AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS HURTS CANADA'S WAR AGAINST TALIBAN

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, recently.

In southwestern 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 Gen. 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 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 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 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 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.