No More Opium ...

No More Opium, No More Money for Afghan Villagers
Sunday, August 02, 2009

Afghan farmers work in an opium poppy field in Nawa district of Helmand province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan.
SHAHRAN, Afghanistan — For as long as anyone can remember, there was no need for paper money in this remote corner of the Hindu Kush. The common currency was what grew in everyone's backyard — opium.

When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father's fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf. Their mothers collected it in plastic bags, trading 18 grams for a meter of fabric or two liters of cooking oil. Even a visit to the barbershop could be settled in opium.

But the economy of this village sputtered to a halt last year when the government began aggressively enforcing a ban on opium production. Villagers were not allowed to plant their only cash crop. Now shops are empty and farmers are in debt, as entire communities spiral into poverty.

Opium is one of the biggest problems facing this troubled country, because it is deeply woven into the fabric of daily life as well as into the economics of insurgency. Afghanistan supplies 93 percent of the world's opium, and it is one of the main sources of funding for the growing Taliban movement.

Yet the government ban on opium is working at best unevenly. In areas of the country under Taliban control, opium production is going strong. In government-held areas like Shahran, it has gone down drastically, but at the cost of the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people. Their anger is imperiling government support in one of the few areas of the country that has resisted the Taliban's advance.

"Now we don't even have 10 Afghanis ($0.25) to give our children to buy bubble gum," says opium farmer Abdul Hay. "Before they would go into the field and collect the money themselves."

Two years ago, opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, grew on nearly half a million acres in Afghanistan. The harvest was worth about $4 billion, or equal to nearly half the country's GDP in 2007. As much as a tenth — almost half a billion dollars — went to local strongmen, including the Taliban, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Under intense international pressure, the government redoubled its effort to crack down on opium farmers. By last year, the number of acres planted with poppy had dropped by a fifth, yet the Taliban's finances remained largely untouched. Ninety-eight percent of Afghanistan's opium is now grown in just seven of the country's 34 provinces — all areas under partial or total Taliban control.

Opium was so entrenched in Badakshan province, where Shahran is located, that it is said Marco Polo sampled it when he passed through in the 13th century. Until recently, the sloping mountain faces were awash with pink, purple and magenta poppies, nodding in the wind. But in the past year, poppy production has gone down 95 percent.

The villagers here held a meeting and decided two years ago not to plant opium, after government radio messages warned that poppy fields would be destroyed and opium growers jailed. Posters distributed throughout the area showed a man with his hands bound by the stem of the opium poppy.

The villagers say they did as the government told them, and planted their fields with wheat, barley, mustard and melons. But these crops need more care than the tough opium poppy, which will bloom with little water or fertilizer.

Most of the wheat fields yielded little because the farmers couldn't afford to fertilize the land. Even where yields were decent, farmers say they could have earned between two and 10 times more by planting the same land with opium.

"See this mustard? It can take care of my family for one month," says 25-year-old farmer Abdul Saboor, pulling up a shoot of the green plant and snapping it open with his teeth. "When we planted opium in this same plot, it took care of all our expenses for an entire year."

The hole in the economy is swallowing up the community, from the farmer to the turbaned shopkeepers whose scales used for weighing opium now sit idle.

Every month, shopkeeper Abdul Ahmed used to bring $20,000 worth of goods to sell in the bazaar. It's been four months since his last truckload, and he has only sold $1,000. Ahmed is one of 40 traders left; there used to be 400.

"We open in the morning and go back at night. No money comes in. No one buys anything," says Ahmed. "There is no money left in this village. Opium is the only income we had."

Villagers say desperation is pushing hundreds to immigrate to neighboring Iran, where they work as day laborers. Farmers throughout the region are also sinking deeply into debt. They borrow money to buy staples like rice and oil, which they used to buy with opium. They also take loans to buy seeds and fertilizer and to rent donkeys to take the wheat to market — an expense opium did not bring because all the local shops accepted it as legal tender.

On a hill flanking the highway in Argu District, a 4-hour drive southeast of here, a thin farmer is bent over cutting wheat with a hand-held sickle. Abdul Mahin says he is several hundred dollars in debt to the man who sold him fertilizer.

"If we plant two bags of wheat, then we'll have just enough money to buy the seeds to plant another two bags of wheat," says the gray-bearded farmer. "We're going backwards. Of course we're angry at the government."

A small number of farmers in other towns are planting opium despite the ban. Most are seeing their fields destroyed, as government agents intensify patrols.

Farmer Abdulhamid, 55, says he has only rain-fed land, and none of it is irrigated. So he can't grow wheat and barley with much success. Unless the government helps, he says, he will have to plant opium again.

"We are getting poorer day by day," says Abdulhamid, in the village of Pengani. "What should I do? Kill my children so that I don't have to feed them?"

When farmers were asked to stop planting, they were promised help from the government. Badakshan is set to receive $1,000 for each hectare (roughly 2 1/2 acres) of land freed of poppies — some $10 million this year. It's being used to build three clinics and three schools, pave a major road and rebuild six fallen bridges.

Farmers say a distant clinic or bridge is not going to feed their children. But counternarcotics experts and government officials respond that the opium ban is necessary.

"These poor farmers are going to get stepped on and get hurt in this effort," says former Drug Enforcement Agency official Doug Wankel, who organized the U.S. counternarcotics effort here in 2003. "But it's a pain that has to be endured for the good of the masses."

"In the U.S. and the U.K., when people do an illegal activity, the police stops them, right? This is an illegal act, so we need to stop it in order to enforce the rule of law," says Zalmai Afzali, a spokesman for the Ministry of Counternarcotics. He also notes the link to the insurgency: "I try to explain to the farmer that cultivates poppy that he is buying a coffin for his child."

Yet the poverty created by getting rid of opium may be stoking terrorism. Nangahar — which became poppy free last year and is held up as an example of government control — has seen a rapid increase in extremism, according to a field study by David Mansfield, counternarcotics consultant for the U.N. and the World Bank.

By April last year, the province rescinded agreements to limit the movement of anti-government groups on its border with Pakistan. By July, these groups were believed to have set up bases in four districts next to Pakistan. By September, they were attacking government buildings. And by October, there were Taliban checkpoints.

Also, the crackdown in the country's far north is unlikely to stop the flow of opium and money to the Taliban in the south. In Zabul — the home province of Taliban spiritual chief Mullah Omar — poppy production grew by 45 percent last year.

Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold, grew so much opium last year that if it was a separate country, it would rank as the world's top opium producer, according to Gretchen Peters, author of "Seeds of Terror," on how the Taliban is bankrolling itself through drug smuggling. Peters says the Taliban's video messages now talk about securing smuggling routes and protecting poppy plantations.

Poppy fields in Taliban areas are so dangerous that eradication teams comb them for bombs before trying to destroy them. Last year 78 government agents were killed trying to destroy fields in the south. By contrast, the worst they faced in Badakshan was crying farmers.

Zainuddin, the head security officer for Darayim district in Badakshan, says he feels awful every time he uproots a poppy field.

"Sometimes I cry as I am hitting the poppies," says Zainuddin, who like many Afghans goes by a single name. "Because I know these are poor people and I am taking away the only thing they have."

Over the past month, dozens of fields have been destroyed in the mountains of Badakshan. Nasrullah, a 35-year-old farmer, planted three small plots of white-and-violet poppies inside a hill of wheat, hoping the taller crop would hide the illegal blossoms.

He stood in silence on a recent morning as nine police officers crossed a small gulch and climbed the hill. They assaulted his crop, hitting the flowers with long sticks until they fell to the ground. He put his face in his hands.

"I didn't plant this for my own pleasure," he says. "I planted this so that my family could eat. All the rest of this is worth nothing," he says, waving at the wheat. "The choice I have to make now is either kill myself. Or leave the country."

["Hey my friend had a great idea, the Western countries should buy all that opium for pharmaceuticals--it's a no brainer!"]

An Eloquent Marine

AN ELOQUENT MARINE
Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:07:09 -0700
Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan

It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains along the Dar 'yoi Pomir River watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard.

The antidote tastes like transmission fluid but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware, we bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.

It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.

I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me. I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.

Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins for over a month and a half now and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns. Actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do.

They have no respect for anything, not for their families or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours.

Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.

They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice but I'm good at it. Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives.

The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here because you have no idea what we're doing and, really, you don't want to know. We are your military and we are doing what you sent us here to do.

You wanna help? Buy Bonds America .

Saucy Jack
Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanistan
Semper Fidelis

Afghan Surge Against Taliban

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghanistan's southern rim, the Taliban's spiritual birthplace and the country's most violent region, has for the last two years been the domain of British, Canadian and Dutch soldiers.

That's about to change.

In what amounts to an Afghan version of the surge in Iraq, the U.S. is preparing to pour at least 20,000 extra troops into the south, augmenting 12,500 NATO soldiers who have proved too few to cope with a Taliban insurgency that is fiercer than NATO leaders expected.

New construction at Kandahar Air Field foreshadows the upcoming infusion of American power. Runways and housing are being built, along with two new U.S. outposts in Taliban-held regions of Kandahar province.

And in the past month the south has been the focus of visiting U.S. and other dignitaries — Sen. John McCain, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, U.S. congressional delegations and leaders from NATO headquarters in Europe.

For the first time since NATO took over the country in 2006, an experienced U.S. general, Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, is assigned to the south.

He says U.S. Gen. David McKiernan, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, has made the objectives clear in calling the situation in the south a stalemate and asking for more troops, on top of the 32,000 Americans already in Afghanistan.

"By introducing more U.S. capability in here we have the potential to change the game," Nicholson said.

The Army Corps of Engineers will spend up to $1.3 billion in new construction for troop placements in southern Afghanistan, said the corps commander in Afghanistan, Col. Thomas O'Donovan.

Violence in Afghanistan has spiked in the last two years, and Taliban militants now control wide swaths of countryside. Military officials say they have enough troops to win battles but not to hold territory, and they hope the influx of troops, plus the continued growth of the Afghan army, will change that.

U.S. officials hope to add at least three new brigades of ground forces in the southern region, along with assets from an aviation brigade, surveillance and intelligence forces, engineers, military police and Special Forces. In addition, a separate brigade of new troops is deploying to two provinces surrounding Kabul.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that Afghanistan could get up to 30,000 new U.S. troops in 2009, depending on the security situation in Iraq. Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman, said Monday that one ground brigade should arrive by spring, a second by summer and a third by fall.

Nicholson said he expects the U.S. forces to be deployed in Kandahar city and along vital Highway 1, which links Kandahar to Kabul, and in neighboring Helmand province, the world's largest producer of opium poppies for heroin.

NATO forces are well positioned in three key areas of northern Helmand, said British Lt. Gen. J.B. Dutton, deputy commander of the NATO's Afghan mission.

"What we have not yet achieved is to join those areas up, so there is a security presence that allows locals to drive safely between those areas. That's the sort of thing we are going to want to improve," he said.

Since 2006, the U.S. has concentrated its forces in eastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan, while the south is policed by 8,500 British troops, 2,500 Canadians and 2,500 Dutch.

Their overall commander is Dutch Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif — who would also have command of any incoming U.S. forces in the south next year. By the fall of 2010 the top officer in the south will be American.

The infusion of U.S. power risks Americanizing a war that until now has been a shared mission of 41 coalition countries. But Dutton, the British general, suggested there was no choice. "It has to do with national capacity and a number of political considerations in those countries," he said.

In Canada and many European countries, governments face low public support for keeping troops in Afghanistan combat zones.

Dutton said the British contribution is "significant," as well as that of Canada, which he noted has lost more troops per capita in Afghanistan than any other nation.

Nicholson, the U.S. general, said the Canadians have fought "heroically" but simply don't have enough forces to secure all of Kandahar. The Canadian Embassy declined to comment.

More U.S. troops — 151 — died in Afghanistan in 2008 than any of the seven years since the invasion to oust the Taliban, and U.S. officials warn violence will probably intensify next year.

"If we get the troops, they're going to move into areas that haven't been secured, and when we do that, the enemy is there, and we're going to fight," said Nicholson, who spent 16 months commanding a brigade of 10th Mountain Division troops in eastern Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007.

That fighting should eventually clear the way for security and governance to take hold, he said.

"If you want to summarize that as it's going to get worse before it gets better, that's exactly what we're talking about," he said.