Aohell

Taleban Not Yet Smoked Out

Four and a quarter years on, the US has not yet gotten rid of the Taliban In fact, they're resurgent in some areas of southern Afghanistan. No need to be surprised about this: quite a few people expected this to happen, including anyone who followed the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. If the Evil Empire at its Evillest couldn't lay the ultimate smackdown on the Afghans, what made folks in the US think they could have a kinder, gentler occupation?

The US bases in Afghanistan follow the pipeline route from Turkmenistan to Pakistan: it's not about terror, after all, but oil. President Karzai has powers more like he was Mayor Karzai. The opium harvests since the US invasion have taken Afghanistan from its one year of near-zero production to three years running of record breaking harvests after a building year in the 2001 planting season - which got underway immediately after the US forces went into Afghanistan.

So where's the good news coming out of Afghanistan, and how can it possibly top the worldwide expansion of the heroin trade made possible by the US invasion and occupation? I don't see huge numbers of birkas for sale on eBay, so I guess the rumors of the Afghan women still wearing them are true. Nothing has changed in Afghanistan since 1979, when the Russians invaded. It remains a violent place with an ineffective puppet government, a continuing insurgency, and runaway opium growing and heroin production.

And guess who got the Afghans started on heroin? Hint: it was almost unheard of in the region until after the CIA and Pakistani ISI got involved in financing the mujahedin in 1980. It's now 2006, and the US is still involved in its attempt to be the first nation to conquer and stabilize Afghanistan. Many nations have conquered it: none have been able to hold on to it for long.

There is a saying in the region: Nobody wins in Afghanistan, not even the Afghans. I believe it. Too bad the current US policy is ignorant of that saying.