Pubdate: Tue, 19 Sep 2006
Source: Sun Times, The (Owen Sound, CN ON)
Copyright: 2006, Osprey Media Group Inc.
Contact:  http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1544
Author: Gwynne Dyer

DESTROYING AFGHAN POPPY FIELDS IS LUNACY

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 southwestern Afghanistan, where 7,000 British, Canadian and 
Dutch troops were committed during the summer to contain a resurgent 
Taliban, the guerrillas 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 United 
States lost in Iraq in the same period, out of a combat force perhaps 
one-10th as big.

Concern in Europe about Western casualties in Afghanistan is already 
so great that none of the NATO countries were willing to commit more 
troops to the fighting when their defence chiefs met in Belgium on 
Sept. 13, despite an urgent appeal from Richards for 2,500 more 
combat troops. Most of them just don't believe that 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 that the question of whose country is 
this, anyway, 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. But the Afghans defeated British 
occupations twice, and a Soviet occupation - when those empires were 
at the height of their power. The Afghans are well on the way to 
doing it again.

Perhaps if the United States 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 President 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 cooperate, 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 United States 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 
that 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 guerrillas start winning and local 
players begin to hedge their bets.

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: Legalize poppy cultivation,then buy the 
entire crop, and at premium prices. Break the link between the 
Taliban and the poppy farmers.

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