With a thriving opium industry in Afghanistan, Obama's troop surge has no hope of success.
HELMAND, Afghanistan and LONDON, U.K. — It was no great surprise that the skirmish was over within a few minutes. A half dozen Taliban fighters lay dead. But the 300 insurgents, who were the target of a joint air and ground assault by two British battle groups on the Regay villages, had evaporated. No self-respecting guerrilla force is going to hang around to be crushed between the anvil of 200 snarling Highlanders and the hammer of 100 bolt-headed British paratroopers.
The mujahideen sensibly opted to down their weapons and wait until the British had cleared off.
It seems daft, therefore, that President Barack Obama has set a date for the start of the withdrawal of the 30,000 extra troops he plans to "surge" into Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban will simply wait the 18 months he's allowed for the surge with their heads down, and then re-start their campaign? As Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader is so often quoted as saying: "You have the watches, but we have the time."
When he announced the surge at Westpoint, the U.S. president simultaneously offered general Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. officer in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, the tools of success (more troops) and then guaranteed failure by revealing his lack of long-term resolve.
The lesson of the assault on the southern end of the Musa Qala wadi in Helmand province in the summer of 2008, and of countless other operations in Afghanistan is that the Taliban refuses to fight on its enemies' terms.
No matter.
A few weeks after the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment left the Musa Qala wadi in their Chinooks they learned another lesson. They swept down on the densely populated string of fortified compounds and hamlets marked as Sar Puzeh on the NATO maps. Here, by the Helmand River and among the lattice of irrigation ditches and rich fields, the Paras found themselves locked in an unrelenting 17-hour pitched battle.
The fighting was so intense that lance corporal Steve Lewis, a ginger-haired former convict from the tough industrial north east of England near Newcastle, shot seven men dead with his sniper rifle. His number two Frank "the Yank" Ward, who hails from the American Midwest, accounted for at least another couple.
As the Taliban fell, more kept coming. Their bodies lay on the sharp stubble of the fields in clumps of bloodied clothing, Apache attack helicopters tore into them, fast jets bombed and artillery pounded, and still them came.
Why?
The answer was sitting in 200 liter drums of frothy brown sludge, and in plastic sacks oozing a black molasses. Opium. Almost every compound the British troops broke into was a processing factory which took opium resin, which weeps from scratches on poppy heads, and turned it into a morphine base for later processing into heroin.
Whether or not the enemy who were fighting the British at Sar Puzeh were genuine ideological Taliban is unknown. Scores of Afghan fighters, and one British sergeant major, were killed that day. The only real difference between the two engagements was the presence of the opium factories.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/091212/afghanistan-taliban-opium
