LAST CHANCE IN 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, 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 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 seen
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 that none of the NATO countries was willing to commit more
troops to the fighting when their defence chiefs met in Belgium on 13
September, 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 southwest 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 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 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 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'
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.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.