Hafvenstein, Joel

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Hafvenstein, Joel

PERSONAL:

Male.

CAREER:

International development consultant, analyst of South and Central Asia, and writer. Worked with Chemonics, an international aid contractor, in Afghanistan.

WRITINGS:

Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier (memoir), Lyons Press (Guilford, CT), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times and Commonweal.

SIDELIGHTS:

International aid worker Joel Hafvenstein went to Helmand, Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century to work on a project designed to persuade Afghan farmers to stop cultivating poppies, the source of opium and the mainstay of the Afghan economy. Ill-prepared for the job, he encountered difficulties both absurd and tragic, chronicling them in his memoir Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier. Hafvenstein describes conditions in which vast amounts of American money flowed into Afghanistan, intended to fund a wide array of economic-stimulus endeavors that did not work. He also chronicles how local authorities selectively enforced the poppy ban, while turning a blind eye to large-scale opium production; routine bloody vendettas, often blamed on the Taliban but quite possibly the retaliatory actions of angry poppy growers; and aid workers who remained clueless about the complex, and sometimes deadly, political realities that continue to structure Afghan economics. As a Registan.net reviewer stated, Opium Season is a "memoir of failures."

For many readers, the blame for these conditions rests squarely on the ignorance and arrogance of aid organizations and their employees. Money sent to Afghanistan, Hafvenstein shows, was not intended to fund projects that would be self-sustaining, but to create stop-gap measures aimed only at the elimination of that year's poppy crop. Instead of gaining intimate knowledge of the culture in which they operate, development workers, the Registan.net reviewer continued, "treat their jobs as little more than adventure tourism." The failure of Hafvenstein's program is evident in the numbers: the harvest that followed the introduction of his project yielded eighty-seven percent of the world's entire opium production. "We had come to Helmand thinking of opium as the local currency, and had tried to replace it with cash," he observes in Opium Season. "But security was the real currency of Afghanistan. The traumatized population of Helmand would trade anything for it, follow anyone who could offer it."

New York Times Book Review contributor William Grimes described Opium Season as a "wrenching account of lofty hopes and bitter disappointments [that sheds] a dismal light on American efforts to improve the lot of ordinary Afghans." Although the Registan.net reviewer felt that these failures were the result of organizational hubris, Grimes mentioned the book's many examples of local corruption—including the involvement of Helmand's governor in the opium trade—as evidence that conditions were far from simple. A Publishers Weekly contributor found Hafvenstein's inside perspective "revealing if narrowly critical," while Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman hailed Opium Season as a "strong first book laden with urgent information and stinging political insights."