American commanders are preparing for a major offensive in Afghanistan to attack one of the most formidable enemies we face in country: corruption.    Despite sincere efforts to promote governance and accountability initiatives, Afghanistan has slipped from 112th to158th place on Transparency International’s global corruption index.   One reason the international community has been unable to effectively tackle corruption in Afghanistan is that our own reconstruction efforts perpetuate the problem. As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently acknowledged, “Corruption, frankly… is not all an Afghan problem.”   Money appropriated to secure and stabilize the country is too easily siphoned and redirected as it changes hands, inevitably making its way to local powerbrokers, insurgent networks, and offshore bank accounts, rather than the individuals who need it most. One solution to this problem lies in the palm of our hands: the mighty cell phone.

When Americans first entered Afghanistan in 2001 there was little infrastructure and no banking system in an entirely cash economy. Nine years later it is still a cash economy and 97% of the country remains “unbanked”, but Afghanistan’s thriving telecom industry offers a way to minimize graft. From a standing start, Afghanistan now boasts a cellular network of 12 million cell phones in country of 28 million. Mobile technology is the largest legal, taxpaying industry in Afghanistan and the single greatest economic success story in the country since the fall of the Taliban. The existing network also offers a proven way to help defeat corruption.

In 2009, the Afghan National Police began a test to pay salaries through mobile telephones, rather than in cash. It immediately found that at least 10% of its payments had been going to ghost policemen who didn’t exist; middlemen in the police hierarchy were pocketing the difference.  Salaries for Afghan police and soldiers are calculated to be competitive with Taliban salaries, but beat cops and deployed soldiers had been receiving only a fraction of the amount paid by US taxpayers because of corruption in the payment system.  Most Afghan cops assumed that they had been given a significant raise, when, in fact, they simply received their full pay for the first time--over the phone.

As the US enters a critical year in Afghanistan with unprecedented amounts of international assistance and contracting dollars on the table, mobile money allows Afghanistan to immediately leap from a cash economy to a mobile money e-commerce system. The existing national cellular network can create a banking system without bricks, mortar—or corruption. There is no better system than mobile currency for transparency to monitor transactions at every level of government, from the military to civil servants. Mobile currency in Afghanistan has already demonstrated the capacity to support salary payroll, limited merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers, loan disbursements and payments. The gains from mobile money far outweigh the risks and costs, many of which can be easily mitigated. As mobile money becomes the “e-hawala”, it will be secured by Know Your Client (KYC) and digital encryption to match payments with intended recipients while also logging all transactions for full transparency.

The US cannot continue to support the status quo in a corrupt Afghanistan. Using mobile technology to transmit all US government payments from secure banking facilities to dispersed recipients in theater would have an immediate and dramatic impact on the economy and efforts to reduce corruption going forward.  This system has significant positive implications for Afghan capacity building and governance.

Imagine if the US required that all payments to Afghans be made by mobile funds transfer. The soldiers and police, as well as their families, their friends and the entire economy, would adopt it in order to prosper. The 243,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces can lead their nation into a mobile banking system that will set conditions for many other positive second and third-order effects by increasing the speed, security, convenience and reliability of salary payments for Afghan workers.  Mobile currency pilot programs have demonstrated a clear path that improves conditions for Afghans today and establishes credit necessary for Afghans to build an economic foundation for tomorrow.  Increased transparency and effectiveness that will follow from e-currency will help the US gain legitimacy as an honest broker while making serious progress in curtailing existing predatory practices. By mandating mobile money for all Coalition payrolls in Afghanistan, we could truly begin to win the trust and good faith of the Afghan people, one cell phone at a time.

Dan Rice is the President of Sundial Capital Partners.  Guy Filippelli is the CEO and President of Berico Technologies.  Both are West Point graduates who have served as Army officers in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively.

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12 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

During the Thailand fighting in May, the rain of media mixed with the dust of politics, creating mud that left honest people feeling bogged down.  People desiring clarity slogged knee deep, then waist deep, and it kept coming.

My reports avoided politics largely because I do not understand Thai politics.  There can be value in this, just as a Korean, for instance, can come to the United States and observe from a “here and now” perspective and, quite possibly—if he sticks to what he sees and not what people tell him to see—render a more accurate observation from a riot.  The “mouths of babes” are not restricted to children.

For many Americans, Asia is a murky, mysterious place inhabited by primitive people and repressive governments.  We see what we expect to see.  Mixing that with muddy journalism, many people at home in America seemed to think the Thai government was slaughtering helpless protesters in Bangkok.  This was untrue.

Many people—and even some journalists who were present—espoused that protesters were unarmed.  Some clearly were armed and to miss this would be egregious journalistic malpractice.  If a medical doctor missed something so big, a lawsuit might be the least of his problems; he’d probably lose his license to practice.

This story ran in Thailand:

CNN, BBC fully deserve criticism
By Dave Sherman

Special to The Nation

Dan Rivers' assertion that CNN's coverage of the crackdown on the red-shirt protest was "impartial" ("CNN, BBC correspondents defend coverage", The Nation, June 12) is simply untrue. The misinformation, generalisations and biases seen on CNN and BBC cannot be easily excused, especially because these reports brought the story of Thailand's conflict to the world - and the story the world saw was not the story of what actually happened.

The point is not that CNN didn't report that some of the red shirts were armed or show those armed men to the viewers. This they did. Where CNN and Rivers failed is in properly explaining the context of what was happening during the May 14-19 crackdown - and without proper context, understanding the story becomes impossible.

When Dan Rivers reported on May 14 that soldiers were firing on protesters, whom Rivers repeatedly insisted were unarmed, he was misinforming his viewers. He was omitting the fact that the soldiers were firing defensively on men who had been attacking them all morning with makeshift weapons, guns and grenades after the Army tried to secure a perimeter around the protest zone. Rivers did not mention that such red-shirt assaults were part of a long-standing pattern of militancy. The red shirts had been attacking legal authorities and civilians for weeks - invading Parliament and Thaicom, beating and killing military officials, fatally attacking peaceful anti-red-shirt demonstrators in Silom, and storming Chulalongkorn Hospital, forcing it to evacuate its patients.

CNN, BBC fully deserve criticism

Insurgencies are like animals, and veterinarians deal with many sorts of animals.  Polar bears are different from kangaroos are different from dogs, and every sort of dog has different qualities and issues.  A highly experienced and equally determined veterinarian could probably spend a year explaining differences between cats and dogs, then switch hats a spend years explaining similarities.  The same is true with insurgencies.  Each is very different and similar.

Today, the insurgency in greater Thailand is in a pediatric stage.  It’s still in a condition that it’s small enough and sufficiently in control that an observer can make out the parts.  If a war matures, it will grow long hair; it will become wild and confusing to everyone.  (The Islamic issue in the deep south is far more mature but also limited.)

In Thailand, there are main morphological influence features that are still easy to discern.  Various powerful influence groups exist within Thailand and the latest Bangkok confrontation brought certain actors onto the stage: most visible were the Red Shirts and the government.  Less visible but crucially important were outside actors, which includes ex Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and agitators under his employ or influence.

The agitators definitely existed.  I saw and photographed some of them.

Luckily, there is zero tribal influence and religion is more spectator than participant here, and in any case is ointment not fuel.

Many observers—including many journalists—seemed to view this simplistically as a “Red Shirt” uprising where the peaceful poor were fighting for justice and equality, yet in reality this is a platypus.  If there be a symbol that best describes the insurgencies I have seen, that symbol might be the Platypus, or a Mr. Potato Head.  The Platypus, Mr. Potato Head, and insurgencies worldwide seem to be made out of spare parts.

The Men in Black seemed to have snapped themselves onto Red Shirts.  Here some agitators are setting tires ablaze just before bullets start flying.

Overlooking Red camp near Lumpini Park, Bangkok.

Inside Red shirtless camp.

Just outside Red camp.

Inside Red camp at a temple where children were brought.  An impartial observer likely would say they were using children as human shields.

During some light fighting.

Massages were available inside the Red Shirt camp and the Army was allowing food and other supplies inside.  The camp had generators and portable toilets.  At one point, before I arrived, Red Shirts stormed a hospital and undermined a substantial part of their support base.

The government and Red Shirts seemed to be playing chess, and the government’s strategy seemed to avoid a push for a decisive win, while playing smart to minimize mistakes to capitalize on Red Shirt missteps.  The Reds seemed more emotional.  Many protestors were living on the streets for many weeks, and so seemed more apt to blunder, though others live and work in Bangkok and were known to join the protests after work.  The government took pressure from some Thais who thought the Army should take a tough line and eject the protesters from the crucial business center, which amounts to Times Square in New York, but what I saw was a government who was—at great expense and also risk—wearing down the numbers of protesters.  Slowly, slowly, more protesters were turning home, shrinking what might have been tens of thousands to what might now be five thousand.  The numbers of protestors was a contentious, subjective subject.  As with the so-called “Million Man March” in America, interests were vested.  Some would have downgraded it to the “The Thousand Guys Get Together” while others would have inflated it to the “Billion Man Revolution.”

Most of the protestors were poor and nobody was keeping the secret that they were being paid to stay.  Some are believed to have earned more to protest than they could earn by going home.  You could see food trucks roll up, and people would line up to eat without paying, and so it was impossible, at least for me, to discern who was there for ideological reasons versus, perhaps, just a temporary job as a paid protestor or maybe something in between.  Out on the streets, in the protest camp, were industrial-sized generators, similar to what our people use in Iraq and Afghanistan, running the Red Shirt fans, lights and televisions out on the streets.  It was commonly reported that the people were living rough, and compared to my hotel they certainly were, but compared to the way many of our troops live in Afghanistan, the Reds were living easy with foot massages available just next to the ice-cold Red Bull, and the popcorn-cooking lady, and the beer vendor, and they were in the middle of Bangkok and the Army allowed them to freely come and go.

Interestingly, whereas tourism—amounting to about 10% of the economy—was gutted, Prime Minister Abhisit would later tell me that the overall economy continued to grow.  Many articles published in international business publications lent support to PM Abhisit’s words.  And so the apparent plan to bleed the Thai government was not working in the broad sense.

During mid-May, as the protests were reaching climax, the government seemed to be moving wisely.  Though people losing money were angry, on a holistic national level, most people would forget the huge sums of money lost, especially given that the damage on the whole was not sinking Thailand, though many businesses—probably many thousands reliant on tourism—were bleeding bright red.  Still, bleeding cash does not make for dramatic photos or journalism; bleeding cash never grabs the eyes like real blood.  Whereas probably thousands of businesses were going bankrupt, they died quietly, while every human death would be magnified a hundred times and dragged through the streets for decades.  There was a classic leadership dilemma.  For someone who apparently had not fought a major counterinsurgency—or perhaps due to some sharp and bloody “feedback” after government mistakes fighting the separatist insurgency in the south—Prime Minister Abhisit seemed to be making decisions that even General David Petraeus might have acknowledged as masterful.

The government seemed to be playing a shrewd, long strategy and their short game mostly revolved around not allowing themselves to be baited out, preferring to bleed more cash than blood, which seemed to frustrate the remaining Red Shirts, whose leadership was trying to instigate violence, while circumventing rational thought with highly charged, emotional messages.  The “man behind the curtain” clearly understands that an arsonist only needs to succeed once, but for the life of him he had not been able to provoke Thailand into civil war.  He was throwing matches hoping to start a fire, while Abhisit mostly shot back with water.

Inside the Red camp politics were thick—after all, this was politics in red ink in every sense.  Much of the propaganda was in English, though few of the Reds spoke English.  The Reds were doing a better job of conveying their message, and this was strangely similar to Iraq and ever increasingly in Afghanistan.  The Reds seemed to be winning English-speaking media ground for several reasons. (I later met with top government press officials and suspicions were confirmed.)  These reasons were similar to what we saw in particular with Iraq.

1)    The Reds had more media “mass.”  As we see in Afghanistan now, ANYBODY can get out the Taliban message, but only the Coalition can get out the Coalition message.  To be clear—I have friends who are Red Shirts and am not comparing them to Taliban.  My Red Shirt friends are peaceful and we talk and have dinner often and have travelled around Thailand together over the last couple years.  This comparison is one of insurgent to government, not of Reds to Taliban.  Bottom line: Communications are excellent in Thailand and techno-savvy is common.  With cell phones, Internet, and venues such as Facebook and Twitter, information flies faster than bullets, and in total the Reds have more mass.

2)    Despite having more mass, the Reds have less media inertia.  We see this in Afghanistan where the Taliban often can run circles around us.

3)    Western media tends to have bias for underdogs, and especially so in areas where we suspect the governments of being overly corrupt or forceful.  In other words, we have a built-in media bias and this is likely due more to experience than some natural propensity.

In regard to the United States and United Kingdom, despite having highly trained, career media officers in our militaries who spend enormous amounts of money hiring outside consultants, our opponents and enemies often overwhelm us with mass, outrun us, and outmaneuver us with experimentation.  They evolve quicker.  After talking for hours over a couple different days with Thai media specialists, the parallels with the U.S./U.K. were clear.  In short, the Thai government will be held to a far higher standard, while the media bias will severely punish their mistakes while tending to overlook transgressions from the underdog.

And so the government was wise to keep its inevitable mistakes to a minimum.  They will be punished for every mistake and misrepresentation, while Red Shirt mistakes and flagrant propaganda will seem to evaporate into thin air.

Another “secret weapon” (if accidental) was that the Red Shirt protestors, being Thai to begin with, were very polite and friendly.  This is normal Thai.  However, when the Reds saw a camera, suddenly you were treated extra special.  One could sense “Stockholm Syndrome” setting in among some of the journalists, but not so much among others.  Though Thaksin hired public relations experts and there were talking points about dictatorship and democracy, the biggest secret weapon was Red Shirts just being friendly.  It’s difficult to write bad words against sincerely friendly, peaceful people.  The Men in Black are a different story.

The undeniable reality is that most of the Reds are peaceful.  But this is a platypus, and part of this animal is poison.  (Male platypuses actually are venomous.)  The violent agitators are energetic and clearly were using terrorism with their bombs, firearms, and arson.  I am suspicious of people who spend effort claiming they are not terrorists.

This man was giving a speech under the “PEACEFUL PROTESTORS NOT TERRORISTS” banner, while wearing a breaker advertising the Beretta 92FS pistol. U.S. forces likely would recognize this as the pistol they are issued.  This man was talking in front of the cameras.  What message was he trying to convey?  Peaceful, or Pistol?  The message was clear: GUN.

Day and night speeches echoed through loudspeakers spread up and down the streets of the protest area.  I do not speak Thai and so the specific messages were mostly lost on me though I used translators at times.  None of the western journalists I spoke with could speak Thai.  The violence and heavy emotions coming from the speakers at night was as unmistakable as thunder.  There were other unmistakable parts that seemed to fall through the cracks.

Inside Red camp a man shows a shotshell of the type used by the Army.

It is widely accepted, and I believe to be true, that billionaire and ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was funding the protests—or at least was majorly contributing to the funding—which from simple observation must have cost tens of millions of dollars.  Though I have read thick stacks of articles and talked with seemingly endless numbers of people, ranging from farmers to political elite, to foreigners who have lived here for years or even decades, the political intrigues provide endless speculative fancy, though nobody in any camp: yellow, red, government, “neutral,” doubts that Thaksin is in the middle of these troubles.

Missing from analysis but jumping out to me on Day 1 (actually several years ago in Thailand) were echoes of communism among the Reds.  Having spent some years in communist or formerly communist countries, the signs are clear, such as when you walk into an old house and smell rats, cats, or bats.  Once your nose is tuned to the smell, it will leap out despite that someone else might say you are imagining things.   Some journalists sensed the communist smell, while others missed it or would not entertain the thought.

There also seems to be a clear desire to overthrow the Monarchy, despite that the King has done a great deal for Thailand and is a man of peace.  From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem that the loss of the King of Thailand would be a huge loss for Thailand, and would also be a significant loss of a friend of the United States.  The King has been a major cause for social progress, such as in promulgating religious tolerance.  In Washington, I spoke at length with General (ret.) Barry McCaffrey—a former American “Drug Czar”—about the opium problem in Afghanistan.  General (ret.) McCaffrey lamented that one of the problems the international community faces in Afghanistan is that it does not have someone like King Bhumibol of Thailand, who, according to General McCaffrey, said that growing opium is not Thai.  It’s immoral.  That, and tangible government action along with eradication and alternative crops, essentially vanquished the issue.  There is no such moral authority in Afghanistan (or nearly anywhere), matching that.

Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, tribes and religion are not factors, nor are Warlords, though some will say “mafias” or patronage networks play a major part.  Unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines where ethnicities are factors leading to serious killing, ethnicity and racism are crucial factors in Thailand but have not led to the recent bone-crushing seen elsewhere.  Racism is a deep and seriously exacerbating problem in Thailand and plays into the scheme of the Thai platypus.  A retired U.S. Special Forces soldier living in Thailand said to me, “Race is a monstrous factor here.”

Slingshots against guns comprised much of the skewed narrative.  A photographer could easily caption this photo, “Courageous resistance uses slingshots to take on heavily armed Thai Army.”  There is truth because that is exactly what he was doing—respect for his courage—and this makes for a heroic narrative that places the journalist in a romantic position.  In reality, some of these guys had heavy weapons and would commit massive arson against even small shop owners who had no more money or power than a hardworking farmer.

The scene was great for dramatic photography, and the more we trump up the danger, the more heroic correspondents become.  Which wasn’t hard to do this time; it was no-kidding dangerous.

Helicopters seldom flew.

Mostly desolate streets.

These soldiers were moving with purpose.  The heavy protest had been going on for about two months but I could recognize that look on soldiers.  Something was about to happen and so I published that it was about to go down, and some days later it did.

The Reds watched.

The Army watched.

The media watched and the people watched the media.

And then the finale on 19 May 2010.

Red Shirt barricades burned.  The Thai Army killed, arrested or dispersed the protests.  In total, about 90 people were killed over the many weeks—including civilians and soldiers apparently hit by protestors—and about 1,900 were wounded.

Protesters set nearly 40 buildings ablaze, while some journalists continued to espouse that they were peaceful.

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Published: 07 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

During the Bangkok fighting in May, radio interviewers back America kept asking about the overuse of force by the Thai Army.  I answered that’s not happening, and there seem to be hundreds of journalists crawling over the streets, and I see them with cameras on tripods on balconies (like mine was) or peering through windows.  How could the Thai government hide a herd of elephants in front of all those cameras?

If there was a slaughter—where are the photos and videos?

There was a curfew at night but many journalists could see the streets from their rooms – I know because many were neighbors -- and the Red Shirts had their own phones and radios, and cameras.  If the Thai Army were performing a slaughter, we would have caught it.

If the Army committed atrocities with probably hundreds of journalists present, and nobody caught it, then we are all incompetent.  This is Pulitzer territory.  If a journalist catches the Army on film executing people, or murdering people who are trying to surrender, that journalist is in for some sort of prize.   If a journalist is not guided by morality, he definitely would be fired by ambition.  Morality, ambition, or both would have demanded exposure.

A huge message can be falsely conveyed with five true words: Thai Army.  Protestors.  Eighty-eight killed.

What I saw—any journalist who was there who missed this should be labeled incompetent—was a large group of protestors with honest grievances, and a small group of agitators who clearly, unmistakably, were seeking violent confrontation with the government.  These agitators were throwing firebombs, committing arson, and shooting grenades and small arms.  (The preponderance of evidence was overwhelming—plus I saw them with my own eyes committing some of these acts and photographed agitators in action.)

