Is insurgency Afghanistan’s only problem? [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/2015/05/is-insurgency-afghanistans-only-problem/

Is insurgency Afghanistan’s only problem?
By Salman Rafi Sheikh
May 22, 2015

In a recent report by Washington Post, Attiquilah Amerkhil — a Kabul-based political and military analyst — was reported to have said, “This is the worst fighting season in a decade … there is now fighting in every part of the country.” The report went on to say that “in the first spring fighting season since the U.S.-led coalition ended combat operations in Afghanistan, heavy clashes are being reported in at least 10 Afghan provinces. The provinces are in every corner of the country, creating widespread unease about whether the Afghan government and army can repel the threat.”

It is quite clear that the Taliban are still fighting (as we also showed in our previous article on Afghanistan), and that they have intensified their so-called “final victory” campaign in their quest for re-establishing their supremacy in Afghanistan. A glimpse of their spring offensive can be had from their latest attack on May 18, 2015. Reportedly, a Taliban attack on a district government headquarters in Afghanistan`s southern Uruzgan province on Monday killed at least seven people, an Afghan official said. Among those killed in the pre-dawn attack in Khas Uruzgan district were five policemen, a former district chief and a school principal, according to Abdul Kareem Karimi, the district chief administrative official. A few days ago, a rest house in Kabul, where foreigners used to stay, was also attacked (May 13, 2015) resulting in five casualties at least. The five dead also included an American and two Indian nationals.

This heightened insurgency is a continuation of the spring offensive the Taliban launched in April. They have since rolled out a fierce battlefield strategy across the country`s north and east, forcing the government to spread its security forces thin on many fronts. Targeted assassinations of government and judicial officials have also been on the rise.

While all this is true and constitute the gravest problem Afghanistan is faces today; it is also a fact that the Taliban are by far only one of the many problems Afghanistan is currently facing. Among other grave problems is political instability. Such reports as published by Washington Post tend to reduce Afghanistan’s problems to insurgency alone. While there is no doubt that the insurgency is continuing, political instability is by no means an “automatic” outcome of it. It has its own dynamics too.

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I've been asking myself for years - why are we still in Afghanistan?



https://www.corbettreport.com/exciting-investment-opportunity-in-afghanistan-record-returns-expected/

Exciting Investment Opportunity in Afghanistan! Record Returns Expected!
by James Corbett
TheInternationalForecaster.com
May 6, 2015

Great news for poppy farmers in Afghanistan: a mysterious, brand new strain of poppy seed has appeared on the scene this year promising a better crop than ever before. According to farmers in poppy-rich Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the seeds appeared out of nowhere, delivered to them by the same drug traffickers who provide them with tools, fertilizer, farming advice and cash advances at the start of each growing season and come back to collect the crop at the end of each season. As Gul Mohammad Shukran, head of Kandahar’s anti-narcotics department, explains, this new strain of seed is expected to produce “better drug plants, which require less water and have a faster growth time.”

It goes without saying that this news is even better for the mysterious seed-suppliers who end up taking the harvested opium and transporting it off to foreign countries to be processed into heroin and sold on the black market. But it works out best of all for the treaty organization that invaded the country 14 years ago and has overseen record bumper poppy harvest after record bumper poppy harvest year after year after year after year after year ever since.

That the NATO forces in Afghanistan are protecting the poppy crop is not even a point of controversy. Five years ago Lt. Colonel Brian Christmas of the U.S. Marines went on Fox News to lament that it “may grind in his gut,” but the NATO troops just have to help the farmers cultivate the poppy crop otherwise the farmers would turn against them.

#t=0

And just like that, the entire “war on drugs” is exposed for the lie that we already knew that it was. Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium from which heroin is derived. The poppies from which that opium is collected are protected by U.S. marines and others in the full knowledge that this will end up on the streets of countries around the world as heroin.

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We have done this before.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia