The extraordinary folly of Britain's new opium war

[CHIMO]

In the next few weeks, an army of 3,400 British troops expects to be deployed to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. This is nearly half the number deployed in Iraq. Everything I have heard and read about this expedition suggests that it makes no sense. British soldiers are being sent to a poor and dangerous place whose sole economic resource is opium. They will sit there as targets for probably the most intractable concentration of insurgents, Taliban, drug traffickers and suicide bombers in the world - until some minister has the guts to withdraw them.

Even the context of this expedition is obscure. The Afghan war was supposedly won and the Taliban defeated in 2001. It is fashionable, even in circles opposed to the Iraq war, to claim Afghanistan as a triumph. The Americans and British bombed the hell out of whatever was left of Kabul by the Russians, and the Afghans themselves. A ramshackle army of warlords and mercenaries was helped back into power and the status quo ante the Taliban was restored. That would have been the best time to leave.

As it was, neoimperialists in Washington and London couldn't resist attempting that Everest of nation-building, a new Afghanistan. Their engaging puppet, Hamid Karzai, rules an increasingly insecure landscape, wholly dependent on western aid and a booming narco economy. Outside Kabul, the country appears to be in the hands of a disparate federation of local rulers, tribal warlords and Taliban commanders, all afloat on a sea of opium - the basis of half Afghanistan's domestic output and virtually all its export and personal wealth.

The Americans are wisely treating this country as history. They are reducing their troops to some 10,000 based at Bagram, dedicated to pursuing George Bush's Scarlet Pimpernel, Osama bin Laden. The rest is being handed over to role-hungry Nato. But Nato has no clue what to do. The French, Germans and Spaniards want no part in the madcap venture. The Canadians and Dutch are nervous, so much so that the Dutch may pull out. That leaves the British, mostly with the turbulent province of Helmand, which is sliding under the control of drug warlords in alliance with a resurgent Taliban.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1677385,00.html

A gift waiting for the BLOC.

[Spazito]

1. It's time for Canada to re-think it's decision to be in Afghanistan

The bush cabal has left other countries to clean up it's mess yet again and I don't think we should be there to do that. I admit I was in favour of us going to Afghanistan right after 9/11 but the circumstances have drastically changed due to the U.S. shift to focus on Iraq and abandoning Afghanistan.