This article was originally published by Brian Cloughley at Strategic Culture
Foundation
On November 5 yet another US soldier was
killed by a member of Afghanistan’s military forces, as the country
continues to be wracked by violence in its seventeenth year of war.
Donald Rumsfeld was US Secretary for Defence from 2001 to 2006 under
President George W Bush. They, along with other psychotic figures such as
Vice-President Dick Cheney, were responsible for the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, and their legacy is apparent in many spheres, one of which is the
drug production bonanza in Afghanistan.
In August 2004 NBC
News reported Secretary Rumsfeld as declaring “The danger a large
drug trade poses in Afghanistan is too serious to ignore. The inevitable
result is to corrupt the government and way of life, and that would be most
unfortunate.” He issued the warning that “It is increasingly clear to the
international community that to address the drug problem here is important
for the people of Afghanistan.”
Rumsfeld, for once during his catastrophic years as chief war-maker, was
absolutely right, and his pronouncement about likely danger and impending
corruption was spot on. The US invasion and subsequent operations led to
Afghanistan becoming the fourth
most dangerous and fourth
most corrupt country in the world.
The “drug problem” to which he referred has expanded rapidly over the
years. It is destroying Afghanistan. It is a main reason for the place being
ungovernable.
It’s all very well to blame Afghans for growing poppies and producing
opium and heroin, but what they are doing is meeting international demand.
After all, there would be no drug industry in Afghanistan if there wasn’t a
welcoming market in the drug-loving prosperous West — although it has to be
noted that only about four per cent of its massive narcotics production ends
up in the US, which gets
most of its heroin from South America.
Mr John Sopko, the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction
(SIGAR), has just produced his latest
quarterly report for the US Congress in which he observes that “From
2002 through September 2018, the United States has committed an average of
more than $1.5 million a day to help the Afghan government combat narcotics.
Despite this, 2017 poppy cultivation is more than four times that reported by
the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2002, the first full year of US
intervention in Afghanistan,” so there is small wonder that the country is
“the largest source of street heroin in Europe and Canada.”
Mr Sopko observed that efforts to combat drugs “have cost US taxpayers
more than $8 billion since 2002, yet Afghanistan’s opium crisis is worse than
ever,” and the increase in the area and quantity of poppy cultivation has
been impressive and depressing.
Washington is well aware of the shattering effects of Afghan drug production,
but the SIGAR writes that “counternarcotics seems to have fallen completely
off the US agenda. The State Department’s new ‘Integrated Country Strategy’
for Afghanistan no longer includes counternarcotics as a priority, but
instead subsumes the issue into general operations. Meanwhile, the US
military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan, and USAID
says it will not plan, design, or implement new programs to address
opium-poppy cultivation.”
It is amazing that “The US military says it has no counternarcotics
mission in Afghanistan.”
What happened to the campaign against
drug processing that began in November 2017 when “US and Afghan forces
launched a series of attacks on narcotics laboratories in southern
Afghanistan”?
The massive aerial bombardment of ten drug-processing laboratories included
strikes by some Afghan air force Tucano aircraft, but the main
assault was by the US Air Force which for the first time in Afghanistan used
its F-22 Raptor aircraft, flown
from the United Arab Emirates. B-52 strategic nuclear bombers based
in Qatar attacked targets, and F-16s joined
in from the Bagram base near Kabul. The operation also
involved KC-10 and KC-135 refuellers, every surveillance means that
could be deployed, and command and control aircraft. This was a major — and
very expensive — operation.
The commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, US General John Nicholson, told
a news conference “We hit the labs where they turned poppy into
heroin. We hit their storage facilities where they kept their final products,
where they stockpiled their money and their command and control.” Not only
that, but “The strikes that were prosecuted last night will continue… This is
going to be steady pressure that’s going to stay up and we are not going to
let up.” He said “the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates there are 400
to 500 opium laboratories across Afghanistan”. So after that first attack in
November 2017 there were ten down and about 400 to go.
But SIGAR tells
us in October 2018 that “the US military says it has no
counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.” Why?
There is nobody better placed to explain this than Mr Sopko, who
had already observed that the Pentagon’s airstrike campaign against
drug laboratories might not have the intended effect, as its “longer-term
impact on narcotics remains uncertain.” Not only this, but “there is also the
risk that air strikes could result in civilian deaths, alienate rural
populations, and strengthen the insurgency.”
He was right on the button, because, as reported by The
Washington Post, in January to June 2018 the UN Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan “documented 353 civilian casualties, including 149 deaths, from
airstrikes, a 52 percent increase from the same period in 2017.”
There is no doubt that these casualties alienate the rural population,
given the example of one strike in July 2018 when the New York Times wrote
that “Fourteen members of a family, including three small children,
were killed when an American airstrike destroyed their home, several Afghan
officials confirmed on [July 20]. In what has become a familiar litany,
particularly in Taliban-dominated Kunduz Province, Afghan and American
officials had initially denied that any civilians had been killed in the
strike . . . claiming the victims were Taliban fighters. Then 11 bodies
belonging to women and children appeared at the hospital in Kunduz City,
about four miles from the site of the attack in Chardara District. The
Taliban do not have women fighters and the children were very young.”
Time after time the US-NATO and Afghan authorities “initially deny” that
there have been civilian deaths or casualties caused by airstrikes and are
then found to be disguising the truth because there can be no denial of facts
when shrapnel-ridden bodies of little children are laid out on the ground.
Such absurd statements play right into the hands of the militants and, in the
predictive words of the SIGAR, “strengthen the insurgency.”
This might explain why the massive and much-publicised air campaign
against opium-processing facilities has been abandoned. But what happens now?
The US State Department and the Pentagon were told by experts that the
narcotics problem was immense. For example, in a
speech at Georgetown University in 2014 the SIGAR said: “By every
conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up,
interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is
up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”
Nothing has changed since then. The 2017 aerial blitz failed utterly, as
have so many plans and operations to attempt to reduce narcotics production,
and the US-NATO military alliance in Afghanistan continues to flounder in a
quagmire of insurgency. The drug catastrophe is plain for all to see, and
after seventeen years of war and expenditure of eight billion dollars the
illegal narcotics industry is thriving.
Can this be indicative of the general level of competence of the US
Department of State and the Pentagon? Can they get anything right?
***
Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’
veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir, and
Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.
