Spineless Johnson and Biden have Afghan blood on their hands

FROM the autumn of 2007 to the end of 2008 I was Deputy Commanding General of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, the first to hold that office. Before that I spent two years as the senior coalition officer in US Central Command. I had, therefore, more than three years of close and direct contact with Afghanistan. During those years I travelled to almost every province in Afghanistan and to the neighbouring states of Pakistan, Khyrgyzstan and Khazakstan. I have a very clear idea of exactly what is going on right now in Afghanistan, and as we see the chaotic scenes from Kabul airport, I fear greatly for anyone who worked with the Afghan government or with Nato, for women and for any non-Pashtun ethnic minorities. Biden’s and Johnson’s failures in Afghanistan have put all those lives on the line and, downstream, will destabilise the region and threaten the West.

[…]  Speaking of corruption leads one inevitably to the elephant in the room – the nexus between insurgency, organised criminality and corruption. The three feed off each other, ensuring that there is vested interest in keeping instability going. In Afghanistan this is focused on poppy production and the sums involved are astronomical. Opium finances the Taliban and, through bribery, undermines the official state. Even northern warlords in non-Pashtun provinces would take their cut, smuggling opium north and west and supplying arms in return. Opium has been the war materiel of the Taliban. In previous wars, we have had no qualms about attacking enemy war materiel – from the blockade of Napoleonic France to the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factory. But in counter-insurgency, military force cannot be used against civilians and criminals are civilians, unless there is a cast-iron case for linking them with insurgency. Until and unless the legal framework is altered to allow the destruction of insurgent or terrorist finance, we will face this problem just as we did with diamonds in Sierra Leone, cocaine in South America and tobacco and livestock smuggling in Northern Ireland. The traffickers and refiners must be attacked and the big growers’ crops eradicated. For the small farmer, a proper system of alternative livelihoods which allows food crops to be got to markets and processing plants must take the place of a drug market that comes to them.

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