So said Canada’s recently re-elected Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday, as he hailed the end of his country’s armed forces’ combat role in the Afghan province of Kandahar.
The prime minister went out of his way to put an optimistic spin on another aspect of the situation in Afghanistan that never gets much mention in the Canadian media (and sporadic coverage in Western media generally). A reporter claims to have overheard Harper observe that “he saw fewer opium poppy fields than before [on previous visits to Afghanistan].”
Those poppy fields he commented on are now Uncle Sam’s problem – the Canadian combat role in Kandahar will be taken over by the U.S. military.
Harper isn’t the first Western leader to have to dance around this issue of opium production in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is the Detroit of opium, or the Silicon Valley, if you like – it produces 90% of the total world supply. The Taliban and their terrorist allies earn billions from control of the production, which they use to fund their war against Afghanistan’s central government.
You would think NATO could eliminate the top leaders of this criminal enterprise the same way it is trying so energetically to kill off Colonel Gadhafi in Libya. But apparently, NATO’s bunker-buster bombs only work against targets in Tripoli, not against Afghan drug labs, or the palaces of Afghan opium barons.
When Western journalists cover the Afghan opium story nowadays, they often focus more on the plight of Afghanistan’s growing population of drug addicts, rather than link the trade in opium to the Taliban’s ability to continue to purchase weapons used to kill American and NATO soldiers.
Fortunately, the Western journalistic pack mentality doesn’t apply to all media outlets covering Afghanistan. The Abu Dhabi-based National posted a information-packed article about Afghanistan’s opium trade about a week ago. That story reveals, contrary to the optimistic Canadian read of the situation, that in “Kandahar [province], the Taliban’s spiritual homeland, nearly 260 square kilometres were planted [with poppies for this year’s opium crop],” according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The Canadian PM and other Western leaders may disagree, because it doesn’t fit with their need to give optimistic speeches – but as long as Afghanistan is the global center of opium production, it will continue to “represent a geo-strategic risk to the world.” (Maybe, in a cynical sense, since so much of the Afghan opium crop fuels the drug habits of Russian addicts, the Western countries don’t really see Afghanistan’s opium industry as a threat directed against their own populations.)
While the NATO nations won’t talk about it much, you can bet Afghanistan’s neighbors – particularly Russia and China – will be more open about the need to break up Afghanistan’s opium cartel. That issue will be front and center when representatives of both states meet in about two weeks for the 10th anniversary gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security body.
Once NATO withdraws from Afghanistan, the fight against Afghanistan’s opium barons will fall to the SCO member-states (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). May the SCO be more successful in this war than NATO has been to date!
