It's been more than a year without one of these missives appearing... I'm having a hard time explaining my silence, even to myself. Those of you who know me personally will attest that it is hardly my strong point!

A lot of it has to do, I think, with what ended up being just an orgy of speaking last fall after publication of my book The Punishment of Virtue, a giant flushing out of verbiage -- like the opposite of force-feeding a goose to fatten its liver for pate. The forced ex-pression, down to the very last drop, of everything I had to say about Afghanistan. To the point that I physically vomited on the plane to my final venues, in Canada.

I also am finding that...I don't have much new to add, even this long since. Canadian officers here -- for whom my book is now required reading -- keep asking if there's going to be a sequel. (They're dying to see their OWN colleagues and friends pinned to the card.) I keep telling them: it would just be more of the same. The fundamental barriers to real improvement here -- Pakistani orchestration of the so-called resurgent Taliban and US unwillingness to call Islamabad on it, and poor Afghan governance and international unwillingness to call Kabul on it -- remain unchanged, and so, therefore, does the situation, overall. I feel terrible for the soldiers out there, expected to hold the line in a battle their own political leaders have set up in such a way as to make it unwinable.

To bring you up to date since my last missive, the wisp of hope expressed therein that villages might just be able to cling together and create some bulwark against the Taliban was misplaced. Last fall and winter saw the most serious and protracted combat operations in Kandahar since the Taliban took over here. (There were no real combat operations to get them to leave, just persuasive bombing.)

Then came the PR campaign this winter about the huge spring offensive we were supposed to expect. I did not. There was too much loud advertisement, too much noise about US troops' rotations being extended and extra Brits being shipped in.

One sharp effort was made, however, to clear the way for such an offensive. In early March, an Improvised Explosive Device was set off by remote control under the vehicle of Mullah Naqib -- the grizzled war-horse who was Zabit Akrem's tribal elder -- who was on his way to his fiefdom of Arghandab, of the leafy orchards. The car was an armored vehicle shipped down by President Karzai not a month previously, to which Mullah Naqib owes his life. His son was not so lucky. His other son lost a leg. Mullah Naqib has only yesterday returned from India where he was supervising the boy's physical therapy. I'll go visit him in the next day or two.

If Mullah Naqib had been killed, then the Taliban could have approached Kandahar from the north, through his Arghandab district, filled with pomegranate trees to provide cover from air strikes, and militarily proficient Alokozais, who, though they lose no love on the Taliban, are out of patience with the corrupt Afghan government, just like everyone else. It would have made for a very problematic spring. But Mullah Naqib survived, and is holding his district. With all of his flaws, his love of money and his simple-mindedness, which can make him easy to manipulate, he has been a bulwark to this government. Largely because of unswerving personal loyalty to Pres. Karzai, and unshakable gratitude to the United States for those stinger missiles in the 1980s. Somewhat in the manner of gnarled farmers in Normandy of World War II vintage, who will never never stop thanking us for the Landings, no matter what has come since.

And so the heralded spring offensive did not transpire. Fighting within range of Kandahar, however -- a shocking phenomenon last year -- has become commonplace. Zhari district is still a problem, and the three that straddle the province just north of Arghandab...that is, one tier away.

We have a new mayor in Kandahar, fresh in from McLean VA. A kind and honest man, but in over his head. About 5 months since he took office, his one notable action has been to try to clear the streets of the big-wheeled wooden carts and wheelbarrows from which small traders sell fruit and vegetables, and the sidewalks of store displays that overflow the cramped quarters onto the public footpath. The idea in and of itself isn't so bad. Kandahar streets are clogged, creating crowds that could be decimated by a suicide bomb. It's hard for emergency vehicles to punch through the de facto open-air market, and the joyous chaos creates traffic tie-ups.

But how did he do it? He consulted with no one. He gave no warning. He just declared that barrows and displays on the streets were no longer allowed -- thus overnight throwing more than a thousand people out of work, with no alternative. Then he went around enforcing his decree in person. He would shout at people, swear at them, throw down their displays or, if they were liquid -- cooking oil or kerosene -- pour them out on the ground... As a result, the entire city is up in arms against him, accusing him of knowing not the first thing about Kandahar, and trying to make it overnight look like a foreign city.

