In a Morrocco Town, a Cradle for Killers

DATE November 29, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Andrea Elliott of the New York Times Magazine discusses
terrorists from Tetouan in Morocco
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Five men involved in the Madrid subway bombings of 2004 and eight men who set
off for Iraq to wage jihad against Americans came from one small town in
Morocco called Tetouan. Most of them were from a neighborhood within it
called Jamaa Mezuak. Why is this town turning out terrorists? That's what my
guest, Andrea Elliott, investigated in her article "Where Boys Grow Up to Be
Jihadis," which was the cover story of this week's New York Times Magazine.
Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for her series of articles
called "An Imam in America." The town of Tetouan is on the northern tip of
Morocco, just a few miles from the Mediterranean Sea, not far from Spain. In
fact, many young men leave Tetouan to find work and new opportunities in
Spain. Elliott went to that town to interview family, friends, and neighbors
of the jihadis. I asked her if there was any connection between the young men
from Tetouan involved in the Madrid subway bombings and those who set off for
Iraq.

Ms. ANDREA ELLIOTT: There were several connections between these two groups.
Two of the men who had died in Madrid, after carrying out the attacks, had a
brother who remained in Morocco who eventually was arrested, along with a
number of other people, and charged with recruiting and financing for this
group of men who inevitably ended up going to Iraq.

The more meaningful connection between these two groups, I think, was a
connection of ideology and influence. I would say that there was a big of a
domino effect in this neighborhood, because when news of the bombings in
Madrid hit, while most people that I talked to were really, really shocked and
appalled, some of the young men in the neighborhood just became curious about
the jihadi movement. And that curiosity wasn't just a kind of random, general
curiosity that one might have, but a very personal curiosity given that they
knew these men. Some of them knew these men in Madrid and had really grown up
alongside them, and in a sense, felt that they knew their hearts. And as
horrific as this violence may have seemed to a lot of people around them, I
think that there was a notion that because they knew them, their motivations
couldn't have been all that misplaced. So I think it just really planted a
seed or even just a question, which was why would these guys we know in Madrid
do this? And kind of just set them on what was really a new course for them,
because in Morocco terrorism is still largely a new phenomenon. The first
major events in Morocco since its independence was the suicide bombings in
Casa Blanca in 2003. So while you've seen certainly, you know, exported
jihad, Moroccans going to places like Chechnya and Afghanistan, a small number
of them, this event in Madrid was really anathema to people and shocking, and
yet I do think it sort of planted a seed in the minds of some of these kids.

GROSS: What was the new course it set them on? How did their lives change
after they saw the results of the Madrid train attacks?

Ms. ELLIOTT: They became really consumed by news of the war. I think it
sort of set them on two tracks. First, they just wanted to understand what
this whole jihadi movement was about and became very focused on understanding
more about what the Koran says and Sunna, and began talking to an imam in the
neighborhood who by many accounts, including the Moroccan government officials
I talked to, is very influential on them. But at the time, they were sort of
comfortably, quietly talking about this. And it was just interesting for me
to see how they connected the dots, taking the war and what they felt outraged
by, namely contractors profiting off of the war itself, and also, you know,
videos that they had come across on the Internet, because at a certain point
television coverage became insufficient. So these images that they would see
of soldiers barging into homes, taking all of that stuff and applying it to a
larger ideology that kind of says the West is at war with Islam. The war in
Iraq is not a kind of confined conflict but a global struggle.

GROSS: Now what about their mosque? You write that their imam ended up being
a recruiter for jihadis in Iraq. He arranged for these men to journey to
Iraq. Tell us all a bit more about what you learned about their imam.

