POPPYCOCK

To Defeat Taliban We Should Be Buying Up Afghan Cash Crop, Not Destroying It

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 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
had 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-10th as big.

To limit their casualties, the British have already abandoned their
original "section-house" strategy of spreading troops through the
villages of the southwest in small groups that would provide security
and help with reconstruction. They were just too vulnerable, so
they've 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 the
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 one
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 their 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 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 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 so people somewhere will grow it.

Even if it is ideologically impossible for the U.S. 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. 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'
livelihood 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.