost because of reduced violence-not to mention the priceless lives saved—have far outweighed the cost of their [Sons of Iraq] monthly contracts."

Call it contract victory. Sounds absurd to call it contract peace.

Back to murdered aid workers, unarmed contractors, contractors who don’t wear Kevlar or ride in armored vehicles – sounds absurd to call them anything but peace contractors. Between July 07 and June 08, the U.N. reported their offices, convoys, and residences were attacked 430 times. Twenty-six staff were killed. During the same period, at least 63 non-governmental aid workers were also assassinated. Last year, “Aid Workers Killed in the Line-of-Duty” were finalists – for the Person(s) of the Year award presented by One-World-dot-Net. Alas, only finalists. First place went to an inventor/entrepreneur, Martin Fisher. Fisher invented an affordable irrigation pump called the Money Maker that is being used in developing countries.

Even with the internet, it’s hard to aggregate the number of aid-workers killed and wounded worldwide, but there have been at least 100 deaths by murder in 2009. It’s that wacky end-of-life & light season again when rain and dust conspire at sunset, when anything could happen.

Minnesota writer Tom Driscoll reports on politics, economic development and life in rural America at The Small of America. He can be reached at smallofamerica@aol.com.

Comments

[Phoenix Woman]

Sadly, the Taliban hate both sets of contractors.