There are journalists both foreign and Thai who dismiss these agitators and hold the line that the violence was due to the Thai government.

Important note: I make no representation about what happened before or elsewhere, only here and now.  Much of the here and now reporting was flatly wrong, bringing question upon previous reporting.

The photo above was taken during actual clearance operations.  The Red Shirts were at this point being compressed like a piston.  Combat-experienced people know what usually happens when an adversary is compressed like a piston.  Either they will begin to surrender or will fire.  They fired.

Enormous respect is owed to the courageous journalists who stayed and kept the Army honest.  It’s only realistic that with such large numbers around, and bullets flying, journalists are probably going to get hit.

Sometimes you get killed because you willingly went into combat:

CPJ calls for Thailand to investigate journalist killings.

Unidentified photographer: Have seen the New York Times use panoramic cameras like that in Iraq.

Often just a waiting game.  This was inside what had just been the Red camp.

One night there was heavy gunfire and also I could see firebombs coming from the Red Shirt camp, and plenty of dangerous fireworks.  (The firebombs that I saw were only going into the street.)  One firework came straight at my window and hit low on a floor below.  These were not gigantic fireworks but if you got hit, at a minimum you were going to the hospital.  They were easily as deadly as bullets.  If you got hit in the foot, your foot would be mangled.  Hit in the head, probably dead or mentally incapacitated from there out.  During daytime, I had seen a firework barely miss some journalists, and when the rockets hit buildings they sometimes blew off small pieces of structure.   Nothing serious unless you took a hit.  Like bullets.  Some people argued that protestors only had fireworks.  How many people might have been seriously wounded or even killed by those rockets and other projectiles?

That night, I was talking on the phone with a wounded Special Forces veteran living in Bangkok, who has a love for Thailand and so pays close attention to the goings-on.  For the last couple months, his advice and predictions had been accurate.  Each day he had encouraged me to talk with Seh Daeng, the rogue General, who had joined the Red Shirt camp.  After some homework and finally reaching the point where I was ready to ask for a meeting, BANG, Seh Daeng was shot in the head somewhere down the road.  The General later died.  Later I would ask Prime Minister Abhisit who shot Seh Daeng, and he said he didn’t know.

Meanwhile, I was telling people that Brigadier General Daniel Menard and General Stanley McChrystal both needed to be fired from Afghanistan, which was causing my own bad press.  Busy days and nights.  People were saying I had seen too much combat in the wars and had gone loony for saying two respected generals should be fired.  (Soon they were both fired.)

Several friends had warned me about staying at Dusit Thani.  While on the phone with the old Special Forces soldier from my 9th Floor room Dusit Thani hotel, there had been much shooting outside and BOOM.  “What the fxxx was that!?” my friend said over the phone.  Whooom whoooom whom whoooom whoooom whooom whom whooooom whom whooom.  “What the fxxx was THAT?” he said again on the phone.  The boom obviously was an explosion, while the whoooom whooom was new to me even after thousands of previous explosions in the wars.  It was loud in real life, but you know how things can be even louder on the telephone.  “No idea what the whooom whooom was bro!  But I think the BOOM probably was 40mm grenade.”  I thought it must have hit down in the parking lot.  (Actually, it detonated three floors above me and the whoooom whooomm was metal siding hurtling downwards.)

My room was dark and I peered through a crack in a curtain with two fingers while talking to my friend on the cell with the right hand.

The hotel alarm sounded so I called the front desk and someone said to get to the basement, and so I made a quick Facebook entry and headed down the fire escape.

Journalists crowded in the basement and some were kitted up.

Amazing how fast the news travels.

I thought this girl had been hit by a grenade (or something) but later learned she had only passed out from fear and was okay.

The hotel staff was professional and calm.  They were part of the solution, not the problem, and were looking out after guests even at the expense of their own safety.

I sneaked back up the staircase to my room and three men came looking, ducking low while entering my room with their own key, but they let me stay with no problems.  Fear was painted over their faces.

The grenade strike at Dusit Thani hotel.   The closed the hotel the next morning and I was the last to check out.

On 19 May, combat and clearing operations were underway.  Journalists were keeping the Army honest and taking their chances.  Who was keeping the journalists honest?  [Photos in this dispatch are not in chronological or geographical order, but are thematically arranged.]

Clusters of permissive soldiers might make you feel safe, but in fact they are the target of the guys with the grenade launchers and there had been death and casualties.  There is a misconception about combat reporting done in Iraq and Afghanistan: many people think it’s safer to be with troops.  This is untrue.  It’s safer to go unilateral.   The journalists were mostly hanging close to the troops but I got back.

There were many dramatic moments and many others like this.

The hotel let journalists recharge batteries.

Before it closed, Dusit Thani kept doors chained and were blacked out at night, but restaurants still were open inside.

Parking lot of Dusit Thani as bullets are snapping by on 14 May.  This guy seemed like he had done this before.  He didn’t run from bullets, but didn’t smile.  Men who have not see much combat often will smile broadly during their first encounters, especially when the bullets are close enough to call it combat but far enough away that you don’t feel like you are actually going to get hit.  When you seriously feel like you are going to get hit, you stop smiling.  After combat with heavy results you never smile again during combat.  You just do your job, if you are still able.

Noppatjak still smiling.

Lots of people were getting in on the action, including former massage parlor king Chuwit Kamolvisit who showed up with a video just before some shooting.

And there was even a cameraman for Chuwit Kamolvisit.

One agitator even said not to film despite that dozens of cameras were around.  His efforts were fruitless.

One of the infamous “Men in Black” (wearing “Army” vest) singled out that guy with camera, said something and came back across the street.

I had been under the bridge to the left but sensed that shooting was going to break out (14 May) so crossed the street back to Dusit Thani parking lot.  Shooting soon started and bullets began cracking down this road flying from the direction of the traffic arrow.

I was told that a taxi driver was shot and killed.  (Much was going on and I don’t know the truth.)

Soon after an ambulance raced away from the scene.

This camera crew walked out onto the street and seemed likely to get hit.  The cameraman will have to focus on the gear and linger for a good shot.

Protestors who were holding their ground during a skirmish stopped to warn the film crew to get back under the bridge.

Camera crew heeded the advice.

Most of the journalists were collegial.  There were a few snippety cats—mostly foreigners—whose “beat” is Thailand.  I’ve only been to Thailand maybe twenty times so can’t claim great cultural understanding, which brought advantages and disadvantages.  Some of those who have been here for years have picked up more on the culture and situations but also seem to have lost the advantage of neutrality.

Journalists kept hunkering down behind that box and this is something that must be understood when big fighting starts.  Competent enemies know where you are going to take cover.

By now, I’ve switched to the “writing” mode and pulled across the street for more safety.  I stayed back from the corners behind the kill radius of the 40mm grenades that were sometimes being launched apparently by “Men in Black.”  (None launched at this time.)  The Army easily could have killed these protestors but did not.

Journalists in war zones often ask the military for proof.  Show me the money.  That’s what we need.  Journalists who say: Show Me the Money.  And now it’s the journalist’s turn: Show Us the Money.  There are countless videos and photos out there of people being hit – such as a journalist being hit by gunfire.  But where is the footage of soldiers actually massacring unarmed civilians?  There are countless videos of protestors using weapons.  Arson.  Guns.  Grenades.  The overarching theme remained: Thai Army.  Protestors.  Almost 90 killed.   Some journalists did convey fuller stories of the realities – there are always the good ones – yet the theme remained one of disproportionate force by the Thai government.  This was untrue during the fighting I witnessed.  The government used far more restraint than Americans ever would have stomached if similar street violence erupted at home.  We would have expected shoot to kill orders after weeks of such violence.  (Or even hours.)

The photographers who wanted the great shots needed to get closer to the action.  By now most photographers were preserving life and limb, but this guy is out there getting the images.  Battle is a strange thing; at this moment the Army is hundreds of meters down the road but they could get here literally in seconds in armored vehicles, or in a quick helicopter move, or snipers on the roof, or just maneuvering from multiple directions.  As a writer, there is nothing that can be seen there under the bridge that can’t be seen from my safer distance, but the photographer must take the risk if he wants better photos.

Sometimes you have to risk getting shot to get the shot.

It’s a numbers game, as you shall soon see.

The photographer in blue appears to be Canadian Chandler Vandergrift, who would be seriously hit on 19 May.

Mr. Vandergrift stuck it out.  His photography is world class, and when you see some of the images he captured it causes one to wonder how he escaped so long without getting hit.

And finally he and others were hit.

WARNING: Graphic images.

(Notice the courageous journalists helping the wounded soldier.)

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Published: 05 July 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

This journalist was all over the place.  She stood out from the crowd for obvious reasons.  One evening, as the sun was setting, she was walking down a mostly desolate street not far from Dusit Thani hotel, and she was alone with that little camera.  Soldiers were here and there, and I thought, “That’s a brave woman.” She walked by and I never said hello.  On another day, she walked by and I was talking with some journalist whose name I never got, and said that if she took off that helmet and body armor you might think she is just another pretty face, but she’s not just another pretty face, is she?  The journalist said that he had once seen her at another time, and she was curled up on the ground, sleeping by a trash can, and he said she is a brave one indeed.

On another day there had been much fighting and some journalists were out in the middle of it but I did not go to the middle.  I watched from the edges as a writer instead of a photographer, but this one apparently had dived in because he was sweating and more covered in soot than this photo seems to reveal.

Despite the danger, witnesses were out there, seemingly by the hundreds.

Often the journalists waited, as do soldiers.

(Note: Photos in this dispatch are not in chronological or “geographic” order, but are ordered thematically.  This is not a comprehensive accounting of the Bangkok fighting.  There are probably thousands of accounts online.)

This was a strange battle area.  Surrounded by modern buildings, nice hotels and the trappings of a modern city, you could dive into a 7-Eleven for a cold drink.  I tried to buy tampons in case of bullet wounds but tampons are hard to come by in Thailand, so, having left my gear in Afghanistan, I bought pads instead.

