In this five-minute video, we can hear an Afghanistani official's opinion and will to follow official, nation-building policy; the best-faith efforts of an Afghanistan soldier who is supervising poppy eradication, an enormous manpower effort on one field of many. This is followed by an attack by Taliban forces on U.S. troops; and the troops’ return to safety. The videographer was slightly wounded in the third part of this video: for the squeamish among you–there is no blood shown. The continuance of the video also teaches us about the stoicism of personnel (in this case, our video producer) under fire and (through our own imagination) other unsavory conditions.
What it represents to me is the diffusion of effort: strong feelings by ISAF-member countries have translated fairly well into official discourse with English-speaking Afghanistani politicians; the English and the goodwill is permeating Afghanistan's troops at least on a selective basis. There is also an undercurrent of wishing to please the narrator/videographer by saying the acceptable thing.
Then we leave eradication totally–and into specific security constraints and in a way, the larger security picture. Like eradication efforts, this video is a stop-start affair, disparate and scattered. Therefore, it gives us a powerful trope under which we can look at the structure and the dissipation of many bona fide efforts to change Afghanistan's economy.
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Note: According to new Pentagon public relations strictures, the public will be less able to obtain information from troop videographers and bloggers. The official reason is that too much bandwidth is being taken up by non-official communication. The link above also links to the official DoD memo of May 11th, 2007.
