Thanks, Sara– it is important that the history modern Afghanistan be known– it was truly on the cutting edge during the reign of Zahir Shah and the democratic legislature.

From an article in 2002(!)

the seed bank issue is enormous:

A team of United Nations scientists has just arrived in Afghanistan to evaluate the environmental damage to that nation from 30 years of war. They’ll assess urban pollution, natural resources, and Afghanistan’s biodiversity. Decades of war and years of drought have also devastated the country’s agricultural sector. And Afghani farmers recently lost a major resource when a seed bank was destroyed, reportedly by looters.

Janet Raloff is senior editor at Science News. She tells the story of the seed bank in the current online edition of the magazine. What was lost, she says, was Afghanistan’s agricultural insurance policy.

RALOFF: We’re talking about lots of varieties of seeds such as wheat, chickpeas, lentils, various kinds of fruits and nuts. They were all labeled and placed in air-tight containers. Each of these seeds, or varieties of seeds, had been selected to represent the genetic biodiversity of native crops, ones that were well-suited to grow in Afghanistan’s very dry environment.

(snip)

CURWOOD: What’s the overall state of the infrastructure of Afghanistan’s agricultural community?

RALOFF: It’s a disaster. At one point, 70 to 80 percent of the adults in Afghanistan were employed in farming. Right now, half of all people in Afghanistan are unemployed. Many of the farmers have been moved. They’ve been resettled in regions far from where they had initially worked. It may be conditions for which they’re really unaccustomed to farming. It turns out, because of the drought, which has been especially bad, that it’s very hard to grow anything at this point. So fields are just barely turning out crops at all.

Trees have died. People who had orchards, the orchards are gone. People who had livestock, which were important for feeding them and for fertilizing soils, they have had to sell them or eat the livestock. Basically, they’re in very primitive agricultural conditions based on the confluence of events, both the drought and the war.

http://www.loe.org/shows/shows…..8#feature1

Back in 2002 when the Democrats briefly controlled the Senate, Foreign Relations had a sub-committee on South-Central Asia (I think that was the designation) that dealt with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Paul Wellstone was the Sub-Committee Chair for a brief time. If we are bothered by State and AID’s efforts in Afghanistan, we ought to bring some pressure on Biden to include in his plans for hearings, a set of sub-committee oversight hearings on the matters set out in Barnett Rubin’s rather clear and to the point article. We need to be smart about this — hearings are not just for the purpose of looking at deliquency — they are also about change, in this instance, probably a change in the appropriations and authorizations for State and AID programs. Then we need to make certain there is a continued interest in these programs from a broad enough strata within the American activist community, that they get oversight, evaluation, and general support over a number of years.

People may not realize, but once upon a time we actually had the Peace Corps in Afghanistan doing rural development work. The first projects went in late 1962 — early 1963, and they stayed about ten years, mostly building clinics, ag training schools, a sort of “county agent” extension service for small and medium sized farmers, and some construction projects done coordinated with AID projects, mostly aimed at irrigation. Some of the best “joy” for the reputation of the US derives from these projects — and it would be nice if first of all Americans could learn about what we once did, and that in many cases actually was of value — and demand an intelligent analysis of whether something similar could be done again.

One upshot of an old Peace Corps project was that the University of California at Davis acquired the genetic material for Fruit Trees and grape culture that had been selected over a very long period (perhaps a thousand years) suited to Afghani conditions and soils. They have the capacity to essentially regenerate the fruit culture, a culture that was largely destroyed by the wars in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I’ve tried to follow the funding for what is known in AID circles as the Roots project — and it is off again, on again and just barely funded. What’s needed of course is the building of nursery facilities in Afghanistan, training of workers, and eventually working with farmers to rebuild this sector of the ag system. (for a thousand years Afghanistan exported fresh cold weather fruit to the Ganges valley in India, — all the way to Calcutta — as a major source of income and exchange.) We are talking Melon, Cherries, Nectarines, Plums, Grapes, and a huge range of pears and apples. But re-establishing the vines and orchards is not short term aid. It will take 10-15 years to bring a newly planted orchard to production — thus the importance of nursery facilities. It will also require the rebuilding of the irrigation systems which conserve and deliver snow melt to the crops. I’d like to see congress knowing enough to ask pointed and detailed questions about such projects.

johnSwifty @ 42

CHS — This link is a week old but is still a valid opinion from middle America concerning the ISG report. Some of the more interesting aspects are in the response comments — showing how parts of middle America still react to these circumstances.

It fits my personal criteria for an important link in that it includes the prescience of RFK and a Sophocles quote. It just doesn’t get any better than that…you’d think it would…but it doesn’t.

“There is a prophet for our times, but you don’t know him. His name is Yeshua.”

How…interesting. I wasn’t aware that the subject of the American presence in Iraq was addressed in the Gospels. What a chimpsucker.

I know! But don’t kid yourself, fundies quote whole swaths of Jeremiah and show how the events of the ‘prophecy’ (which was some 2000 year old version of Moab, in the prophet’s vision) are occurring today. It’s scary stuff, but it is a part of the religious base’s thought process. If you ever wonder who or what comprises the foolish 30% who still thinks Bush is an act of God, those are the folks.

Now, I don’t know anything about this Yeshua guy and I’m not going to look into it — there’s enough false prophets in the world today without rooting more out.

Rumor is there is a new Al Qaeda video out that makes the claim that Osama Bin Laden was inspired by the writings of Michael Crichton.

-GSD

I would have bet on another hack, Tom Clancy (disclosure: I’ve read a lot of Clancy and didn’t hate every minute of it), but Crichton is one of those rare instances of some minute talent being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Any thing which moves Crichton down a notch or two in the course of this generation’s public estimation, can only aid in history thinking better of us. Now, if we can just manage to insure that Tom Cruise never gets another award for ‘acting,’ I think we will go even further towards restoring our credibility as a society.

EvilDrPuma @ 33

And here I thought Kindasleezy was some kind of Soviet/Cold War expert. Surely she knows that we didn’t come out of that period by sticking our fingers…

…in our ears…

and singing loudly whenever the subject of diplomacy came up. Stupid chimpsucker.

i don’t know where that “Soviet expert” meme started, but she was jibber-jabering about what a serious threat the Soviet Union was right up to the moment it burst like a soap bubble. Every major pronouncement she made about the USSR was, in fact, remarkably wrong. She was wrong like the 1930’s Republicans who said Chancellor Hitler was a stern-but-fair guy with whom we could deal. In the run-up to Iraq, on Tim Russert’s show, she said that containment had of the USSR had been a mistake and we should in fact have attacked them in 1948 or so. Russert just stared at her goggle-eyed. After all, that attacking the USSR thing has worked out really well for everybody else who had tried it. Just ask Hitler!
She is not a Soviet expert. She is technically what we refer to as “an idiot.”

…Afghanistan, the country where arrogant world powers go to die.

ROFLMAO! I don’t think I’ve ever heard Afghanistan’s role in global politics so neatly described.

CHS — This link is a week old but is still a valid opinion from middle America concerning the ISG report. Some of the more interesting aspects are in the response comments — showing how parts of middle America still react to these circumstances.

It fits my personal criteria for an important link in that it includes the prescience of RFK and a Sophocles quote. It just doesn’t get any better than that…you’d think it would…but it doesn’t.

“There is a prophet for our times, but you don’t know him. His name is Yeshua.”

How…interesting. I wasn’t aware that the subject of the American presence in Iraq was addressed in the Gospels. What a chimpsucker.

And I have good cookie recipes, too.