Ms. ELLIOTT: The imam was very popular in the neighborhood among some people
because he was young and really affable, and he recited the Koran with a very
melodious voice, and people were taken with him. He led prayers at a mosque
that was never given the official government stamp. And he would talk to the
young people who came to his mosque in the evenings and he was sort of like a
friend and brother to them, and in some ways stood in contrast with the other
imams in this neighborhood. This neighborhood had a lot of mosques, at least
10 by my count. And the older imams, I think, were perceived by some of these
guys as sort of stiff and set in their ways, and this guy was just--something
about him I think struck them. A lot of people I talked to, their eyes would
light up when they described him even though he's now in jail, and the
Moroccan authorities claimed that he's the recruiter. Somebody with a lot of
information about this group, who was very good friends with a lot of them who
I talked to at length, believes that, yes, he may have actually connected them
to people who were financing and arranging these trips, but didn't recruit
them, that they really essentially recruited themselves and found a way to get
there through him. Exactly how he fits into this, I think, remains a bit of a
riddle.

GROSS: Why is he in jail?

Ms. ELLIOTT: After these five men left the neighborhood and news of this
began to spread, Moroccan authorities just set out to crush this, and arrested
a number of people, more than 20 people, including the imam--from around the
country, not just in Tetouan--and charged them with arranging trips and
financing them into Iraq with the assistance of al-Qaeda in North Africa.

GROSS: Did these young men, before leaving for Iraq, tell their families
where the were going and why?

Ms. ELLIOTT: The sense I got was they actually took pains not to tell
anybody where they were going. Possibly because they felt that it would
endanger their families. This is a country that has dealt with quite an
aggressive approach by the government in prosecuting terrorism. And they just
also didn't want anything to stand in between them and their voyage. So news
really came to the families once they had left. A number of them called home
and asked for forgiveness. And...

GROSS: Forgiveness for what?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Well, it's an interesting question because the phrase that they
used translated in English reads, `forgive me if I have done you wrong,' or
`forgive me my mistakes.' And this is a phrase that one hears commonly in the
north of Morocco when people are saying goodbye before going on a long
journey. So it's not entirely clear. There are a lot of rules, none of them
official necessarily, but the mores of this whole jihadi movement are still
taking shape; and a lot of people believe, for instance, that it's important
to ask your parents permission before leaving, to pay off your debts, and to
pray to be a good person. So I think that possibly some of it was that they
hadn't asked for permission. And this is something that they were criticized
quite a bit for in the neighborhood after leaving.

GROSS: What do you think think their expectations were about what they would
do in Iraq? Do you think that they went with the idea of becoming suicide
bombers or of something else?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Exactly what they expected, I don't think we'll ever know
because they're missing, with the exception of two who appear to have been
detained in Syria. But the sense I got from people who knew them really well
was that they were prepared to be, quote/unquote, "martyrs," that they were
prepared to give up their lives in order to defend Muslim land. The sense I
got from talking to US military officials is that many of the foreign fighters
who get to Iraq arrive with this notion, sold to them often by imams in their
hometowns, that they will be fighting some kind of heroic battle, only to find
that they will, in fact, be deployed on suicide missions targeting other
Muslims. And many officials have asserted, US officials, that the majority of
these attacks are carried out by foreign fighters, the suicide attacks
directed at other Muslims. And so there may be a real degree of deception or
disillusionment in terms of what people wind up doing vs. what they expect.
But in the case of this group, it's not clear exactly what they expected to
do.

GROSS: Yeah, I know you mentioned that a lot of the foreigners who go to Iraq
to fight jihad are deployed as suicide bombers against other Muslims, but in
the case of this group of young men who came from the small town in Morocco,
their imam told them that Shiite Muslims weren't genuine Muslims, that they
were basically unfaithful.

Ms. ELLIOTT: Yes.

GROSS: So I'm thinking maybe they wouldn't have been that upset if they were
in a suicide bombing against Shia.

Ms. ELLIOTT: That was an anecdote that really stood out to me as meaningful
because certainly people must realize, and certainly by the time that they
left, they should have known that a lot of these attacks were directed at
other Muslims. This is no secret, and the fact that he felt this way and that
he had a role of influence in their lives, I think, certainly indicates that
they may have agreed that such an attack would have been OK.

