Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Diwo

Our team has been in Diwaniyah Province for the last two weeks. We are staying at FOB Echo, a relatively small and pleasant base located just on the edge of the eponymous provincial capital. Compared to the large and sprawling bases that have been our homes for the last couple of months, FOB Echo has been a joy. There are eucalyptus trees all around and the birds that call them home. Our hooches, the DFAC, and our office space are within a short walk of each other. The weather has been very pleasant, crisp in the morning but a comfortable mid-70s during mid-day.

The pattern of our provincial assessments has been to cover each province in one month. Last month we covered three provinces and this month we are covering Diwaniyah in about three weeks. As a consequence, we’ve been pushing hard to go out every day and we’ve been largely successful, aided by the capable leadership of Lieutenant Garcia, who commands our personal security detail. Garcia graduated from Texas A&M in 2006 and so has taken a personal interest in helping us out. He’s been great.

Diwaniyah is steeped in the history of civilization. This is the location of Nippur, an ancient Sumerian city over 4,000 years old. The land also shows signs of a long history of use. There are many places where the soil is now too salty to grow crops. Some farmers have scraped the top layer of soil into long mounds on the sides of fields as one way to address the problem, although it usually makes a bad situation worse in the long run. Nonetheless, a lot of wheat and barley are grown here. The western part of the province is a rich rice-growing area, contiguous with the rice-growing area in Najaf that we visited back in July. The rice is now ripe and being harvested. There are also fish ponds here, although not nearly as many as in Babylon.

Diwaniyah city is rather attractive and, although this is a relative description, much cleaner city than many others we’ve visited in southern Iraq. The city has many graceful blue-tipped minarets. The downtown is lively with rotisserie chickens and gyros for sale on the sidewalk, barbershops, tea houses and snack shops, fruit and vegetable stands, and other stalls for hardware and car parts. We convinced LT Garcia to take us into the main market area to interview some fruit and vegetable wholesalers, although only if we went in there with a smaller group. I was fortunate to have been chosen to go into the market. We went in a tight security bubble but I never felt threatened. Of course, I don’t know anything about security, so what do I know of the real threat? Of course, our little entourage attracted quite a crowd, mostly of kids who hang around the market.

The kids can be pesky and aggressive but mostly they are just curious about us and want to see what the American soldiers are doing. When driving through the streets of the city, we are viewed with a mixture of suspicion and mild anxiety (what one soldier described to me as “the stink-eye”), although as soon as they see my hand waving from the back seat of a Humvee, they break into a broad grin and return the wave. The transformation is startling but nearly universal. In the countryside, without exception, the kids come running towards our convoy, waving exuberantly. With school now in session, invariably we encounter kids on their way home from school—smiling, laughing, waving, and jumping up and down.

Early on here we were made aware of the backdrop of our work in Diwo. Apparently, Americans have been here only recently. Last year, the province was under the nominal control of Polish forces. Together with an American general, a deal was struck to provide farmers with fertilizer and tractors. The farmers—mostly sheikhs perceived to be helpful to American forces—received the fertilizer but not the tractors. The governor, in learning about the giveaway, became angry and seized the tractors. The governor is a Badrist. The Badr Brigade was formed during the Iran-Iraq War, consisting of Shiites who fought on the side of Iran in that war. After the fall of Saddam, the governor returned to Iraq after a long exile in Iran. He’s been somewhat of a thorn in the side of the coalition forces and the central government.

Shortly after our arrival here we received a visit from some Special Forces soldiers based here at FOB Echo. They gave us a list of sheikhs that we might consider visiting. Not having scheduled anything to that point, we started working down the list. Each one told us the same story about the tractors and appealed to us to intervene on their behalf. Recognizing that this was a political hot potato, we’ve opted to remain neutral about it. On the one hand we recognize the legitimacy of the governor’s position, that he is the leader of this province and he would have to inherit responsibility (given the government’s traditional role and heavy hand in supporting agriculture) for supporting fuel and maintenance on the tractors. On the other hand, we also recognize that farmers are in desperate need for machinery to work the land to plant more wheat so that people can eat. It seems that the governor is using the withholding of tractors (and allocations of water) as ammunition against people who are not in his favor or who have been working with coalition forces.

This has been the “elephant in the room” with all our work here. Nonetheless, we’ve had a great stay here in Diwo. After nearly six months of doing this, as you might imagine, we are getting pretty good at getting to the core issues quickly. This has allowed us to drill deeper in our assessments and make more meaningful and specific recommendations. Although there are huge needs for big-ticket items like renovation of the irrigation and drainage system, we have focused on building human capacity for problem-solving and technical knowledge. In the long-run, I think this is where Team Borlaug can really make a difference once projects begin to be implemented.