A second-hand update from Afghanistan

The workshop on legal reform my office held for a group of Afghan criminal justice officials is winding down. All in all, it was a great experience to a part of. I had a chance to talk extensively with both the UNODC's country officer for Afghanistan and a US Dept. of Justice official working with the Afghan delegation. The UNODC country officer was fairly optimistic regarding the ability of the US to decrease opium production in the country in the long-term. He mentioned that some of USAID's alternative livelihoods programs (they're the programs designed to help poor farmers transition from cultivating poppy to other, non-illict crops) have actually been somewhat effective. Although I'll have to do my own research to figure out if this is the case, he seemed pretty blunt about other challenges Afghanistan is facing. For now, at least, I'll take his word for it.

And here's a fun fact I learned from the DOJ rep - did you know that following the US invasion of Afghanistan, the US left reconstruction of the country's criminal justice system in the hands of Italy? While it may have sounded like a great idea at the time, the results have been, uh, less than sucessful. Only recently did the US get involved with criminal justice system reform (technically, I think Italy still is in charge but now the US has a prominent role in the reform process). Considering that a lot of the recent press on US involvement in Afghanistan hasn't been very positive, maybe conditions are (slowly) improving in the country.