Reality check on Afghanistan VII

I’ve spoken about the danger of  terrorism, but there is also the danger of an increase of drug trafficking to Europe.

Afghanistan is already the world’s largest supplier of opium. But opium, which is used to make heroin, is not the only illegal drug that the war-torn nation is producing.

Over the past four years, Afghans have also been getting better at making methamphetamine, known colloquially as speed, crystal or meth.

In some parts of Afghanistan, methamphetamine output already appears to be outpacing that of opium. But, researchers have argued, not enough attention has been paid to the burgeoning illegal drug trade.

Now, with the US withdrawal, some European Union authorities worry that illegal Afghan methamphetamine might pose an increasing danger to Europe.

“The German federal police is intensively monitoring the situation,” a spokesperson from the authority said, “because methamphetamine has been produced in large quantities in Afghanistan for several years now, and because of the danger that it could also reach the German or European market via traditional heroin smuggling routes.”

According to Philip Berry, a lecturer at King’s College and author of The War on Drugs and Anglo-American Relations: Lessons from Afghanistan, 2001-2011: “If Afghanistan’s methamphetamine industry continues to expand, there is the potential that Europe, along with other international markets, will become a more prominent destination.”

Afghans started making methamphetamine seriously only about four years ago, according to a November 2020 report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).

There had been reports of Afghans “cooking” meth up in kitchen-sized laboratories since 2013, extracting it from over-the-counter medicines such as cough syrups. But this process is complicated, dangerous and requires chemistry skills.

It was when locals discovered they could extract methamphetamine from a local plant that production seems to have really taken off.

Ephedra, called bandak or oman locally, is a perennial grass easily harvested from local hillsides. Once used for firewood or to treat kidney ailments, it is now picked, packed and dried, then chemically treated to extract ephedrine.

The latter process is simple and comparatively cheap. In a second, more complex step, the processed ephedra is used to make methamphetamine crystals.

“The data available suggests that Afghanistan has in a short period of time become a producer and supplier of relatively large quantities of low-cost ephedrine and methamphetamine,” the EMCDDA researchers warned. “The potential scale of ephedrine and methamphetamine production … the income it generates and the speed at which it has emerged, are both surprising and worrying.”

They cautioned that meth manufacture may soon come to rival opium production in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is already known to supply more than 80 percent of the world’s opium and Europe is the biggest market, with heroin smuggled in mostly through the Balkan states and Turkey.

In 2019, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that the overall value of economic activity around opiates for export in Afghanistan was worth anywhere between $1.1bn and $2bn (nearly 1.7 billion euros), which is equal to up to 11 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Afghan methamphetamine is catching up.

A study published this month by the UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) looked at how the Taliban was funded in the southwestern province of Nimruz, on the Iranian border.

Most of its income is from taxing legal goods crossing the border – and not illegal drugs.

But the ODI also concluded that, in terms of tonnage, more methamphetamine was being produced in, or moving through, the province than opium.

Evidence from various quarters – including satellite imaging of potential meth production facilities, on-the-ground interviews and shipments seized by police in different parts of the world, including in Turkey and on the Iran-Pakistan border – points to a rapidly growing methamphetamine trade.

Afghan methamphetamine has also made inroads into international markets. It has already been discovered by authorities in Africa, Australia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

There are unconfirmed reports that some could have reached Europe, too.

“We believe that some [Afghan methamphetamine] has gone to Turkey,” said Laurent Laniel, an EMCDDA analyst focused on drug production and trafficking. “And if it reaches Turkey, then we assume that some will get to Europe.”

But Mansfield – an independent consultant who authored A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan and has been researching and regualarly visiting Afghanistan since 1997 - argued that Afghan meth has not had enough attention from European government agencies : “There needs to be a more systematic approach to testing.  Most agencies just test a substance to see if it’s meth and for its quality. They don’t tend to test whether it’s made from the ephedra plant or from pharmaceuticals.”

For example, although it has shared some concerns, the German federal police’s forensics department, which regularly examines seized drug shipments, has yet to test whether the meth it comes across is from Afghanistan. And its officials say the department is unlikely to do so unless it receives a legal request or order from a body such as the UNODC.

