August 2009 

The other day three Australian soldiers were seriously wounded in Afghanistan, from a road side bomb. Last week another soldier was killed. This week a fresh deployment of Australian soldiers commenced their fighting in that country. Also, my holiday photos were printed, including one I took of that marvelous bronze statue of an Afghan on his camel as I got off ?The Ghan? at the Alice Springs Railway Station. The photo records our debt to the men of Afghanistan who opened up the inland of Australia with their camel trains that brought sustenance and goods to the outback stations.

How come our early camel drivers are now our enemies? Why are Australians fighting in Afghanistan? This week journalist Walter Pincus in Washington (?Afghan war will exceed cost of Iraq, say experts?, SMH, 10/08/09) reported: ?As the US expands its involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that it is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that is likely to eclipse that of the Iraq war.?

?This assessment follows comments on Saturday from the new head of the British Army, General David Richards, who believes stabilising Afghanistan may take as long as 40 years.  Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 the US has spent $US223 billion on war-related funding for that country? Aid spending, excluding the cost of combat operations, grew from $US982 million in 2003 to $US9.3 billion last year.?

?Military experts, including some advisers to General McChrystal, insist that additional resources are necessary. ''We will need a large combat presence for many years to come, and we will probably need a large financial commitment longer than that.  The task that the US has taken on in Afghanistan is in many ways more difficult than the one encountered in Iraq, where the US has spent $US684 billion in war-related funding. The US President, Barack Obama, has a timeline for US involvement in Iraq but has not said when he would like to see troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.?

Does any Australian on Central Station or in Dubbo feel safer because our troops are fighting in Afghanistan?

We started fighting in Afghanistan because we wanted to help stop the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and others involved in the war on terrorists and because we were asked to go. Australia always goes when asked for troops: to fight the Boers, the Turks, the Germans, the Japanese, the Malays, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Afghans and a dozen other nationalities.

No nation has succeeded in invading Afghanistan for the last two thousand years. Even the Russians had a disastrous experience. The desert and mountain tribesmen are financed by their opium crops sold on the streets of Western countries.

Afghanistan's opium production has doubled in the past two years, reaching a record high this year despite billions of dollars of aid and the presence of international troops.  The southern province of Helmand has become the world's biggest source of illicit drugs, surpassing the output of entire countries. This is despite a multi-million-dollar effort led by Britain and the United States to cut the opium trade, which finances the growing Taliban insurgency that has killed thousands of people, including scores of Western soldiers.

The amount of Afghan land used for growing opium is now larger than the combined total used to grow coca - the raw ingredient for cocaine - in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined.  It is estimated the total opium harvest for the year is 8,200 tonnes, up from 6,100 tonnes last year - a 34 per cent spike. The area planted with opium poppies has risen to 193,000 hectares from 165,000 last year, representing a 17 per cent rise. Afghanistan accounts for 93 per cent of the global opiates market. Opium cultivation is closely linked to the Taliban insurgency with the hardline Islamic movement, which has ties with Al Qaeda, using the drug economy to fund arms, logistics and pay.

You might think the international military forces operating in Afghanistan would help fight against opium ? but this they have so far refused to do. The Afghan Government's poppy eradication program should be undertaken more vigorously with those farmers choosing not to grow opium being given rewards, such as new schools and hospitals.

According to the experts at Erowid, ?Poppies produce a wide variety of useful medicines including opium, heroin, morphine, codeine. Each of these medicinal derivatives comes from the unripe seed capsule or pod of p. somniferum.

Morphine, thought to be the most effective painkiller known to medicine, acts largely on the sensory nerve cells of the cerebrum, blocking messages of pain from other parts of the body. It is also a stimulant, inducing euphoria and evaporating anxieties, tensions, fears, and inhibitions -- the effect sought by addicts. But it also decreases respiration, dangerously in higher doses, and is highly addictive.

Codeine, an ingredient in many cough syrups is another alkaloid isolated from p. somniferum. It has both cough suppressant and analgesic properties and is often recommended to relieve minor pain.

Papaverine, a muscle relaxant that blocks the nerve impulses responsible for muscular contractions, is used to treat intestinal stomach spasms as well as the respiratory spasms triggered by asthma attacks.?

Australian troops could have as one of their tasks the eradication of growing opium poppies. But ironically, the other nation that grows opium poppies is Australia. Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market. Tasmania supplies about 50 percent of the world's raw material for morphine and related opiates. About 500 farmers grow the crop on 49,420 acres of land. I have driven past miles and miles of opium poppies growing in Tasmania.

Farmers have been cultivating increasing amounts of opium poppies for medicinal use. In Afghanistan, Western troops are fighting a ferocious and lethal war to eradicate Taliban-backed terrorism. Yet eight years on, poppy cultivation is higher than ever.

We are sending even more troops to this poor, impenetrable country where invaders have never won a war. Common sense and a little history point to two things. Accept the fact that our campaign to rid Afghanistan of opium hasn?t worked. In fact, President Obama?s ?man in Afghanistan? Richard Holbrooke described it as the ?most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years?.

Today they grow and harvest their poppies as they have done since long before British colonists smuggled opium into China and established Hong Kong out of the carnage of the opium wars.

Every summer in Tasmania, field officers and a patrol of 12 police from the drugs squad patrol the farms to prevent theft. In Tasmania, it is illegal to enter a poppy field and possession of poppy material attracts a $3000 fine, or up to two years in jail. Tasmania grows poppies under a 1961 United Nations convention designed to provide the world with sufficient supplies of opiate-based painkillers. The International Narcotics Control Board chose the island state because it straddles the 41st parallel where growing conditions are ideal, and with its small population is considered a low security risk.

The Tasmanian poppy industry has been developed over 30 years and has grown into a $200 million-a-year export business.

It seems obvious that now we should allow pharmaceutical companies to buy all the opium crop produced in Afghanistan. So what if the more you buy, the more they?ll grow. The price will drop and they?ll diversify into loquats and cucumbers.

Second: get out of Afghanistan. We can try to negotiate with feuding warlords and the Taliban. But don?t let any more of our troops die trying to turn that mountainous region into a western fairytale of democracy.

Our Tasmanian farmers may be unhappy to surrender their best cash crop, but it?s a small price to pay if it brings the troops home. It would be cheaper to pay the Tasmania farmers $200 million to grow lavender than to pay for our troops to be in Afghanistan. But why do you think the Tasmania Green Senators, Bob Brown and Christine Milne have been so silent on this?

Washington is sending another 3200 marines to Afghanistan in addition to its 28,000 troops already serving there. Australia's defence force now has more than 1000 personnel serving in southern Afghanistan, including a 300-strong special forces group, a reconstruction task force and RAAF Chinook helicopters and air traffic controllers.

Can there now be any doubt about whether the money and resources devoted to Afghanistan could be spent more usefully somewhere else? Those trillions of dollars could have gone into reconstruction, alternative sources of cash crops, reform of the opium trade, and the creation of genuine civil society and democracy projects.

It is time that we had a fresh look at the answers the government has given to the question, ?Why are we in Afghanistan??

Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.

Sources: Afghan war will exceed cost of Iraq, say experts , SMH, 10/08/09, Opium Poppy Medicinal Uses, Erowid.