US's Afghan policies going up in smoke

[bemildred]

On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry that increased poppy production could be a destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in southern Afghanistan".

That rising violence - a full-scale onslaught by the resurgent Taliban - put Afghanistan back in the headlines this summer and brought consternation to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) governments (from Canada to Australia) whose soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led to believe was a peaceful "success story".

Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops that took over security in embattled southern Afghanistan from the US in July, warned at the time, "We could actually fail here." In October, he argued that if NATO did not bring security and significant reconstruction to the alienated Pashtun south within six months - the mission the US failed to accomplish during the past five years - the majority of the populace might well switch sympathies to the Taliban.

But coming in the midst of NATO anxieties and Taliban assaults, what are we to make of Rumsfeld's "legitimate worry" about Afghan poppy production, which this year will provide 92% of the world's heroin supply? And what are we to make of President George W Bush's presidential determination, issued just before Afghan President Hamid Karzai's September visit to Washington, that the Afghan government must be "held accountable" for that poppy harvest; that it must not only "deter and eradicate poppy cultivation" in the country, but "investigate, prosecute and extradite all the narco-traffickers" in the land?

Asia Times