Any helmet was better than none.  Protestors often used slingshots with iron ingots, lugnuts, marbles and rocks.

Cameras everywhere.

The world was watching.

Nowhere to hide.

Must have been hundreds of journalists from many countries.

This is Nattha Komolvadhin from Thai PBS.  There was some fighting going on here this day.  I got to talk with her at length during an interview much later.  Very sharp journalist complete with a PhD.

There was fighting just here on the street.

Journalists wore green armbands.  This man was also wearing a red cross.  Maybe he was playing it double safe, but the best insurance against getting shot is to not be here, or to wear body armor.

Base of Dusit Thani hotel.

Was hot but not as bad as Afghanistan or Iraq.

Often it was hard to tell if they were journalists, tourists or maybe soldiers undercover.  Saw some guys who looked far too fit and military to be journalists, and they wore the same types of shoes.

Rama IV road just near Lumpini Park.

Skirmishes happened in many places over a period of weeks.  I was there only about ten days.  My guess was that freelancers and those from small companies were mostly without body armor.

After bullets started flying, numerous journalists at different times sought cover behind this green box.

Most amazing is how quickly information was flowing.  Every decent phone is a camera.  Facebook.  Twitter.  Real-time vignettes flew around the world far faster than bullets.

With war reporting, the danger levels usually go like this:  Most dangerous is video work.  Second is still photography.  Third is writing.  Safest might be painting: I say this because a famous British fine artist once painted soldiers straight off my photos -- without my knowledge or authorization -- indicating she had been in battles she had never seen.  She was making gobs of money in a London art gallery while getting significant international press, all while pretending to have been there.    (Amazing that a famous painter would rip-off an internationally known photographer apparently while expecting to not get caught.)

With still photography you can, at times at least, reach around and get a quick shot.  But there are those pesky rules of combat: if you can see them, they can see you.  If you can hit them, they can hit you.

With video, the gear often is bigger and it takes longer to get good shots.  Worse still, the shooter must focus more on the camera.

Soldiers only have to focus on the environment.  Interestingly, as a writer, if you talk “too much” with soldiers or government officials, you’ll likely be called a pawn or a stooge, but if you hang out with arsonists you might be called an intrepid researcher.

This journalist came around during some fighting.  He looked distressed and I asked if he was okay and he talked about someone who was hit.

This man also came from the direction of someone who was hit and I thought he might have seen it but I didn’t ask.

Just waiting.

Some of the body armor didn’t look so serious.  This body armor might create more work for the surgeon: after the journalist gets wheeled in, she might look at the X-Ray, pull the mask over her face, and realize she was going to have to dig out the bullet and pieces of the body armor.

Some of the helmets were made for a different job.

Tourist maybe?  I didn’t know but there was fighting just here.  Journalists are not screened from Thailand and require no special visas or permissions, and tourists definitely were coming and going from the fighting area.  Sounds like the U.S. government is today censoring the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico more than the Thais were doing here.  (The Thai government was censoring some websites, illegal radio stations and so forth, but I saw zero battlefield censorship.)

There were rumors of death threats from some protestors to journalists, but most protestors were not threatening.  There was serious fighting over the weeks with about 90 people killed and around 1,900 wounded.

Thai TV 3 was targeted and the building burned.

“At least 27 buildings and locations were on fire as of 9 p.m. local time, including the Thai TV 3 building, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority, Siam Theatre, several banks and part of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, officials said.”

Noppatjak Attanon (blue shirt) spent some time in America and played football in high school.  Noppatjak was among many courageous Thai journalists who got close enough to get burned.  Ultimately it’s probably far more dangerous for Thai journalists than for foreign correspondents, though foreign correspondents were taking casualties. Noppatjak is famous in Thailand and he works at “The Nation” which was also specifically threatened by militants.  I went to their offices to be interviewed and soldiers were guarding it against attack.  I spent some time with Noppatjak on the street.  He is instantly recognized.  Journalism can at times be more dangerous than soldiering.

Nothing is more powerful than still photography, though in the journalism world, photographers are often deemed the lowest rung.  “Shooters” are often seen as fungible and hirable like taxis.  Yet the truly top-notched shooters, that top percent, are not fungible, and can be a force unto themselves.  Still photography is—in my opinion as a writer—by far the most powerful and versatile method to convey powerful messages quickly and broadly.  Nothing else comes close.  Not video, not writing, not portraiture or radio or telephone interviews.  Still photography is the Big Gun of war reporting.

And yet the snobs are often the writers, who might view themselves as intellectually superior, but who when teamed up with a top-grade photographer can literally, without exaggeration, affect battlefields as would the most powerful generals.  Nevertheless, photographers generally are seen as sidekicks, supporting actors, and downrange you might hear a journalist quip, “Oh yes, the Shooters are first to the bar and last out.”  (While the writers plug away at their stories and wrestle with editors.)

Battlefield television is usually not the most powerful, but can be the most dangerous.  The crews often are larger, the gear is bigger, and during shooting (and SHOOTING!) they often try to linger on a scene to get the full effect.  Videographers must focus on the gear.  Experienced military Combat Camera folks will tell you that your chances of getting killed on the battlefield multiply when you start shooting video.  It’s true.  Also, that big camera gear often can look like a weapon, like a rocket launcher, and this can be especially so during the dramas of heavy fighting which include smoke, fire, darkness, extremely loud noises, sweat in the eyes, screaming, fear and lots of adrenaline and some guy who pokes around a corner from within the “enemy” positions and he has something on his shoulder and BAM BAM BAM BAM.  Dead.  Then comes the report, “Government security forces are believed responsible for killing of a cameraman…”

Sometimes nobody is really responsible.  Sometimes the surfer gets bashed on the rocks, the rocket explodes, or the climber is swept away in an avalanche.  It just is.

Never know where correspondents have been.  Last week they might have been reviewing restaurants when action came to their neighborhood, or they might have seen a dozen conflicts and sailed the seven seas.  As the years unfold, some of the most interesting people I meet are the experienced international correspondents, while others give the feeling they are running from child support.

Unidentified journalist taking local transport into the Red Shirt camp.

Some people blamed many journalists for catching a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome” inside the Red Shirt camp, and some of them did in fact seem to drink the Kool-Aid.  “Drink the Kool-Aid” is American slang meaning they blindly believe what are told.  The term is derived from an American cult leader named Jim Jones who persuaded about 900 people to commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, and if you pay close attention you’ll often hear it around U.S. politics, or in military circles.  Even while grenades were being fired and dozens of buildings were ablaze in Bangkok, some journalists continued to spout that the protestors were peaceful and unarmed.  They were drinking the Kool-Aid.

The Reds were getting much favorable press, and so nearly all of them seemed to be extra polite and friendly with journalists which creates its own cycle.  Meanwhile, the police and Army were being polite, respectful and professional, yet not offering lunch and soft drinks.  (Of course.)  If the military offered gratuities, likely we would view it with cynicism, but when protestors did the same, it was a sign of friendliness.  I sensed that part of the friendliness was just normal Thai culture, but there also was extra-friendliness toward people with cameras.  Some of the journalists truly seemed to fall for it.  Hook, line and sinker.  Others seemed to go with the flow—keeping in mind that editors in Berlin, London and New York have strong say in their stories and if Iraq taught me anything about journalists and journalism it was that distant editors set the tone for most publications.  After the acceptable white lines of a narrative are painted, few people stray from the path.

Humans see what we expect to see, and there is no doubt that many people expected to see an Asian government using a sickening amount of force to quell dissent.  We expected to see that.  But that’s not what actually happened.  Not at all.

[More to follow.]

Please click here to read Even as the World Watched: Part I

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Michael Yon has been invited to embed again by both Great Britain and the US.Michael Yon isn’t a correspondent who sparks a neutral reaction in the reader. You either love him or you don’t. There’s not much of an in-between.

In April Yon’s embed in Afghanistan ended abruptly. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was in charge and some of Yon’s fans blamed the general. The official reason given was “overcrowding by journalists.”

In a dispatch announcing the change, Yon wrote, “Haven’t seen a journalist in weeks.”

In the preceding month, Yon had pulled no punches in his dispatches,  criticizing Canadian Brig. Gen. Daniel Ménard who commanded Task Force Kandahar. Yon took some heat for that one too, until the truth came out.

A court martial found Menard guilty of accidentally firing a weapon while preparing to board a military helicopter in Kandahar—the shot allegedly came close to hitting Canada’s chief of defense as well as military vehicles. Then a female Canadian soldier confessed to having an inappropriate relationship with Ménard. The rest is history.

Yon said in an email: “Insofar as Menard, that guy allowed Tarnak River Bridge to be blown up.  Lost Ian Gelig.  Halted many operations for DAYS.  Lied about it.  ND'd with his rifle.  Lied about it.  Affair with enlisted subordinate...  Good grief.”

Yon was speaking of Spc. Ian Gelig who was killed when the bridge was blown up by a suicide bomber. Other soldiers were wounded. Civilians were killed. Arguably, these were preventable deaths.

Not for the first time was Yon, in the face of skepticism, proved correct.

I could write a book about his observations. I will never forget the night I found an article by Yon as I researched material about a young Army captain charged by the government with premeditated murder. I became interested after learning the captain was not present when the murder occurred.

Yon had no way of knowing how useful a dispatch he had filed at the time of the alleged murder, long before the captain was charged. Yon had actually written about an Iraqi colonel who was one of the captain's accusers. I emailed that article to the captain's attorney as soon as I found it. Yon couldn't possibly predict how helpful that article would be in placing the events surrounding the alleged murder in context. Yon simply wrote the truth as he knew it to be.

If you want to know what kind of writer Yon is—or for that matter, what kind of man he is—the best place to turn is his latest book, ‘Moment of Truth in Iraq,’ just published in paperback. It’s a remarkable account for those of us who are armchair analysts with a vested interest because we have people we care about placing their lives on the line in a desolate land known for sucking the life out of her own soldiers and those from foreign lands as well.

