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.

Afghanistan: Winning in Marjah, Winning Beyond?

Mohammad Elyas Daee and Abubakar Siddique write for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:

MARJAH --- Azizullah Khan might be this town's best example of civic-mindedness.

He is a middle-aged farmer here in Marjah, a cluster of shops and low-slung mud walls at the center of a recent large-scale military effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan's volatile Helmand Province.

Afghanistan: Getting the Real Point Of The Marja “Offensive”

His dedication to community under the most trying of circumstances earned him the respect of Marjah's locals, who long depended on his pharmacy in the town's dusty bazaar as their only health-care option.


When news came that Afghan President Hamid Karzai would be visiting on March 7, following the anti-Taliban operation carried out by Afghan and NATO forces, it was Khan who was entrusted to speak for Marjah's residents. With their marketplace in ruins as a result of the offensive, the feeling was that Khan would be well-suited to present their demands and concerns based on firsthand experience.

Addressing the president inside the community's main mosque, Khan peppered his message with salutations and blunt grievances, even reminding the Afghan leader of his oft-repeated promises to step down if he failed to deliver security and services.

"We are not asking you to resign, but our patience is running thin," Khan told the only president that Afghans have ever elected. "For the past eight years the warlords have been ruling us. Their hands have been stained with the blood of innocents and they have killed hundreds of people. Even now they are being imposed on the people in the name of tribal and regional leaders. People are afraid to convey the real feelings of locals because they sense themselves to be in danger from all sides."

Khan pleaded for the government to ensure security, remove any military presence from schools and private homes, compensate locals for losses resulting from the recent fighting, and help rebuild schools, clinics, and irrigation canals.

His most impassioned and telling appeal, however, was for Karzai to avoid repeating a past mistake: Do not hand over control of local affairs to former militia commanders or other "people with influence."

The plea, met with cheers and nods of approval by the hundreds of locals assembled at the mosque, highlights a window of opportunity that has been opened in Marjah, a town that in many ways is a microcosm of what has gone wrong in much of southern Afghanistan.

Early Backlash

War-weary locals initially welcomed the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001, but their feelings soon began to change. After finding themselves ruled by former mujahedin commanders installed by the government in 2001, many of Marjah's youth went to the other side, joining the insurgent ranks who paid well and protected the opium-poppy crops on which many of the towns 15,000 farming families depended.

Kabul and its international backers tried to improve the situation. The governor, police chief, and other key officials were removed, and 5,000 British troops were tasked with controlling the area.

The Taliban, however, filled the vacuum of governance. Many locals welcomed the development, preferring the stability provided by the Taliban over the chaos of life under draconian local strongmen. The Taliban enforced hard-line religious edicts and did not tolerate crime or feuds among the communities they controlled. Justice was cheap, swift, and decisive.

But locals were aware of the shortcomings as well. The Taliban offered no education, health care, or prospect of future development. The group was seen as controlled by foreign militants -- Arabs and Pakistanis in particular.

Many of those concerns are only coming to light following operation "Moshtarak," or "together." If it turns out that that locals are confident enough to look past their fears of a Taliban return and toward a better future, the transformation could prove to be the joint military offensive's greatest success.

Familiar Story

Marjah residents appear eager for a fresh start, despite the fact that 25,000 of them have been displaced and scores killed during the recent fighting. But they are clearly voicing their demand that honest local officials -- untainted by corruption and attentive to their needs -- be in control of local affairs.

The man whose return to power they might fear most is 57-year-old former Helmand police chief Abdul Rahman Jan. Jan is typical of the power brokers dominating local affairs in rural communities across Afghanistan. Once an anti-Soviet mujahedin commander, his rise to power in the 1990s and again after the ouster of the Taliban eight years ago led to local suffering. Members of his militia pillaged, raped, and engaged in the drug trade, according to locals.

Since 2007, when the Taliban overran his Marjah stronghold, Jan has lived in Helmand's provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, with his extended family of 12 children and grandchildren. Marjah residents want it to stay that way, but the bearded patriarch is already hinting that he might soon return to his sprawling home and farmland in Marjah.

