Yes, I agree that the drug/arms trade is beyond the local community’s control. Which smaller ‎‎‘drug-state/conduit’ (Golden Cresent, Columbia, Mexico/US…..etc etc) has managed to ‎control the lucrative trade? ‎

Getting involved in un-raveling drug and arms trade in any part of the world is brave ‎‎‘resistance’ work too, but perhaps should be done by every concerned person on his OWN ‎turf or backyard.
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Afghans can handle it themselves IF they want to. “Afghanistan briefly witnessed one of the ‎world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns when Taliban leader Mullah Omar declared ‎that growing poppies is un-Islamic. As a result of this July 2001 ban, opium poppy cultivation ‎was reduced by 91% from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares. The ban was so ‎effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this area, ‎recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.”
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Certainly, wise and humane, non-colonial micro-crediting is an important and valuable non-‎military strategy and while no one can deny that economic stability is an essential pre-‎requisite for peaceful development, some one has to have the common sense to divert billions ‎of dollars from the military to building factories etc.
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However, economic stability alone cannot bring a culture of peace. In fact, it can feed greed, ‎so that the wealthy ‘tribal-lord’ who’s getting wealthier or the ‘developed’, rich-world ‎politician who is earning more and more, even if by just means, are not any less violent or ‎war-like.
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This is where nurturing non-violence within the local communities need to go hand-in-hand.
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Thanks!‎
Hakim
Our Journey to Smile in Afghanistan ‎

This is a generation of Afghans who have been treated like indentured servants on their own land by both the Taliban and their own governors (the other war lords). This was never in the far past or the near future about ideology in the rural regions where we are sending our troops.
It as always been and still is who gets to tax and heard the local people. The local farmers complain in confidence to our journalist. “We are looted by day and murdered by night” by opportunist on both sides.

Even when our boots on the ground come through, local farmers offer them bags of opium if they have it available, hoping that will be enough to pacify and keep our well heeled soldiers from bringing harm to them and their family while our troops are in the neighborhood. Opium has long been used in the region like cash. People are so poor they have no form of banking or any other form of credit, save their own children, heaven forbid.

They scummed to raising fields of poppies because the Taliban are the only ones who will offer them the micro financing to survive while the crop is growing. Of course the Taliban or the Afghan mafia take the lions share of the profit from this crop. The mafia builds their palaces in Kabul with it and the Taliban buy arms with it.

They buy arms and pay salaries to a sea of unemployed youth who have no prospects out side of the drug trade for success, to ambush the American troops who think they are coming to end their rein. But here is the kicker. Who are they buying their arms from? I ask because someone (not ready to name names yet) is selling the US made guns and munitions to kill our boots on the ground with.

Meanwhile there is no attempt to stop and destroy easily spotted convoys of Taliban running Taliban processed heroin across the desert to all points north of Afghanistan or over the mountains to the ports of Pakistan. Some say the Pakistani secret police and its officials are making great profits by allowing the Taliban to smuggle arms in from their own ports. Is there anyone else in the region willing to trade arms for heroin?

What amount of military aid sent by the US to the region is ending up in the hands of Taliban War Lords and being used to maintain the production of heroin? Is the fight on the other side of the border in the Swat Valley more about who gets to exploit the peasants?

What kind of wink and nod is going on with our CIA, the mob in Afghanistan and the gun runners in Pakistan? And how do you undermine this kind of activity with the help of local populations?
How do you establish a rule of law in a region where the heroin trade is being used by both sides for their own means?

1. Can you dry up the sea of unemployed youth by providing them a work study programs that offer them a future and pays them to go to school and build up their communities? (What a great idea, this might even work in South Central, LA)

2. Why aren’t Americans offering local Afghan farmers abundant forms of micro credit for growing crops that feed people instead of making them slaves of the Taliban War Lords or the Afghan mafia? Give them such a well organized local credit system that they can leave the Afghan mafia in the dust and hire Taliban youth to work in their fields. The best way we can protect our troops on the ground as well as defend the local Afghan peasant, and reduce the Taliban War Lords to a local rag tag phenomenon in the wilderness is by defunding their operations in the heroin trade.

3. Therefore use your technology to follow and take out all of the heroin processing and convoys supplying it where it is still left. Make processing and shipping heroin too dangerous and unprofitable.

4. Inflate the cost of the Taliban’s favorite weapons. Of course this is really difficult if the Pakistani army keeps leaving their own guns behind. Have a food for guns campaign in the Highlands where people do not have good land for agriculture.

5. When ever possible pit the Afghan Mafias and Taliban against each other instead of the local people.

No doubt this will really upset the Pakistani secret police. The Afghan mafias will use everything they have to leverage against the government and our troops on the ground. But making trouble for the Afghan mafia may gain us respect by moderate Taliban. The Mafia will do everything they can to over turn the current Government. But at least the people will see us going after the oppressors who have created drudgery for them.

Finally, the Swiss were once a contentious and difficult people at one time in history. But they found opportunities to become more than nomads in the mountains herding live stock and smuggling. What we need to do is find a way for local villages in the AfPak territories, industries that are unique to their geography that provide local people with economic stability. What technologies will allow them to become the next watch makers, craftsman and chocolate makers of their region. And who knows maybe even the bankers.

http://ourjourneytosmile.com/blog/2009/05/afghanistan-a-dying-opportunity-to-free-the-‎waterfall%e2%80%8e/‎

Excerpts :‎

Afghanistan
A dying opportunity to free the waterfall

In this dream of a kinder world, ordinary people from all races and nations take a dying opportunity to ‎gather at the World Heritage Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan on International Peace Day 21st ‎September 2009,‎
to hope for peace and reject violence.‎
And against all odds and dams, to free the waterfall.
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I and my Afghan friends have a waterfall of humane dreams and wishes in which we are grieving, crying and ‎hurting badly.
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‎“Don’t be silly,” I’ve thought. ‎

We’ll be misunderstood and laughed at as illogical and unrealistic or as anti-this or anti-that. ‎

Not to mention the almost complete self-deception, corruption, greed and the culture of war worldwide, ‎perceived by some as perfected in Afghanistan.
‎
To record, that even in the ‘darkest and driest of places’, there exists waterfalls.‎

Ah–gotcha on the night letters. Now I understand what you were getting at. Thanks for the clarification. I have a couple of thoughts regarding that particular scenario, but I will admit that this is all speculative because responses have to vary from place to place depending on circumstances. I don’t intend to be patronizing in the following–I know you know a lot of this, but I include it for the sake of others reading our conversation.

First, I think a community under that kind of threat has to understand that the Taliban needs their cooperation. All groups like this are parasitical, and they need the community to continue to function (with the modifications demanded by the Taliban, obviously) to support their existence. So in responding to night letters, etc., you’d want to put them in a position where they cannot have what they want if they carry out the threat.

So, for example, one possible response would be to behave like you’d behave if the night letter were a kidnapping: the best response is to publicize it as loudly as possible and demand the letter writer come forward to the community if they are so brave. Then, you find the key leaders of the community necessary for it to continue to function (the local religious leaders, community admins, or even key agriculture workers) and you put them in the school as teachers if permitted by local social mores or they position themselves around the school as human shields. Now the Taliban has to choose. But under no circumstances should the community bow to the demands of the letter, ever. This tactic has an even better chance at working if the locals have access to communications tech of any kind: their resistance can be broadcast or disseminated, which will encourage others, whether it succeeds or fails.

Yes, this is dangerous in the extreme. All resistance to totalitarianism is. However, the alternative posited by McChrystal, if I understand correctly, is to arm the locals. Some of those arms will likely find their way into Taliban hands. Some of those will be used ineffectively by new trainees, and those that are used effectively will have to win a firefight against the Taliban to protect the women and children threatened by the night letters. You seem to have some direct experience with Afghanistan and these kinds of situations, so I’ll ask you: what tends to happen to the women and children in a locality that resisted by armed force if they lose? In both cases, the consequences for failure are the same: the Taliban retaliate viciously. But historically, the people in our hypothetical town have a much better chance at surviving–even if their resistance fails–than they would if they failed at an armed resistance.

And here, I’d just reiterate the advantages that such a strategy has over the violent strategy: the chance for political jiu-jitsu to ensue, the possibility of damaging Taliban morale, etc.

One thing we always try to push in our trainings: this strategy doesn’t need a charismatic leader. For example, the Rosenstrasse 2-4 incident in Berlin vs. Hitler’s regime (which saved the Jewish men in mixed marriages from deportation to death camps) was spontaneous and had no charismatic leader. That’s the point of including “general” resistance as described above alongside “organized” resistance, so that people don’t have to wait for orders from the top down to proceed.

I agree: this is a herculean task. And, as you point out, violence permeates Afghan civil life at the moment. However, a civilian anti-insurgency strategy seems no less herculean than anything remotely close to a “textbook” COIN effort, and it has the advantage of doing something to change the level of violence in Afghan society while allowing the locals a vigorous method to “fight” in a militant way. It will have to be approached the same way Khan approached it: as a method of jihad. That’s what makes the cultural legacy left by Khan so exciting: by helping it to blossom again, we’d be encouraging an alternative vision of jihad that can fight the Taliban’s perverse jihad for dominance both in the field and in Pashtun cultural life.

Tell me more about your experiences in Afghanistan, if possible (I know you may not be able to say much.)

I will certainly admit my ignorance to the gentlemen you linked to who led campaigns of non-violence; whenever I think I know all there is to know about a place, my ignorance reaches up at grabs me! I will definitely read some if the reference cited concerning Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, thanks!

Most of the medical clinics I saw operated at small bases in Eastern Afghanistan treated several gunshots wounds from inter-tribal violence; anecdotal perhaps, because I have no stats on it, but I do not recall anyone being shocked by the fact that people were shooting each other in Afghanistan over land, money and women.

My link led to a page talking about the successful tactics the Taliban have been using to get their messages out, and I intended to highlight the night letters; besides the ability to rapidly engage with the media after an event such as the recent one in Farah, the Taliban excel at leaving “Night Letters” threatening violence against people unless they do exactly what the Taliban want. Such letters were once left under the door of two teachers in a small town in eastern Afghanistan, who subsequently stopped teaching at the school in fear for their lives. Lovely. What would have happened had the teachers stayed in place, or if the small town had employed nonviolent resistance? I think the school would have remained an empty building in either case, although the teachers or leaders in the town, or their children, or an unholy mixture of them all would have been met untimely deaths with bullets or bombs.

I agree that the current strategy, or at least the implementation of it, is failing. I also expect that General McChystal (pending his confirmation in Congress) will dramatically change the strategy, and energize its implementation.

Operationalizing mass civil disobedience at this point would be a herculean task, and there is no leader that I know of who could unite the geographically and ethnically fragmented populace into such a campaign, nor an external organization with the wherewithal to organize one.

If McChrystal is not successful, especially from the outset, then America (and therefore everyone else) will likely abandon Afghanistan, and satisfy itself with UAV and missile attacks on terrorist camps in the region, and say that it is meeting its foreign policy objectives of “isolating Al Qaeda”; for the sake of the Afghan people and their future, I hope it works. . .

I am confused as to how your link supports your assertion that “nonviolence as unlikely to work.” The article seems to hammer home how our superior expertise at the use of violence isn’t pushing us toward victory. I’m not a newbie to strategic counterterrorism communications, however; in fact about a year and a half ago I was part of a group government staff who spent a week in London to discuss counterterrorism communications strategies with our counterparts in the British government. My notes from that trip helped guide some of the recent legislation that focuses on strategic communications. (As an aside, strategic communications are themselves nonviolent methods…) In fact, this material, in my view, supports my criticism of using violent methods to break consent to the Taliban’s movement: we play right into their strengths and increase a population’s hostility to us. (This material also points to what I view as a silly view on the part of the Defense Department, which remains willfully blind to the fact that the strategic realities of the modern communications world make their use of violence a liability in the fight for the “hearts and minds” of the population. “Dammit, those civilian casualties that we knew we’d cause by using airstrikes in support of ground forces are on al-Jazeera again!”)

No, Afghanistan is not a semi-liberal democracy. That is also a non-sequitor. These methods have been used against regimes far more efficient at mass slaughter than the Taliban. While in some cases “shaming” plays a role, it’s not essential to method. The above is not a flower-power leaflet; it explicitly contemplates the brutality of the opponent and accounts for it.

I admit to being a little confused by your argument here, but it might be because I’m making an assumption about your position. Do you subscribe to the same theory of counterinsurgency as posited by the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual?

If so, you might be surprised to find that both the strategy and tactics described above and COIN actually share their fundamental view of “victory.” The COIN manual is very clear: victory is achieved when the local population stops supporting the insurgency and switches to supporting the host-nation government instead. That’s flat out stated in print on paper in the COIN manual. There is no caveat on the number of insurgents still operation, troop strength of the enemy, etc. Victory according to modern COIN doctrine happens when consent to the insurgency ends in localities, period. The insurgency cannot survive without a willing “sea” of locals to swim in. That’s not a theory posited by some nonviolent hippie; it’s been a staple of counterinsurgency/insurgency strategy since there was such a thing (see Mao, for example).

The problem for COIN, however, is that its means fight against the desired end, both in its pure implementation and in the bastardized version which we’re currently calling “counterinsurgency” in Afghanistan. We’re not going to field anything remotely close to the troop numbers required for anything like a “textbook” minimum force level for COIN in Afghanistan; it’s not politically or economically possible. So we’ll try to compensate with heavy doses of technology and force-protection-oriented tactics that will entail heavy civilian casualties. Our methods and the backlash they cause are wonderful at killing people but not sufficiently eroding consent to the insurgency.

I’d hate to quibble with you about Pashtun cultural experience with nonviolence, but…خان عبد الغفار خان

Whether they currently “practice it within their own tribes, never mind when dealing with outsiders” is also irrelevant. Effective military training and sufficient weaponry to hold off hardened groups of Taliban in a violent confrontation also appear to not be present across the country, yet Petraus and McChrystal aren’t writing off the attempt to rectify that situation, right? Strategic nonviolence is a militant method of fighting; it can be taught the same way we’re hoping to teach them to fight with guns–and if it ends up being used against us like the munitions we’re shipping to the Afghan government, that’s a hell of a lot better for our people in uniform.

P.S. I really hope you haven’t been trying to respond to this in the last hour because I’ve been obsessively editing it and adding to it. Sorry LOL