AFGHAN OPIUM PRODUCTION MOCKS OUR COUNTERINSURGENCY EFFORTS

Yes, as our media keep reminding us, our soldiers in Afghanistan are
"heroes," men and women doing a difficult, dangerous and sometimes
fatal job. They are undoubtedly doing the best they can, but, through
no fault of their own, that best cannot be good enough.

Good enough to stop the insurgency in Kandahar and other parts of
southern Afghanistan. Good enough to keep the Taliban at bay. Good
enough to leave in 2009 with security assured and reconstruction
under way in that corner of this post-medieval country.

Yesterday, the impossibility of this self-defined mission - as the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization is executing it - became even
clearer with the latest report from the United Nations about opium
production in Afghanistan.

Ever since the United States toppled the Taliban, and ever since NATO
took nominal control of the mission, poppy eradication has been high
on the list of priorities for reform. After all, it fuels the Taliban
insurgency. Shutting down that source of money, therefore, conforms
to one rule among many of counterinsurgency: Starve the insurgents of support.

Within NATO's division of labour, the British are supposed to be in
charge of poppy eradication. Yet, the biggest upsurge in poppy
production has occurred in Helmand province, where more than 7,000
British soldiers are based. The poppies are proliferating under the
very noses of the eradicators.

Of course, the Americans with their anti-drug crusading spirit are
doing most of the work. Predictably, they are failing. The funniest
picture of the month was a Holstein cow the Americans had brought to
an agricultural show being looked at by bemused locals. Wisconsin meets Kabul.

Antonio Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and
Crime, reported yesterday that "Afghanistan's opium production has
reached a frighteningly high level, twice the amount produced just
two years ago." Apart from 19th-century China, "no other country in
the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale."

Afghanistan is a narco-state. It produces 93 per cent of the world's
opium. Nothing NATO has done, and nothing it proposes to do, will
change this fact, except at the margin.

The insurgents, therefore, will continue to be well-financed from the
proceeds of the opium trade, and corruption will continue to be rife
in the Afghan government, some of whose members are directly involved
in production and trafficking. Official corruption, of course, turns
citizens against the very government that Canadians and other NATO
countries are trying to help.

As long as NATO keeps trying to eradicate the trade - which brings
farmers far more income that growing wheat or other crops - the
mission will chase its tail. A useful command is: When failing, stop
digging - meaning rethink the entire policy (as Canada's Greens
propose) by creating a domestic market to supervise growing and
purchasing. Nobody in authority, including the UN, thinks that way.
So the digging continues.

Tactically, Canadian "heroes" are doing what they can. Strategically,
they are part of a wider mission defying basic rules of
counterinsurgency warfare.

Starving the insurgents is one rule, one that is being mocked by the
drug trade. Sealing the border is another rule, mocked by the porous
Afghan-Pakistani border across which insurgents (and drugs) flow with
almost unimpeded impunity.

Having enough boots on the ground is another rule, mocked by the
relative paucity of NATO troops and the unwillingness of most NATO
partners to put their soldiers in harm's way. With too few troops,
air power is too often used, with collateral civilian casualties.

These casualties contribute to mocking another counterinsurgency
rule: that the battle is for the support of the local population.
Foreign aid, including Canadian, is undoubtedly useful in this fight,
but there isn't enough of it. How could there ever be enough in one
of the world's poorest countries?

We are told, and rightly so, that we must "finish the mission," that
Canada cannot "cut and run," that our men and women make the country
proud. All of which is true but beside the point: The mission,
however defined, is defying too many basic rules of
counterinsurgency. Without a series of NATO course corrections,
bravery alone will not bring strategic victory.