Kabul's Mission Impossible

Fri Feb 3 19:17:15 CET 2006

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Voor wie blijft nadenken (en dan bedoel ik niet over politieke spelletjes):

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/southasia/article_1094586.php/Kabul%60s_Mission_Impossible

 From Monsters and Critics.com

South Asia Features
Kabul`s Mission Impossible
By Martin Walker
Feb 3, 2006, 19:00 GMT

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The vote in the Dutch parliament
Friday to send up to 1,400 of their troops to the NATO mission in
Afghanistan may help save the battered credibility of the alliance, but
it faces something dreadfully close to Mission Impossible.

The United States wants to withdraw some 4,000 troops from the Afghan
mission. NATO, or at least its energetic new Dutch secretary-general
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, wants to be seen as militarily useful so it has
deployed its first mission outside the traditional European theater of
operations.

For the past two years, NATO has deployed some 9,000 troops in and
around Kabul. The force includes some 2,000 Germans, about a thousand
Turks, the same number of Canadians and just over 500 from Italy,
Belgium, Spain and Britain, which is about to send some 3,200 more.

The Canadians are being reinforced to about 2,200, and the overall NATO
contingent should soon amount to over 15,000 troops, and moving into
some of the dangerous regions that have hitherto be mainly manned by
U.S. forces. The British are being deployed to Helmand province, a
dangerous zone where the Taliban remains powerful, and which has seen
100 U.S. troops killed over the past 6 months -- an ominous figure,
given that the 100th British soldier has just been killed in Iraq.

In order to reinforce this NATO mission, the Dutch went through an
agonizing public debate and a political row that brought up all the old
European resentments about the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and
for a while it threatened to sink the government. The government had to
make all sorts of promises, like an insistence that no detained Afghan
would be allowed to end up in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, to win the vote. And they pledged that the Dutch troops would
be under strict Rules of Engagement that would let them fight back, but
not initiate hostilities, nor fight alongside the U.S. forces on
aggressive patrol missions.

The Dutch troops, like their NATO allies, are doubtless all brave,
decently armed and trained. They have been assured by their commanders
and their politicians that theirs is an important mission, bringing
peace to a war-battered land. They will be helping guard the engineers
and aid workers who are trying to rebuild, and facing the same extremist
Islamist enemy that exploded bombs in Madrid and London.

Oh yes, and they are meant to help fight the war on drugs by supporting
the Afghan government`s efforts to eradicate the opium trade and crop,
which fuels the heroin that ends addicting and killing young Europeans.

And as part of the Alice-in-Wonderland Rules of Engagement under which
NATO operates, the mandate does not allow the troops deliberately to
damage civilian property, which means that cannot burn the poppy fields
directly, only provide support to the Afghan government employees who
will strike the matches.

This is the baffling part of the mission. Outside of drugs, and the
money challenged in by aid workers and troops, there is almost no Afghan
economy worthy of the name. One in four of the 25 million population is
dependent on food aid.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations, Afghanistan is by far the world`s largest producer of opium.
The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says the country accounts for more
than two-thirds of global opium production, and each of the last three
years has seen record crops, despite the 2002 ban on illicit opium poppy
cultivation and the trafficking and consumption of opiates. This should
come as no surprise, since the poppies that produce opium are estimated
to earn approximately eight times more income per acre than wheat, using
less water and fewer inputs.

'The livelihoods of about 1.7 million rural people -- around 7 percent
of Afghanistan`s population -- are directly dependent on poppy
cultivation,' says the FAO.

'And poppy production has spread to more remote, less accessible parts
of the country due to increasing political and physical pressure on the
main growing areas. For poor rural farmers struggling to survive amid
the chaos resulting from more than 20 years of conflict and, more
recently, four years of drought, the cultivation of opium poppy has
provided relatively secure cash income and the means by which poor
farmers and the landless could get access to land. It has also offered
the only source of credits and agricultural inputs, with traders often
offering advances against future production.'

But the drugs trade is the only bit of the Afghan economy that works. By
destroying it, we undermine the chances of President Hamid Karzai`s
government to bring order, prosperity or very much else, except more of
the $10 billions in Western aid that was promised at this week`s London
conference.

Moreover, by destroying the drugs trade, we act as the Taliban`s
recruiting sergeants, giving them the opportunity to pose as the
defenders of Afghan peasants against the NATO troops and the hirelings
of the Karzai government of Kabul. An impoverished Afghan peasant who
finally gets some money from his opium crop is not going to welcome the
arrival of NATO troops standing guard as the crop is destroyed. He might
even join the Taliban in order to protect it.

The United States has been fighting the war on drugs for the past 34
years, with little visible success. Cocaine and heroin remain widely
available despite draconian prison sentences. The U.S. Justice
Department`s own figures show that 55 percent of federal prison inmates
are behind bars for drug offences, and so are 21 percent of adults in
state prisons -- a total of some 300,000 people.

In short, the demand for drugs from the West resists strenuous efforts
to control it. The Afghan peasants, in the absence of anything else,
feed that demand. Understandably, the governments of the West would like
to curtail the Afghan supply, in conditions that will make such an
effort not only dangerous for the troops, but liable to undermine the
very mission of stabilizing the Afghan government they have been sent to
fulfill.

This looks like Mission Impossible.

And this is the real danger to NATO. It was the Dutch Army, remember,
that under their strict Rules of Engagement as peacekeepers in Bosnia in
1995, were unable to prevent the Serb forces from massacring some 5,000
Bosnians at Srebrenica, which had been declared a `safe zone.` The
morale of the Dutch army has barely recovered from this humiliation.

Now they are on another peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, and a great
deal of NATO`s political capital has been expended to get them there.
NATO embarked on this operation to show the Americans that they remained
serious and important allies. But with this misbegotten decision to join
the war on drugs as well as the war on terrorism, they now risk losing
more public support at home than any approval they may gain in the Pentagon

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********