#6
Moscow Times
March 28, 2002
Narco-Feudalism Still Rules
By Pavel Felgenhauer

General Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan, came to Moscow last week to pay a courtesy visit. Franks commands the war via satellite from his central command staff complex in Tampa, Florida, but he told reporters in Moscow that he and his wife were on the move for a week, going to Africa, visiting troops in Afghanistan and finally coming to Russia.

Of course, Moscow is not directly involved in military operations in Afghanistan. Still, Moscow is the main sponsor of the Tajik faction of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance that is the backbone of the interim Afghan government's rag-tag army. Without basic Russian support, the allied mission would be that much harder to accomplish.

Last fall, as the United States was pounding the Taliban to bits from the air, Iran also strongly supported the effort. But after the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters melted into the Afghan wilderness, the short-lived alliance ended and the Iranians are today, according to U.S. officials, trying to flush the Westerners down the same drain as the Taliban.

Moscow is not yet turning its coat, and Franks got a warm reception. Contentious issues, like the planned U.S. military personnel arrival in Georgia or the coming invasion of Iraq, were not discussed. Iraq is a political matter, not fit for a general to elaborate on, while Washington has not made its final decision. Georgia, Franks told me, is the responsibility of the U.S. European command and nothing to do with him.

In Moscow, the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan are still considered to be potentially deadly opponents. Officials mostly wish Franks good luck in rooting them out, though many generals that fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s truly believe that the United States is getting itself into the same quagmire they found themselves in. Franks came to Moscow after handing out medals to U.S. servicemen who had just finished a major operation against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters remaining in southeastern Afghanistan, along the border with Pakistan. Franks insists that Operation Anaconda was a resounding success: It was announced that up to 800 fighters were slain, and the Shah-i-Kot region was captured and cleared of opposing forces.

However, less than 50 bodies were actually found. U.S. officers allege that Afghan allied soldiers told the Taliban and al-Qaida of the operation well beforehand. Afghan soldiers, led by General Zia Lodin, should have done the main job in Operation Anaconda, with U.S. forces in support. But the Afghans swiftly retreated after meeting resistance, and U.S. soldiers were rushed to the front, sustaining serious casualties.

The weather in the Afghan mountains was bad during the 11 days of Operation Anaconda. Transport helicopters often could not land or evacuate troops on time. Strategically important hilltops were captured with losses, only to be soon abandoned. And in the end, apparently, the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters slipped away in large numbers.

Such stories tend to elicit a smile from Russian veterans of the 1980s Afghan. They had exactly the same experiences. (The Afghan allies always slip away if their is any serious trouble, helicopters are never on time, enemy body counts are always falsified and so on.) After almost 10 years of combat in Afghanistan, the total number of enemy fighters killed, as reported by commanders over the years, exceeded the entire official population of the country -- a fact often joked about in Russian military and intelligence communities.

Franks himself did a stint in Vietnam in 1967, where the body count became virtually the only measure of military success. The United States won the count, losing some 60,000 men, to Vietnam's estimated 2 million lives lost. But the war was lost.

The Afghan economy and society is based on two pillars: tribal warlordism and the heroin trade. These two pillars are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The Taliban and al-Qaida tried without much success to dismantle this narco-feudalist system, so when the United States attacked the heroin traders of the Northern Alliance and the Pashtun traditional tribal chiefs, all joined the fight for freedom.

But now it's the U.S.-led coalition that is the main potential threat to narco-warlordism. Franks insists: "We will find and destroy the pockets of resistance." However, while Americans poke around and disrupt drug-trafficking, the Afghan two-pillar system will produce and support anti-Western rogues -- many more than Franks' men can ever hope to kill.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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