Afghan Poppy Fields

It is hard to picture what took place in the fields of the Somme nearly one hundred years ago. There is nothing to help you to assimilate the reality: Over one million people killed each other in four months of military stalemate. I have no experience that enables me to comprehend this hard and brutal statistic. Nature’s answer was to blanket the land with red, spreading poppies as if to forget the human destruction; the cocktail of blood, rotting flesh and spent artillery shells that lie beneath. The poppy flower disguises the human reality that marks the Somme as one of the most somber moments in modern history. But today, when cultivated, the poppy takes on a much more sinister role.   <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> The poppy fields of Afghanistan are farmed. These fields, along with the mountains that surround them share a human destruction with those fields in France. Twenty-Eight Thousand Soviet troops lost their lives in Afghanistan. But how did a band of lawless tribesmen overcome the might of one of the world’s superpowers? On the face of it, it seems to an impossible achievement. The answer is equally puzzling since one man made it possible for this ruffian group of unprofessional soldiers to win: Charlie Wilson. Charlie Wilson was a Democrat congressman for Texas, is best known for Federal prosecutors investigation into his cocaine party at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. His womanizing and hot tub antics were legendry within the Beltway. But his debauched lifestyle concealed a much more focused and serious man than anybody would have given him the credit for. Wilson was appointed to the Defense appropriations sub-committee and this is where he exercised his power. He used his position to manipulate CIA funds towards the Afghan Mujahideen. It is a mystery as to just how a congressman managed to do this. This power is not, constitutionally, in the hands of a man such as Wilson. It belongs to the president and congress was the body that gave the president that exclusive right. So where were the checks and balances?  Congress was not aware of Wilson’s appropriations on behalf of the CIA. There was no congressional debate or scrutiny. But ultimately there was no accountability to the American people. They were unaware of what was being done in their name since nobody consulted them or their representatives.

Wilson was inspired by what he had seen in the refugee camps in Peshawar, close to the afghan border. The Soviet Mi-24 helicopter gun ships had forced Afghans out of their villages as they ethnically cleansed the region. Despite only having meager weapons these Mujahideen warriors were giving the Soviets are hard time. Wilson saw an opportunity. If the Mujahideen were equipped with modern military hardware to shoot the Soviet war birds out of the sky, they would not control the land.  It could present the Soviets with a nightmare – their Vietnam! 

