Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery.

News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel. 

News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war. 

And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in trhe end, according to captured Taleban fighters, is, we hear, that Taleban footsoldiers are paid $400 to $500 a month. A substantial part of what these footsoldiers do is protect the drugs and arms trade. 

Now ask yourself this question. What would those poor peasants live on if they didn't get paid drug money from the Taleban cartels? They would have to scratch a poor living from the blasted soil. What could earn them an equivalent income to drugs and arms? Nothing. Not even the "saffron" that US intelligence has put forward in a half baked attempt at implanting a substitute crop.

Increasingly, what the US and British troops are facing in Afghanistan is a war against a drig cartel that hides behind a a fundamentalsit Islamic ideology, just as in the end, Sendero Luminoso was a drug cartel that hid behind Maoism. 

The real cause of the problem is not an ideological insurgency now, but it is a fight against a mafia, an expanding and powerful international drug cartel.

Look at Mexico's war against the drug cartels. Britain and the US and other western countries are disparaging about the Mexican governments possibility for success. According to them the Mexican government is being unrealistic and too heavy handed in its fight against the narcos in Mexico. But is that not exactly what NATO faces Afghanistan, with the additional, but increasingly flimsy ideological trappings.

The reason why a fight against a cartel is very hard to win is because, naturally,  the Livelihood of millions of Afghans is at stake. Remove the drug trade and you impoverish not only the Pashtuns, but everyone who benefits from the trade indirectly. Money will cease to circulate through what is already the shambles of an economy. The reason why you can't win a war against the cartels is that if you win, you consign people to abject poverty. 

This is the reason why all Obama's drones and all Obama's men will never put Afghanistan's state together again.

What has been very interesting has been the criticism of the Karzai government for corruption. Corruption itself is a bad word, but in this instance, corruption has become an embarrassing euphemism for narco-politics.

Yes, it is true that the Taleban cartel have diversified to some extent. They are also running guns from north to south in addition to the drugs they run from south to north. They are involved in other criminal activities as well. But primarily they are a drug cartel. 

Logically, if the Taleban really were out and out extremists with a desire to do damage and provoke an even bigger  "clash of civillisations" they could have done so easily. They could have damaged London and many other British, European and American cities.   But they haven't.

A territorial army man, 6 foot 6, a man of great moral fibre, got back a few months ago from Afghan where he was training the Afghan police. (There but for the Grace of God). He is going out with one of my neices. In fact, he was very reluctant to talk. But what I read into what he was saying is that drug taking in the British army and other armies, and especially in the US army, is an increasingly serious problem in Afghan at the moment. 

For a lot of bored soldiers, there is nothing much to do there except take drugs. The British, American and European way of life doesn't stigmatise drug taking really, and so, apparently, some of the squaddies are at it.

But there is another problem that will make the war agaisnt the Taleban almost unwinnable and that is the problem faced by any force that fights against a mafia. Omerta, yes, but in addition to omerta, the propensity to corruption in the occupying forces themselves. 

This is the way it is in Mexico. The closer you are to the fight against the Cartels, the more offers you get that you really can't refuse.

If we take the view that the conflict in Afghanistan is becoming, increasingly, a conflict against the Pashtun, Taleban drug cartels posing as Muslim fundementalists or using Muslim fundamentalism, then we need to reframe the way we see western countries should view Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a dirt poor and broken country. The only way to get rid of the Taleban cartel is not by attacking them with guns, tanks, drones and planes: People will always risk death to feed their families. 

Only when Afghanistan has an infrastructure, when it has developed enough to be able to generate alternative sources of income will the problem begin to fade. We don't face the real possibility of terrorist attacks from the Taleban, we simply face the prospect of a glut in the heroin market.