AFGHANISTAN: A MODEST PROPOSAL

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
Lieutenant General David Richards, British commander of Nato forces
in Afghanistan, recently. 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 US 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 that none of the Nato countries was willing to commit more
troops to the fighting when their defence chiefs met in Belgium on
September 13, despite an urgent appeal from General 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 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 US 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 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

That's the price you pay for disrupting the established order, and
the US 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 US 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 guerilla 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 up 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.