The drugs are destined for Britain's streets. The guns go straight to the Taliban front line. The weapons on sale include machine guns, sniper rifles and anti-aircraft weapons like the ones used in the attempt to assassinate the Afghan President Hamid Karzai last weekend.
"We never sell the drugs for money," boasted one of the smugglers. "We exchange them for ammunition and Kalashnikovs."
The drugs come mostly from Helmand, where most of Britain's 7,800 troops are based. The opium grown there is turned into heroin at factories inside Afghanistan, sold into Tajikistan and smuggled to Europe. The guns are broken down into parts, smuggled back into Afghanistan and delivered to the Taliban. One kilogram of heroin can buy about 30 AK-47 assault rifles at the bazaar.
Nato claims the Taliban get between 40 and 60 per cent of their income from drugs. The smugglers' claims suggest the real cost could be far higher.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other dignitaries quickly scrambled toward safety when the sound of gunfire and explosions in the distance interrupted a military ceremony they were attending in Kabul Sunday morning.
The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility for the attack which happened at a Mujahideen Day ceremony, honoring those who fought against the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Army commanders were making frantic arrangements last night to bring Prince Harry back from Afghanistan after an American website disclosed that he had been serving with other British troops fighting the Taliban.
The prince, who is 10 weeks into a 14-week tour, was believed to still be in the country last night among British soldiers in the southern Helmand province.
The lid was blown on Harry's deployment yesterday afternoon by the Drudge Report, a US political blog, ending a voluntary agreement by the British media to keep it secret until he had returned. His job in Afghanistan was to monitor Taliban fighters' movements transmitted on to screens nicknamed 'Kill TV'.
Imagine if a liberal Web site had outed details of our war in Afghanistan, putting at risk the lives of US coalition soldiers? That's what just happened, except it was the conservative Matt Drudge who did it.
For a period of time, the Bush Administration promoted the war in Afghanistan as (among other things) a place where Western powers could promote better treatment for women. Visits by Laura Bush, in secure and remote bunkers far from the real world, highlighted the new Afghanistan where women were active participants in modern society. Whether there was any truth to those stories is hard to say and not even relevant considering how the forgotten country has drifted backwards in so many ways. When a country invades and occupies another country, it should be assumed that you accept responsibility for its people. The failing country has booming poppy crops, issuing death sentences for journalists and women are worse off today than even during the Taliban. We own this and it's shameful.
Grinding poverty and the escalating war is driving an increasing number of Afghan families to sell their daughters into forced marriages.
Girls as young as six are being married into a life of slavery and rape, often by multiple members of their new relatives. Banned from seeing their own parents or siblings, they are also prohibited from going to school. With little recognition of the illegality of the situation or any effective recourse, many of the victims are driven to self-immolation – burning themselves to death – or severe self-harm.
This is an important story because we'll be seeing a lot of this over the next nine months. The right wing noise machine will falsely and baselessly attack our candidates. We'll, of course, fight back. The question is whether the traditional media falls for it this time around -- or does its job.
The right wingers were in a frenzy over an answer Barack Obama gave at the debate last night, which once again exposed the failure of the Bush/Cheney/McCain rush to war in Iraq:
You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon -- supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.
And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief. Now, that's a consequence of bad judgment.
Bad judgment is actually an understatement. So, no surprise the Bush/Cheney/McCain lovers would want to discredit that story. It's a devastating indictment of the national security abilities of the GOP. After all, Afghanistan enabled Al Qaeda -- and Al Qaeda launched the attack that killed 3,000 Americans. This incident is emblematic of the approach to national security undertaken by Bush and enabled by Congressional Republicans -- including McCain. They are failures.
So while the right wingers were in a lather over Obama's answer, Jake Tapper found out the story is true.
More after the jump...
I called the Obama campaign this morning to chat about this story, and was put in touch with the Army captain in question.
He told me his story, which I found quite credible, though for obvious reasons he asked that I not mention his name or certain identifying information.
Short answer: He backs up Obama's story.
The longer answer is worth telling, though.
The Army captain, a West Point graduate, did a tour in a hot area of eastern Afghanistan from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004.
Prior to deployment the Captain -- then a Lieutenant -- took command of a rifle platoon at Fort Drum. When he took command, the platoon had 39 members, but -- in ones and twos -- 15 members of the platoon were re-assigned to other units. He knows of 10 of those 15 for sure who went to Iraq, and he suspects the other five did as well.
The platoon was sent to Afghanistan with 24 men.
"We should have deployed with 39," he told me, "we should have gotten replacements. But we didn't. And that was pretty consistent across the battalion."
He adds that maybe a half-dozen of the 15 were replaced by the Fall of 2003, months after they arrived in Afghanistan, but never all 15.
