Stop, Rethink, We Can’t Win This Way in Afghanistan

We can’t win in Afghanistan. Not the way we are fighting now. Not with our current strategy. I recently remarked on our lack of Pashto speakers and the handicap it presents (here). And earlier I commented on the opium trade problem (here):

We cannot both “win” in Afghanistan and eradicate the poppy/opium trade there. That would be expecting too much. Too much of the economy is dependent upon the opium trade. Any political process to create a stronger, better central government will have top face that fact.

The Dexter Filkins’ NY Times article “Poppies a Target in Fight Against Taliban” indicates that our military is, indeed, going to try to do both. Filkins writes (here):

American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.

The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency. The additional troops, the centerpiece of President Obama’s effort to reverse the course of the seven-year war, will roughly double the number already in southern Afghanistan. The troops already fighting there are universally seen as overwhelmed. In many cases, the Americans will be pushing into areas where few or no troops have been before.

Through extortion and taxation, the Taliban are believed to reap as much as $300 million a year from Afghanistan’s opium trade, which now makes up 90 percent of the world’s total. That is enough, the Americans say, to sustain all of the Taliban’s military operations in southern Afghanistan for an entire year.

And:

Then there is the problem of weaning poppy farmers from poppy farming — a task that has proved intractable in many countries, like Colombia, where the American government has tried to curtail poppy production. It is by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm. The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say. The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.

 “The people don’t like to cultivate poppy, but they are desperate,” Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, the governor of Zabul Province, told a group of visitors this month.

To offer an alternative to poppy farming, the American military is setting aside $250 million for agriculture projects like irrigation improvements and wheat cultivation. General Nicholson said that a $200 million plan for infrastructure improvements, much of it for roads to help get crops to market, was also being prepared. The vision, General Nicholson said, is to try to restore the agricultural economy that flourished in Afghanistan in the 1970s. That, more than military force, will defeat the Taliban, he said.

“There is a significant portion of the enemy that we believe we can peel off with incentives,” the general said. “We can hire away many of these young men.”

I disagree. This strategy seems crazy. I share John Robbs view (here):

Despite this global guerilla thinking in the Marines, the advocated approach appears to be heavy handed and will focus on crop eradication and firefights with the Taliban (which means we haven't learned much from Iraq).  Further, the funds available for the construction of an alternative economy (most of which will be siphoned off by big companies and corruption) is a paltry $450 million to replace a $2-3.5 billion economy.  It's also a small fraction of what we are spending on troops in the area.  The likely outcome is a much hotter insurgency in Afghanistan, as the number of fighters swell due to newly impoverished farmers, and a spread of the violence to previously pacified areas as groups move to find new areas to grow.  It may even intensify the spread of the insurgency in Pakistan as members of Afghan groups opt to move to greener pastures in Pakistan.  

Please, commanders, give this a serious rethink!

Comments

[sohbet]

your website very quality
Film İzle
Chat
Sohbet
kebap sipariş