Another setback.

What I do during my periods of disillusionment is focus back down...on soap. Compared to vast policy pronouncements, diplomatic analysis, or governance reform campaigns that could be replicated across the country, it may seem trivial. And yet I am daily amazed at the tiny miracle we work here; and that miracle turns out to require a lot of exacting, detailed, and repetitive work, performed to constant standards. Something that does, in the end, take up most of my waking hours.

We're up to 8 varieties of soap, now. This heavenly flower from Khakrez district to the north of Kandahar called here "ganacha" turns out (discovery thanks to sleuthing by a botanist friend in San Antonio) to be Salvia spinosa, a distant relative of sage. It smells like bananas and lime. Botanical name and certified harmlessness (even helpfulness) in hand, we can now market a soap that uses ganacha water and essential oil. Color: violet. But it's in short supply this year, because we didn't get much of the flower to distill. Still, it was great fun to develop a new shape and color.

Major addition since last I wrote: an electric seed oil press. No more do the Arghand guys have to tone their muscles by turning the hand-crank press for 3-4 hours each day, to produce barely enough oil to make a batch of soap. Now, thanks to Portland-based Mercy Corps, we have a spiffy electric machine, which churns out about 8 times as much oil per day as we did before. With typical Afghan frugality, my guys insist on passing apricot kernels and almonds through the press three or four times, to make sure it's squeezed the last drop of precious fluid from the nut-meat. This unfortunately takes place at another office, because the current offerings in electricity in Kandahar are neither regular enough, nor come in sufficient phases, to run the machine. So two guys troop off of a morning supplied with tea, a radio, and a plastic crate full of raw material, to feed the beast for the day, while the other two tend to the other activities, such as polishing soap or distilling essential oil.

The process by which we make soap has a bunch of extra steps most natural soap-makers avoid. The most significant one is called "hand-milling." After making the soap by mixing oils (which we have electrically pressed from those almonds and apricot kernels and pomegranate seeds, and anise and all) and dissolved lye, and pouring it into a mold, and letting it set overnight, and taking it out of the mold -- this is where the process would end for most of the natural soaps you see in your neighborhood Whole Foods -- we then grate it like a potato, melt it down over a (big) double-boiler, and add the colors and essential oils.

Aisa shows up early in the mornings to do the grating. We had an industrial-sized grater made up in the bazaar, which you can step on to hold it steady while you're grating. Aisa is incredibly hard-working, and a little crazy, so I have a huge fondness for her, and blow up at her often. She laughs and says she is the keeper of my remote control. (As in IED. Meaning: she can push the button and make me explode.) Her sister in law tried to drive her out of the house her brother lets her have on his property, and when cutting off her access to water and power didn't do it, she stabbed her in the ribs and the throat, when I was in North America last year. So now Aisa has a bit of a squint.

After she's grated the soap and set it up on the double boiler, then comes the phase where I get involved, because I'm trying to goad this process into becoming marginally...uniform. Like, a cooking recipe rather than dash and taste and hope it comes out as good as last time. It's a problem because Aisa is the only one who can read a scale, so giving directions in grams or liters doesn't work for the two women who mix the colors and aromas into the soap. So I'm going back to rework the formulas, trying to come up with spoonful measurements... I want to leave the gals with really clear and repeatable instructions when I leave for Europe and the US in August. 8 is getting to be a lot to keep in mind...

So they're still calling on me when they get to the color and flavor part. My desk is in a corner of the office, right up against the front window (so I have a factory foreman's view of what's going on outside!) and Zarghona, very heavy and very sweet, will lean out from the steps till she's got part of her bulk across the window, and I notice her. And I'll bound up and cross the porch to the soap melting room and see how things stand. I've been getting VERY irritated this week because it seems we have to keep learning the formulas over every time from scratch. "Desert Fields takes essential oil of Artemisia persica BEFORE we drip in the steeped walnut husks, because the essential oil has to be completely mixed in throughout the soap, whereas, we want the dark color from the walnut husks to be in irregular veins. So you have to call me earlier, and you want the husks steeped and ready right from the start, before the soap is melted, or it will take too long to get ready, and all the pretty golden nuggets will melt down." (Of course, the vocabulary is a little more basic in Pashtu.)

