Why are we in Afghanistan

Occasionally you hear or read a journalistic piece that genuinely throws light upon a situation and promotes a real understanding of what's going on in the world. While watching the spiders the other night, I also played some of the news programmes that I download via the I player. One that I had downloaded just before the elections in Afghanistan gave me that understanding of what the hell is really going on in that benighted country and why Britain, America and others are really there.

The initial reason why Britain, America and others allies went there was to get the Bin Liner (Osama Bin Laden). That changed to supposedly getting rid of the Taliban. The trouble is that the reasons given by our governments seem to change and we the people are left wondering what is really happening.

Then Gordon Brown gave the standard policy statement saying that we are there to stop terrorism on the streets of London, that weekend. Well I can now see that this is mostly bull. While that was the reason why this war started, it is now much more about stopping the production of Heroin. As Afghanistan is the source of ninety percent of the Heroin and most of it is grown in Helmand Province, this revelation enabled me to finally understand what this war is really about.

I can see the logic in what has happened, as if in freeing Afghanistan from the repressive leaders the west also stopped the source of the drugs trade, that will genuinely stop much of the misery that drugs cause. While that may be a desirable outcome, it is not the reason why we went there.

As most of the British lives lost have been in Helmand, the way that this is is normally reported is that because Helmand is a stronghold of the Taliban but what is not reported or rarely so, is the criminal gangs that are in control of the drugs trade. For them the chaos of the war helps their vile trade.

However, rather than just make this posting a tirade about the war in Afghanistan, with this new understanding I have been able to go back and look at the reporting of the war and so much of what has happened and is happening is explained.

While the terrorist threat is real, most of the threat is actually coming from Pakistan not Afghanistan. Even yesterday with the end of a court case that saw the conviction of three more of the airlines bomb plot, the trail flows to and from Pakistan. Equally while the Taliban in Afghanistan did allow Al-Qaeda to operate in the country, they were never trusted by the Taliban. In reality the current insurgency is much more about getting foreign troops (us) out of their country.

No matter how bad a countries government is, the peoples will never fully accept foreign troops invading. Add to this the corruption of the government that the west is supporting and the Afghanistan population just see the devastation the invaders cause and their politicians enriching themselves. All fuelled by drugs money.

Also is the numbers of innocent Afghan civilians killed by allied air strikes or other allied actions. Given the tribal nature of Afghan society, these civilian deaths only serve to harden the Afghan people against the foreign invaders. Then if you add into this equation the manipulation of the intelligence by the Drugs barons and it looks as though many of the incidences of civilian deaths could be as a result of the Western forces persuading the Drugs traders rather than the dealing with the terrorist threat and the Taliban.

Now I am fully aware that the Taliban are a vile, dictatorial bunch of rouges, and there could be a justification for removing them, but that was never the stated reason for the west going to war with Afghanistan Nor is this covert war on Drugs that the west are fighting. If the public became aware that this now appears to be the main reason why we are there, would people in America, Britain et al support the war and the deployment of troops? Personally I doubt it.

When the Taliban were the government in Afghanistan they actually stopped much of the drugs trade in the country. So rather than stop the growing of poppies and Heroin production the war has created the circumstances where the Heroin trade can flourish.

We support a highly corrupt government that seems to care very little for the people. We build schools but fail to provide the security so that children, especially girls, can get the education needed. Far to much of the money that is supposed to be rebuilding the infrastructure gets siphoned off. Civilian deaths enrage the local populations and feeds into the mistrust of why the Allied forces are there.

If our governments were just honest about our objectives there then perhaps we can defeat the terrorist threat, and get the people of Afghanistan to support the end to the drugs trade too. But at the very least we need to stop supporting yet another corrupt government and be open about the war on Drugs. Unless this happens we will end up failing on all fronts as the war there at present is just acting as a recruiting Sargent for terrorists and the chaos is enabling the drugs trade to flourish.