Taliban Bide Their Time to Outlast Surge
HELMAND, Afghanistan — It was no great surprise that the skirmish was over within a few minutes. A half dozen Taliban fighters lay dead. But the 300 insurgents, who were the target of a joint air and ground assault by two British battle groups on the Regay villages, had evaporated. No self-respecting guerrilla force is going to hang around to be crushed between the anvil of 200 snarling Highlanders and the hammer of 100 bolt-headed British paratroopers.
The mujahideen sensibly opted to down their weapons and wait until the British had cleared off.
It seems daft, therefore, that President Barack Obama has set a date for the start of the withdrawal of the 30,000 extra troops he plans to "surge" into Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban will simply wait the 18 months he's allowed for the surge with their heads down, and then re-start their campaign? As Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader is so often quoted as saying: "You have the watches, but we have the time."
When he announced the surge at Westpoint, the U.S. president simultaneously offered general Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. officer in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, the tools of success (more troops) and then guaranteed failure by revealing his lack of long-term resolve.
The lesson of the assault on the southern end of the Musa Qala wadi in Helmand province in the summer of 2008, and of countless other operations in Afghanistan is that the Taliban refuses to fight on its enemies' terms.
No matter.
A few weeks after the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment left the Musa Qala wadi in their Chinooks they learned another lesson. They swept down on the densely populated string of fortified compounds and hamlets marked as Sar Puzeh on the NATO maps. Here, by the Helmand River and among the lattice of irrigation ditches and rich fields, the Paras found themselves locked in an unrelenting 17-hour pitched battle.
The fighting was so intense that lance corporal Steve Lewis, a ginger-haired former convict from the tough industrial north east of England near Newcastle, shot seven men dead with his sniper rifle. His number two Frank "the Yank" Ward, who hails from the American Midwest, accounted for at least another couple.
As the Taliban fell, more kept coming. Their bodies lay on the sharp stubble of the fields in clumps of bloodied clothing, Apache attack helicopters tore into them, fast jets bombed and artillery pounded, and still them came.
Why?
The answer was sitting in 200 liter drums of frothy brown sludge, and in plastic sacks oozing a black molasses. Opium. Almost every compound the British troops broke into was a processing factory which took opium resin, which weeps from scratches on poppy heads, and turned it into a morphine base for later processing into heroin.
Whether or not the enemy who were fighting the British at Sar Puzeh were genuine ideological Taliban is unknown. Scores of Afghan fighters, and one British sergeant major, were killed that day. The only real difference between the two engagements was the presence of the opium factories.
Helmand produces around 90 percent of Afghanistan's opium. Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's heroin. The business is worth at least $4 billion a year to Afghanistan's drug lords. These barons lead clans with their own militia who depend entirely on the opium trade for their economic survival. Many have links to the Taliban. They pay the Taliban tax and
protection money, the Taliban often transports opium out of Afghanistan into Pakistan for export world wide. Some drug lords are part of Mullah Omar's own commanding shura.
Equally, according to Gretchen Peters, author of "Seeds of Terror — How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban," drugs are transported through Pakistan in Pakistani army trucks or on convoys organized with the help of the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) which has ideological and strategic links back into the Taliban.
On top of that, large numbers of senior officers in the Afghan National Police, ministers in Hamid Karzai's government, and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's own brother, are also intimately involved in the illicit trade. Karzai's government's corruption may be lubricated with money from foreign aid — but the whole country is drowning in the pigswill of drug money.
While opium continues to provide around 50 percent of Afghanistan's GDP, the region will remain in turmoil. An outbreak of peace is the last thing that those who profit from opium, the drug lords, the Taliban and senior members of Karzai's own administration would like to see.
And one should not be conned by recent figures which show a 10 percent drop in production — because prices are also at a 10 year low. In a market this tightly controlled, the drug barons are simply cutting back production to boost prices, and save hassle. This is what the Taliban did with its "ban" on opium production in 2000.
Opium has spread a hallucinogenic miasma across Afghanistan which has had NATO stumbling about in a haze of confusion, unable to tell ally from foe, layering a matrix of criminality on top of already baffling clan, tribal, regional and political tapestries.
Get rid of it and the conflict will boil down to a fight against the real Taliban.
This does not mean eradicating poppies from the fields. This would be inhumane and counter productive and would drive Afghanistan's poor into the hands of extremists.
But soon Nato will have another 40,000 troops. So, so what if the Taleban goes underground — the drug lords and their processing laboratories will still be around to provide targets for the surge. The bulging bank accounts and property investments of the Afghan mafia bosses in the United Arab Emirates and Europe, are easy to trace.
MI6 and the CIA know who these people are. They know where they live, where their children go to school in Europe and the U.S., where their drug labs are. They are the deserving targets of the surge. But, a failure to put them out of business will doom the surge, and all that follows, to failure.
