Fruitless Battles in Afghanistan.

Journalists continue to prate about what Obama or Brown must, should, or ought to do about Afghanistan.As for the continuing war in Iraq, it seems to have dropped largely out of the main news as body bags of NATO troops are not returning home, no matter the continuing chaos there.

Diplomacy, especially among close allies discussing the spilling of blood and treasure, is a messy business. But Obama's ultimate success in Afghanistan, or even significant progress in what remains a largely military effort, hinges on engaging international partners to help determine the best suited course of action.

So said Olivier Hampton in 2009. Read the Guardian in 2010 and, apert from hard left ideologues glowing with schadenfreude that the West is failing where the USSR failed also, the stream of journalism not mentioning energy security still prevails.

The diplomacy amongst the NATO states is a tricky business but the messy business is presumably on the ground in Afghanistan as civilians get incinerated and blown to bits by NATO bombs in a war that cannot bring 'ultimate success'.

Hampton is acting as a mere as a messenger only of NATO power here because 'ultimate success' in Afghanistan does not depend on the military effort. It hinges on what cannot be admitted and what cannot be done because it depends on the role of oil and drugs.

Which is why 'ultimate success' is a chimera where the objectives of the NATO mission are at fundamental odds with one another and cannot be reconciled and never will.

The real issue for why there is still this inability to control Afghanistan, irrespective of blabber about increased troop numbers or the war on terror, was rushed in at the end of Brown's speech yesterday-'the wheat for opium programme'-and which promises new miracles.

Brown proclaimed ,

I believe that the key to the reduction in heroin in Helmand by 37 per cent - announced by the UN earlier this week - was Governor Mangal’s ‘food zone’ programme. With the support of the British military and civilian experts, wheat seed was delivered to 32,000 afghan farmers - combining an alternative to poppy with protection from Taleban intimidation in a secured area of Central Helmand.

This will quite simply fail. Poor farmers won't give up opium growing because it's far more profitable than wheat and not only the Taliban but also the warlords supporting Karzai i.e on our side are still heavily involved in drugs.

Prohibition whether in eradicating the crop ( now recognised as a failed strategy ) or busting the dealers and traffickers of which Brown boasted in the speech only decreases supply, raises prices and still does nothing to decrease demand.Hence the continued profits and insurgency.

Richard Holbrooke is now the US envoy to Afghanistan and is so confident of ultimate victory that he cannot define it other than comparing it with pornography because people 'will know when they see it'. If, of course, they ever do or if enough care.

In June 2009 at an international conference Holbrooke had already declared that the programme of poppy eradication was to be replaced with an agricultural development plan. Including the possibility of cultivating grapes for fine white wines according to Fratelli, the Italian Foreign minister .

How converting poppy fields into a large vineyard for the world's wine market in a nation bordering Pakistan and governed by puritanical mullahs is something that remains curious. Some have even toyed with the cultivation of other fruits. As Voice of America reported,

The pricey fruits are pomegranates - and in Afghanistan, there are 48 different kinds - including a seedless one. With rising demand for nutrient-rich pomegranate juice in wealthy nations, U.S. and Afghan officials are trying to connect foreign businesses with local growers.

William Phillimore is a businessman whose company's "Pom Wonderful" branded juice has enjoyed a surge in sales from health-conscious consumers in the United States. He was invited to Kabul's International Pomegranate Fair to try the local fruit.

This year, U.S. and Afghan funded programs helped send more than 2,000 tons of the fruit to supermarkets in Dubai.

That was in December 2008.

The plan of substituting opium with agricultural crops was outlined well before General McChrystal admitted that NATO forces had been charging fruitlessly like a bull at a matador and suffering a slow death from a thousand cuts or Brown started talking of 'Afghanistanisation'.

The real reason why NATO cannot win is that any short term military victory can only stave off the Taliban long enough for the Afghan state and its Western trained troops to be able to get protects worker whilst they get cracking on the construction of the TAPI pipeline in 2010.

Contrary to what many think, Afghanistan is all about oil or rather energy security and gaining a large measure of control over the flow of oil and gas from Turkmenistan and directing it away from China and Russia.In providing an alternative to the IPI pipeline which would avoid the need to include Afghanistan and hence the need for a Western role.

The TAPI pipeline will bring $160 million per year in transit fees according to former BP petro-economist John Foster and is a crucial part of NATO's partnership with neighbouring states to forge mutually beneficial regional ties.

However, the competition to control the government and get hold of the profits from the transit fees has to alienate one faction from another. That has happened even in states like Georgia.In Afghanistan it will just lead to a continuation of opium for cash and weapons.

Not least because proxy conflicts will continue as one faction looks to other regional backers to advance its interests against a fragile central government and has a mass market for heroin in the West to finance insurgencies.

The situation is clear: there can not be any victory unless drugs are legalised in the West.

That issue is never on the agenda because to discuss it would bring up the prospect of irreconcilable objectives that can only be reconciled by doing something that both the UK and USA governments would never consider doing.

It is perverse that governments which prate about helping the people of Afghanistan, when faced with the trade off between the one thing that might reduce the profits from opium and hence the cash global terrorism and corrupt politics, ultimately think their election chances are more important.

The humanitarian objectives will drop away as the layers of justification surrounding what was always war based on an underlying realpolitik peel away like layers of skin from an onion leaving only more horror, decay and futile deaths in the wake of the mission.

Though naval power has been replaced by air power since Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness just over a century ago, during the last Great Game, the following part of his fable on liberal missionary aims remains as true today as it was then when Marlow recounts,

"We came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on.....In the empty immensity of the earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six inch guns: a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech-and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity about the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery about the sight: and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly that there was a camp of natives-he called them enemies-hidden out of sight somewhere."