Afghanistan: Why the Poppies Trouble the Marjah "Victory" (Foust)

A month after the hype of the "victory" of the US offensive for the town of Marjah in Helmand Provice, reality is proving troublesome. Th Associated Press has the counter-hype, "The Taliban have begun to fight back, launching a campaign of assassination and intimidation to frighten people from supporting the U.S. and its Afghan allies," while Asia Times Online reports that on 7 March, "Afghan President Hamid Karzai faced an angry reception from people" when he visited the southern town of Marjah following a major military assault against the Taliban.

Getting behind these headlines, Joshua Foust posts about the political and economic situation on Registan.net:

Afghanistan: Return of the Militias?

Two weeks ago, I wrote in the New York Times:

Good government will matter little, though, if the local economy is in a shambles. Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment.


In Helmand, opium is the only way farmers can acquire credit: they take out small loans, called salaam, from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials, often in units of poppy seed, and pay back that loan in opium paste after harvest. If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their loan — a very dangerous proposition.

Western aid groups distributed wheat seeds last fall, but there was little follow-up and it seems few farmers used them. This year, the aid workers should be prepared to pay farmers compensation for any opium crops they are unable to harvest as a result of the fighting, and the Western coalition should help the groups develop a microcredit system.

Behold:

The swift American-led military offensive that drove the Taliban from power in this southern Afghan farm belt came at an inopportune time for the area’s poppy farmers. That’s created a quandary for Marjah’s new, U.S.-backed leaders and for the American military as they try to transform this sweltering river valley, whose biggest cash crop is opium poppy, into a tranquil breadbasket.

“The helicopters are landing in my field,” the weathered farmer told Fennell as they sat in the dirt outside the Marines’ newest forward operating base in Marjah. “You have to stop landing there. Next time, the Taliban will put an IED in the field,” an improvised explosive device, the military’s term for a homemade bomb.

Unfortunately, the Marines are refusing to compensate farmers for any damage they cause to their poppy fields. This is counterproductive—as the farmer himself strongly hinted, there remain strong ties to the Taliban in the area (more on that below): the Taliban, in fact, rescued Marjeh from predatory government officials some time ago and had set up a relatively stable set of economic and judicial institutions. If the Marines are going to destroy those, and there are many reasons why they should, they have to immediately provide alternatives or risk brutalizing the very people they need to win over.

Unfortunately, the Marines in Marjah seem determined to stamp out opium—a far cry from the clear thinking that accompanied their first deployment to Helmand in 2008, when they vowed to resolutely ignore the opium and focus on more important things (seriously: focusing on opium instead of almost anything else badly misses the point).

There’s no time to waste. In that same NYT article, I wrote:

Last, progress on these other fronts will do nothing if the Taliban return, which means a significant number of troops must stay for at least a year. Gen. David Petraeus, head of the Central Command, has said that Marja was merely an “initial salvo” in an 18-month campaign to also retake neighboring Kandahar Province, the birthplace of the Taliban. Kandahar is Afghanistan’s second-largest city, so it is reasonable to assume that many troops will be pulled out of Marja for that campaign…

At a minimum, at least two battalions should stay in Marja permanently, to undergird the new government. They shouldn’t build a new base outside the town for this, or “commute” to the area from strongholds in Helmand like Camp Leatherneck. They should live right inside the town, providing security and guidance from within. You can’t have a “population-centric” counterinsurgency unless you take care of the people.

There are reports emerging from Marjeh that the Taliban is alreadyreasserting itself. While the military ferries Haji Zahir, the new “governor,” to and fro in a helicopter—quite the vote of confidence, considering Marjeh is an area of only a few dozen miles on a side—the Taliban have already begun posting night letters, and beating and even beheading people who cooperate too closely with the U.S. Even so, the barriers to the new government succeeding are basic enough to make me question whether ISAF was lying about having a government in a box ready to go.

“How may of us are from Marjah?” U.S. Marine Col. Randy Newman asked the two-dozen men taking part in the meeting. “None. The Taliban are from Marjah. They have earned some amount of trust of the people. The people trusted the Taliban justice. If we continue in this manner, we will not earn their trust.”

During Sunday’s meeting, the U.S. Army adviser working with Afghan forces told Zahir that the security forces were being constrained because there was no judicial system in place to jail suspected Taliban insurgents turned in by local residents.

We need to sit down and have a very strong discussion about how we’re going to deal with Afghan justice for these men we know are hurting people,” said Matt, who’s advising Afghan police in one section of Marjah. They look at me and smile because they know they’re going to be released within 24 to 48 hours.

“The people of southern Marjah are not going to be confident in our ability to bring security until we can permanently take those men off the battlefield,” he said. “That’s where we earn the population’s trust.”

Again: we destroyed a functioning government and replaced it with borderline-chaos. If the Marines cannot get this under control very quickly, it will turn against them in a very bloody way.