GROSS: So how many people from Tetouan in Morocco who set out for Iraq to
become jihadists actually made it to Iraq?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Well, we don't really know. Eight set out to Iraq and two of
the eight were detained in Syria. Some of the others did make it in. Their
identities have not been confirmed to me. One senior military official told
me that possibly some of them had either died or been detained, but exactly
what happened to them isn't known. There was a raid in September of a
militant safe house of sorts in Iraq where soldiers seized a trove of
documents that looked kind of like intake forms for foreign fighters arriving
in Iraq, with their names and their countries of origin and how much money
they had and details about their families. And some of these forms were found
for at least some of the five men from Tetouan who had possibly made it that
far.

GROSS: My guest is Andrea Elliott. We're talking about her New York Times
Magazine cover story "Where Young Men Grow Up to Be Jihadis." More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter Andrea
Elliott. She wrote the Times Magazine cover story "Where Boys Grow Up to Be
Jihadis" about a town in Morocco that seems to be breeding terrorists. Most
recently eight men from there went to Iraq to wage jihad against Americans.

The men from this town in Morocco were inspired to become jihadis in part
because other men from their neighborhood had been behind the Madrid training
bombing in 2004, and those men really went up in a blaze. I mean, they were
in a house together when the police were about to break in, and they blew
themselves up. And some of them shortly before they blew themselves up were
on the phone home saying goodbye. So it was a really dramatic end to a really
dramatic story, and in the minds of these men a very successful story because
they pulled off this horrible attack in Madrid. Now the men from this town
who went to Iraq kind of fizzled. Nobody really knows what happened to them.
Nobody knows if they succeeded in accomplishing any attacks in Iraq. So
what's their legacy in this town? Do you think they're inspiring more jihadis
or not?

Ms. ELLIOTT: I think it's hard to say. Certainly in the wake of their
departure there's been such a focus by the government to clamp down on this
that it seems to have stemmed the flow, at least according to officials and
locals I talked to. They didn't leave behind any videos, as far as I know,
and there are no posters, for instance, exalting them, because as one person
put it to me, `Such a thing would be forbidden in Morocco.' I think that
people in the neighborhood are in large part very bothered by it. But
certainly they have their champions. The Madrid bombings, I think, brought a
much more unanimous kind of disapproval and dismay on the part of people in
this neighborhood. I encountered more nuance in the descriptions of how
people felt about the Iraq group than I did about the Madrid group.

GROSS: What do you mean?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Well, it's funny. The Madrid group, everyone kept telling me,
when I interviewed people about this sort of again and again, that they're
terrorists, that what they did is awful, that killing innocent people is not
jihad. And I think that the reason they feel this way in large part is
because this region of Morocco and in particular this city is very connected
to Spain. A lot of people have family living in Madrid who could have been
affected by the bombings. They feel like they're a part of Spain in some
ways. So they're very disapproving of that.

But when it comes to the Iraq group, I just detected, you know, more hesitancy
to write them off as terrorists. A lot of people that I talked to felt that
they really qualified more as resistance fighters, not as terrorists. One
person in particular comes to mind--because this neighborhood really has a
love/hate relationship with the United States. And this one person who's a
wedding planner, a young guy, went to great pains to explain to me why these
guys were resistance fighters, not terrorists, that they were defending Muslim
land that had been taken. And we got into long debates about the meaning of
jihad. I wanted to understand what he meant. And at one point I asked him
why they couldn't have done a different kind of jihad, to work to improve the
conditions of their lives, for instance. And his response to me was, `Well,
why didn't George Bush work on the United States? He went and occupied
Afghanistan instead.' Yet a few weeks ago when I checked in with him, he
rather gleefully told me that he had applied for the visa lottery to come live
in the United States. So this is the kind of duality that I encountered again
and again in the neighborhood. It's just an interesting chasm in the
neighborhood between how they feel about US foreign policy and how they feel
about American culture and...

GROSS: Well, I think this ambivalence about America can also be summed up in
things like popular culture. I mean, you describe, like, how one of the
suicide bombers in the Madrid attacks who came from this town wore his hair
like John Travolta, I'm not sure from which movie.

Ms. ELLIOTT: "Saturday Night Live"--"Saturday Night Fever."

GROSS: "Saturday Night Fever."

Ms. ELLIOTT: Sorry. Yeah. "Saturday Night Fever."

GROSS: And some of them listen to hip-hop. I mean, they liked a lot about
American culture. And you hear a lot about this among militant Muslims, that,
you know, that on the one hand they emulate American popular culture, and on
the other hand they hate so much about America and want to kill Americans in
Iraq.

Ms. ELLIOTT: Yeah, I mean, I think the line is drawn between culture and
policy, and this is what I encountered again and again and again in this
neighborhood, was just this real love/hate relationship with America. On the
one hand people wore FBI caps, and the most popular spot...

GROSS: FBI caps?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Yeah.

GROSS: Well, that's a surprise.

Ms. ELLIOTT: Adidas knock off track suits, John Travolta haircuts from
"Saturday Night Fever." The most popular spot to congregate for men is Chicago
Cafe, right in the middle of the heart of Jamaa Mezuak. Yet as soon as I
would tell people where I was from, they immediately wanted to talk about the
war in Iraq. And I just heard again and again, you know, `Your president is
the biggest terrorist in the world.' One man who told me that was wearing a
baseball cap with America spelled across the front in gold, as he said this.
So there is this real duality there, and I'm sure that some of these men who
turned to terrorism in both the Madrid and Iraq groups from this neighborhood
lived that very much. In particular one guy who wanted to be--he dreamed of
being a stand-up comedian and wrote his own songs and listened to 50 Cent and
Eminem, and had his song by Eminem that derided President Bush translated into
Arabic. There's just a real engagement in American culture and rejection of
the United States in terms of its policy.

GROSS: Were you able to talk with mothers of the suicide bombers or would-be
suicide bombers?

Ms. ELLIOTT: Yes.

GROSS: Tell us some of the responses you got from mothers about their sons'
actions.

Ms. ELLIOTT: There was a tremendous amount of resistance to believing this
could be true, and just enormous grief. I kept hearing, `He's coming back.
He really went to Spain. I see him in my dreams walking down the road in
his...(unintelligible),' this mother told me.

You asked about the legacy earlier. One of the hardest things about the fact
that we don't know what happened to them is the kind of tricks that this plays
on the minds of their relatives and the people that they left behind, because
they can't quite close the door. They just don't know. One mother said to
me, `I just want to see a piece of his bone. That's all I want to see, just
to be sure that he did this.' The mothers I talked to were really horrified at
the notion that their sons would be capable of this kind of destruction and
violence. And, you know, one mother said to me, `If your child has a fever,
you can feel it. How couldn't I have felt it if they were dead?' So I think
that they just don't want to believe it.

GROSS: So what do you feel like you walk away knowing that you didn't know
before after investigating this story?

Ms. ELLIOTT: One of the things that always frustrates me, and I think a lot
of my colleagues, about terrorism coverage--because it's the position that
we're placed in after a big event happens--is now little is understood about
these people. So either they've killed themselves and you can't get to them,
or they're locked up because the plot has been foiled. And in the aftermath
of whatever event it is that you're covering, people are understandably
scared, and so you don't really get much of a sense of who they are. And
there are plenty of people who are members of groups or who belong to circles
of friends who sympathize with this and who don't actually follow through.
And I guess I don't feel fully satisfied that I understand what it is that,
you know, enables someone to actually be willing to give up his or her life.

I did get the sense with one of them that there was a lot of trepidation and
second guessing and doubts after he left Morocco, because he called back five
or six times from Syria to his home. And this was one of the more powerful
things that I came across in talking to people who knew him well, including
family members, was that he just seemed so distant on the phone. He was
trying to pretend that everything was normal and asking questions like had his
brother done his homework, and yet he's about to go kill himself or
potentially die fighting a battle that it sounded like he was suddenly worried
he should have never signed up for. So I guess I have a lot of questions
about what happens once they do cross over the line, not just what pushes them
over, but then once they get there, what is that process like. And that those
are things that I wish we knew more about.

