BUYING OPIUM MIGHT END TALIBAN FIGHT

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 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 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 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 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 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
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 guerrilla 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 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.