Brits embark on another imperialist folly

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Wednesday January 04, 2006 17:23 by John McGowan

Thousands of poor farmers struggling in the barren wastelands of Afghanistan are poised for an invasion of over 3,400 British troops in the coming weeks.

The troops are intent on ruining the farmer’s livelihoods by destroying their crops. Without the money made from selling their cash crops the rural population will be forced into even more harsh levels of poverty. Many will be forced to pack their things and leave for an uncertain future at the mercy of rigid immigration laws and criminal gangs in the West. Others will stay and resist the occupiers using whatever force they can get their hands on.
The British troops are part of a NATO mission that nobody else apart from Blair’s Government wants to get involved with. The Americans - who carpet bombed the ragged Taliban out of the Afghan capital and then installed a puppet Government – have largely fled the bandit ridden mountains outside Kabul allowing the Taliban and other vicious warlords to reclaim vast swathes of territory. The slimmed down US forces primary target is the capture of the elusive Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Unlike Iraq there is no oil in this country ravaged by decades of warfare. America’s mission here in their brutal post 9/11 assault was simply motivated by blood thirsty revenge.
The only crop of value in Afghanistan is the poppy, the flower used to produce opium which is the supposed target of Britians latest imperialist folly.
The poppy has been cultivated in the area for centuries and since the collapse of the Taliban, which had begun an attempt to stop production, there has been a resurgence in the sector. About 90 % of the heroin sold in the UK and Ireland comes from Poppies grown in Afghanistan.
Now, it appears that the British Government is intent on becoming embroiled in it’s own version of the ‘narco-wars’ that have seen billions of US dollars wasted by the US in futile attempts to wipe out coca production (most of the money went, of course, on training right wing terrorists, bolstering regimes compliant with American aims in the region, destroying the livelihoods of subsistence farmers and spraying tons of pesticides across thousands of acres of countryside).
Should Afghan farmers be forced to pay for the foibles of a western society bloated with money and depressed addicts? And even if it was legitimate to bomb Afghan poppy growers would this really stop its production? Even in the unlikely scenario that it did a new drug would simply emerge – crystal meth the current destroyer of American suburbia, for example – to replace opium related narcotics.
Britian led by the imperialist Blair, filled with the same hubris that has afflicted the US administration, is intent on beginning a new chapter in its shocking history of cowardly missions to plunder and rampage across the globe.
The remnants of the Taliban and the mercenary warlords who have moved into the vacuum of power left after the American invasion will resist the British – who as usual will be hopelessly ill prepared with little knowledge of their foe. As always it will be the ordinary poor people on the ground who will be caught up in the middle and will be forced to run or resist and risk a meaningless and grim death.