Jan has formed a 35-member Marjah Shura, or tribal council, in anticipation of renewed control of Marjah. While his return was made possible by the recent offensive, which cleared the agricultural town of insurgents, Jan has been openly critical of the effort's results.

"People were very optimistic that this offensive will free us from the clutches of the terrorists, but as the offensive advanced hardly any Taliban [fighters] were killed or captured," Jan laments. "Only two Taliban were killed and one was injured. There were around 470 [small] Taliban groups but none of their members were captured. Few weapons or mines were recovered."

His past might help explain his dour appraisal of the military operation. Formerly allied with Helmand strongman and former Governor Sher Muhammad Akhudzada, Jan was appointed as the provincial police chief after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. After that, Helmand slowly entered a downward spiral as the former mujahedin cabal took the opportunity to recoup financial and personnel losses they had incurred during the Taliban regime, when Jan was chased across Afghanistan by his Taliban enemies.

Haunted By Past

When thousands of UN-mandated British troops moved into Helmand in 2006, Jan was among the first officials fired because most locals were tired of the excesses of his tribal militia.

During the same period, a reinvigorated Taliban made inroads into much of southern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. Then Marjah and Nade-Ali, an adjacent district in western Helmand, fell to Taliban fighters, who were dislodged only after the arrival of 15,000 Afghan and NATO troops in February.

Locals now see Jan busily lobbying in Helmand and Kabul to be given control of his former Marjah stronghold in return for having kept the region under nominal government control while in power. Many suspect him of using his influence within his Noorzai tribe against the Ishaqzai, who over the years have provided manpower to Taliban ranks to counter his influence. (Both Pashtun clans are part of the larger Durrani Pashtun tribal grouping, which populates much of southern Afghanistan and has played a central role in the country's politics.)

It is clear that when pharmacy owner Khan conveyed Marjah residents' demands to President Karzai, his advice against returning "people with influence" or former militia commanders to power was aimed squarely at people like Jan.

Karzai, who considers southern Afghanistan his home constituency because he was born and raised in a prominent ethnic Pashtun lineage in neighboring Kandahar Province, has indicated that he is listening.

In remarks to journalists after hearing complaints from Marjah residents for more than two hours on March 7, the president appeared to understand their concerns.

"They felt as if they were abandoned, which in many cases is true, and this sense of abandonment has to go away," Karzai said. "We have to address their problems, we have to give them what we have not [given them] so far, and provide them with the security that they require."

Anxious Days

But this new attempt to provide good governance is fraught with difficulty as well, as the provincial government's appointment of one of Marjah's own to run the town's affairs has shown.

The candor of Haji Abdul Zahir Aryan, who was chosen to be Marjah's governor, appears to have won over the town's residents. The appointment has caused a stir outside Afghanistan, however, where reports have alleged that he served four years in a German prison after being convicted of stabbing his stepson.

Largely due to a name variation, the details remain murky. The Washington Post, which has investigated the reports, writes that the case being cited corresponds to that of a "an Afghan man who went by Abdul Zahar" while in Germany.

Brushing aside any talk of controversy, the soft-spoken 60-year-old Marjah elder tells RFE/RL that he indeed lived in Germany for years, legally and with a visa. But he categorically denies having been convicted of or serving time for such a crime.

Looking ahead, he says the future of Marjah and its residents depends on how Kabul responds to their demands.

"As far as issue of the return of the Taliban is concerned, it depends on the performance of the government," Aryan says. "If the government continues to deliver on its promises and to carries on reconstruction and wins over Marjah's people, then the Taliban will find no space here in the future. But if the government turns its back on Marjah, as it did in the past, then the Taliban will rebuild their sanctuary here."

Aryan's message, seconded by people like Khan, clearly carries weight among Marjah locals. For Afghanistan's international backers, the message -- and the messages of others from a region largely silent in recent years -- will be tainted until they know for sure who is delivering it.

It's a tightrope that Kabul and its NATO allies must walk as they try to develop a formula that can work not only in Marjah, but throughout southern Afghanistan.