Peninsula Peace and Justice Center
Robert Fox
The Guardian (UK)
Afghanistan has chalked up another record opium harvest according to the UN Office of Drug Control, which is good news for almost no one - least of all the wretched farmers - except the Taliban.
According to the UN, Afghanistan now produces more than 90% of all the heroin sold illegally throughout the world. More than half of that comes from Helmand province, where the British troops went last year to bring security, justice and a better life for all. After more than a year of intense fighting, usually at close quarters, local leaders are claiming that their villages and communities have been the victims of excessive force - in particular by bombing from the air.
Earlier this month, the new British ambassador in Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, warned
that Britain should prepare for a commitment to Afghanistan for some 30
years. In an echo of the imperial hubris of Lord Curzon, former viceroy
to India, Cowper-Coles said plans are afoot to build a new
"super-embassy" as the base of British operations in the shadow of the
Hindu Kush. Curzon in his time ordered a new British mission to be
built - on a site now sold to Pakistan - so our man could be "the
best-houses minister in Asia". The grounds were said to be sufficient
for an encampment of a brigade of the old Imperial Indian Army.
One wonders quite what Sir Sherard wants to house in his new
proconsular palace. Currently, Britain has 7,100 troops in Afghanistan,
more than in Iraq now, and due to go up to 7,700 by October. This
figure is either too little or too much, depending on your point of
view. This reflects the ambiguity of British policy in Afghanistan
today.
Clearly, the number of international forces on the ground belonging to the Nato-sponsored Isaf (international security assistance force), some 37,000, is insufficient for an old-fashioned policy of occupation and pacification. Not that such a policy ever worked in Afghanistan since the Moghul invasion of Baibars - as the Russians from their adventures in the 1980s and the British through three Afghan wars know full well.
Anyway, colonial pacification based on bribery and hanging is not an option in today's circumstances. The alternative of local deals, muddling through, and fighting the Taliban to a standstill when they appear - the present British concept of operations - doesn't seem much of an option either.
There is no doubt that the British have had success in recent
months, clearing Taliban from the Sangin valley and the Kajaki dam. But
the action across southern Afghanistan has had a downside, too.
Increasingly, village farmers and tribal leaders say they are becoming
the victims of indiscriminate bombardment, mostly from the air, of the
international forces. They also say that they have no alternative
livelihood to growing opium poppies - hence the huge increase in the
area of cultivation in Afghanistan up from 105,000 hectares in 2005,
according to the UN, to a whopping 165,000 hectares last year. All this
now yields an income of just under $3bn, most going to middlemen and
traffickers, and their Taliban tithe masters, and very little to the
farmer who gets roughly $125 per kg of opium paste - down from $138 per
kg in 2005.
The reconstruction NGO, the Senlis Council,
believes now there has to be a drastic change of course before the
Karzai government in Kabul and its international friends lose the
support of southern Afghanistan altogether to the Taliban. They want
Gordon Brown to review urgently the UK's policies in Helmand and the
south, over drugs in particular. While the British troops are defeating
the Taliban in the field, says Norine MacDonald the president of
Senlis, they are losing the propaganda war.
"The Taliban are taking advantage of our errors and are using these
grievances to become an increasingly legitimate political movement in
southern Afghanistan," she says.
The signs are, however, that the American forces are prepared to use
more aerial bombing to make up their shortfall in ground troops - and
they are prepared to adopt a new strategy of widespread aerial spraying
of poppy crops. This, believes Ms MacDonald, will alienate the farmers
even more and throw them into the arms of the Taliban. She also
believes the Taliban are moving into a new phase of a guerrilla
campaign, which will focus more on terrorist suicide bombings and
assassinations in the main centres such as Kandahar and Kabul itself.
Evidence of the growing power of the Taliban is the sudden surge in
their attacks round Jalalabad and across Nangahar province in the east.
Senlis believes the international forces should adopt a strategy of
secure poppy production for medicinal morphine - of which there is a
huge shortage. Some 80% of the world's population cannot get
morphine-based painkillers, not even codeine, says Senlis in a new
report this week. Even the children who are suffering injuries and
burns from Nato bombing now in hospital in Lashkar Gha and Kandahar
cannot get adequate painkillers.
But in such a depressed and criminalised area as the southern
Afghanistan, bringing any sense of order to poppy production looks
difficult. Security seems set to be a major problem for the foreseeable
future as there is little means of controlling the flow of Taliban
recruits from the tribal lands of Waziristan in Pakistan. Yet, almost
every alternative to controlled production looks as problematic - or
worse.
Peninsula Peace and Justice Center · 305 N. California Avenue · Palo Alto, CA
peaceandjustice.org/article.php?story=20070627141636976