More importantly, the book focuses on what troops did right and wrong, but always with reverence and care given to the value of our military. Whatever he is or isn’t, Yon truly values the men and women who fight the good fight and if he perceives a dangerous policy, such as the current Rules of Engagement, he tells people about it.

As I read the book, I realized how miserably many in media have misunderstood this war, and how the same applies to many of us back home.

In an email Thursday morning, Yon wrote to tell me his situation has changed. A few bloggers, some under the cloak of anonymity, had accused Yon of breaching Operations Security by revealing too much information. At least one engaged in what some might call character assassination.

Yon’s email on Thursday said, "And all this nonsense about my being disembedded for OPSEC...  Have been invited today by British and U.S. military."

Many of his fans—more than 35,000 on Yon's Facebook page alone—will applaud the news. They rely on Yon to tell them the truth, whether they like what they hear or not.

For those with loved ones there, once they come to know Yon, seek his reportage as a source of information many in big media distort--or more kindly put--may overlook.

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Well, I wouldn’t cross Michael Yon, the intrepid independent war reporter and photographer who has covered the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction and dogged intensity. For weeks, he was fulimating about two men – Brigadier-General Daniel Menard of the Canadian Army and General Stanley McChrystal.

Then, two things happened. First, Menard was fired. Then, McChrystal was fired.

True, neither was dismissed for reasons directly related to Yon’s reporting – though Menard’s negligent discharge of his rifle at Kandahar can hardly have helped any case he had for staying and McChrystal’s chances of remaining in post might have been greater had his Afghan war strategy not been facing excoriating criticism from the likes of Yon.

But it might be wise for generals to keep on the right side of Yon, who was disembedded by McChrystal’s staff, in the future. Perhaps fortunately for him (though it’s no accident – he assiduously cultivates media opinion shapers), General David Petraeus has an excellent relationship with Yon.

Yon often writes about his private email communicaions with the former Iraq commander, the most recent of which was to congratulate him on being nominated to command Nato forces in Afghanistan. Afterwards, he posted this on his Facebook page to his 35,182 fans, many of whom serve in the US military:

Just got a nice response from General Petraeus. This is going to be a long, long journey for the troops, for the General, and for me. Let’s turn this around!

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Yon has consistently turned out major stories about the war that others missed, such as the Canadian Brigadier General who not only fired his weapon negligently but also was accused of having an affair with a female staffer. The military and media lagged in that coverage.

Yon also pinpointed a serious blunder that left a vital bridge unsecured in Afghanistan, leading to deaths and injuries for soldiers and civilians.

In a dispatch on Yon's Facebook Fan Page where approximately 35,000 fans read his posts, he wrote: “If a Colonel under General McChrystal's chain of command publicly dismissed General McChrystal in a major magazine, McChrystal would be forced to fire him or appear weak and not in control.”

The military doesn’t take kindly to public criticism that runs bottom to top.

Apart from Yon, however, many conservatives have been troubled by the prosecution of this war in accordance with demands from the left and from media, and complaints about the dilution of the Rules of Engagement have been vocal in some quarters. Troop deaths rose sharply this year in Afghanistan, but national media, sympathetic to Obama, rarely make note of that. When President George W. Bush was in office, however, troop deaths were noted daily and above the fold.

A general feeling among national security conservatives is that even before Obama took office, leftwingers and allied media had actually prolonged the war and endangered troops just as they did during the Vietnam era. Another general feeling is that Obama lacked the experience to manage the war, even if his Democrat political base would permit it. The president is already behind the timetable he claimed he’d meet on troop withdrawal during his campaign.

Perhaps as a result of the attention Yon receives from branded media and from fans, it’s fathomable why some bloggers would launch personal attacks.

It appears Yon’s criticism of the general was prophetic. Yon also wrote on Facebook: “Unless McChrystal basically denies the article, he must be fired. If he is not fired, I will start calling him President McChrystal because Obama clearly is not in charge.”

Obviously Yon was ahead of the curve.

Yon’s embed was recently canceled and he has been filing dispatches from Thailand. His widely acclaimed book ‘Moment of Truth in Iraq’ has just been released in paperback.

[Ed. Note: Yon actually began to crit the general sometime in April.]

[Correction: Thanks to my readers I have corrected Eikenberry's rank! Sorry about the unintentional demotion.]

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Michael Yon
20 June 2010
Chiang Mai, Thailand

Recent violence focused world attention on the Kingdom of Thailand.  As the attention flowed in, foreigners poured out, even though fighting was tightly localized and not focused on travelers.  Tourists literally had to search for trouble to find it.  Of course, some did.

Like other famous countries, Thailand seems to be annotated in peoples’ minds by a single footnote.  This is akin to trying to describe the contents of an Encyclopedia using a single, all-encompassing sentence.  If asked, many people might summarize Americans as rich, arrogant, imperialistic Christians, while we might describe ourselves as peaceful, freedom-loving and generous to a fault.  Likewise, Thailand wears its own name tag – especially so in the touristy areas – yet intricate realities of both countries naturally defy broad strokes.

Thailand is big, considerably larger than California by area, while its 64 million people approximate the combined populations of Florida, North Carolina and California.  This complex country, with its intriguing history, is saddled with commensurate politics, and would require an expert to attempt explanation.   Jabs at down-in-the-weeds “analysis” by most foreigners, and most Thai people, will yield quackery.  Unfortunately, knowledge has never been prerequisite for strong opinion.

Like most countries, Thailand has its share of social woes.  Yet knowing that your baby is ill, what is actually wrong, and how to cure it are three separate matters, and when it comes to politics, consensus reality is rarely burdened by mere facts or stunning insight.  For example, during ten trips into Nepal, I talked with people who fully realized that their government was malformed, and yet they set about curing it by donning the cloak of Nepalese Maoism.  It remains to be seen if the cure will be worse than the original disease.

While in Afghanistan, I watched with growing alarm the news coming from Thailand, having first sensed a potential civil war growing in 2008.  Something changed.  Or at least I felt it for the first time.  There was a subtle but unmistakable bite in the air.  The first time I felt that bite was in what is now the former Yugoslavia.  It was sharp and obvious to all.  In Thailand it was subtle, more like a nibble by comparison, but clear.

The better aspects of Thailand had grown on me, and so even from Afghanistan I kept up on news and messages from the Kingdom.  From Afghanistan, I flew to Chiang Mai, whence these words are written, the very heart of the growing “Red Shirt” insurgency, and where the chill had first touched my sense in 2008.

Descriptions of the specific grievances and causations are bountiful and would be redundant and ill-informed if re-penned here.  Though I am aware of many thoughts and theories surrounding the Thai unrest, other observers are far more qualified to comment.  Interested readers will have no problem finding endless sources.  Some facts are obvious: in April, tens of thousands of Red Shirt protestors had poured out of mostly northern and northeastern Thailand into Bangkok, seizing key municipal terrain equivalent to Times Square in New York City.  Protestors’ demands shifted and would require many words to describe.  In short, they want a new government.  The aggrieved apparently are being supported by ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire accused of corruption of billionaire proportions.

Politically, the closer one looks the more complicated it becomes.  Words are confusing while actions speak clearly.  So for now, let’s step back and look at the punches that are being thrown, and not why they are being thrown.  The fist leads back to the arm and the arm leads to the motivation.

One of closest hotels to the action that was still open was the Dusit Thani, just next to the Red Shirt barricades.  There had been fighting and recent fatalities nearby, so I checked into the Dusit Thani on 12 May 2010.  From the balcony, the Red Shirt camp was visible down below across a four-lane highway called Rama IV.  About two-dozen had been killed in recent weeks.  I happened to show up just before the big fighting.

In the morning, I had breakfast at the 5-star Dusit Thani and then walked across the street to the Red camp, entered with no dramas through an opening in the barricades, and began to walk among the Reds.  The Reds had built medieval-looking barricades from car and truck tires, including long bamboo spikes, concertina wire and other obstacles.  The barriers looked treacherous and difficult.  In reality, the barricades made for great, dramatic photos while being militarily inconsequential.

Maybe five thousand protestors were spread over several kilometers, and though many had been there for over a month sleeping rough, spirits seemed high.  No weapons were visible other than slingshots, though I now accept as fact (following upon later experiences) reports that violent instigators had been firing 40mm grenades and other weapons, as well as exploding large fireworks.

The encampment, occupied by maybe 5,000 people, was surrounded by Thai Army with a large interstice of no man’s land.  (It wasn’t entirely no man’s land; I and many other people traveled through frequently, although it was never a good place to linger for tea.) However, politics get tricky here.  Many or even most of the soldiers come from backgrounds that might make them favorable to the protestors, and so, striking the Reds with the Army hammer, might in theory cause the hammer to shatter.  The more militant among the protestors, the so-called Men in Black, were believed to have been (or are) elite Thai soldiers.

Flocks of journalists – local and international – had descended into the conflict zone, and the flocks naturally brought the toxic guano of consensus journalism, and also great physical danger for the journalists, which danger could be deceiving in Bangkok.  Comparing the difficulty of covering conflict in Thailand to Afghanistan or Iraq is to compare pebbles to boulders.  The entrance obstacles to Iraq and Afghanistan will eliminate probably 99% of the international press from any meaningful, long-haul coverage.  By contrast, many international correspondents live in Thailand.  CNN correspondent, Dan Rivers, reported that he and his family had to evacuate their residence because the fighting was so close.  Covering Bangkok is no more difficult than covering Washington D.C., and in fact Bangkok might be easier when considering visa issues.  And so, in my particular case, I was staying in the Dusit Thani Hotel, which was actually in the battle zone.  My balcony was a front row seat to some fighting, which meant you could die there, so I seldom went onto the balcony, but sometimes watched from within the darkened room.  In fact, I was talking on the phone when a grenade exploded three floors above me.  You could eat a fine lunch or dinner and literally one minute later walk outside and be in the fight.  It was bizarre.  During some fighting, I was out in the shooting, just 150 meters from my room; made some photos and walked back into the hotel, took the elevator to my room, uploaded images to Facebook, and within minutes walked back outside.