Currently, Australian law enforcement is among the few agencies testing to see if methamphetamine they catch is derived from Afghan ephedra plants.

All the experts interviewed say it was impossible to know whether more methamphetamine or opium would head to Europe under the Taliban’s rule.

Last week, a Taliban spokesman promised to ban drug smuggling and production. Which is an unsurprising attempt to position itself as a legitimate government, has pledged to ban narcotics production and smuggling. They may attempt to use narcotics control to gain international recognition and development funding.

Even if they do ban narcotics, there must be appropriate mitigation strategies to sustain the mesure.

A more important factor is how the Afghan economy performs from now on. Economic collapse could stimulate the production of more illicit drugs. If there is no way to fund a government, there won’t be any more government jobs. A lot of people may head back to the land. Opium poppy cultivation is a very labour-intensive job. If there’s more labour, there might be more opium.

Whether that happens will be a function of how the Taliban chooses to run the country and how Western donors choose to engage with the Taliban.

The exodus of Afghan executives and intellectuals plus the imposition of widespread sanctions could well fuel an economic crisis that would lead to large numbers of refugees and increased levels of drug production, that would undoubtedly impact the region and Europe.

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Reality check on Afghanistan VI

I have been asked everyday another question : How will the Taliban govern Afghanistan? It may be up to us.

The U.S., France, NATO is out, but what the Biden Administration and its Western allies do in the weeks and months ahead will have a big influence on whether the Central Asian country reverts to the insular medieval barbarism of the 1990s or modernizes in order to conform to major international norms.

The Taliban is far from monolithic. They have common values: adherence to sharia law, resistance to foreign interference, the traditional Pashtun tribal code of pashtunwali. How those general values manifest into specific policies and laws will be subject to interpretation through the movement’s fluid internal politics.

Divided along regional and tribal lines, an alliance between anti-imperialist Afghan nationalists motivated to protect the country’s sovereignty and Islamic fundamentalists, and partly composed of former Ghani regime soldiers and policemen who defected under pressure’, the Taliban is a highly decentralized movement whose desperate leadership could tilt it toward the hardliners, or more liberal and modern.

Right now, the Taliban are saying the right things and sending positive signals about keeping girls schools open, allowing women to work, and amnesty for Afghans who worked for NATO occupation force. Clearly the order has gone out from the Taliban shura to their fighters to behave correctly. Images from a Taliban press conference reveal that the presidential palace has not been vandalized or looted. In a signal that this is not your father’s Taliban, high-ranking Taliban official Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad sat for an interview with a female television journalist whose face was uncovered. Former president Hamid Karzai is safe despite having remained in Kabul. While Western news media made much of the Taliban firing their guns outside the airport, firing over people’s heads was clearly an attempt at crowd control.

Westerners would not have voted for the Taliban to govern Afghanistan. But it is not our country, therefore, we don’t get a vote.

For the foreseeable future, what seemed inevitable to anyone who was paying attention over the last 20 years is now a fait accompli. The question now is: which Taliban will we and, far more importantly, the people of Afghanistan be dealing with?

The Taliban who are allowing French, British and other nations’ troops to travel inside the capital in order to escort their citizens to the airport for evacuation—who even risked their own lives to evacuate Indian embassy staff—and who have left unmolested old Afghan government posters of ousted president Ashraf Ghani and iconic Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, a sworn enemy of the Taliban assassinated by Al Qaeda?

Or the thugs who tortured and assassinated nine members of the Hazara minority and have threatened to subject women to forced marriage?

The U.S. and its Western allies face a choice.

They can exert pressure through de facto economic sanctions, as the Biden Administration has done by freezing the Afghan government’s $9 billion in assets and cutting off half a billion in IMF funding, and via airstrikes, which means enforce a collective punishment and pushing the Taliban to their limits.

Another option, or should I say, a human and clever choice, is to offer economic aid and diplomatic recognition.

Or they can tailor a middle path that ties rewards to Western perception of the new government’s behavior.