But we are getting there. And I'm even teaching our young Admin officer, Mahmuda, to shape the soap. Till she came and rescued me, this was the one phase of the whole process that really and truly only I could do. For some reason, the women don't really understand, or can't translate to their hands, the notion of deliberate asymmetry. I have gathered some rocks from the bed of the Arghandab River that resemble the shapes of our soaps, but it is still very hard for them to visualize. So, in effect, every bar of Arghand soap has been shaped by yours truly. Shaping means kneading the lumps that have been pre-weighed by Aisa (170-172 for the big "soap stones," and 67-69 g. for the little pebbles we sell in bags of 5.), kneading it like bread dough, till it takes on a relatively uniform consistency, but the colors have swirled in a very IRREGULAR way, and then slapping them around a little with the palms of my hands till they suddenly look like rocks. That usually takes about an hour or two. And my triceps are becoming nicely defined.

The next day, the women polish these fresh "soap stones," and array them downstairs in our vaulted-roof cellar to cure. I go down later and rearrange them (I'm beginning to realize that all those SAT practice tests we took with questions asking us to order things..."Match items in column A to the appropriate pair in column B, following the example below"...really did do a doozie on all of our brains. I automatically see patterns in things, and pick out the item that contradicts the pattern, and so become quite anal about the arrangement of the soap in the cellar.) and put a little post-it on the new shelf with the date. The soap has to cure at least a month. It improves with age, like cheese or wine or most people I know.

The men do the second polish, at the end of the cure, dipping the hardened soap into warm water, and caressing it forcefully, compressing down all the little nubs and irregularities it's developed over the month, then patting it dry with a dishtowel and wiping it off again with a rubber-gloved hand, to give it an amazing sheen. Sometimes I help with that phase, and always with the next, slipping the finished soap into little cello bags and cinching the tops with some rough yarn spun by local nomads. Every step needs rigorous quality control. Our labels proclaim 4 1/2 oz. or 125 grams (not precisely equivalent); most of the soap weighs in at about 4 3/4 oz., but if it falls short, it's set aside to sell to the Canadian army headquarters. The stuff zips out of there within a few hours.

We've finally started mixing our body oils. Three to match the first three of our soaps, alphabetically: Amandine, Anisette, and Desert Fields. What enchantment to concoct these elixirs...70% oil of wild pistachio, a tiny pipette full of essential oil of Artemisia persica, 5 g. of pomegranate seed oil, for the trace magic (more is too powerful) of those wheat-like seeds. The result: a deep golden liquid, redolent of sweet evergreen and something like menthol, that rubs into your skin like a lotion. Amandine is a lemon-crystal that smells like Grandma's marzipan cookies. Anisette a deep green, and somehow you can make out the specific aroma of "seed" wrapped up in the licorice. We have sent these to a healer in Montreal. She is a massage therapist, and a perfectionist. She tested them, in every way, including on her tongue and the body of a pregnant woman. And judges they are of an entirely different order than any other oil on the market.

When North America Coordinator Jennie Green was here, we experimented with another idea. Some types of flower are too delicate to give up any essential oil when distilled. (Rosa damascena is right on the cusp.) Reading a novel called Perfume, sent to me by Louise-Odile in Montreal, I discovered a now disused (in perfumes) technique for extracting scent from flowers. Bathe them in warm oil. It's basically the same idea as putting rosemary in a bottle of olive oil. There is a beautiful tiny flower called "sinjit," which grows on a tree and turns into something sort of like a date, only dry and powdery inside. After the women painstakingly plucked the flowers off the willowy twigs they came on, Jennie and I soaked them in almond oil, heated over a double boiler. Then strained them out and started with new flowers, again and again. The result, smelled directly, was a bit cloying. I was ready to chuck the whole experiment. But Jennie had the brilliant notion of spreading some of the stuff on her skin. And the smell changed entirely. Suddenly we were in a wild flower-speckled meadow in late spring, under a warm sun...