I had arrived in Bangkok literally just in time for the main events and despite what must have been hundreds of journalists already there, suddenly my work was all over Thailand, as had happened with my reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.  The sudden notoriety was unexpected -- I expected to be a face in the crowd -- but shortly thereafter I took an exclusive trip with the Prime Minister of Thailand, Abhisit Vejjajiva.  And so this, and the next dispatch or two, is meant to describe what I witnessed, in order to set the context of my private conversation on a jet with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand.

Most interesting was that even while the world watched they were again mislead by consensus journalism.

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Michael Yon
Published 15 June 2010

Brunei, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam

Among the more interesting coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan are the legendary Nepalese Gurkhas.  Trained and fielded by the British, as they have been since colonial days, Gurkhas are a fascinating admixture: today many are British soldiers used to traveling the world.  Many of them grew up barefoot and poor in remote and primitive mountain villages in the high Himalayas: places that closely resemble parts of Afghanistan, geographically and culturally.  They understand impoverished life in a harsh environment personally, though Nepal has enjoyed some material progress in the last few decades.   That combination of background and experience makes Gurkhas helpful at generating useful approaches to Afghan development.  They know what is possible, and they’ve seen experiments succeed or fail.

A Gurkha veteran named Lalit whom I met, deep in the jungles of Borneo, at a British Army man-tracking school, came with good ideas.  Lalit began a conversation by announcing that many of Afghanistan's energy, land restoration and fuel needs could be solved if the Afghans would immediately adopt "Gobar Gas" production. This mysterious substance could improve the lives of Afghans as it had that of the Nepalese, he said, as, with great enthusiasm, he began to explain.

I returned to Afghanistan, this time to areas of Ghor, Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.  No Afghan along the way had heard of Gobar Gas.  I flew to Nepal to talk with Gobar Gas experts and users.

Nepal

Physically, Nepal and Afghanistan share striking similarities.  Both contain extreme mountains and have few roads.  The mountains are harder still to live in, because of the lack of electricity, transportation, communications technology and just about anything else associated with modern societies.  Both countries have, unfortunately, been saddled with corrupt governments, universally mistrusted.  They each have about 30 million people—eighty percent of whom are subsistence farmers, living in small villages.  The median age in both places is under 20, suggesting future crises. Half of the Nepalese are literate; perhaps a third of Afghan men can read, now, in the opening decades of the 21st century.

Desires, complaints and problems in both places often run parallel.  Sizable populations are isolated for months each year by snow, rain and landslides—or just lack of bridges.  Government influence in both countries mostly ends with paved roads.  (Though Nepal actually has a government of sorts, and not surprisingly, far more roads, if still few.)  In the hinterlands life remains primitive.  Government edicts and ideas issued from Kabul or Kathmandu are unheard or ignored—the words might as well come from Timbuktu or the Moon.

A remarkable difference in Nepal is that most ethnic and religious groups coexist reasonably well, and despite their recent civil war the Nepalese are less prone to allowing rule by local warlords, general violence, and especially violence directed toward outsiders.  Even during peak wartimes I had no difficulties walking hundreds of miles through contested areas in Nepal.  Though Nepal is one of the poorest, least developed countries on Earth, and despite rampant corruption and recent war, progress is perceptible.

Nepal is arguably a half-century ahead of Afghanistan in governance, education, press, and tourism; the steady stream of intrepid travelers who want to visit Kathmandu and trek the Himalayas is the country’s good fortune. Even during wartime fighters leave tourists alone.  Old-timers in Nepal say that in the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, few boys and almost no girls outside the ruling elite went to school.  Today education is ever increasing in Nepal—though not universal. Democracy was first tasted in Nepal in 1950, but did not truly take hold until 1990.  The trend lines are slow but good.  (Some educated Nepalese might take issue with the previous sentence.)

Though Nepal is still poor and underdeveloped, if Afghanistan reached Nepal’s current level in a few decades, that would rightly be considered a success.  And so Nepal has become a sort of looking-glass for Afghanistan.  It’s a good place to search for insight and ideas that might be applied in Afghanistan.  The Gurkha idea for Gobar Gas was a pearl from Nepal.

Dung

“Gobar” is the Nepali word for cow dung.  The “Gas” refers to biogas derived from the natural decay of dung and other waste products and biomass.  In Nepal, villagers use buffalo, cow, human, and other waste products for biogas production.  Pig and chicken dung are used in some places, as are raw kitchen wastes, including rotted vegetation.

Gobar is typically mixed with a roughly equal amount of water, and gravity-fed through a pipe into an airtight underground “digester,” where naturally occurring bacteria feast on the mixture. This anaerobic process produces small but precious amounts of gas. That gas can be fed directly into a heat source, such as a cooking stove, and used to power it.

The biogas that is produced is 50-70% methane by volume, similar to natural gas, and a convenient source of clean energy. The biogas is easily collected and stored for lighting, cooking and other household uses.  After the bacteria have finished digesting the dung, the byproduct is a rich organic fertilizer (sometimes called slurry).  That fertilizer is more effective than raw dung, with two important benefits for hands-on farmers:  it doesn’t smell bad, and almost all the pathogens and weed seeds have been destroyed.  There is no downside.  No waste.  No poisonous residues or batteries.  No moving parts.  Gobar Gas is an astonishingly elegant tap into “the circle of life” that environmentalists, economists, development people and humanitarians should all appreciate.

The Home Plant

BSP-Nepal

According to Saroj Rai, the Executive Director of the Biogas Sector Partnership (BSP-Nepal) in Kathmandu, which oversees the Biogas Support Program (BSP), the idea came to Nepal in 1955, when Bertrand R. Saubolle constructed and demonstrated a plant.  In 1975/76 the Nepalese government installed 199 individual plants.  But biogas truly took off when the Dutch launched a large-scale program in 1992.

Today, an average-sized home installation might cost US $530—big money in Nepal—but subsidy mechanisms and microfinance schemes have led to the installation of approximately 204,000 units in the last two decades.  The BSP program estimates that, with subsidies, another 500,000 units should be built.

It’s not just Nepal. Other poor Asian countries have started.  Biogas has become so popular in Vietnam that many farmers have it installed on their own, without subsidy.  Subsidies vary greatly from up to 50% in countries like Laos, to 13.5% in Vietnam. The size of the subsidy required to persuade farmers to install the equipment is a reflection of both the relative wealth of farmers, and the priority they place on having a reliable substitute for wood, charcoal and other fuels, as well as the value of the fertilizer.

Millions of Gobar Gas units current operate in India and China.

Women, Children and Trees

In Afghanistan and Nepal, poor women use wood-burning stoves to cook inside poorly ventilated homes—while their children crawl around the smoky, sooty rooms. This leads to a high rate of respiratory and eye problems.  The homes are like smoke chambers in Nepal, and seem even worse in Afghanistan.

Before coming to the biogas sector, Mr. Rai worked in photovoltaic energy.  “Biogas has much greater socio-economic benefits,” said Mr. Rai in his Kathmandu office, “but biogas is not sexy like photovoltaic, which mostly helps men.  Biogas mostly helps women—the men don’t really notice because they still get cooked food, so why would a man invest 25,000 rupees?  But men will invest in photovoltaic because they get the sexy solar panel,” he said.  “Even women sometimes will opt for photovoltaic solar power because they don’t realize the headaches, coughing and eye problems come from cooking.”

“Forget about the environmental benefits,” said Mr. Rai.  “People don’t see the value in saving the trees.  Unless they are very enlightened they are reluctant to try biogas.  It’s about social marketing.  These types of products are not easy.  But once you install a Gobar Gas plant, the woman typically says, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this twenty years ago!’ Once they experience the benefits they are overwhelmed and social marketing is very easy.”

“Some women spend more than twelve hours per day, six days per week collecting firewood,” he said, “and children who could be in school are out collecting wood.” Those are extremes, to be sure, but as a rule women and children spend hours a day collecting fuel.  During walks in the mountains it’s common to see children out collecting wood in little baskets. Given a choice, Nepalese mothers prefer that their children go to school.

In addition to the health advantages of biogas for women and children, the rest of nature also benefits.  Birds and other creatures do better when trees remain standing. In Nepal a single biogas plant can save about 2,500 kilograms of wood per year.  Trees anchor topsoil and prevent erosion.  In some places, the wood is simply gone.

The people of Bhatti—a village whose business is making moonshine—said they had heard about Gobar Gas but never wanted it.  Wood for cooking and making raksi (rice whiskey) was plentiful.  But they burned through all the wood—destroying the local economy.  LP, kerosene and other fuels are too expensive to use in making moonshine. So the entire village of nearly a hundred people began travelling—up to three days to and fro—to buy wood from other places.  Even the men had to spend their time scratching for wood—a situation too humiliating to stand.  Gobar Gas started flowing in Bhatti in November 2009.

Lizard Hole

Ghor Province, Afghanistan is similar to dry parts of Nepal.  In Ghor there is a village called Karbasha Qalat (Lizard Hole) populated by a cow, sheep, horses, dozens of people, and thousands of lizards.

Villagers dry the dung in the sun and collect it into huge stacks, as people do in India, and Nepal, and across many places.  Karbasha Qalat (KQ) is like a dry Galapagos with all those lizards basking in the sun atop rocks and dung.  Unlike the islands, KQ is not at sea level, but over 8,000 feet.

In some places Afghans tell stories about today’s barren mountains having been covered by forests.  If there ever were trees around KQ, they are gone. The wild plants that can survive here must be bitter to man and beast.  There is no local wood.  When the manure is burned, it chokes those nearby, and then it is gone.  If KQ had a biogas generator, tons of manure would make gas while yielding slurry, to fertilize the now barren land.  And there wouldn’t be human and animal feces everywhere—a serious hygiene improvement.  The villagers in KQ had enough manure piled up to fuel a rocket with Gobar Gas.

Ten kilos of dung yields roughly an hour of stove burning time, and one of those skinny cows produces about 12 kilos per day.  KQ had a great herd of sheep—probably a couple hundred—kept in pens when not out feeding.  Villagers scrape sheep dung from the pens, which they mixed with cow (I saw only one), mule and horse manure for cooking.  A small stream runs through the village.  Afghans will use greenhouses if taught; I’ve seen them in Helmand and Oruzgan.

The bio-slurry from the digester is so effective for growing crops that in some countries, according to Mr. Rai, biogas is not an energy program but an agricultural initiative. In Vietnam it has been adopted for sanitation.  The biogas and the great sanitation benefits, including reduction of waste-borne diseases, are byproducts in one place and impetus in another.  In Karbasha Qalat, with a few greenhouses using the bio-slurry, the standard of life could dramatically improve.  There must be thousands of “Karbasha Qalats” in Afghanistan.

SNV: The Dutch Connection

The more one learns about biogas, the more one sees the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) humming in the background.  SNV started working on biogas in Nepal in 1989, further adapting the Chinese technology (the system is used across China), and developing an effective market-based program model.  The Dutch could not be accused of looking for short-term solutions or following the crowd.  Fifteen years in, SNV decided their domestic biogas program model was ready to replicate elsewhere in Asia.  They started the program in Vietnam in 2003, and the Asia Biogas Program targeting 1.1 million beneficiaries in Vietnam (second phase), Bangladesh, Cambodia and Lao PDR in 2005.

Wim van Nes, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, is in charge of supporting SNV’s biogas programs in fourteen countries, seven in Asia and seven in Africa.  And so I had to find Wim van Nes, but that comes later.

Good for Business

Biogas brings national-level benefits to countries such as Nepal, helping to spur business, and has created employment for about 9,000 Nepalese. These include jobs for local masons, who are trained as biogas technicians.  Another benefit for rural development professionals: biogas programs create a new, sustainable profession even in depressed rural areas.

Today, the challenges for Mr. Rai revolve around nurturing a holistic business sector by simultaneously prodding supply—including the development of biogas appliances—and demand.  BSP-Nepal, with 30 employees, has a presence in 75 districts.  Challenges remain, especially in remote areas, but the program is growing steadily.

Incredible Return on Investment

For a typical Nepalese family, installing a biogas facility, even with subsidies, is expensive.  But people feel that the investment pays for itself quickly.  Some women reported that Gobar Gas installations completely returned the investment within a year to 18 months.  SNV figures are more conservative, but even they show a complete return on investment after about three years.

These rapid returns measure the financial cost against real financial gain, from new activities that are more likely to generate income, which take the place of the daily search for fuel to survive.  For instance, in Nepal, Subarna Budhathoki said her Gobar Gas unit cost 35,000 Nepalese rupees after the subsidy, but she made 50,000 rupees the first year by selling vegetables.  Subarna said, with a smile that hardly ended during the entire lengthy conversation, that she would have earned 200,000 rupees on tomatoes that year, but the tomatoes were victims of a hail storm.  So she cleared a real profit of 15,000 rupees in the first year.

Long Term Gains

But it’s important to consider the less easily monetized but still very real benefits of using Gobar Gas.  Saving 2,500 kilograms of trees each year per family has long-term economic value to farmers as the soil is revived. Improved health from better sanitation and the absence of constant wood smoke in the home has clear economic benefits, as does the ability to send children, freed from the labor of searching for fuel, to school.  These gains and many others don’t fit on a balance sheet.  But they are the conditions for real, long-term economic and social development in the Third World.

The SNV program in Cambodia is doing well.  The economics favor success in Cambodia more than for Laos.  In Cambodia, for instance, wood can be difficult or expensive to acquire.  Cambodians I talked with who had SNV-installed biodigesters were very happy.  In Laos, however, the relatively small population and large number of trees makes people less excited about biogas and so the program is off to a slow start, though this is the perfect time, before the trees are gone.

Households of four to five people require about two cows or buffalos to create enough raw materials.  A thousand chickens or a hundred small humans can match one big water buffalo, and four pigs equal about two cows in dung production. Connecting the family outhouse gives a slight Gobar boost, but is more useful for sanitation than fuel.

(SNV has plenty of detailed analysis country-by-country for the MBAs, scientists and farmers to analyze.)

Mrs. Am Phaly, at Koh Prak village in Cambodia, saves about one hour a day on cooking.  After the $150 subsidy, she paid $250 for the installation of her unit, and saves $150 per year on charcoal and electricity.  In the time saved, Mrs. Phaly runs another business: a plant nursery.  She also buys 2.5 tons of rice per month and sells it all.  (She had a least a ton of rice in this room.)  The blue pipe in the background is the gas.  Mrs. Phaly was not sure who the President of the United States is, but said she feels lucky to be Khmer.  All three of her kids go to school.  A neighbor came over and laughed, saying that dung had become gold at this house.  But Mrs. Phaly will not handle the animal waste that goes into the digester.  She has her husband run the plant.

Taboos

In Nepal, cow dung has both religious and societal sanctity, and its virtues are praised in songs.  They handle Gobar as we would handle apples.  Interestingly, Gobar doesn’t stink in Nepal.  Some Nepalese have had the experience of traveling in the United States, and becoming nauseous when passing by a cow pastures.  Feed for American cows makes the Gobar stink terribly for Nepalese. In Nepal, I’ve seen women clean floors with fresh, wet buffalo dung, which they later dry and cook with, or increasingly some feed into the digester.

Mr. Christophe Barron, the Head of China Program for Initiative Development, installs biogas in China.  Mr. Barron recounted seeing numerous biogas program failures in Africa, largely due to taboos, though Mr. Barron said there is little problem in China.  The implications for Afghanistan are unknown, though some Afghans definitely handle dung.

The Chinese will connect outhouses to digesters without a second thought, but many Nepalese refuse to connect outhouses.  In Nepal, social obstacles are steadily being overcome by smart program design and time; to qualify for subsidy, the buyer hires one of the BSP-Nepal accredited companies.  The blueprint requires that a pipe be installed, for a future connection to the outhouse.  The owner can choose to connect or not.  In the early days, according to Mr. Rai, very few people connected outhouses, but today two thirds of Nepalese households eventually make the connection.  Less than 1% of the families in Laos have connected outhouses to the digesters.

Larger Projects

SNV concentrates on domestic biogas, but others will undertake larger endeavors. Sunil Krishna Shrestha is the Nepalese manager of a German-funded project.  Most home installations use a 4 or 6m3 plant, but this 30m3—at an orphanage for 40 children—is enough to run two stoves for 6-8 hours per day, saving about $130 per month in LPG costs.

Associated with the orphanage is a larger project where two large biogas plants are being installed along with greenhouses.  The kids learn how to use the biogas and work on the farm.  The goal is to achieve a financially self-sufficient orphanage by the year 2020.   Today they collect kitchen wastes from seven restaurants to feed the digesters, then sell organic vegetables back to the restaurants at 20% over the non-organic price.

Two installations (one each of Chinese and Nepalese design) were being connected to five homes—with a goal of connecting fifty homes.  Sewage pipes will run from the toilets to the digesters, and biogas will run back to the kitchens.  Households will pay a small monthly fee, and that fee will go back to the orphanage.

The 50m3 Chinese design is made by an established Chinese biogas company called Puxin, and Mr. Shrestha said the cost is about $19,000.  The Puxin system needs to be fed only once per six months.  The 100m3 Nepali design cost about $34,000 and will be fed by the animals, kitchen wastes and toilets on a daily basis.

Other Afghan Factors

Afghanistan recently won the silver medal in a competition for the world’s most corrupt nation.  Somalia beat them by a nose, walking away with the gold medal, and all the gold that was meant for the people.  Adding resources to Afghanistan has only made it more corrupt by giving thieves something to steal and more power after they steal it.  Grassroots efforts can bypass many of these issues.

More than forty of the world’s most developed nations are nurturing Afghanistan, trying to push, pull and prod it into shape.  Simultaneously, it won a silver medal for corruption.  This means, at very least, that top-down solutions are typically not working.  The government cannot be trusted with development money, because they don’t care about the development part.  We might as well feed the money into bio-digesters.  Fundamental progress in Afghanistan can best be achieved with more bottom up efforts.  That’s what worked in Nepal.

There is no accurate census for Afghanistan.  This causes headaches for the U.S. military and others, because they don’t have a great understanding of who is where.  A Nepalese census found that only about 13,000 families live above 3,000m.  As a rule, 3000 meters is the limit for use of a biogas facility.  Though some companies have installed them a little further up the mountains.  There is no true technical limit for altitude, but there are practical limits.

Temperature

The caloric rollercoaster for the star anaerobes begins at about 15ºC (59ºF).  That’s when they start waking up and going to work.  To kick them out of bed, some farmers pile straw atop the digester.  Decaying straw produces heat.  Busy anaerobes begin to help by producing heat inside the digester.  Some people build greenhouses over top, or barns.  In China, according to Jan Lam, the SNV biogas project manager in Cambodia, “The ‘3 in 1’ approach is popular.  A greenhouse contains a vegetable garden, pig sty and biodigester.  Vegetable waste is fed into the pigs and their waste goes directly into the plant which is often large enough for cooking and a water heater.”

In cold weather, digestion can be prodded with warm water.  As temperature rises, production rises, but the top of the “thermo coaster,” the ideal temperature, is about 35ºC (95ºF).  Good dung, plenty of water, little oxygen, and the anaerobes do their job.  Above that temperature, they slow down, trying to shed some heat.  But if slowing down doesn’t work, if their world gets too hot, they die.

