afghan war
29 Oct 2009
Civilising Afghanistan To Death
In Afghanistan, if the US military thinks you might be connected to the drug trade, they can simply shoot you on sight, writes Jeff Sparrow
Over in Afghanistan, the locals have once again displayed their backwardness, this time by objecting to the US military's compilation of a hit list: a register of suspected drug lords for army units to kill on sight. Afghan officials object that foreign troops summarily executing people identified as criminals via secret evidence will — get this! — undermine the local justice system."They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," says Mohammad Daud, the Deputy Interior Minister for Counternarcotics. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own."
Laws? Constitution? Legal Codes? Where's this guy been for the last seven years?
Ali Ahmad Jalali, the former Afghan interior minister, seems equally primitive. "There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he says. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?"
The simple natives might be incapable of grasping the legality of battlefield executions but the US military says that, really, there's no problem. The death list complies with international law and the military's own rules of engagement because, to add someone to the register, the Pentagon requires "two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence".
So there you go. Before they shoot someone dead, they even get some of that fancy evidence stuff. What more could you ask?
Anyway, a few days ago, the New York Times threw some more light on the US's relationship with the Afghan opium trade. As it transpires, it's not every drug dealer who gets marked for death, since, as a former CIA agent explained: "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn't live in Afghanistan."
Mother Teresa might not but Ahmed Wali Karzai certainly does — and he was publicly identified by the White House more than a year ago as a major player in the opium business. As Time magazine puts it, "on the streets of Kabul and Kandahar, the name Wali has long been synonymous with someone who can get away with a crime because he has friends in the right places."
The most obvious of those friends is his big brother Hamid, the current Afghan president, and the guy whose regime the West thas been propping up for years.
But the Times now reveals that Ahmed Karzai has other backers. Wouldn't you know it, he's on the CIA payroll — and has been for eight years.
More specifically, Karzai helps the CIA run a paramilitary outfit called the Kandahar Strike Force. He rents buildings to the CIA; he organises meetings with the Taliban.
As the Times says, with magisterial understatement, the CIA's financial support for someone whom the White House calls a drug dealer suggests "that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban".
You think? Some drug chieftains get shot dead without trial. Others go on the payroll. How could this war possibly go wrong?
Well, let's ask some of the combatants.
Here's Joe Glenton, a lance corporal in the British Army, who now faces a court martial for refusing to go back to Afghanistan. Instead, he spoke at a Stop the War rally. "I expected to go to war," he explained, "but I also expected that the need to defend this country's interests would be legal and justifiable. I don't think this is too much to ask. It's now apparent that the conflict is neither of these and that's why I must make this stand".
Perhaps even more significant is the testimony of Mathew Hoh, a former captain in the US Marines who last month resigned from the US Foreign Service in disgust at what's taking place in the southern Afghan province of Zabul. In his resignation letter, he argued that the occupation — and the US support for Karzai's corrupt regime — fanned the ongoing violence. As he put it, "the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by the unrepresentative government in Kabul."
Hoh's remarks accord with what Nur al-Haq Ulumi, an Afghan parliamentarian told the Washington Post in reference to the US Army's hit list. "We have some people, powerful people, inside and outside government, who can freely smuggle drugs. If we had an honest government, the government could track down and arrest these people — everybody knows this. Already, people feel that foreigners didn't really come here to reconstruct our country. They think the foreigners just came here to kill us."
Now why would they get that idea?
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Thanks Jeff. You’ve provided an interesting analysis as to what you perceive to be some of the problems facing the Afghan people. Now the hard bit - are you able to offer any solutions?
Jimbo,
There’s no longer any easy solutions in Afghanistan. But quite obviously there’s no chance of the situation improving while the country remains under occupation. Afghanistan has suffered for decades — most of last century, in fact — as the arena in which the great powers implement their machinations. Until that ends, the country will never know peace.
So the most immediate step can be summed up in three words. Get. Out. Now.
We aren’t about to move out Jeff, along with the rest of the Axis of the Willing.
I’m gob struck that many of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq even ‘lefties’ think we should stay. As if we are there to help the population.
If the Australian public had a wider understanding of the proposed Gas Pipe lines intended to pass through Afghanistan, then they might better understand why we are there.
Even under the Taliban, as I understand, opium production was at about 50 tons per year, now it’s at 6500 tons.
How can this happen under out watch??
Some of the more conspiratorially minded believe this is how the CIA funds it’s black-ops.
Surely not, Oliver North from Pentagon with the help of his CIA buddies was convicted and stopped from doing that sort of thing during the Iran/Contra affair; buying coke from Sth America, and selling it in Los Angeles (The Crack Capital of the World), and buying arms and selling them to Iran, during an embargo – no less.
But he’s gone straight since his prompt presidential Pardon and he’s now a Military analyst/journalist for FOX News.
We’ve (our allies) printed and distributed jihad books, dumped uranium on them, funded and trained militant extremists, enthroned oil interested parties, and murdered any village or kid or wedding party that stood in our way and these people will continue to be treated as pawns by our policy makers.
Many Afghans are offering their children for sale; not because they are cold and heartless, but because they figure that if anyone buys them then they will surely feed them. Beats seeing your kid starve to death.
