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| Afghan Choices or American Interests? |
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As Benedict Fitzgerald from Jamestown Foundation wrote:
Despite the new US government optimism, significant problems remain. The war on terrorism is in serious trouble. The Taliban have regrouped and are using Pakistan as both a haven and a staging area. As a result of attacks on US-led coalition forces, local Afghan and international aid officials have slowed or halted reconstruction efforts in many areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border, as well as elsewhere throughout the country. The warlords or local leaders remain predominant in many areas of the country, undermining attempts to expand the Karzai government's writ and withholding income that should accrue to the Kabul government. Poppy production is now at a four-year high.ii
The key aspect that is constantly overlooked is that Afghanistan is unfortunately viewed solely through the prism of the US led ‘war on terror’. It is only in this political context that Afghanistan matters to the western world. In a post cold war world, Afghanistan no longer has the leverage provided by superpower competition. Its population constitutes a trivial population of even the South Asian regional economy, its lands do not bear any of the world’s key commodities and it has no key waterways or ports. However what Afghanistan has is geography and this forms its strategic value close to the key areas of South, West and Central Asia, effectively at the heart of the Islamic world. Afghanistan’s neighbourhood is its strategic attraction bordering countries, which on the one hand contain significant energy reserves while also containing populations that are supportive of an Islamic Caliphate. It is through this prism that unfortunately the progress or lack of it in Afghanistan’s development should be viewed. The achievement of key strategic goals of winning the ‘war on terror’, stopping the radicals winning power in the region and ensuring a wider diversification of energy capacity should be seen as primary goals with Afghanistan’s development as secondary or even tertiary. Progress in Afghanistan is therefore only prioritised when development or political reforms are congruent to the achievement of the primary strategic goals. As one US commentator succinctly wrote:
American objectives in Afghanistan are, however, clearly stated, if not made widely available. First is the destruction of al Qaeda's networks, training camps, stockpiled resources, and communication systems. Second is the destruction of any governing entity providing support or sanctuary to al Qaeda: this was primarily the Taliban regime. Third, reconstruction efforts would be undertaken to ensure that international terrorism could not use Afghanistan and its people as a haven or operating base in the future.iii
As can be seen, all the US objectives are directly linked to her primary strategic goals and not to making Afghanistan a prosperous state in her own right; this has significant implications for the discussion around warlords, opium cultivation, managed elections or the lack of economic development. Hence it is inevitable that the interests of the Afghan people with respect to issues such as narcotics, political empowerment or infrastructure development will not always coincide with those of Washington.
For example there is little to indicate that the Afghan warlords that America relied upon to fight the Taliban regime are no longer in positions of authority. Rather the evidence is that President Karzai remains extremely reliant on them and that the US requires their support to achieve her primary goals. On the 1st of March 2005 President Karzai appointed the notorious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who has been accused of war crimes, to the position of the chief-of-staff to the commander of the armed forces. His notoriety is such that both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International felt obliged to comment adversely on his appointment. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch stated that General Dostum should not have been given any official position and must be held accountable for his actions during the civil war in the 1990s when thousands died, as well as in the deaths of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001. The appointment of the notorious Dostum, Gul Aqa Sherzai’s reappointment as Governor of Kandahar and Ismail Khan as a cabinet minister gives a lie to Karzai’s earlier statements that warlords were the next greatest risk to Afghanistan. It is also a clear indication of US strategic and security priorities being put above those of the Afghan people.
Turning to narcotics, no one disputes that in the early 1990s, under the supervision of the Afghan warlords, poppy cultivation grew rapidly, while during 2000 and 2001 the Taliban were largely successful in enforcing a ban in poppy cultivation. With the return of warlord rule since the US led invasion of 2001, there is now mounting evidence to indicate a sharp increase in poppy cultivation. In its Afghanistan Opium Survey of 2004, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) suggested that the narcotics business in Afghanistan, which it valued at $2.8 billion, was now equivalent to about 60 percent of the country's 2003 GDP and that Afghanistan last year supplied 87 percent of the world's heroin. In 2003 Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN anti-narcotics program, wrote that "Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists." In a more recent survey, published in November 2004, Costa warned that if the drug problem in Afghanistan persists, "the political and military successes of the last three years will be lost." If critics think that some of the officials in the United Nations involved in the production of these reports may have a hidden agenda and want to exaggerate the situation on the ground, then they should look no further than the latest U.S. State Department narcotics survey report. The report states:
Afghanistan’s illicit opium/heroin production can be viewed, for all practical purposes, as the rough equivalent of world illicit heroin production, and it represents an enormous threat to world stability. With an estimated 40 to 60 percent of its GDP attributed to narcotics (IMF), Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming a narcotics state.iv
What the State Department report did not say was that poppy cultivation had largely been eliminated on religious grounds in the last year of Taliban rule. In response to this situation President Karzai declared in December 2004: "As we did jihad against the Russian invasion we should now do a jihad against the narcotics, which have dishonoured our nation among the international community." The Afghanistan government and its supporters are already claiming success for a very significant reduction in poppy production that the UN and other agencies have reported for 2004. However it is difficult to determine if the claims of success of the Afghan government should be believed since President Karzai has refused to implement an aerial spraying campaign against poppy cultivation on the grounds that it would lead to open revolt against his government. The latest State Department report attributes the reduction in poppy production to disease and drought that has affected large parts of South Asia rather than any true underlying factors of supply reduction. Other reports indicate that warlords may have large stores of poppies hidden and are waiting for international prices to rise as a result of the nature-related shortages that have occurred in 2004.v
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