Soldier-farmers Toil with Afghans
(NSI News Source Info) August 25, 2008: In uniform, they look like any other Soldier. But the heart of Lt. Col. Stan Poe's unit of Texas National Guard troops is radically different than most combat outfits in Afghanistan, answering to the sounds of agriculture and the sight of crops. Soldier-farmers, one might call them. The Texas Soldiers, agricultural experts who come from Aledo to Weslaco, are on the forefront of a new National Guard initiative to bring Afghan farming out of the 19th century, in a place where decades of war have destroyed infrastructure, wrecked government capabilities and provided a favorable environment for illicit poppy production.
Virtually everything is on their plate -- preventing erosion, irrigating fallow orchards, developing ways to market crops regionally, down to helping one farmer keep his grape juice from fermenting. They're doing it all without much of a playbook, either.
"The disadvantage of that is that we have nothing to go off of," Poe said.
"But the advantage is that we really get to set the direction for agriculture in Ghazni province."
Creating stability
The Army National Guard has provided medical, veterinary and engineering support for decades in Central America, but the idea of an agriculture-focused program in Afghanistan came from two Missouri Soldiers -- Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn, director of the Army National Guard, and Maj. Gen. King Sidwell, Missouri National Guard adjutant general.
It is a mission that the Guard is qualified for, said Col. Martin Leppert, who oversees the program from the Guard's headquarters in Virginia. There is no similar program for Iraq, although there are talks starting about the possibility.
"The commanders on the ground want as many of these teams as they can get," Leppert said. "They see the good in what the [teams] can do long-term to turn the tide and create stability in the farming regions."
The National Guard teams are a welcome presence to the Afghan government, which has complained that not enough nonmilitary aid is flowing.
"This is always what we asked for," said Ashraf Haidari, a political counselor in the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C. "There has been some, but not enough to meet the needs of Afghanistan. Revitalizing agriculture is one of the key priorities for our government. To the extent that we get technical assistance in military form or civilian form, it helps us a great deal."
Ag experts
The Texas team is built around 12 people who are experts in animal science, horticulture, agronomy, soil, pest management, hydrology and engineering.
All volunteered for the mission, even though it is the second or third combat tour for many of them. So many other Texans volunteered that the state will send a second team in March when the first group returns.
But the agriculture experts did not go alone. A sizeable security force of Guard Soldiers accompanied them. All are led by Poe, an engineer in Houston who is a part-time infantry officer. The team also added a pet, an adopted Afghan mutt with green eyes.
"I've been an infantry officer my entire career, 25 years," he said. "This is very different. I always thought my command would be in a combat mission. But this is a good mission. You really get to see the effects you're having."
If a particular problem comes up that is outside the expertise of the team, they e-mail or phone experts at Texas A&M University.
Other states are quickly ramping up to join the mission. Nebraska, Tennessee, Indiana and Kansas are sending teams in the coming months, and Kentucky just volunteered.
Missouri, the first state to deploy, is working in the desperately poor Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan.
"The challenges we've had getting states on board is because the Guard is so busy with missions throughout the theater," Leppert said. "We compete with resources with the entire National Guard. But having said that, the local farm boys of the Army Guard have come out of the woodwork."
Limited markets
The Texas team is based in the Ghazni province of eastern Afghanistan, not far from the Pakistan border, on an installation with Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.
Except for Ghazni City, the province's population is widely dispersed in very small villages that are not easily reached because of poor roads and 10,000-foot mountains. Distance is not just measured in kilometers or miles but in hours of travel.
Afghanistan is in the middle of its growing season, and many of the country's 30 million people grow something -- wheat, corn, tomatoes, apples, apricots, almonds, pomegranates.
"It looks like barren wasteland until you drop water on it," Leppert said. "I don't know what kind of magic stuff is in the soil."
Of course, the best-known crop in Afghanistan is the poppy. Almost the entire world's supply of illegal opium is grown there, and its proceeds are believed to be funding the Taliban's continued attacks on U.S. and NATO troops.
But the Guard teams have nothing to do with poppy eradication. They are adamant on that point.
"We are not into poppy eradication," Poe said. "We have not seen any in Ghazni, but if we did, we would not do anything about it. That's another unit's job."
The problem in Afghan agriculture is not the lack of ingenuity but the inefficiency, some of it brought on by 30 years of constant war and a decimated infrastructure.
Ask an American farmer or producer what he would do if he did not have dependable electricity, irrigation, tractors, paved roads, trucking companies, rail lines and marketing associations, and one can get the picture of how difficult it is to make a living in agriculture.
Those farmers who produce more than their family can eat can, at best, sell their wares on a roadside or perhaps to Pakistan, which stores it and then sells it back to the same farmers later in the year at inflated prices. Or they grow poppies, which sell for more money than legal crops.
"They have very little infrastructure to support their harvest," Poe said. "Whatever they can sell their harvest for at that time is what they get. The rest of it goes to waste. They have no means to store it or preserve it."
Afghan water control doesn't exist, either. There is plenty of water from snow runoff, but it is seasonal, and farmers have yet to harness that water for year-round irrigation.
"I've seen farmers using sandbags as a lock," Poe said. "Whatever they can capture and collect at their spot is what they have available. Water management is the largest issue and it cannot be resolved in one year. It will be handed off to future [teams]."
Early progress
Already the teams are making headway, the leaders say.
The Texas team is planning to build a slaughterhouse in Ghazni, and one is almost complete in Nangarhar. One of the Texas engineers, Capt. Joaquin Campos, is designing a power source -- possibly solar or wind -- that is more reliable than the sporadic electric service in rural areas.
Cold-storage facilities have been built to store perishable crops, and the teams are developing demonstration farms where villagers can learn about better agricultural techniques.
"Just in the small amount of time our boys have been on the ground, they've gone after some quick-hit infrastructure support projects to start making a turn for the local farmers," Leppert said.
Much of their early work, too, is in building provincial leaders' trust.
That work with government leaders is key to making lasting change, said Haidari, who added that too much assistance is done in an "ad hoc, some here, some there" manner that does not build government competency.
"We need technical expertise to use in that secure environment," he said. "That's part of an effective counterinsurgency strategy. If we don't help the people with their livelihoods and create jobs, it will be really hard to win their hearts and minds."
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