NATO, Afghanistan and Self Defense

Date: 2010-03-09 21:11:24

By Natalia Kobseva

If you think that you are aware of what's going on in Afghanistan today, think again. The very people, politicians, generals and journalists--feeding you information on the Afghan matrix are unsure about both, their facts and their conclusions.

A few days after it was announced that Afghanistan's opium production may well exceed 53% of national GDP in 2007, an investigative reporter asked an officer inside the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime about the impact (i.e. the futility) of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on poppy eradication and crop substitution schemes since the Taliban were forced out of Kabul in late 2001. "We don't appear to achieve anything credible," the officer acknowledged on condition of anonymity. "In fact, we just do our best, year after year."

An Afghan volunteer supporting NATO's drug eradication programmes was a bit more precise when confronted with the hard fact that more than 660 tons of opium and morphine, valued at US$4 billion, have been exported from Afghanistan last year. "We keep telling the small farmers to grow poppy substitutes and they keep telling us that they don't own the land, they don't have title," the volunteer revealed in a private conversation. "It is obvious that the warlords and clerics determine who grows what and where, not the farmers we keep talking to daily." The volunteer appeared to have no idea whether the various groups currently directing crop cultivation, drug kingpins, pro-Taliban Mullahs and religious radicals were working in conjunction or otherwise.

In 1978, there were hardly any poppy fields in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the trade in drugs was flourishing in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. In 1978, despite a deep-rooted feudal structure in the countryside, where the majority of Afghans lived, Afghanistan was substantively self-sufficient in food. In 1978, the Afghan government determined that economic and social progress in Afghanistan could only take place if (a) land reform laws were effectively implemented, (b) the huge rural debt due to moneylenders was cancelled without delay and (c) adequate rural credit was made available to small farmers.

After all, as a foreign economist visiting Afghanistan at that time concluded that "without fundamental changes in the agrarian milieu, this country will not achieve any breakthrough whatsoever. This is primarily an agricultural country, and a complex one at that, and there is now an urgent need to sharply increase investments in rural infrastructure, in order to raise productivity, and to improve the quality and packaging of output."

Without comprehensive answers to a series of fundamental and disturbing questions, talk of Afghanistan's reconstruction is meaningless, without context, without any grasp of the reality on the ground.


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