We have ordered and purchased the first lot of hand blown glass bottles in which to sell these oils, but the affixing of the (smooth glass) stopper to the (smooth glass) bottle remains a conundrum. Upon which Jennie and her immensely inventive husband Michael are setting their minds.

One final saga to share, for those of you who have not been along for the bumpy ride. In August of last year, thanks to the unflagging work of the one officer they had who actually accomplished anything, Arghand won a contract from the lavishly funded (by USAID) "Alternative Livelihoods Program," implemented by one of these Beltway Bandits, called Chemonics. Just to give you an idea. Each of its employees makes $100,000-$190,000 plus 35% hazard pay, plus 35% "post differential," plus 20% for working on Saturdays. And Chemonics charges USAID $600,000 per person per year. In other words, is clearing more than 100% in profit. Chalked up to development assistance provided by the good people of the United States to the people of Afghanistan.

Even that would almost be OK, if what was delivered for this sum was energetic, innovative, effective development work. But the track record of ALP/S has rivaled for ridiculousness that of the Keystone Kops. Of $119 million dollars to spend over 5 years, less than four were disbursed at the end of the first year, and most of that on Chemonics itself. (At $600,000/yr. salaries add up! Let alone armored vehicles and luxury offices left empty.) A few infrastructure projects passed on from a previous program, "cash for work," (Isn't that...work?) in which unskilled laborers on short-term projects earned $3/day -- slightly less than the going rate for unskilled labor, and far less than what the opium harvest brought in this year...a locally astronomical $20 - $25/day. Much of that leaking out to "ghost names" on payrolls. Chemonics officers -- especially chiefs of party -- coming and going on a dizzying schedule, so it was hardly worth learning their names, let alone striking up any kind of relationship.

Although Arghand represents one of the few truly sustainable alternative livelihoods initiatives in the Afghan south, we were denied funding during the first year of operations. The reasons given were that ALP/South would be funding large-scale operations of a "proven business model," ALP/S was focusing on Helmand, not Kandahar Province (then why the huge staffed, vehicled, gardened office in Kandahar?) and would be funding buildings, not operating expenses (then why were we later refused funding for a building)? These explanations, incidentally, provided AFTER they dragged me through a lengthy, repetitive, exacting application process.

Anyhow, we did get the funding in August of 2006, we completed the contract early and with flying colors (all production and marketing goals exceeded), and, during multiple follow-up visits were repeatedly promised another contract.

But in Kandahar, I have learned to scale back my trust. Especially in loud protestations. On March 1 we submitted a proposal. It went through a couple of adjustments, and as far as I knew, on May 1 was complete, after I gave up on ALP/S capacity to estimate the cost of an improved internet link-up for the two computers, maybe three, at Arghand.

Some days later, I received the surprise visit of two gentlemen, one a Chemonics vice president, the other the new head of Business Development Services, tailed by an entire vehicle of bullet-proof-vested, gun-toting "security" -- an accoutrement I had repeatedly told ALP/S was unacceptable in the current climate.

At the end of the grand tour, they asked what I wanted from them. Well...I was a little caught off-guard... some notion of the status of our contract would be nice, since, for example, Jennie's and my salaries were in abeyance. But that was supposed to be the task of another program officer, the pert and very bureaucratic gal who had taken over for wonderful Homira Nassery. The gentlemen responded that they would "take a look and see what it needed."

Sarah goes into a low hover.

Because I knew what this meant. And sure enough, I get this condescending e-mail from the BDS guy (salted with "wannas," and "gonnas" and "hope to talk to you real soon") about how I need to persuade USAID of the "raison d'etre of all this," so "let's have the names of those retailers that are waiting on line to carry your product," let's have figures on return for a bar of soap, and overall profit and loss, all of your financials since inception, and any other information that might be of use.

I had been through this a year back. Chemonics doesn't need to know profit and loss because this is not a grant, but a fixed fee contract for services provided...we had been taught the arcanities of the different possible contract mechanisms, and the fact that ALP/S isn't ALLOWED to give grants, when we signed our last contract. And here was another new officer who didn't have a clue about either us or his own organization telling me I had to start a contracting process again from scratch. At $600,000/year. A sizzling exchange of e-mails followed, in which I was accused of unbusinesslike, unaesthetic behavior -- he stopped just short of calling it unladylike. I wrote back inquiring why it was unbusinesslike to express frustration at the ALP/S incompetence, whereas that incompetence itself (at $600,000/person/year) was not unbusinesslike?

At this point the head of the whole program (duly cc'd) waded in, with a lapidary missive directing me to ignore all other e-mails, those not written by him personally, and adding that "encouraging staff initiative can have exasperating results." That was just the corker. One of the "staff" was a Chemonics vice president!

Eventual upshot: after some soul-searching, we decided to withdraw our application. After the final boss e-mail, we could have had our money in a jiffy. All I would have had to do was insist that thenceforth we deal exclusively with him. Perhaps I should have followed that course, since it would have been instructive to him to have to go through all the details of contract preparation and project monitoring. However, my view of Arghand is that it is not just Arghand. It is itself and something more...a kind of test case and exemplar. Through our experiences, I hope that we can locate some of the nexes where development assistance and other aspects of nationbuilding are going wrong, illustrate them, and serve as a force for improvement of the entire system. Part of that mission implies taking stands of principle that may contradict our short-term self-specific interests. And for me, it was just the end of colluding with the giant legalized corruption represented by Chemonics/ALP-S.

So we have turned elsewhere for about one final year of funding required to set us firmly on self-sufficient feet. What we need, basically, is a salary for Jennie and me, a large solar-voltaic system to run our seed oil press described above, about $45,000 for land and as much for a building that could hold an Arghand expanded to a size that would allow us to put away our begging bowl forever. It looks as though the Canadian government is going to spring for the first two of those items. Going through their application process was also instructive. What it showed me was that the entire Canadian system was geared around a single concept of development assistance. To whit: CIDA has resources, which it provides to beneficiaries (aka poor Afghans) through an intermediary, whose role is seen primarily as a funnel. That is, the goods are handed by CIDA to the intermediary, whose job is to hand almost all of them on to beneficiaries. CIDA tries to make sure the intermediary tears off as small a hunk as possible as it hands the stuff along. That's a good perspective as far as it goes. It would tend to eliminate $600,000/person/year.

However, it seems to me that it translates a rather limited idea of economic development work. Let's say you're going to fund a collection dairy of the type I ran in 2004. Well then, you might be providing the salaries of the workers at the processing plant, as well as the dairy equipment, in order to make it viable enough to be able to buy milk from 100 families forever more. That is, your investment might be directly IN the intermediary, rather than the eventual beneficiaries. Same with, say, an organic almond cooperative. You might invest in the agricultural workers (i.e. pay salaries), and maybe even make up the difference to farmers of a reduced yield of almonds during the two years of organic procedures needed to obtain certification and higher prices. At a meeting with CIDA people in Ottawa I spelled this out...that along with more conventional development strategies, they might also begin to think of themselves as...venture capitalists. Because boy has that proven to be a powerful engine for innovative economic development. You could see eyes lighting up around the room.

The CIDA vice president suggested that Arghand might serve as just what I want it to be: a kind of test case for CIDA to examine its procedures and ingrained attitudes and see what needs changing. I'm not entirely sure that the field officers have appreciated my direct channel to their hierarchy in Ottawa. I've been commenting every step of the way, a kind of "explication de texte" in international development. Upshot: we seem to have won the grant. I hear that at the approval meeting here someone asked skeptically: "Do we do this?" (That is, directly support a functioning economic enterprise, rather than just teach sewing, for example.) The answer came: "Usually, no. In this case, yes."

What I read in to that was: Sarah is a gadfly who happens to have captured the ear of much of the Canadian government and national media. In this particular case, we are going to do what's good for us.

I hope this is not in fact the spirit in which CIDA is awarding this grant. I personally see Afghanistan as a tremendous opportunity for CIDA to show the rest of the world how it's done. To forge itself into a truly revolutionary, effective, innovative public development agency. And I hope we can help. In the meantime, the score, after Canadian army shipping and CIDA stepping in where USAID and its minion failed: Maple Leaves 2, Eagles Zip.

Love to you all,

Sarah