U.S. Marines Ignore Opium to Not Upset Afghan Locals
May 8th, 2008Britain in Secret Talks with the Taliban
NATO Forces Supplied Food, Water and Arms to Taliban Forces in Southern Afghanistan
Via: AP:
The Marines of Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon sleep beside a grove of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant’s gooey resin smile and wave.
Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world’s largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.
The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees — money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.
Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won’t be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans’ only source of income.
Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.
“It’s kind of weird. We’re coming over here to fight the Taliban. We see this. We know it’s bad. But at the same time we know it’s the only way locals can make money,” said 1st Lt. Adam Lynch, 27, of Barnstable, Mass.
The Marines’ battalion commander, Lt. Col. Anthony Henderson, said in an interview Tuesday that the poppy crop “will come and go” and that his troops can’t focus on it when Taliban fighters around Garmser are “terrorizing the people.”
“I think by focusing on the Taliban, the poppies will go away,” said Henderson, a 41-year-old from Washington, D.C. He said once the militant fighters are forced out, the Afghan government can move in and offer alternatives.
An expert on Afghanistan’s drug trade, Barnett Rubin, complained that the Marines are being put in such a situation by a “one-dimensional” military policy that fails to integrate political and economic considerations into long-range planning.
“All we hear is, not enough troops, send more troops,” said Rubin, a professor at New York University. “Then you send in troops with no capacity for assistance, no capacity for development, no capacity for aid, no capacity for governance.”
Most of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan operate in the east, where the poppy problem is not as great. But the 2,400-strong 24th Marines, have taken the field in this southern growing region during harvest season.
In the poppy fields 100 feet from the 2nd Platoon’s headquarters, three Afghan brothers scraped opium resin over the weekend. The youngest, 23-year-old Sardar, said his family would earn little money from the harvest.
“We receive money from the shopkeepers, then they will sell it,” said Sardar, who was afraid to give his last name. “We don’t have enough money to buy flour for our families. The smugglers make the money,” added Sardar, who worked alongside his 11-year-old son just 20 yards from a Marine guard post, its guns pointed across the field.
Afghanistan supplies some 93 percent of the world’s opium used to make heroin, and the Taliban militants earn up to $100 million from the drug trade, the United Nations estimates. The export value of this harvest was $4 billion — more than a third of the country’s combined gross domestic product.
Though they aren’t eradicating poppies, the Marines presence could still have a positive effect. Henderson said the drug supply lines have been disrupted at a crucial point in the harvest. And Marine commanders are debating staying in Garmser longer than originally planned.
Second Lt. Mark Greenlief, 24, a Monmouth, Ill., native who commands the 2nd Platoon, said he originally wanted to make a helicopter landing zone in Sardar’s field. “But as you can see that would ruin their poppy field, and we didn’t want to ruin their livelihood.”
Sardar “basically said, ‘This is my livelihood, I have to do what I can to protect that,'” said Greenlief. “I told him we’re not here to eradicate.”
The Taliban told Garmser residents that the Marines were moving in to eradicate, hoping to encourage the villagers to rise up against the Americans, said 2nd Lt. Brandon Barrett, 25, of Marion, Ind., commander of the 1st Platoon.
In the next field over from Sardar’s, Khan Mohammad, an Afghan born in Helmand province who lives in Pakistan and came to work the fields, said he makes only $2 a day. He said the work is dangerous now that Taliban militants are shooting at the U.S. positions.
“We’re stuck in the middle,” he said. “If we go over there those guys will fire at us. If we come here, we’re in danger, too, but we have to work,” said the 54-year-old Mohammad, who supports a family of 10.
An even older laborer, his back bent by years of work, came over and told the small gathering of Afghans, Marines and journalists that the laborers had to get back to work “or the boss will get mad at us.”
Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover, whose platoon is sleeping beside a poppy crop planted in the interior courtyard of a mud-walled compound, said the Marines’ mission is to get rid of the “bad guys,” and “the locals aren’t the bad guys.”
“Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio,” said Stover, 28, of Marion, Ohio. “When we got here they were asking us if it’s OK to harvest poppy and we said, ‘Yeah, just don’t use an AK-47.'”
sitting here at my desk in kabul on a thursday afterooon, i’m moved to comment…
there’s another dimension to this issue that’s rarely mentioned… many of the warlords and regional commanders (not all those individuals are associated with the taliban), make loans to the hardscrabble farmers to buy poppy seed and to pay for the use of machinery to cultivate the fields and dig irrigation ditches… the loan gets repaid at harvest time with some left over for the farmer… when the “good guys” go in and eradicate the crop and then the warlords and commanders go looking either for the crop harvest or their money back, it’s not uncommon for the poor farmer to offer one of his young daughters in satisfaction for the loan… in lieu of that form of payment, the farmer and sometimes his entire family gets killed… it’s a harsh, primitive, but very effective loan collection system…
so, what i read a lot of daily reports on, no surprise, is attacks carried out on poppy-field eradication teams that usually get reported as “terrorist incidents”… it would be ever so helpful if our esteemed “news” media would report things in context, but i supposed that’s just too much to expect…
and, of course, we haven’t even come close to the topic of how to help that poor farmer actually make enough of a living to be able to feed, clothe and shelter his family…
http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/
This Seems like totally valid COIN strategy to me..
Interesting input from the “Kabul desk”, though the business model in play sounds as western as it does eastern, except for the fate of the daughters — though that too may be changing in the west over the next few years if things go badly enough in some areas. Feudal or Futile, you decide.
And as someone who is more than a little familiar with the inner workings of the Mighty Wurlitzer, reading this one left me with an unmistakable “Alice in Wonderland” sensation, as I felt the rabbit hole yawn wide beneath my feet and I plummeted headlong into the land of the Red Queen.
Now I may be remembering this incorrectly, but didn’t opium production decline pretty radically under the Taliban’s hardline rule?
Am I supposed to actually believe that just like that they’ve changed their Islamic spots and decided that opium production as a cash crop is suddenly far more important than their particular flavor or religious extremism?
And from where exactly did AP pull the “$100 million” figure listed as the Taliban’s cut?
More than anything, this smells like a “humanizing” piece aimed at demonstrating that the Marines are “sensitive” to the locals, and that they aren’t all just “towelheads” to our most efficient standard-issue killing machines — and I don’t call them this lightly, having trained at MCRD San Diego — and beyond — many moons ago.
I’ve re-read the copy several times now, if only to see how much subterfuge I can unpack using Derrida’s favorite logic.
The close quote on the piece was perhaps the best non-sequitorial moment of all: conflating Ohio corn and Afghan poppies.
That’s a favorite semantic trick, offering the most difficult bits to swallow in the conclusion, better still in third-party form as a quote. I have heard the technique referred to as the “last nail” effect, though I’m sure there are others.
While on the surface the young Marine’s “conclusion” seems somehow vaguely reasonable, consider the implications of what he has (supposedly) said for a few minutes and see how many problems you can find in just this single monstrous assumption.
I’ll wait.
@profmarkus
I lost my first response to your comment looking at the link you posted at the bottom of your comment which, I might add, added no credo to your “sitting behing a desk in Kabul.”
Hmm. “Sitting at your desk in Kabul on a Thursday afternoon.”
Who are you that you are “moved” to comment?
Just want to know as I am used to more clear and clarified comment from folks who post here.
Im all for Cloak and Dagger skullduggery but I still fail to see where your trying to go with this.. Tactically from the local area of operations of those marines, what they are doing is sound.
Chapter 3 of the below should show more the aims of what the marines are trying to achieve locally:
http://www.usgcoin.org/library/doctrine/COIN-FM3-24.pdf
From the military perspective surely rather than wasting their time burning a source of income for the majority of rural afgans and alienating the population smarter use of time/resources with projects, such as the following:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/04/political-maneuver-in-counteri/
If your trying to make a case of the dubious morality or ethics involved in narco-terroism on a nationwide or even global level then i really don’t think this is the best article to argue from..