Pouring on the pressure would be a tragic mistake. It will would strengthen the hand of the most radical Taliban hardliners at the expense of relative moderates who want Afghanistan to look and feel more like Pakistan: undeniably Islamic in character but connected by trade and communications to the outside world. You don’t want your adversary to feel as though it has nothing left to lose—so give them something they want to keep.

Let’s be mindful of how the blunders of American policymakers in response to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran needlessly radicalized a revolutionary government.

Had President Jimmy Carter not admitted the deposed Shah to the U.S. for medical treatment, activists college students would not have seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran or taken 52 staffers as hostages. Supreme Leader and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, by temperament a moderate who opposed hotheaded tactics, was forced to side with the radicals during the hostage crisis or risk being pushed aside by his own uprising. After the embassy was taken over, there was too much national pride at stake for either party to back down. The U.S. and the new Iranian government dug in their heels, leading to decades of misunderstanding and antagonism.

While a total absence of pressure would be politically unpalatable and unrealistic given the Taliban’s 1990s track record, Western policymakers should deploy a light touch with Taliban-governed Afghanistan and have the humility of letting Vladimir Putin deal with the Taliban to protect Russia’s backyard.

Playing the tough guy will only strengthen the hand of hardliners who don’t want girls to be educated or for women to fully participate in society, and prefer to return to the bad old days of stonings and demolishing cultural treasures.

It is a fact. Right now, the relatively liberal wing of the Taliban is in charge. Let’s try to keep it that way. For the sake of Afgans and the whole region. Not to mention, the whole world, still a prey to terrorism.

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Reality check on Afghanistan V

I have been asked several times one question: How did the Taliban manage to conquer so quickly its long lost power ?

The answer is simple. The American way of dealing with a lost war is to withdraw its forces. The Afghan way of dealing with it is to change sides as quickly as possible.

The Afghan way of war has created confusion among foreign political and military leaders in the past 20 years, but never more so than during the past few weeks as the Taliban swept through the country, capturing city after city without facing serious resistance.

Intelligence agencies had generally assured western leaders that the Afghan government had the soldiers and weapons to make a fight of it. They did so, even after president Joe Biden announced on 14 April that all American troops would be out of Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Biden said that a Taliban victory was not “inevitable” and Boris Johnson added that the Taliban had “no military path to victory”. Experienced politicians do not make such confident predictions unless their intelligence chiefs have been telling them the same thing.

The reason so many well-informed people got it so wrong is that they were comparing the military strength of the two sides. But the Taliban victory was not military so much as political. Analysts now wring their hands and explain that Afghan soldiers often were not paid and lacked supplies of food and ammunition. It is also true that the Afghan army had become accustomed to calling in close American air support and felt bereft without it.

The political triumph of the Taliban came about because Afghans with power – military commanders, civilian officials, tribal leaders, local warlords – decided that the US had done a deal with the Taliban and they would be wise to follow suit as quickly as possible. They saw president Donald Trump make concession after concession in negotiations with the Taliban in Qatar without the Afghan government getting anything in return. Biden confirmed this approach when, for domestic political reasons, he decided to grandstand in announcing a complete US pull out.

The most striking feature of the Taliban seizure of power is that it took place with so little fighting. This was the case even in what were once the heartlands of anti-Taliban resistance before their overthrow by the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001. Easily defended mountain strongholds in the Hindu Kush and large anti-Taliban cities like Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif fell after a few days fighting or without a shot being fired.

The speed and ease of the Taliban advance was self-fulfilling as Afghans became convinced that they were going to be the winners. Deals were done with powerful warlords – or their underlings – who had been expected to resist. This repeated the pattern of the 1990s when the Taliban first took power in the country. At that time cities and towns often changed hands because the Taliban simply paid their enemies to go home. It would be surprising if this has not happened again.

These changes of allegiance sped the Taliban on their way to Kabul, but the loyalty or neutrality of their new fair-weather adherents is shallow. They will expect to retain their old control under the loose authority of a Taliban central government. Moreover, it may be difficult for the largely Pushtun Taliban to rule Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara areas without conceding a high degree of autonomy to them. The risk-laden alternative for the Taliban would be to use extreme violence against Afghanistan’s minorities, but the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other smaller groups collectively make up not far from 60 per cent of the population.

