The following is a letter to Americans from an Afghan farmer who appeared briefly in the new Frontline documentary "Obama's War", which he viewed online.
Full letter, below the fold.
I'm a farmer in Afghanistan.
I'm lucky enough to have traveled a bit, to read and speak some English, and I have a few trusted British friends who have helped to translate this message.
My family has had a very successful agricultural business for half a century, in the Helmand province shown in the documentary. Our organic poppies are made into analgesics that have been prescribed for more than 6000 years. Of course, like all pain killers, they have potential for abuse and addiction, and we pray that they are used properly by adults for pain relief, sleep, and pleasure, and are regulated in smart, responsible ways. We understand that the US government is regulating them exactly the way it regulated alcohol between 1920 and 1933. This helps keep prices high, with no tax. Good luck with that.
Unlike many businesses, we welcome competition, since our product is the finest and the demand always exceeds our supply. We understand that in the US we compete with the makers of Oxycontin, Percocet, Percodan, Dilaudid, and many other narcotics from the Farma drug cartel [sic] that does so much to help elect your Congress, your President, and create your country's health and drug policy and laws. What a lucky thing for PhRMA members they don't make anything that's dangerously addictive and illegal!
(I've learned you're seeing a change now in the US. President Bush guaranteed PhRMA $500 billion and promised not to let anyone import foreign medicine at vastly lower prices -- and got full PhRMA cooperation and re-election support. President Obama made the same agreement, got even more cooperation, and convinced PhRMA to accept $80 billion less -- a 16% discount. What a negotiator!)
On Frontline, Marine Captain Eric Meador recalls conversations we had: "I was asked point blank by some of the locals that are farmers, 'Hey, what are you going to do about my drugs? Because that's the way I make my money. That's the way I make my living. That's the way I feed my family.' "
The Captain never gives his answer -- soon there's incoming fire from an unseen gunman which the narrator calls "The Taliban". (I think it was actually my neighbor.)
But the narrator is clear: "for now the Marines turn a blind eye -- it's a matter of priorities."
It's not like my neighbors need to see Frontline to understand: If "the Taliban" and "the insurgency" weren't here every day shooting at Americans and blowing up their trucks, Americans would be burning our crops -- even more aggressively than they burn tons of American growers' crops each year in the War on Drugs that President Obama has vowed to rename.
Now, I'm not a very religious person myself, and I used to hate the Taliban for the way they treat women. But please try to picture this: suppose your Nebraska farmers have been growing wheat for a century, only now they're occupied by a foreign Army of soldiers who don't speak English, drop bombs that kill women and children, raid homes, kidnap men and hold them without charges, threaten everyone with guns -- and really hate wheat. Now suppose some kind of religious zealots -- maybe your Utah Mormons -- wanted to help get rid of them. If the Mormons are keeping the occupying force too busy to destroy your crops, aren't they really your friends? Maybe you wouldn't care so much about how many wives they have, or their magic underwear, or that maybe they're armed batshit crazy Mormons, until you had your country back.
In fact, Taliban help here goes much further. As American experts -- including advisors to Generals Petraeus and McChrystal -- explain on Frontline:
"[The Taliban] have developed a very sophisticated tribal engagement policy. The US and Afghans really have developed nothing."
"This spring the Taliban's chief commander, mullah Mohammed Omar, even issued a 30 page booklet on how to engage the population. Keep good relations with the local people, it says. Our mission is to keep people safe. In southern Afghanistan the Taliban now has ombudsmen. So they send people out into southern Afghanistan and they say, 'How are we doing? What do you think of your local shadow governor? Is he just? Is he doing a good job?' They ask questions like this. And you know what it is, is the direct challenge to the way NATO/ISAF and the government of Afghanistan have been doing business for the past 8 years."
It's true, the Taliban knows how to speak to us. In contrast, my translator from the US disappeared suddenly this year. I eventually learned that President Obama fired him after it was discovered the translator liked boys better than girls. In the Frontline piece you can see who replaced him: "a translator who doesn't speak the local dialect or English very well", and an armed Texan who doesn't know two words of Arabic, and whose terrifying frustration mounts in each conversation, where "the simplest communication seems impossible".
NATO forces have already achieved victory in a way -- if their goal was really stability for Afghanistan. Ten years ago, poppy farmers and the fundamentalist Taliban considered each other natural enemies -- a threat to Afghanistan's stability. But today we've put aside our differences in pursuit of the same goal: an Afghanistan no longer occupied by NATO forces. That's why we're winning. The Taliban ended its old anti-poppy rhetoric as part of a program known as "giving a crap whether and how the people of Afghanistan feed their families". (We understand counterinsurgency expert David Petraeus himself is reviewing this innovative idea.) The program has been so successful that there is no evidence of ethnic cleansing or looming Shia/Sunni civil war here, and the Americans don't have to train us to get along. Consider us trained!
Now would be a perfect time to leave.