These people are not merely ‘collateral damage’ ; they are the result of the nature of our war.
I’m amassed that all the so called ‘intellectuals’ that haunt this site can’t see the truth.
I guess they can only go by what they see and read.
Any chance that the Jesuit Interests behind this site can do something about that?
Eight years of war, and STILL no cheap heroin over here is Oz. And the bloody europeans are paying 35-40euro a gram! Aussies are doing our bit -I say we stop giving our allies a free ride and demand equal access to the benefits.
That asside, you can be sure that one only criteria for ending up on that hit list is being an enemy/competitor of the bunch of drug dealers, warlords and corrupt officials who the west happens to be presently allied with. Western armies are being used as tools in interfactional power struggles. The taliban rose to power as the solution to the very corruption and interfactional fighting which the west is currently fueling with its policies.
Jeff, I understand where you’re coming from, and I don’t think for a moment that there are any easy solutions. However, simply saying that the west should pull out seems to me however to be an extremely simplistic approach. It begs the obvious question… what would happen next? Can you give me an idea about how you see a pull-out of NATO and US forces bringing about peace, democracy and development?
phoneyid, he’s back!
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28808.html
"House Republicans have a new foreign policy adviser with a controversial pedigree: Oliver North."
" North’s mission: Relay his insights into the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, where he recently visited."
Truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks for an excellent article Jeff!
This relates directly to the numerous recent NM articles calling for an end to the ‘war on drugs’.
Legalise all drugs, and pay the Afghan farmers to keep growing their poppies, as they have done for yonks, and REGULATE the whole business.
A key element of all the problems in Afghanistan relates to the massive income derived from heroin production. 90% or so of the world’s smack supply comes from Afghanistan.
End the War on Drugs, GIVE FREE heroin to every one who feels they can’t live without it, and blammo, a major source of revenue for the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government is removed.
Jimbo,
The withdrawal of foreign forces is, as the philosophers say, necessary but not sufficient for peace. What follows after that depends on whether or not ordinary Afghans can create a political alternative to the warlords and religious sectarians. That might sound like pie in the sky, except that every study shows that the various warlords owe much of their status to the foreign presence, either because they benefit directly from patronage (like most of the Northern Alliance gangsters associated with Karzai) or, conversely, because they’ve built popular support through their fight against the occupation (the basis for the Taliban’s resurgence).
In an Afghanistan free from great power intervention, that factor no longer applies. And so the construction of a civil society becomes once more possible.
No-one suggests that everything will be fine as soon as NATO leaves. But an end to occupation fundamentally changes the dynamic of the country. After all, without the foreign presence, what actually do the warlords have to offer? Sure, they might have weapons but you can’t maintain control by weapons alone. In post-occupation Afghanistan, the demands of ordinary Afghans for things like development, civil liberties, housing, education — all the normal things that people demand in peacetime — start to exert themselves.
Well put jeffsparrow. A full withdrawal is by no means going to suddenly bring peace and stability, in fact in the short term it could well deliver much worse. I see the potential for a chaotic period following a withdrawal as various internal powers fight for control. But it would be a painful first step in what would ultimately be a long term local re-building process, the Afghans creating the type of society that they want.
The US supposed ‘democratic’ agenda is merely a cover designed to justify their actions in the eyes of their own electorate, and sadly, large parts of the western world have also been sucked into it. The US leadership knows full well that democracy cannot be imposed successfully when the local population simply doesn’t identify with it. But they can achieve some sort of control over an imposed democracy and that is why they keep doing it, with complete disregard for the lives of the local population. They simply failed in Vietnam, they tried it in Iraq, no-one bought it, so they invented stories of WMD’s and ended up with a puppet democracy in a country still full of chaos and bloodshed. Afghanistan is just the latest in string of invasions/occupations intended simply to spread American influence and control.
There is no easy way to fix this problem and no hope of a happy ending for a long time to come. But nothing can justify the complete dismantling of society in Afghanistan for purely political reasons. Talk of the drug trade is redundant, the US has no interest in fighting it and it merely becomes another smoke screen for their real intentions. Western forces must withdraw for Afghans to have any hope of living their own lives their own way ever again.
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Hi Jeff, thanks for your response. I really hope that what you suggest might be the outcome of a withdrawal of US/NATO forces, but I can’t help thinking that Afghanistan might just become another Somalia - a failed state with no central government to speak of, abandoned by the world, with declining education and increasing child mortality rates. Is there a model of western engagement in Afganistan that might work better, or at least not be as bad as you suggest?
Good article - US/NATO forces should be withdrawn immediately.
All wars are big, bad business and should be stopped.
First naive assumption of the US/NATO forces is that the trade in opiates from Afghanistan can be stopped.
Second naive assumption is that all nations see trade in opiates as illicit.
Third naive assumption is that the Afghanis think there’s something wrong with the traders (warlords) of the most lucrative industry in Afghanistan (opium) showing support for Karzai.
Fourth naive assumption is that the women of Afghanistan would rather be under occupation, at war, with no guarrantees of peace or equal status in the near future; than attempting to negotiate their rights, in peace, with their newly elected President, no matter who he’s supported by.