The Hillary Doctrine by Hudson Valerie M. Hunt Swanee Leidl Patricia

Author:Hudson, Valerie M., Hunt, Swanee, Leidl, Patricia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL011000, Political Science/International Relations/General, SOC028000, Social Science/Women's Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Ugly: Old White Guys

Jimmy loves Afghanistan.94 At sixty-eight, divorced, and estranged from his two daughters, he has found a sense of belonging in what one U.S. colonel refers to as “the devil’s rectum.” His employer, a for-profit corporation that implements USAID development projects, pays him generously for doing, well, not so much.

During the short desert evenings and even longer nights, Jimmy likes to stretch out on a plastic chair, cigar clamped between his yellowing canines, and a bottle of smuggled spirits at his elbow. His sexual exploits, he boasts, border on the Herculean. “Seven times in one night,” he burbles contentedly. “She was young but she couldn’t get enough of me.”

Jimmy would be firmly near the bottom of the dating sweepstakes in North America. But he doesn’t care. “Girlfriends” come for five bucks a pop in this part of the world, and they’ll do “anything.” There are plenty of brothels in Kabul—otherwise known under the euphemism of “Chinese restaurants”—where women are trafficked in to service U.S. contractors and other foreign workers. When Jimmy is in the mood to splurge, he might splash out on higher-priced hookers in Dubai or Thailand, but generally speaking, he prefers to stick to Cambodia or Laos where the action is cheaper.

Jimmy likes them young and is none too troubled about whether his “girlfriends” are trafficked or not. “It’s their culture,” he replies airily, “they do it to support their family. Besides, I’ve never met a girl who says to me ‘Look, I’m being held against my will.’”

The Jimmys of the world—noxious though their views may be—are not necessarily as harmless as they may seem. Because Afghanistan is a hardship post, recruiters find it difficult to locate seasoned and experienced staff. Although the recession has made it a little easier to hire and retain people, USAID requirements still stipulate minimum years of service in “fragile environments” plus education and technical expertise that is often so specific that it doesn’t allow for much flexibility.

For more senior posts, in particular, this means that many promising female candidates won’t qualify because women haven’t been working in sufficient numbers or for long enough in hardship posts. For-profit contractors also earn a percentage for every position they manage to fill with any warm body that qualifies—with Americans at the top of the heap. It doesn’t matter how committed these recruits are or are not so long as they possess the requisite experience in the right kind of post. Although not particularly captivating in person, Jimmy is a golden goose.

“I’d happily toss him off the roof or throw him down a well,” says one of his former colleagues, a chief of party (COP; project heads hired by for-profit contractors to oversee the implementation of a USAID program) who is now working in Africa.95 “Guys like him make all of us look bad.” While, as we have seen, both contractors and subcontractors are strictly prohibited by U.S. law from purchasing commercial sex—even when off-duty—enforcement is lax to nonexistent.

Donald Steinberg, former deputy director

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