Trading Sex For Secrets

Call me naive, but I find it more than slightly ironic that the CIA is now handing out Viagra in exchange for intelligence abroad, while the U.S. government continues to ban the distribution of condoms, contraceptives and reproductive health procedures via the Global Gag Rule.

Isn't that being just a little unfair? Encouraging men to be sexually invigorated, but leave women to fend off their own fertility?

That is just one curious thought (among others) that I had after reading the Washington Post story today titled: Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan.

While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

In their efforts to win over notoriously fickle warlords and chieftains, the officials say, the agency's operatives have used a variety of personal services. These include pocketknives and tools, medicine or surgeries for ailing family members, toys and school equipment, tooth extractions, travel visas, and, occasionally, pharmaceutical enhancements for aging patriarchs with slumping libidos, the officials said.

Hmm. Trading sex for secrets. That doesn't seem terribly shocking considering the sordid history of the CIA. The article even describes the "long tradition of using sex as a motivator" in the intelligence business saying that "the Soviet spy service was notorious for using attractive women as bait when seeking to turn foreign diplomats into informants."

Also, I do think there is a moral relativism argument to be made about the long term damages of distributing Viagra instead of guns. I'd have to say that I prefer the basic concept of distributing dissolvable pharmaceuticals instead of re-loadable automatic weapons. However, it is the psychology behind the distribution of Viagra to these warlords and chieftains that is most bothersome.

"Aging village patriarchs were easily sold on the utility of a pill that could “put them back in an authoritative position,” the official said.

Yikes - did you just say "authoritative position"???  Feministe breaks down the problematic nature with this sort of mechanism saying:

While I am not knowledgeable enough about U.S. intelligence operations to make a judgment about whether there are more effective and less sexually suggestive options out there - I would prefer that if we are going to be passing along little blue pills to the residents of the Afghanistan, that the U.S. rescinds the Global Gag Rule and allows NGOs to pass along little blue condoms at the same time.

If indeed the Viagra method is effective and less damaging than the exchange of guns or money, it only seems right, in my opinion, to allow birth control or emergency contraception to be distributed to the women who are now at the mercy of the "authoritative" positions these men are suddenly finding themselves in.