Pubdate: Tue, 19 Sep 2006
Source: North Bay Nugget (CN ON)
Copyright: 2006 North Bay Nugget
Contact:  http://www.nugget.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2226
Author: Gwynne Dyer

BUYING OPIUM MIGHT END TALIBAN FIGHT

Most people in Afghanistan are farmers. If Hamid Karzai's 
Western-backed government in Kabul is to survive, it must have their 
support. So not destroying their main cash crop should be an obvious 
priority for Karzai's foreign supporters. But what the hell, let's go 
burn some poppies.

"We need to realize that we could actually fail here," said Lt.-Gen. 
David Richards, British commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, last week.

In south-western Afghanistan, where 7,000 British, Canadian and Dutch 
troops were committed during the summer to contain a resurgent 
Taliban, the guerillas now actually stand and fight, even against 
Nato's overwhelming firepower and air power, and everything that 
moves on the roads gets ambushed.

The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained than anything 
seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in organized units with good 
light infantry weapons.

In the past month, Britain and Canada have lost about half as many 
soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the U.S. lost in Iraq in the same 
time, out of a combat force perhaps one-tenth as big.

Concern in Europe about Western casualties in Afghanistan is already 
so great none of the Nato countries was willing to commit more troops 
to the fighting when their defence chiefs met in Belgium Sept. 13, 
despite an urgent appeal from Richards for 2,500 more combat troops. 
Most of them just don't believe a few thousand more troops will save 
the situation in Afghanistan.

To limit their casualties, the British have already abandoned their 
original "section-house" strategy of spreading troops through the 
villages of the south-west in small groups that would provide 
security and help with reconstruction. They were just too vulnerable, 
so they have been pulled back to bigger base camps and replaced by 
Afghan police (who will make deals with the local Taliban forces to 
save their lives.)

The rapid collapse of the Taliban government in the face of America's 
air power and its locally purchased allies in late 2001 created a 
wholly misleading impression the question of who controls the country 
had been settled.

Afghanistan has always been an easy country to invade but a hard 
country to occupy. Resistance to foreign intervention takes time to 
build up, but the Afghans defeated British occupations (twice) and a 
Soviet occupation when those empires were at the height of their 
power, and they are well on the way to doing it again.

Perhaps if the U.S. and its allies had smothered the country in 
troops and drowned it in aid at the outset, the rapid increase in 
security and prosperity would have created a solid base of support 
for the government they installed under Karzai.

But most of the available troops were sent off to invade Iraq 
instead, and most of the money went to American contractors in Iraq, 
not American contractors in Afghanistan (though little of it reached 
the local people in either case).

The various warlords who allied themselves with the United States are 
the real power in most of Afghanistan, and in the traditional 
opium-producing areas in the south they have encouraged a return to 
poppy-farming (which had been almost eradicated under the Taliban) in 
order to get some cash flow.

Poor farmers struggling under staggering loads of debt were happy to 
co-operate and by now Afghanistan is producing about 90 per cent of 
the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

That's the price you pay for disrupting the established order, and 
the U.S. should just have paid it

There's no real point in destroying poppies in Afghanistan, because 
they'll just get planted elsewhere: So long as heroin is illegal, the 
price will be high enough people somewhere will grow it.

Even if it is ideologically impossible for the United States to end 
its foolish, unwinnable "war on drugs," it should have turned a blind 
eye in Afghanistan.

But it didn't. For the past five years a shadowy outfit called 
DynCorps has been destroying the poppy-fields of southern 
Afghanistan's poorest farmers with U.S. and British military support.

This was an opportunity the Taliban could not resist and the alliance 
between Taliban fighters and poppy-farmers (now often the same 
people) is at the root of the resurgent guerrilla war in the south.

It begins to smell like the last year or two in a classic 
anti-colonial war, when the guerillas start winning and local players 
begin to hedge their bets.

After taking heavy casualties, Pakistan has agreed with the tribes of 
Waziristan to withdraw its troops from the lawless province, giving 
the Taliban a secure base on Afghanistan's border.

Karzai, seeking allies who will help him survive the eventual 
pull-out of Western troops, is appointing gangsters and drug-runners 
as local police chiefs and commanders. The end-game has started, and 
the foreigners seem bound to lose.

Only one chance remains for them. The futile "war on drugs" will drag 
on endlessly elsewhere, but if they legalized the cultivation of 
opium poppies in Afghanistan - and bought the entire crop at premium 
prices - they might just break the link between the Taliban and the farmers.

Store it, burn it, whatever, but stop destroying the farmers' 
livelihoods and put a few billion dollars directly into their pockets.

Otherwise, the first Afghan cities will probably start to fall into 
Taliban hands within the next year to 18 months.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine