Sunanda K Datta Ray: Operation Enduring Addiction

WHERE MONEY TALKS

The death of a 13-year-old English boy from an overdose of heroin is a tragic reminder of the social cost of what George W Bush lauded last June as "the first victory in the war on terror".

While the American invasion has plunged Iraq into a bloody civil war, it has turned Afghanistan, the supposed beneficiary of Mr Bush's Operation Enduring Freedom, into the supplier of 70 per cent of the world's opium and 95 per cent of the heroin that merchants of death push in the streets of British towns.

The United States cannot bring itself to admit that things are infinitely worse for ordinary Afghans and Iraqis as a result of its intervention.

Hence, a huge propaganda campaign about democracy and optimistic timetables with a strong element of make-believe. After several delays, Afghanistan will go to the polls on October 9. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to follow next spring. Iraq's polls are planned for January.

Western agencies are making much of the claim that large numbers of Afghans, including four million women, defied death threats and intimidation to register to vote.

American and European observers galore will watch over the process in the 25,000 polling stations. At the end, everyone will proclaim a famous victory for Hamid Karzai, the pro-Western Simla-educated ethnic Pashtun leader, elegant in astrakhan hat and trademark cloak, whom the Americans anointed three years ago.

He will naturally vanquish all the other 17 presidential contenders, including a woman, Massouda Jalal, and Yunus Qanuni, the ethnic Tajik chief who is de facto representative of the Northern Alliance which seized Kabul with US support in 2001 but has since forfeited American backing.

Mr Karzai's predictable victory will be hailed globally as the triumph of democracy. The Western media already eulogises him as the only nationalist in his country, a claim that overlooks the unity of all the warring tribes against the Soviet Union.

Afghans are a nation when they feel threatened as a whole, but that does not mean that electoral legitimacy alone will empower Mr Karzai with authority over the fierce tribal loyalties, clan rivalries, ambitious warlords and catch-as-catch-can power politics of his turbulent land.

Nor will the promised mandate make a jot of difference to the flourishing multibillion dollar trade in opium poppies which generated an estimated $2.3 billion in 2003, about half the Afghan economy.

About 1.7 million rural Afghans "" seven per cent of the population "" depend for a living on cultivating poppy. These impoverished peasants cannot grow anything else in their rocky soil; traditional fruit crops are withering with orchards bursting with buried mines.

Irrigation, credit, seeds, storage and markets are all lacking. But a chain of processors, smugglers and dealers links the poppy fields of Jalalabad to victims like the 13-year-old English boy.

We are told that by enticing young innocents abroad, the poppy crop finances narco-terrorism, arms warlords like Ismail Khan, the Herat governor whom Mr Karzai recently overthrew, and explains the return of the Taliban whom Operation Enduring Freedom was supposed to have destroyed.

Yet, it was the Taliban that issued and enforced a blanket ban on poppy cultivation on religious grounds, forcing cultivators to move to Pakistan. Freed of Taliban control by the US military, and enjoying their American-given enduring freedom, Afghans returned to growing poppies in 2001.

Mr Karzai renewed the Taliban ban and began an eradication programme but these were only token gestures by an administration that is under siege. Its writ barely extends beyond Kabul and its environs. It would probably collapse altogether if the 18,000 American troops (the 130,000 in Iraq seem equally ineffective) and 10,000 from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in the international security force withdrew.

Attacks on government supporters that are also blamed on the resurgent Taliban and on Osama bin Laden's shadowy legions have caused more than a thousand deaths during the last year. The southern and eastern mountains are simmering with revolt.

Foreign aid workers were again the target of violence recently in Herat. Soldiers are constantly deserting from the 14,000-strong national army. Mr Karzai appears to have abandoned the attempt, at least for the time being, to disarm and disband the innumerable mujahedeen militias which is a precondition for elections, according the the 2001 Bonn agreements.

The fear of what some commentators call a failed narco-state are grim enough but, essentially, they concern Afghanistan's internal affairs. American claims that another fundamentalist regime in Kabul would again afford protection to al-Qaeda is hedged in with ifs and buts, for, like Saddam Hussein's mythical stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Taliban responsibility for al-Qaeda terrorism has not been conclusively established. And if the Taliban were in fact guilty, so, too, were America's own protege, Kabul's allies and sponsors in Islamabad.

With 270,000 heroin users who each consume up to 35 metric tons of the Afghan stuff, Britain took the law into its own hands in 2001 and mounted an operation to destroy stockpiles, break supply chains and buy up poppy sap directly from growers.

It failed because subsidies for alternative crops like wheat could not compare with profits from opium, and because the warlords quickly shifted the stockpiles.

Often, MI6, the British agency handling the operation, ended up paying for opium that had supposedly been destroyed but had actually been smuggled abroad. The weak and vulnerable young, not just in Britain but worldwide, therefore continue to pay an awesome price for Mr Bush's adventurism.