Nicolas Henin, a reporter’s blog

Nicolas Sarkozy should announce in the coming days in Bucharest an increase by 1,000 troops of the French military force in Afghanistan.

The idea is bad. The timing is bad.

The war in Afghanistan can no longer be won considering the basis on which it started. Every single aspect of it was communautarized. And the hunt for Al-Qaeda quickly became a hunt for Pashtuns. Targetting a community, as we have seen in Iraq, can only damage the relation between the army and the population. To some extend, the Taliban movement has legitimacy from the people. Rather than making the confusion between Talibans and Al-Qaeda, one should rather adress the reasons for this popular support.

Among those who doubt of the efficiency of the military operations, many US observers and officials (read my previous post on Afghanistan) as well as the Afghan president Hamid Karzai himslef (CBS’ 60 Minutes produced a great story on the subject).

Increasing the military presence in the country is not only dangerous for the troops. It is also costly, at a time the French governement requires a budget diet. And it is a show of support to a Bush administration that even a large majority of the American public no longer supports. It weakens also the European position, while countries like Germany are facing pressures to increase their troop level.

Pledging that ‘the solution is not only military’ is a fake excuse.

Not only cannot the solution be military. But it must be merely Afghan as well. And as free as possible of foreign influence.

The American counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan costs the US tax payers one billion dollars a year. But, according to the former ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke (read his column in the Washington Post here - you need to register), it may be «the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy.»

Ineffective ? Not only. This program is even counter-productive.

«It actually strengthens the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan», Holbrooke says.
According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the area under opium cultivation increased to 193,000 hectares in 2007 from 165,000 in 2006. The harvest also grew, to 8,200 tons from 6,100. The evidence, for the former diplomat, of the failure of this program.

«The program destroys crops in insecure areas, especially in the south, where the Taliban is strongest. This policy pushes farmers with no other source of livelihood into the arms of the Taliban without reducing the total amount of opium being produced. Meanwhile, there is far too little effort made against the drug lords and high-ranking government officials who are at the heart of the huge drug trade in Afghanistan — probably the largest single-country drug production since 19th-century China (‘liberated’ Afghanistan has virtually been turned to a narco-state, producing 90% of the world’s opium, I precise) — whose dollar value equals about 50 percent of the country’s official gross domestic product. There is a direct correlation between opium production and security », he says.

Despite this, very few allies of the US in Afghanistan dare to give them any piece of advice and France is likely about to announce an increase of its military deployment.