Afghan Journal

from Photographers Blog:

Poppy politics

It's not hard to find a field of poppies in the village of Jelawar, north of Kandahar. Some are hidden discreetly behind mud walls but others have been brazenly planted within sight of the main road. During a recent patrol, I accompanied Afghan National Army Captain Imran (he uses one name) and a group of U.S. civil affairs soldiers on a tour of Jelawar's back roads as they tried to assess the extent of this year's opium production.

The first field we came to was a couple of hundred meters across, filled with pink poppy flowers in full bloom. There were several men working the field and Imran asked them what they were doing. A farmer looked up from pulling weeds and said they were working on their onions. Indeed, in a poppy field the size of a football stadium there were a handful of green onion shoots pushing out of the soil. Not exactly the perfect cover, especially after the farmer admitted to planting the poppies in the first place.

As we walked from one poppy field to the next, Imran was not amused. Finally, he gathered a group of farmers together to give them some bad news. "President Karzai has said it is illegal to grow opium poppies and that they must be destroyed. I give you 48 hours to cut down your plants or I will return with Afghan police and Afghan soldiers and we will force you to destroy these fields."

The farmers protested. What about the money we have already spent to prepare the fields and irrigate the land? Why not let us harvest this year's crop and we will not plant next year? Imran was firm. "My hands are tied", he said. "If I let one farmer harvest his crop then I must let everyone harvest their crops. Everyone must be treated in the same manner."

Opening up Afghanistan’s trade routes

The United States is pressing Pakistan to allow Afghan agriculture products to pass through its territory to India, the U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a trip to the war-torn country this week. Opening India’s huge and exploding market to Afghan farmers sounds like a perfectly logical thing to do. Their produce of dried fruits, nuts and pomegranates long made its way to India before the partition of  India and Pakistan in 1947, immortalised in Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s classic story for children, Kabuliwallah.

Reviving that trade  from landlocked Afghanistan may well turn farmers decisively away from poppy cultivation, the United States hopes. It would also make agriculture, on which an estimated 80 percent of the population depends,  more worthwhile and make them less vulnerable to the Taliban.  

But this exactly the sort of thing that stirs anxiety in Pakistan. India’s growing presence in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001 has, after Kashmir, become the single biggest sore point in Pakistan. Islamabad fears that New Delhi’s  vast Afghan aid programme, close ties with President Hamid Karzai’s government and its expanded diplomatic presence is part of a policy of strategic encirclement. It is, in some ways, the coming together of its worst fears.

Despite the U.S. pressure, Pakistan has made clear it  won’t accept such a transit agreement, The Nation newspaper reported late last month, describing it as a  step to restore “some semblance of sovereignty”. Pakistani businessmen are also opposed to granting such rights to India, believing Indian goods will flood the Afghan market and eat into their share, the News said.

But can America be stopped ? As columnist Trudy Tubin points out, the Obama administration regards agriculture as its top non-security priority in Afghanistan. “Restoring the country’s once-vibrant agricultural sector would create jobs that undercut Taliban recruitment. It would give farmers an alternative to growing opium poppies and shrink the Taliban’s profit from the drug trade.”

Protecting the “bullet magnet” and improving life in southern Afghanistan

Katrina Manson is a Reuters reporter based in East Africa. She recently accompanied the British government’s development agency, DFID, on a visit to Helmand  province in south Afghanistan.

                                               By Katrina Manson  

The new head of Helmand’s Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT), tasked with helping to develop one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous and conservative provinces, says that the 300-strong group’s greatest achievement to date is the fact that the governor has managed to visit all 13 districts.

It might sound a strangely slight claim to success for a body that will this year spend £190 million on efforts to rebuild the province and help provide basic services such as justice and education, but for PRT head Lindy Cameron, success is about somebody else doing the work. The PRTs are joint foreign military and civilian teams trying to rebuild the war-torn nation.

“My job is making the government good,” said Cameron. “The point of us being here is to get district government and services up and running and to support the government to be effective enough that people will see it as credible. We have a particularly active and energetic governor who sees it as his job to get out to the people rather than to twiddle his thumbs in an office in Lashkar Gah.”

A favourite of the British military and development officials, Helmand’s provincial governor Gulab Mangal, has been credited for championing opium poppy replacement programmes and helping to steer parts of Helmand’s population away from the Taliban.  

Governor Mangal, is known by British helicopter pilots as a “bullet magnet” for just such feistiness (the helicopter he was travelling in was hit by rocket fire last year). Mangal’s successes against the insurgency and his close cooperation with British and U.S. forces in Helmand have brought him many Taliban-shaped enemies who would be happy to see the back of him.