Despicable way to treat our soldiers. Despicable. And, actually, Tapper (who linked to ten sites that criticized Obama on this issue) puts it best:
I might suggest those on the blogosphere upset about this story would be better suited directing their ire at those responsible for this problem, which is certainly not new. That is, if they actually care about the men and women bravely serving our country at home and abroad.
So forget about the billions that have gone missing, even though they were US tax dollars. (You know, the tax dollars that Bush and the GOP like to tell you is yours.) It's just as though it never happened if the contract fraud occurs overseas. No matter how corrupt or how mismanaged, Bush says it's all OK in the name of spreading democracy or whatever that's supposed to be over there. Clearly we lost billions after Katrina due to mismanagement but Iraq has been a black hole, littered with charges of corruption, fraud, rape, theft, murder, you name it. This is what Bush and the GOP want to condone, as if none of it ever happened.
And to think people around the world think Bush and his talk of freedom and democracy sounds so fraudulent. That would be because it is.
Yes, I was quite curious as well what progress she was citing and the story fails to mention anything specific. Of course, this is because there is no progress to cite but don't tell that to whoever coughed up the headline. Afghanistan has drifted for years and now we have a resurgent Taliban, increased poppy production, dropping investments and a government who stands idle while a journalist is found guilty of downloading a report on women's rights. No wonder they can't cite a damned thing.
The US response still seems weak. Young Afghan journalist Sayed Pervez Kambaksh is currently being held in prison because he downloaded and distributed a report on women's rights. If the US is supposed to be bringing democracy, as the administration likes to tell everyone, they ought to be moving much more aggressively to assist Pervez who is sitting in miserable conditions. Is this the best Rice can do? From his family in Afghanistan:
While the international campaign to free Sayed Pervez Kambaksh grows, life in jail for the 23-year-old student is, according to his family, "nothing but enduring hell day after day".
He shares a cell meant for four people with 30 others at the prison in Balkh province where he has been held for more than three months. In that time he has been attacked by Taliban prisoners who have been told by officials that Mr Kambaksh is guilty of blasphemy. His food has been contaminated by guards, he has lost weight, and is traumatised.
The US is taking an amazingly low profile on a very serious problem. If Bush wants the world to take him seriously when he talks about democracy, he better find a minute to support democracy. The initial report was that Afghan student journalist Parwez Kambaksh was found guilty and sentenced to death because he downloaded and distributed a document about women's rights. Thanks to a campaign by The Independent (UK), this disgraceful situation has been brought to the attention of people around the world and the Karzai government is starting to show interest in this publicly embarrassing situation. As the story makes the rounds some additional information is starting to surface which helps explain why the puppet government previously showed such limited interest in this gross violation of human rights.
Some media groups, including Reporters Without Borders and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, allege the charges against Kambaksh are in retaliation for his brother's investigative journalism articles, which detail human rights abuses at the hands of political and paramilitary factions in northern Afghanistan.
Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, Kambaksh's brother and a leading independent journalist in the region, has named government officials who extort money from locals in some articles, said Jean MacKenzie, country director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.
NOTE FROM JOHN: Chris posted this in the wee hours of the morning (God bless his Parisian soul), but this story is far too important to let slip away unread. Folks, this is post-Taliban Afghanistan. This is the war that we supposedly won - you remember, the one that we pretty much quit in order to invade Iraq. This story is horrifying. This is not a democracy, and people like this are not going to be our friends. ___________
Afghanistan is sentencing a journalist to death because he downloaded and distributed a report on women's rights. Is this the government that we're propping up with our soldiers and tax dollars? I understand that different cultures have different views but this is so incredibly against everything we stand for as a country. Is this really the kind of government we want to support?
A young man, a student of journalism, is sentenced to death by an Islamic court for downloading a report from the internet. The sentence is then upheld by the country's rulers. This is Afghanistan – not in Taliban times but six years after "liberation" and under the democratic rule of the West's ally Hamid Karzai.
The fate of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh has led to domestic and international protests, and deepening concern about erosion of civil liberties in Afghanistan. He was accused of blasphemy after he downloaded a report from a Farsi website which stated that Muslim fundamentalists who claimed the Koran justified the oppression of women had misrepresented the views of the prophet Mohamed.
Even Kabul is close to being threatened. Chalk up another botched mission by Team Bush and his boot-licking Tony Blair. If the US wants to be a leader, it's going to have to actually lead and not run away as we've seen in Afghanistan. Moving troops out of Afghanistan and into Iraq is coming back to haunt us. It's only a matter of time before the Bush crowd starts complaining again about NATO needing to send more troops when in fact, it was the US who abandoned this war. Mission Accomplished?
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.
Despite tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid poured into the country, the insurgents, driven out by the American invasion in 2001, now control "vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries", the Senlis Council says in a report released yesterday.
On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a "significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change".
Ah yes, that pesky oversight issue again. When something happens once, well, things happen. When it occurs over and over and over, you have a trend. In this case, a trend of cynicism, corruption and failure.
Too much aid to Afghanistan is wasted -- soaked up in contractors' profits, spent on expensive expatriate consultants or squandered on small-scale, quick-fix projects, a leading British charity said on Tuesday.
Despite more than $15 billion of aid pumped into Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001, many Afghans still suffer levels of poverty rarely seen outside sub-Saharan Africa.
"The development process has to date been too centralized, top-heavy and insufficient," said a report by Oxfam.
By far the biggest donor, the United States approved a further $6.4 billion in Afghan aid this year, but the funds are spent in ways that are "ineffective or inefficient," Oxfam said.
"Ineffective" and "Inefficient" sums up the Bush and GOP years rather nicely. The old $500,000 per year fly-in "experts" always seem to deliver similar results overseas. I thought fly-by foreign aid was proven to be a bust years ago. Then again, the GOP managed to not hear about the financial policies of the 1920s either since they seem intent on repeating the same mistakes.
If you are a poor farmer in Afghanistan (or for that matter, Laos, Myanmar, etc) and you can either grow crops that sell or crops that don't sell, what are you going to do? It doesn't even make sense to ask poverty-level farmers to do the "honorable" thing in the anti-drug crusade and go hungry. Being pragmatic has gone out of fashion in Washington over the last few years but at least Gordon Brown is giving it a go.
Gordon Brown is planning a radical scheme to subsidise farmers in Afghanistan to persuade them to stop producing heroin, as part of a wide-ranging drive to re-energise policy in the conflict the prime minister now regards as the front line in the fight against terrorism.
The Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch-Brown has admitted that the rise in opium production in the country means Britain "cannot just muddle along in the middle" and must come up with more imaginative ideas on opium eradication.
Ministers are looking at what Lord Malloch-Brown describes as a system of payments loosely along the lines of the common agricultural policy to woo the Afghan farmers off opium production. The government is conducting joint research on suitable economic incentives with the World Bank.
A similar strategy was rolled out in northern Thailand in the late 1980's with reasonable success. Today the former poppy growing region is one of the nicest regions to visit in Thailand. The Thai royal family (the Princess Mother, in particular) took a leading role in the program that helped replace poppy fields with coffee and macadamia nuts. (Here is a great PDF download about about the program.) The program helped promote those products as well as other locally produced goods so instead of growing poppy (for heroin) they grow and produce other products to feed themselves. The end result are farmers who can grow products that are in demand that do not add to the drug trade problems. They also created one of the most spectacular public gardens in the world, The Mae Fah Luang Garden.
This is an obvious situation where pragmatism will produce greater results compared to the moralizing sledgehammer approach that has been failing year after year in Afghanistan.
UPDATE: Check out the Mae Fah Luang Garden photos on Flickr. What a stunning garden and orchids to die for.
THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups.
The death of Trooper David Pearce underlines the rising dangers for Australia's 1000 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them deployed in the Taliban's southern heartland -- a region some of Canberra's NATO allies consider too dangerous to fight in.
"This place can only go up or down, and it's going down fast, which is something the international community simply will not understand," said a security analyst who has been working in and out of Afghanistan for 30 years.
Almost six years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were ousted, their insurgency is gaining strength, fuelled by resentment at NATO bombing of civilians, billions of dollars of wasted aid, a lack of jobs and record crops of opium, the raw material for heroin.
The fighting is spreading to places once relatively safe, including the capital and the western and northern parts of the country.
The Marines want out of Iraq. They'd rather be fighting in Afghanistan. You remember Afghanistan? The country we've been totally ignoring since we decided to invade Iraq. The country the Taliban and Al Qaeda are taking over again. The country in which George Bush let Osama get away. Yes, that Afghanistan.
So, if the US pulls out of the Coalition of the Willing, then who will lead it? Togo?
You mean we didn't win? I thought Afghanistan was the cornerstone of Bush's success in the never-ending war on terror. Republicans bragged about this success story and have always been so sensitive to criticism of that other failing venture. So tell me again where Bush actually has had success in this supposed war? Heck, tell me where he has succeeded with anything, foreign or domestic. Just as he used to brag about our victory in Afghanistan, he used to brag about US home ownership standing at record highs, thanks in no small part to his brilliant team so I guess we should expect to hear him accept some responsibility for that Hindenburg-like catastrophe as well, right?