It did. Afghanistan became the war that the Soviets could not win. Year after year Congress pushed hundreds of millions of dollars towards the Mujahideen. Their funding matched by the Saudis, who also recruited over 30,000 Arab volunteers, to fight in the region. Wilson later claimed that the Mujahideen brought down the Soviet Empire. While the Soviet regime would have crumbled in the course of time, the drain of the Afghan war certainly did speed the process along. To the Mujahideen, Charlie Wilson was their hero – the T.E Lawrence of Afghanistan. And the respect was mutual.  That it was beyond Wilson’s ability to pass scrutiny on his new friends led to tragedy of global proportions.       When the Soviets left Afghanistan they turned on their old adversaries – themselves; just as they have done for centuries. But this time they were using sophisticated American weaponry to level their barbaric and ancient grievances against each other. If the Soviets had driven Afghans out of the villages with their gun ships then the Mujahideen were equally brutal to their fellow Afghans as they re-entered the country. The State Department’s Cross Border Humanitarian Aid Program was witness to the rape, murder and robbery that the Mujahideen liberators left in their trail. And unbeknown to nearly every American, they were paying for it. Even reports of Mujahideen’s drug business did not stop the flow of American dollars. Two warlords devastated a town, killing hundreds of people with their advanced US weapons as they fought over a good looking young boy that one of them was going to rape. It is ironic that America’s adversaries, the Soviets and the Taliban had stamped out the culturally accepted Afghan habit of pedophilia. {See The Sex Abuse of Boys in Afghanistan}.  But the magnitude of Wilson’s shortcomings led to are far greater tragedy. I am reminded of a young New York women, walking a Manhattan Avenue, covered in dust as she put distance between herself and the collapsing buildings on September 11th. 2002. She looked into the television camera, bewildered, and said, “What have we done to them?” This question demands a lot more than the bumper-sticker reply such as the “they are evil” tag. Let me quote from George Crile’s book, My Enemy’s Enemy. This book is also known as Charlie Wilson’s War.“The question is not so difficult to understand if you put yourself in the shoes of the Afghan veterans in the aftermath of the Soviet departure. Within months, the U.S. government "discovered" what it had known for the past eight years - that Pakistan was hard at work on the Islamic bomb. (The dirty little secret of the Afghan war was that Zia, the former Pakistan President, had extracted a concession early on from Reagan: Pakistan would work with the CIA against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and in return the United States would provide massive aid but would agree to look the other way on the question of the bomb.) But with the Russians gone, sanctions were imposed and all military and economic assistance was cut off. A fleet of F-16s that Pakistan had already purchased was withheld. Within a year, the Clinton Administration would move to place Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism for its support of Kashmiri freedom fighters. The Pakistan military had long been the surrogates for the CIA, and every Afghan and Arab mujahid came to believe that America had betrayed the Pakistanis. And when the United States kept its troops (including large numbers of women) in Saudi Arabia, not just bin Laden but most Islamists believed that America wanted to seize the Islamic oil fields and was seeking world domination.” The pendulum of US foreign policy has swung the breadth of possibility in the last one hundred years. WW1 and WW2 were justifiable examples of US prevarication towards war, particularly European war. Although, it has to be said, that when America’s input finally came, it was decisive in both wars. Since then the pendulum has moved to an interventionist policy that has proved to be catastrophic failure for the world, devastating in the loss of civilian life, costly in American lives and deeply divisive amongst Americans who are, otherwise, the friendliest people you can find on the planet. John Bolton would probably disagree with this policy assessment. He makes clear in his new book that Iran is the problem it is today precisely because America did not intervene, earlier; by signing up to four years of European diplomatic efforts has magnified the problem. But this is a bit of a red herring. The administration took its eye off the ball with Iran long before it focused on removing Saddam Hussein. Iran’s nuclear ambitions could have been resolved well before the European diplomatic act was in place.              Charlie Wilson’s proxy war was illegal and ultimately, for America, self-defeating. The consequences drove him to drink. The bigger crime was that America abandoned Afghanistan, once the Soviets left. For all of the billions of dollars the US and the Saudi governments poured into this war-scarred country, it never built a road, established an economy or provided the infrastructure of government. America’s withdrawal created a resentment that went far beyond the American about face with Pakistan. It cemented the belief, from within the region to the mosques in London, that the US was only there for its own interests. And it was into this vacuum that the Taliban walked, along with their criminal partners, Al-qaeda. It was a serious error of judgment and one that the American people, and the west, have paid dearly for.   The pretty Afghan poppy fields will soon be harvested. It pays so well compared with food crops. It will provide over 90% of the world’s needs for Opium and the recreational drugs derived from it. It is ironic that those old, Mujahideen warlords, the Taliban and Al qaeda, control Afghanistan’s drug-trafficking cartel. It is both ironic and hypocritical as it is against all Islamic doctrine. But to these criminals, it is all about money to fight a war. They will be buying ever increasingly sophisticated weaponry on the arms black market and they will have the money to do it.  The future is looking increasingly bleak for the small number of allied troops that come mostly from, what Churchill once referred to as, “The English speaking world”.  I do not understand why the allied governments do not buy the poppy crop and then destroy it. Equally, purchasing food crops at a higher price would be a disincentive for farmers to grow poppies in the first place. Have we forgotten Afghanistan….. again?    But not for long - Afghan farmers are expecting a bumper crop this year. The film “Charlie Wilson’s War” will be released for Christmas.

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The Anglo American