The Taliban have one important advantage in holding onto power. For the moment, no foreign power or neighbouring state looks likely to support an anti-Taliban resistance movement with arms and money. They won power in the 1990s because of backing from Pakistan and lost it in 2001 because the US backed the Northern Alliance.

The US, Britain and other states warn that they will not tolerate Afghanistan becoming once again a haven for terrorists, as it was when Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were based in the country.

But this time round the Taliban is eager to win international recognition as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. They would pay a heavy price in terms of international isolation if they host al-Qaeda or Isis.

Another argument against other jihadi organisations again congregating in Afghanistan is that 20 years ago, when Osama bin Laden had his headquarters and camps there, an alliance with him was a two-way street. The Taliban gave him refuge, and he gave them money and a core of fanatical fighters. It was, after all, two al-Qaeda suicide bombers who assassinated the Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, just prior to 9/11.

But the Taliban no longer need help from al-Qaeda and there is every reason why they should reject a renewed alliance. On the other hand, there may be Taliban commanders who feel ideologically akin to al Qaeda and its clones and will give them covert aid, in case Kabul doesn’t not get the economic help the Taliban need to develop their country.

The Taliban are visibly astonished by the completeness of their victory and will take time to digest and consolidate it. The outside world will be wondering what to make of the new Afghan regime and what will be the implications of its success for them and for the region.

It is in the interests of the Taliban for the moment to show a moderate face, but they have fought a ferocious war for two decades, taking heavy casualties. There will be many in their ranks who do not wish to dilute their social and religious beliefs for the sake of politically convenience. Despite the amnesty just declared by Taliban leaders, many will seek vengeance against former government supporters whom they have long denounced as traitors.

Just like in any other revolution ; beginning with the French in 1789. It will be hard to avoid casualties. Let’s only hope there will be much less than the 75.000 Afgan military deaths and about 71.000 Afgan civilian lives lost during USA’s and OTAN's 20 years of occupation.

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Reality check on Afghanistan IV

The Taliban blitzkrieg that dismantled 20 years of neocon and liberal imperialism in Afghanistan has also marked an ignoble end to all manners of pretences.

Twenty years ago, the United States pretended it was going to Afghanistan to dismantle the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and bring Afghans peace, prosperity, liberal democracy and rule of law. Above all, it acted as if it was invading Afghanistan to liberate Afghan women from their burqas and make them all look just like American women.

Now, a “new and improved” Taliban is in power in Afghanistan. This is the US’s parting gift to all Afghans. The Americans, who have been negotiating with the Taliban in Doha for months, were undoubtedly fully aware that the group would take over the country as soon as they pulled their troops out. Everything went according to their plans – they only slightly mismanaged optics at the Kabul airport.

This new Taliban is markedly different from the Taliban of 20 years ago. This time around, its leaders want to be part of regional and global politics. It seems, during the Doha conferences, they realised that their resumption of power in Afghanistan now needs international recognition – they realised that to survive, they must rule, not terrorise.

Their first press conference clearly showed that the Taliban leaders had been watching quite a bit of BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera as they loitered in the lobbies and rooms of gaudy hotels in Doha. They can now schmooze and lie as skilfully as Barack Obama, and are far more believable than Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron put together.

Today, the US and European liberal media are terribly embarrassed by the Taliban’s rapid rise to power, and the evident (but misleading) futility of the US and its allies’ military adventure in Afghanistan. Their embarrassment is rooted in the fact that they helped George W Bush sell the lie that the US was in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and its Islamist ideology and bring peace and prosperity to Afghans. But their miserable embarrassment should not pre-empt a more realistic assessment of what the Taliban might do.

The Islamophobic boogie man the media had created of the Taliban after 9/11 does not allow the world a moment of peaceful reflection that perhaps the Afghans are better off with the Taliban, the devil they know, than they were with the US occupation – and the murder and mayhem it had occasioned.

