Lufkin-based staff sergeant serving on development team in Afghanistan
Staff Sgt. Justin Mitchell stands with one of the Agribusiness Development Team’s district Agricultural Extension Agents in Ghazni, Afghanistan. The ADT is currently working to help the people in Afghanistan become more agriculturally efficient.
By LARISSA GRAHAM/The Lufkin Daily News The Lufkin Daily News
An East Texas man is working to help people in Afghanistan become more self-sufficient.
For the last 4 1/2 years, Tyler resident Justin Mitchell has served as a staff sergeant in the 702nd Military Police Company, part of the Texas Army National Guard that calls Lufkin its home base. Right now, he is serving in Ghazni, Afghanistan, as part of the Agribusiness Development Team, which is working to help provide the people there with sustainable ways to provide for themselves. The ADT is made up of specialists from across Texas.
“It’s a unique creature, really,” Mitchell said about the 68-person unit that is made up of individuals with widely varying areas of expertise. Mitchell, who studied animal science at Texas A&M, is the animal science and veterinary expert on the team.
Mitchell’s team is the fourth ADT to come to Afghanistan from Texas. One more team will go after his leaves.
While there, Mitchell and others in his team are paired up with residents in Ghazni, where they form a group similar to a local extension service. That group is led by provencial-level officials, similar to Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples, Mitchell said.
“We direct them on how to be extension agents and how to impact the population,” Mitchell said. “By doing that, they provide a service to the residents, and it increases the legitimacy of their government and helps with the transition from U.S. troops to Afghan control.”
Agriculture plays a huge part in Afghanistan and has a much larger immediate impact on the people there.
“We’re a small unit, but we play a very integral part in the transition, in the fact that we work with a lot of different individuals in the agricultural sector,” Mitchell said.
Though the ADT is playing a huge part in the transitional effort going on in Afghanistan, Mitchell said the team is in no way trying to westernize their culture or their methods.
“The things that we do at home, 99 times out of 100 they don’t work in Afghanistan. The military learned that as a hard lesson sometimes,” he said. “A lot of times they’ll tackle a problem thinking they know how to handle it, and, yeah, they do in an American way, but not a way that’s sustainable to Afghan culture. You have to step back from problems a lot of times and analyze them and get Afghan experience.”
At one point, Mitchell and his fellow team members helped Ghazni residents construct a new slaughterhouse. Working closely with local engineers and officials, they showed them how to go through the bidding process in a transparent manner, and how to advertise the opportunity for bids on television and radio.
Their main goal is to create a solution to the problem that will be sustainable after coalition forces leave, Mitchell said. For example, farmers could be given a tractor to farm the field, but if the machine broke down or needed maintenance, they wouldn’t be able to fix it.
By holding discussions with their local counterparts and looking back on the work that other teams have done, the ADT can help provide solutions to problems that benefit the people long after they have left Afghanistan soil.
“Ghazni is growing,” Mitchell said. “Everything’s kind of picking up a little bit over here. We want to make sure that as a population they have a facility they can use for years to come. Part of the job is to coach and mentor Afghan counterparts like engineers and agricultural officials.”
Spending time in Afghanistan is much different from the time Mitchell spent in Fallujiah, Iraq, as a response team that helped train Iraqi police.
“They were further along as a society and had more modern things. People in Afghanistan have cell phones, but they’re still a very poor country that uses subsistence farming, and that kind of thing,” Mitchell said. “It’s a harsh climate and a harsh country, but they’re hard people that have survived there for 3,000 years.”
Larissa Graham’s email address is lgraham@lufkindailynews.com
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