Afghan opium production mocks our counterinsurgency efforts
JEFFREY SIMPSON
August 28, 2007
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.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
http://www.theglobeandmail.com//servlet/story/LAC.20070828.COSIMP28/TPStory/Comment
What is Karzai like-he seems like an interesting dude? Have you read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars?
