Military

A Different Mission In Afghanistan

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published September 21, 2009 at 3:00 AM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

San Diego National Guardsmen are part of a unit deploying to Afghanistan this week. Their mission is to develop agricultural businesses.

This is the first National Guard unit from California to deploy to Afghanistan with a different set of marching orders. For security reasons, Specialist Besiderio Batucan of San Ysidro says he can't say exactly where they are going, but it is in a dangerous province of Afghanistan.

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He says his job is on security detail, but many of his colleagues on the unit have agricultural and marketing skills.

“We’re not going to be going there to harm bad guys,” Batucan says. “Our mission is basically to help the Afghani people to do things like soil sampling and growing things like corn and grapes, and help their economy so that they can stand on their own feet.”

The head of Batucan’s unit, Lieutenant Robert Parry, says National Guardsmen from Kansas have already worked with Afghani farmers to increase grape production. He says they encouraged the farmers to grow vines on trellises instead of along the ground, the traditional practice.

They hope to give young, unemployed Afghanis an alternative to signing up with the Taliban.

Military

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.