The US accomplished its mission in Afghanistan – it funnelled money to its military-industry complex with a 20-year-long occupation, learned from the asymmetrical warfare that occupation occasioned and showed its capabilities to its rivals. So President Joe Biden pulled US forces out of Afghanistan without thinking for a second what will happen to some 40 million human beings the US treated like disposable herds in its military calculations.

The Taliban is now back, and it is free to do with their country as it pleases. But what exactly will the armed group do now that it has regained control of Afghanistan and ousted the puppets the US installed? This is yet to be seen. For now, what is necessary is a careful study of the trail of death, destruction and indignity the US leaves behind wherever it goes to advance its military power.

It is delusional to think the US military can be the source of anything other than terror and mayhem anywhere it goes. Those of us who lived through the banality of Bush’s “war on terror” and the rise of neo-conservative militancy remember only too well the crescendo of terrorising propaganda against anything that wasn’t White Supremacy or Zionist Supremacy.

What did Afghanistan itself achieve under US occupation? A comprador  class of political elite totally alienated from its own people, beholden to the false promises of the US military and political hegemony. Afghans are now back to their own devices. Whatever happens to them is better than the indignity of 20 years of military occupation that had created a comprador  class of politicians who crumbled like a hollow sandcastle as the Taliban spread its military might.

The Taliban fighters are Afghans, too. They did not come from the moon. This is their country and they are not any more fanatical and conspiracy driven than those tens of millions of Trump supporters, the QAnon believers, anti-vaxxers, Proud Boys, and the rest of them. If people are scared of Taliban leaders Haibatullah Akhunzada, Mohammad Yaqoob, Sirajuddin Haqqani, or Abdul Ghani Baradar, they have not been paying attention to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Marine Le Pen, Stephen Miller, Geert Wilders or Steve Bannon. Same level of sugar density, different bucket.

The overwhelming majority of Afghans have had no choice but to live with the Taliban. They deserve much better, of course, than the fate has assigned to them. However, fanatical, reactionary, retrograde, or not, the Taliban is at home in the region.

What did two decades of American military occupation bring the Afghans?  Peace, prosperity, democracy? Are Americans capable of any such gift to any country on this Earth – least of all “democracy”?

What did Afghans gain after 20 years of US occupation? Did they prosper, did they have a day of peace? What can the Taliban do to Afghanistan that it and the US and their European allies have already not done to it? How many precious Afghans – men, women and children – have been lost to the combined militant thuggery of the US and the Taliban?

They finally sat together in Doha and arranged for a handover of Afghanistan back to the Taliban from the US military and the pathetic Afghan leaders like Ashraf Ghani and Hamid Karzai were not even part of the negotiations. What self-respect could Ghani have after that? Of course, he ran away to the nearest US military base he was allowed to enter.

As for Afghan women and girls, they are far better off fighting the fanaticism and stupidity of the Taliban on their own and not under the shadow of US military barracks. Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish and Arab women have been fighting similar, if not identical, patriarchal thuggery right in their neighbourhood, so will Afghan women. Have Indian women not been revolting against a whole culture of rape in their homeland? So will Afghan women fight against the Taliban.

Thanks to the USA, a “new and improved” Taliban is now in power in Afghanistan.And they want to remain in power. To do so, they will soon demand to come to the United Nations, or other gatherings of the global community, to show how civilised they have become.

If Afghans who think and believe and act differently than the Taliban do stay put in their homeland and fight fanaticism one day at a time, Afghanistan can eventually become something like Iran, or Pakistan, or India or even Turkey. If they stay and resist, without the weight of an occupying power, the Taliban will face the peaceful nobility of a dignified ancient nation that has civilised barbarians far worse than this murderous gang of fanatical power mongers – and it will crumble.

Afghanistan is the land that gave the world Rumi, the Herat school of art and architecture, countless other poets, philosophers, mystics, historians and scientists. It can handle a gang of “Proud Boys” in Pashtun gear too. There is no need to be condescendent with them. They have History on their side. They can manage on their own, with a little help from Russia to, finally, profit from their natural ressources and develop their economy, as well as their mentality.

PALESTINA 

INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix

Addameer

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International Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom

Defense for Children 
Breaking the Silence

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The Intercept Brasil

AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas