Daily Times

LASHKAR GAH: As U.S. and Afghan forces pound Taliban drug factories this week, farmers in the country’s largest opium producing-province and narcotics experts say the strategy just repeats previous failed efforts to stamp out the trade.

U.S. Army General John Nicholson, who heads NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, announced on Monday a new strategy of attacking opium factories, saying he wanted to hit the Taliban “where it hurts, in their narcotics financing”.

Critics say the policy risks further civilian casualties and turning large swathes of the population dependent on poppy cultivation against the Afghan government.

“The Taliban will not be affected by this as much as ordinary people,” said Mohammad Nabi, a poppy farmer in Nad Ali district in the southern province of Helmand, the heartland of opium production. \”Farmers are not growing poppies for fun. If factories are closed and businesses are gone, then how will they provide food for their families?”

Opium production in Afghanistan reached record highs this year, up 87 percent, according to the United Nations.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said last week that output of opium from poppy seeds in Afghanistan, the world’s main source of heroin, stood at around 9,000 metric tons in 2017, worth an estimated $1.4 billion on leaving the farms.

In Helmand, cultivation area increased 79 percent.

Publicising the new strategy, which he said was open-ended, Nicholson showed one video of an F-22 fighter jet dropping 250-pound bombs on two buildings, emphasising that a nearby third building was left unscathed.

U.S. troops have long been accused of causing unnecessary collateral damage and civilian deaths. The United States says it takes every precaution to avoid civilian casualties.

The four-star general emphasised that farmers were not the targets. “They are largely compelled to grow the poppy and this is kind of a tragic part of the story,” said Nicholson. Experts, however, question whether the new strategy will have an impact on Taliban financing.

“All these things have been tried before and not produced effective results. If they had, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” said Orzala Nemat, director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, which has been researching the country’s drug trade for a decade and a half. Another analyst said it was simply a futile game of “whack-a-mole.” Those familiar with the drug industry in Afghanistan said it would only take three or four days to replace a lab, which generally has a low sunk-cost. They also say it was not just the Taliban involved in Afghanistan’s drug trade.

Published in Daily Times, November 24^th 2017.