GROSS: Andrea Elliott, thank you very much for talking with us.

Ms. ELLIOTT: Thank you.

GROSS: Andrea Elliott is a reporter for the New York Times. Her Times
Magazine cover story, "Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis," was published
Sunday.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

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Interview: Joel Hafvenstein discusses his year in Afghanistan
working to convert poppy farmers to work in other jobs
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Joel Hafvenstein went to Afghanistan in 2004 for a worthy project, but without
the resources to accomplish the goals. The project was to create jobs that
would provide an alternative to growing poppy. The Afghan government had
promised to eradicate the opium poppy fields in the Helmand province. The US
Agency for International Development had hired a contractor to create jobs
that would provide economic alternatives to poppy. Hafvenstein was hired by
the contractor as deputy leader of the project, running the operational side.
To meet payroll, he had to find ways of moving a million dollars in cash each
month to the Afghan frontier, a place without banks. Before he had a safe, he
carried thousands of dollars in his pockets. His job ranged from planning
work sites to buying shovels.

Joel Hafvenstein, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Would you describe the goal of your project in Afghanistan during the period
that you're writing about?

Mr. JOEL HAFVENSTEIN: The goal of our project was really to provide a
temporary cushion for the rural economy in Helmand province. USAID knew that
they didn't have alternatives in place to offer the farmers alternative crops,
alternative sources of credit, alternative ways of farmers to make a long-
term living, and so for that first year before they had a chance to introduce
those long-term alternatives, they ordered a couple of USAID contractors to go
into the provinces with the most poppy cultivation and to just create
short-term cash jobs. It was sort of a New Deal style project, where you've
got tens of thousands of Afghan farmers, gave them picks and shovels and sent
them out to fix up the canals, to fix up the roads, to do in a sense a
deferred maintenance on these things that had just gone into extreme disrepair
during the war years in Afghanistan.

GROSS: You know, a question you raise in your book is why would a farmer give
up the perfect crop? Why is poppy the perfect crop in Afghanistan?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, in Afghanistan, because of the long war years, a lot
of the orchards growing fruits and nuts that farmers made their living off of
before the war were destroyed or mined, the roads were wrecked, electricity
was wrecked over most of the country, and so you really need a crop that
doesn't require refrigeration, that can be transported over bad roads without
bruising or falling to bits, and then can be sold on international markets.
And opium fits that bill perfectly. Also because of the way the whole rural
economy is structured, a lot of the poor farmers there can't get access to
land unless they grow poppy. The landlords will, you know, order them to grow
poppy on this sharecrop land. And they don't have access to credit, they
can't get loans to tied them over from then they plant to when they harvest.
And the poppy traffickers will pay them at the time of planting for a certain
amount of opium at harvest. So in all those ways, poppy is better suited than
any other crop right now for farmers to make a living.

GROSS: So how many jobs did you have to create and how much money did you
have to pay in this attempt to lure people away from growing poppy?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, our aim was to pay more or less 50,000 people over
the course of one year. We were basically going to pour about $10 million in
salaries into the province. Now if there'd been a thorough going poppy
eradication program in the province, that wouldn't have actually made up more
than $10 million. Well more than $10 million is involved in Helmand province
in the poppy industry. But we thought that if there was some attempt at poppy
eradication, we would try to fill the gap with cash so that the bottom didn't
just drop out of the rural economy along with the poppy.

GROSS: One of the biggest problems you had, perhaps the biggest problem that
you had, was security. What are some of the options that you had for
providing security for your men and for protecting them, for protecting the
payroll?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, a lot of aid agencies in Afghanistan choose to go
largely unprotected in their work on the idea that if you have men with guns,
you're more likely to make a target of yourself. And initially we tried to
keep a pretty low security profile. When we sent payroll teams out to pay our
workers, then we would send police along with them, local police. But for the
most part, we tried to get by without armed guards for most of the time. And
this was at a time when Helmand province was a relative oasis of calm in the
south. So it wasn't crazy to think that we could do that. A lot of other
groups down there did. But we quickly found that because our payments were
getting us into political feuds--we'd go to a district and unbeknownst to us
we'd be paying perhaps more people from one clan than another, and that would
put our guys in danger, and we eventually got a carjacking in which a couple
of our engineers were briefly abducted from one of our work sites. And after
that, it became clear that we would need to take stronger measures to protect
our staff.

GROSS: So what are your options in terms of hiring security?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, at that point, you have the option of hiring a
private security company. I mean, we've probably all heard of Blackwater and
Dyncorp and some of these other companies that have a big presence in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But those come very expensive, and USAID, especially in
Afghanistan at that time, was reluctant to authorize the millions of dollars
that it could take to pay one of those companies to protect a project.

There was one company, security company, that did come at USAID rates, but
that was essentially because they just took these unreconstructed Afghan
militias and hired them. So these groups weren't very disciplined, they
weren't reliable, and they had their own feuds that they were carrying on.
So, really, some of the projects I worked on worked with this group, and I
just felt that, really for our project, they'd cause more trouble than they
solved. And that unfortunately left us with the only option being to work
with the local Afghan police to request from the governor of the province a
unit of Afghan police to act as security escorts for our project and to do our
best to train them and discipline them, equip them for the job.

GROSS: How effective was that?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: It was an extraordinarily difficult job. We found very
quickly that the Afghan police had all the same bad qualities as the militia
groups that we had seen working with the private security companies, because
in essence after 2002, the US and NATO focused a lot of attention on reforming
the Afghan army and have actually seen some fairly good results from that.
But police reform fell through the cracks, and as a result, the police, even
today in Afghanistan, are for the most part still militia groups, often with a
history of banditry, and it takes a vast amount of work to discipline them and
give them any sort of professional structure.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Joel Hafvenstein, and his new
book is called "Opium Season: A Year On the Afghan Frontier." And it's about
the year that he spent working for a private contractor in Afghanistan,
contracted by USAID, the US Agency for International Development, and the job
was to create projects that created jobs for people in Afghanistan as an
alternative to growing poppy.

OK, so we were talking about how big a problem security was for you and your
team. How many people did you lose?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: In May, 2005, our project was attacked, we were told by
Taliban, and initially five of our colleagues were killed out in a monitoring
visit to the field. And then the following day, the funeral convoy of one of
those casualties was attack and another six lost their lives. So 11 in total.

GROSS: How did you get the news?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: I was at that point packing to leave. I'd just got engaged
and was on my way out from the project. And I got the news of the first
attack when I was back at the guest house, tying up some loose ends. And the
following day after I'd been to the funeral of one of my friends who'd been
killed, a car screeched up and we heard the news about the funeral convoy.
And I didn't believe it. I thought it was just a rumor that had been spread
in the wake of the first attack. But then we got back to the office and I got
a call from a journalist who was with the bodies, and he said that the only
identifying mark on the six dead men was my business card, which is in the
pocket of my friend who was killed. And that was the point at which I knew
that the project was going to collapse.

GROSS: And was that the end of the project?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: It wasn't the final end of the project, but we stopped all
of our activities. We pulled out the expatriate workers, first to the PRT
military base and then to Kabul. And at this point, USAID was working on
getting a long-term project going, the long-term alternatives. And they
decided that they would just roll what was left of our project and staff into
the long-term project rather than keep it going as planned until the end of
its one-year span.

GROSS: What kind of turning point was this in your career and in your life?
And I ask this knowing that you felt a sense of personal responsibility for
the security of the men who were killed.

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: I mean, obviously it was a shattering moment. I felt that
I and my colleagues, you know, while we had had no good options to choose from
with security, obviously the option that we ended up choosing--working with
police--hadn't been enough to protect our men from being killed. And yet I
had by that point formed very close bonds with so many of the Afghans that I
worked with, and they continued to believe in the possibility of
reconstructing the country, they continued to ask for me to come back and help
them. I guess this was a turning point in that USAID and the State Department
began talking more about acceptable casualties in the reconstruction of
Afghanistan, and I resisted that and continue to resist that. I don't think
that that's an approach that we can take with these Afghan staff. But I still
am committed to the reconstruction of Afghanistan and to trying to make it
happen in a way that doesn't risk the lives of the people that we work with.

GROSS: My guest is Joel Hafvenstein. His new memoir is called "Opium Season:
A Year On the Afghan Frontier." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH
AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Joel Hafvenstein, and he's the author of the new book
"Opium Season: A Year On the Afghan Frontier." And it's about the year that
he spent heading up a project with a private contractor that was funded by the
US Agency for International Development, USAID. And this was a project whose
goal was to create jobs for people in Afghanistan to convince them to give up
growing poppy or working in the poppy economy. He's no longer working on that
project, but he's back in Afghanistan working on a similar project in a
different region in the north of Afghanistan.

Now, Joel, you spent part of your childhood in Nepal. Your father is a
missionary, and when you were growing up, you know, he was in Nepal and other
countries too?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: At that point, we were just working in Nepal. Since our
family left Nepal, he's worked in a lot of countries across Asia.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. And in fact, he goes to Afghanistan a couple of times a year,
and you did some traveling with him while you were there.

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Yes, I did.

GROSS: You write in your book, "There was a profound difference between what
had brought my father to Afghanistan and what brought me here." What are some
of the differences you see between the work that he's done abroad and your
work?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, I think when you look at this mission ethic that I
grew up with, it's people who had a really serious, long-term commitment,
vocation to help people in a particularly country. And as a result, they'd go
there and they would learn the language, they'd live there for, you know, a
decade or two. They'd be working on, you know, as doctors in the hospitals.
My father was an engineer, building hydroelectric projects in hospitals. And
by contrast, it's pretty common in the professional development industry, the
contractors for USAID, for people to take one year stints or even shorter
ones. They don't learn the language unless it's a sort of regionally useful
one, like Spanish, and there's not a commitment to the areas in the same way
that I saw growing up in that community that I lived in. And as a result, you
get these turnover problems where people are always leaving and taking their
knowledge with them, taking their achievements with them and their
relationships, and I certainly felt bad about being part of that.

GROSS: That you were one of those people who come and go...

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: That I...

GROSS: ...and doesn't make the long-term commitment.

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Well, exactly. I mean, I've been in and out of Afghanistan
since 2003, and so far the longest stint I've worked there was the six months
in Helmand.

GROSS: Oh, you do keep going back?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: There's been something about Afghanistan, the beauty of the
country, the friendships that I've made there, that does pull me back. And I
am open to and looking for possibilities to stay there for a longer term
project that I think is really making a strong positive difference.

GROSS: You know, I would think that part of the attraction of doing aid work
or any kind of service work in a developing country is the sense that, like,
your work will be valued and appreciated, you are giving of yourself to help
others. But in a situation like yours, you're in Afghanistan, and
particularly in the period you describe in the book, you know, some people
really appreciate the work you're doing, but a lot of people would prefer to
kill you because you're American and because you are against the poppy
economy, which a lot of people benefit from, and because the Taliban benefit
from the poppy. So what's it like for you knowing that you're trying to do
this in a service work, but at the same time there are a lot of people who
would like to kill you for it?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: In a way, it's encouraging. I mean, certainly it's
frightening, but it's not that the people that we're trying to help as such
are hating us and trying to kill us. The people who are trying to take over
the country and bring it back to a Taliban government, or the people who want
to keep the war economy of smuggling drugs, guns and crime going, they are
opposed to us, and they are potentially trying to kill us. But in terms of
the reward, I feel like the fact that the people we're trying to help are, by
and large, you know, show gratitude, and the people who are trying to derail
the progress in the country are trying to kill us. You know, those are both,
in a way, they show we're on the right track. It's when we have complaints
from the people who we're trying to help that it gets discouraging. It's when
projects, you know, you try to organize a project that has good effect, and
for one reason or another it is ineffective. When people complain, you know,
that's the day when you go home and feel like, `Gosh, what am I doing here? I
should just go back and be a temp in New York.'

GROSS: Does that happen much?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: It happens. It has happened in, I think, pretty much every
aid agency and development project that I've seen. It's just not an easy
thing to do. There are a lot of political forces pulling in different
directions, both US political forces and Afghan. There's a lot of ways for
well intentioned projects to slip up. But, you know, you do also see projects
that work and have a positive effect, and those, you know, that's what keeps
you getting up in the morning.

GROSS: When do you go back to Afghanistan?

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: I'll be heading back on Friday.

GROSS: Well, Joel Hafvenstein, thank you very much for talking with us. Good
luck and be safe.

Mr. HAFVENSTEIN: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: Joel Hafvenstein is the author of the new memoir "Opium Season: A
Year On the Afghan Frontier." He's still working in Afghanistan on a different
USAID project. He returns there Friday.

Coming up, Kevin Whitehead reviews a new Dewey Redmond reissue. This is FRESH
AIR.

(Announcements)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Kevin Whitehead on Dewey Redmond's "The Struggle
Continues"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Tenor saxophonist Dewey Redmond, who died last year, had recorded as a sideman
with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny and Charlie Hayden's
Liberation Music Orchestra. He also led and recorded with his own groups and
fathered another tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redmond. Jazz critic Kevin
Whitehead says Dewey Redmond never quite got the acclaim he deserved and that
a just reissued album from 1982 shows how good he really was.

(Soundbite from Dewey Redmond song)

Mr. KEVIN WHITEHEAD: Saxophonist Dewey Redmond could be tough to pin down.
A fine blues and ballad player, when the mood hit him, he could play half-hour
solos full of fire and beautifully developed ideas. Even so, some jazz fans
lumped him in with the avant garde because he first attracted attention as
alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman's sidekick in the 1960s. But even when he
played Coleman's licks, they came out in Redmond's deep, gruff, tenor voice.

(Soundbite from song)

Mr. WHITEHEAD: The resemblance between Dewey Redmond's and Ornette Coleman's
playing, they reflect their shared roots, they knew each other since high
school back in Fort Worth. In jazz, to call a saxophonist from those parts a
"Texas tenor" conveys that they have a shouting tone and a strong connection
to the blues. The label fits Redmond. This music is from his fine 1982 album
"The Struggle Continues," just back out on ECM. It shows how versatile
Redmond can be and contains what may be the heaviest blues in the ECM catalog.
It's called "Turn Over, Baby."

(Soundbite from "Turn Over, Baby")

Mr. WHITEHEAD: Dewey Redmond's quartet on "The Struggle Continues" includes
Ornette's old drummer, the New Orleans great Edward Blackwell. Bassist Mark
Harris, a Redmond regular and one of Blackwell's favorite rhythm partners, and
the too-little heard from pianist Charles Eubanks. They can push the
saxophonist hard or lay back when he wants to show off his pretty tone. It's
lustrous on the waltz "Love Is" where Redmond glides along, milking a few
phrases.

(Soundbite from "Love Is")

Mr. WHITEHEAD: Dewey Redmond's "The Struggle Continues," with five of his
tunes plus Charlie Parker's "Dewey Square," was his best bid for the
widespread success that always eluded him. Redmond never quite succeeded in
getting lumped with modern tenor masters like Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Heath and
Clifford Jordan. In the '90s, it made me cringe when Dewey would introduce
himself on stage as Joshua Redmond's father. No disrespect to the younger Mr.
Redmond, but his dad was the man. His records could be problematic for
various reasons, but "The Struggle Continues" plays to Dewey Redmond's
strengths as much as any album he ever made. That's good reason to be glad
it's back.

(Soundbite from song)

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead teaches English and American studies at the University
of Kansas, and he's a jazz columnist for emusic.com. He reviewed the Dewey
Redmond reissue "The Struggle Continues."

You can download podcasts of our show on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.