Choices

Imagine if you will, living life as a subsistence farmer.  Your lot in life is fairly miserable.  You know it is miserable because of the backbreaking work trying to scratch out a meager existence for you and your family from the sun-baked earth that is southern Afghanistan.  Only you really don’t know how miserable you are because you’ve never left your province.  Your entire life, and that of your father and your father’s father, has been within a thirty-mile radius of where you currently live.  There is no phone, no television, no running out to the mall – there is only the sweat and blood that you’ve poured into the soil so that your spouse and children may eat.

Every morning you awake before the sun paints the sky with yellow and orange streaks as it rises over the mountains to the east.  You chew on bit of bread made yesterday while you await your chai tea to become sufficiently hot.  There is no sugar to sweeten the taste, nor is there a bit of chocolate to accompany your tea.  There is only the warm liquid itself.  Sugar is a luxury that is rarely affordable in your life; you barely make enough to purchase your food much less something to sweeten it.

As you drink the last drop of tea, you walk to your prayer rug.  You kneel to demonstrate your subservience to God and pray to thank Him for His blessings.  You have not been given anything, save your life.  But you are thankful because it has brought you children.  It is for those children that you rise so early in the day.  Just outside is your field.  It is not a large field and it doesn’t sit next to the river but it is big enough and close enough for you to grow your crop. 

Exiting your home, you glance back at it.  It isn’t much, even here.  It is four mud walls, hardened in the hot Afghan sun.  The logs that comprise the roof jut out of the mud, as if they do not want to be covered in such mess.  But it is not a mess to you; it is shelter from the summer heat and the winter cold.  It, like you, protects your children as if in a warm embrace – seeking to insulate them from the dangers of the world outside.  Standing next to your home, already awake and ready to work, is your only companion during the hot, hot days in the field – your donkey.  He is the one who works with you day in and day out.  He walks the rows with you; plodding along at your pace, pulling the plow to break up the hard soil so that a seed may be planted – a seed that brings life not just to a plant, but to life for your family.

You and he move along the ground, him pulling and you guiding a wooden and iron plow.  It is the same plow your father used; your son will use it too one day for there is no escape from this life.  As you walk the fields guiding the plow, the sweat begins to drip off your body.  It digs into your eyes, burning them with the salt it contains.  You wipe away the sweat with a hand calloused from years of toiling in the soil.  Once your small field is tilled, you place a seed at intervals ever so gently along the rows; you are patient and careful doing so as you cannot afford more seeds.  Your back aches from walking the rows and placing the seeds, but you move on.  The pain is bearable because it must be.  For the next few months, you will continue walking the rows of your field, constantly checking on your seeds like you would your babies.  You will do so with an attentiveness that cannot be broken by sickness or laziness or whatever excuse one might invent to avoid the work because these seeds are your children in a sense.  Indeed, if these seeds do not grow your children do not live.  This is life as a subsistence farmer in Afghanistan.

As your plants reach up into the sky and grow strong, evidence of your labor is reflected in the tiny flower at the top of each stalk – a thing of beauty within a field of dirt and sweat.  It is the only true color you typically see.  Your work has paid off.  All the months of dragging a plow, walking hunched over down the rows, carefully attending to the needs of the plant, has finally paid off.  A beautiful flower at the top of rows and rows of green stalks blooms as proof of your success.  You go to the prayer rug again, kneeling to thank God for His blessing, to thank Him that your children may survive the winter with the food this crop will buy.  You smile as you lay your head down that night; it is a smile of a contentment that comes with the realization that hard work will pay off with the harvest tomorrow.

Suddenly, you thrust from your slumber by the sound of “thump, thump, thump” in the cool night air.  Your donkey is pulling at his rope in fear, seeming to almost pull the house down.  He sounds as if he is screaming in the night.  You rush outside to see the helicopters diving down low over your fields.  With the first pass they spray a liquid.  You are unsure what the liquid is or why these helicopters have chosen your fields to spray it on.  Then, you hear the Toyota truck pulling up to your house.  Soldiers of the Afghan National Army jump out before the trucks have even come to a full stop.  As the helicopters circle overhead, a few of the soldiers point their rifles at you and yell for you to remain still in the doorway of your home.  The remaining soldiers toss three things (you cannot tell what) into your field.  These things explode and immediately cause your field to burn. 

Within minutes, your entire field is ablaze.  As you stare at your field in shock, the soldiers, unnoticed by you, get into their trucks and leave.  Soon, you recognize that the helicopters have left too.  As the fire begins to burn out and smolder, you continue looking at your field in a state of shock.  You barely hear the cries of your children.  Your only thought is that your livelihood has just been taken from you.  It is too late to plant again because the growing season has gone.  How are you to feed your children? 

As the smoke mixes with the rays of the rising sun, you see a lone figure walking toward you from the distance.  You do not acknowledge him as you are still confused by what just happened.  The stranger walks right up to you and says that the Americans and the Afghan government have punished you for growing poppy.  But poppy is the only crop that pays enough to feed your family, you tell him.  Now you have nothing, no money to feed your children.  "You can feed your family," he says, “We’ll pay you $100 to plant an IED along the road the Americans use.”  What would you do?  

While the specific details of poppy eradication may vary, the end result is the same.  This is what was done here in previous years.  This policy arose from an inability to engage in ex ante thinking.  This method of thinking asks what effects a decision may have in the future.  No thought was given to the secondary or tertiary effects of poppy eradication.  Drugs are bad, poppy is used to make drugs ergo poppy must be destroyed.  Thankfully, some began to realize that, for subsistence farmers, it was either poppy or joining the insurgency in some form.  They cared only about having enough money to feed their family.  Wouldn’t we all?

Today, there are many programs trying to handle this issue.  Some seek to eliminate poppy at the distribution level rather than at the source.  This way, a famer gets paid.  However, that can only work for so long since the distributors will inevitably stop buying if they cannot get their product to market.  Another innovative program is to pay farmers a subsidy to grow another crop.  This program thus uses one form of law (contract) to enforce another (criminal law).  The farmer can feed his family, interested countries defeat or disrupt the drug trade, and the insurgency is denied a funding source and potential new recruits.  The best part, I’m told, is who finances most of the program.  Japan and Iran.  Yep, Iran.  If you think politics makes strange bedfellows, try war.