Installing a digester is like adopting a baby elephant.  It can’t get too hot or cold.  It must eat every day, and drink lots of water.  Sometimes it needs a little washing.  If the water source is far, the system is impractical.  Many parts of Nepal and Afghanistan are impractical for baby elephants and biogas.

Reliability

Plants in Nepal seldom break unless there is an earthquake or calamity, cracking the collector dome.  Concrete is semi-permeable to gas, requiring sealant on the concave side of the dome.  A tiny crack in the sealant allows methane to escape, disabling the unit until it is repaired.  Cracks on the bottom and the wall of the digester can self-seal like scabs.

If too much oxygen gets into the digester, the anaerobes die and the unit must be cleaned out and refilled.  The anaerobes can be killed by too much soap, pesticides, insecticides and other “cides” such as antibiotics.  Experts say hospital installations are headaches because when people take antibiotics, they kill the microbes, but the bigger problem is toilet disinfectants.  On farms, cows on antibiotics can also kill the plant.  Gisella McGuinness, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, said that a prison installation in Nepal is working fine.  This is important, she said, because the prison is only allotted a specific amount for food and cooking gas, and so the Gobar Gas allows more of the budget to go to food.  Asked if antibiotics damage the plant, she answered, “no because prisoners don’t get much medical care.”

Kanak Mani Dixit, PhD, is a well-known academic and journalist in Nepal, who lived in New York for 10 years and is the publisher and editor of the monthly magazine Himal Southasian.  Dr. Dixit said that his family was one of the first to install Gobar Gas in Nepal, and their plant has been running with no problems for about 30 years.  Jan Lam from SNV says, “All plants are constructed with a guarantee clause.  Usually the guarantee period is 2-3 years.  If a plant functions after a 2 year period, it will function for a 20 year period with normal operation.”

Maintenance costs are trivial.  BSP-Nepal estimates that 94-98% of the plants that were installed since 1992 are still operational.  In Vietnam, the SNV program manager, Jeroen Kruisman, in his Hanoi office, said that about 99% of the about 74,000 plants in Vietnam are operating.  Mr. Kruisman explained that plant failures occur because of socio-economics, not design.  If a farmer moves or sells his pigs, for instance, the plant stops.

Physically, the plants are not indestructible. But for all intents and purposes they only fail due to calamities such as earthquakes and floods, in which cases people have more to worry about than fixing their Gobar Gas.

User Investment and Social Marketing

Financial participation from users is crucial to marketing success.  Experience shows that if users are not investors, they tend to let the units fail, and as Andrew Williamson from SNV said in Laos, “One bad unit equals ten good units.”  Entire programs can suffer heavy damage by installing plants for people who do not care for them.

Lalit, the Gurkha soldier who first told me about Gobar Gas, said his father installed a biodigester some 25 years ago and it never had a problem.  Lalit’s dad was also a Gurkha who had traveled the world, and when he returned to Nepal and installed biogas, other villagers were skeptical.  Lalit says that today hundreds of families in the immediate area have Gobar Gas.  “It’s monkey see monkey do,” said Lalit.  “If you bring Gobar Gas to Afghanistan, at first they will not believe it works.  Then they see it, and all will want Gobar Gas. And then it’s easy.”

Social marketing likely would be a large dimension of a program for Afghanistan.  This is not as simple as just installing a few hundred thousand plants, but includes the development of an entire business sector.  Though the Chinese and Indians are the undisputed champions of biogas in their home countries, it’s unclear if they would succeed in Afghanistan.  SNV has biogas operations in 14 countries and has developed institutional expertise from bottom to top.  Social marketing is nuanced and would require an “international mindset” to crack that nut in Afghanistan, and even within countries the marketing is complex.  In Nepal, there are arguably 160 ethnicities and 67% of users come from only two of those.  On literacy, in Nepal 83% of members of biogas households are literate while about half the country cannot read.  Higher subsidies are provided to ethnicities that are less involved in biogas.

Bottom line: Social marketing is complex and unit failure nearly always is due to user failure.  The user must participate in costs or there will be a high failure rate.  Program success builds through social marketing as a result of successful units.

The SNV idea is to plant the seed that leaves behind a viable, self-sustaining biogas industry that functions alone and without perpetual outside inputs.  To accomplish this goal, SNV conducts a detailed feasibility study and strategy.  Then comes the nuts and bolts of identifying managers, training trainers to install units, social marketing, subsidies and other details.  The biogas units themselves are different in every country, as is the strategic business model, which must be tailored to cultural values.   A rule of development projects is that the technology is the easy part. The keys to success are in getting people to change what is often age-old traditional behavior.  It’s tricky to convince a farmer that this new technology should be a priority for his family.

In Laos, when SNV opens programs in new districts, they identify social leaders such as teachers or veterinarians, and install biogas at their homes.  Those social leaders become kernels for social marketing.  When a farmer wants biogas, the local government official who has been trained by the SNV project inspects the person’s home for basics such as water availability, dung output, and flooding potential.  If the official signs off, the process can begin.

Carbon Credits

Global warming is a huge political issue, playing out across the planet.  Though third world nations can rarely afford to be as pollution-sensitive as developed nations, biogas is a ticket into the international carbon credit market.  In that market, entities which reduce net emissions of greenhouses gases can sell carbon credits to companies which use more carbon-based fuel.

According to Saroj Rai, Nepal pulled in about $600,000 on the sale of seven years’ worth of carbon credits from 19,396 plants. That represents a small start, since Nepal has 220,000 plants, which BSP-Nepal is working to get certified. Selling these carbon credits will potentially bring tens of millions of dollars into Nepal over the projected life of the plants.  This “carbon revenue” is earmarked by the government for re-investment into biogas and other renewable energy programs.

CDM certification, which is necessary in order to participate in the international carbon market, is painstaking, extremely expensive, and takes up a big part of the return unless the national program is large enough to achieve an economy of scale.

For the farmers on the ground the eco-friendliness is just a byproduct.  In parts of Cambodia and Nepal, biogas is attractive because the wood is gone.  Other countries use biogas plants for agriculture.  China and India view biogas as basic infrastructure.  These programs would exist regardless of trendy carbon credit markets.  Nonetheless, the advent of these credit schemes works for investors and users alike.

On a side note, I attended some carbon financing talks in Kathmandu in relation to biogas.  That part seemed like a scam of global proportion.  The rest of the biogas program seemed incredibly good.

Final Leg: Vietnam

This research began serendipitously in the jungles of Borneo, leapt to Afghanistan, over to Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, back to Nepal, and finally to Vietnam.  Vietnam is set to become SNV’s most important biogas undertaking.  Vietnam biogas likely will overshadow even Nepal’s wildly successful program.

Whereas Nepal has over 200,000 domestic units, SNV-Vietnam program manager Jeroen Kruisman said that since 2003, 74,000 units have been installed in Vietnam.  Annual installations have already passed Nepal.  The program is so successful in Vietnam—the social marketing so strong—that many farmers don’t even spend the time waiting for subsidies; they just buy the plants.  About 22,000 units will be installed in 2010.

Most fascinating about the Vietnamese success, is that Vietnamese say they buy the plants for the sake of improved sanitation.  The maximum subsidy is only about 13.5%.

The Vietnamese raise millions of pigs in urban and semi-urban environments.  Imagine a tracthouse neighbor with a backyard full of pigs.  Swine draw flies, mosquitoes, stink to high heaven, and unlike cow dung, pig dung is not safe to use to clean your floors.  It poisons the water.  And so, Vietnamese use the biogas only as an afterthought, though they are happy with the savings.  Many Vietnamese are rich compared to Nepalese.  Vietnamese cook mostly with gas or coal, making Hanoi smell acrid.

In Vietnamese, “biogas” is Khi Sinh Hoc, but a lot of Vietnamese don’t know that because they call it biogas.  For Vietnamese, it’s biomoney.  At this rate, biogas may add billions of clean dollars to the Vietnamese economy.  They buy the sanitation systems because the neighbors then permit them to raise more pigs.  At a different household, a Vietnamese woman said she is sending her son through university with money from the extra pigs.  Again, domestic biogas can be a nearly direct link to education.

For governments there is an additional payoff: increased legitimacy.  The incremental improvement in conditions that each plant represents is a more direct route to winning hearts and minds than most big, impersonal development projects.

SNV experts say national leaders like to be associated with the biogas projects, explaining why Nepalese President Yadav came to the Kathmandu biogas conference.

According Mr. Kruisman, SNV expert for Vietnam, there might be a technical potential for 2 million units, and a practical potential of about 1 million units in Vietnam.

This research odyssey on Gobar Gas was sparked by Lalit, a Gurkha whose father installed a plant in Nepal, and a man who grew up eating hot meals cooked on Gobar Gas, and who saw his village, house by house, install Gobar Gas, go to school, start businesses and prosper.  Villages with Gobar Gas are better than villages without.

It could work in Aghanistan. Our troop concentration of efforts and resources happens to be in optimal places for biogas.  The Helmand River Valley, for instance, is ideal. The Dutch have the experience and resources to make it happen.  They are already a crucial partner in Afghanistan.  And it fits into our current strategic, nation-building needs.  Our huge, “save Afghanistan all in one fell swoop” electrification projects have not been as successful as we had hoped.  Domestic biogas grows like a tree, from the bottom up, and the roots occur at the district level, a level we must win at.

Subsequent some matchmaking, SNV has been in contact with the U.S. Army with interest in bringing biogas to Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, since I completed this research in 2009, in an attempt to bring Gobar Gas to Afghanistan and help win the war, the trajectory of the war has taken a nosedive.  I’ve never had confidence that the current U.S. President has the wisdom or personal fire to win this war.  Our President is not a war winner, a reality so obvious that this sentence is already redundant.  My final hope, or nearly final hope, was that General Stanley McChrystal would have the fire and the wisdom.  He has the fire.

Note: An excellent book that covers these topics and more: “BIOGAS, As Renewable Source of Energy in Nepal, Theory and Development.” (ISBN 99946-34-76-3)

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