Marines Bypass Taliban Opium Fields in Afghanistan

GARMSER, Afghanistan — The Marines of Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon sleep beside a grove of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant’s gooey resin smile and wave.

Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world’s largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.

The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees — money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.

Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won’t be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans’ only source of income.

Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.

”It’s kind of weird. We’re coming over here to fight the Taliban. We see this. We know it’s bad. But at the same time we know it’s the only way locals can make money,” said 1st Lt. Adam Lynch, 27, of Barnstable, Mass.

The Marines’ battalion commander, Lt. Col. Anthony Henderson, said in an interview Tuesday that the poppy crop ”will come and go” and that his troops can’t focus on it when Taliban fighters around Garmser are ”terrorizing the people.”

”I think by focusing on the Taliban, the poppies will go away,” said Henderson, a 41-year-old from Washington, D.C. He said once the militant fighters are forced out, the Afghan government can move in and offer alternatives.

An expert on Afghanistan’s drug trade, Barnett Rubin, complained that the Marines are being put in such a situation by a ”one-dimensional” military policy that fails to integrate political and economic considerations into long-range planning.

”All we hear is, not enough troops, send more troops,” said Rubin, a professor at New York University. ”Then you send in troops with no capacity for assistance, no capacity for development, no capacity for aid, no capacity for governance.”

Most of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan operate in the east, where the poppy problem is not as great. But the 2,400-strong 24th Marines, have taken the field in this southern growing region during harvest season.

In the poppy fields 100 feet from the 2nd Platoon’s headquarters, three Afghan brothers scraped opium resin over the weekend. The youngest, 23-year-old Sardar, said his family would earn little money from the harvest.

”We receive money from the shopkeepers, then they will sell it,” said Sardar, who was afraid to give his last name. ”We don’t have enough money to buy flour for our families. The smugglers make the money,” added Sardar, who worked alongside his 11-year-old son just 20 yards from a Marine guard post, its guns pointed across the field.

Afghanistan supplies some 93 percent of the world’s opium used to make heroin, and the Taliban militants earn up to $100 million from the drug trade, the United Nations estimates. The export value of this harvest was $4 billion — more than a third of the country’s combined gross domestic product.

Though they aren’t eradicating poppies, the Marines presence could still have a positive effect. Henderson said the drug supply lines have been disrupted at a crucial point in the harvest. And Marine commanders are debating staying in Garmser longer than originally planned.

Second Lt. Mark Greenlief, 24, a Monmouth, Ill., native who commands the 2nd Platoon, said he originally wanted to make a helicopter landing zone in Sardar’s field. ”But as you can see that would ruin their poppy field, and we didn’t want to ruin their livelihood.”

Sardar ”basically said, ‘This is my livelihood, I have to do what I can to protect that,”’ said Greenlief. ”I told him we’re not here to eradicate.”

The Taliban told Garmser residents that the Marines were moving in to eradicate, hoping to encourage the villagers to rise up against the Americans, said 2nd Lt. Brandon Barrett, 25, of Marion, Ind., commander of the 1st Platoon.

In the next field over from Sardar’s, Khan Mohammad, an Afghan born in Helmand province who lives in Pakistan and came to work the fields, said he makes only $2 a day. He said the work is dangerous now that Taliban militants are shooting at the U.S. positions.

”We’re stuck in the middle,” he said. ”If we go over there those guys will fire at us. If we come here, we’re in danger, too, but we have to work,” said the 54-year-old Mohammad, who supports a family of 10.

An even older laborer, his back bent by years of work, came over and told the small gathering of Afghans, Marines and journalists that the laborers had to get back to work ”or the boss will get mad at us.”

Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover, whose platoon is sleeping beside a poppy crop planted in the interior courtyard of a mud-walled compound, said the Marines’ mission is to get rid of the ”bad guys,” and ”the locals aren’t the bad guys.”

”Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio,” said Stover, 28, of Marion, Ohio. ”When we got here they were asking us if it’s OK to harvest poppy and we said, ‘Yeah, just don’t use an AK-47.”’

High Speed Battle Zone Strike Vehicle

The U.S. military is looking for light, high-speed four-wheelers that can zip troops around battlezones. And just about every major player in the defense industry — including Blackwater — is lining up to supply the vehicles. Military vehicles have generally gotten heavier in recent years, to protect troops from roadside bombs and other threats. “The latest Humvee model, the M1151, weighs in at more than 5 tons, twice the weight of the original, unarmored M998,” GovExec.com notes. “The military’s new ‘Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected’ vehicle program is awarding contracts to build wheeled transports as heavy as 40 tons.”Dean Lockwood, a Forecast International analyst, tells Defense News, “With the way they have up-armored the Humvees, they are too heavy to do many of the missions they were originally intended to do.” Moreover, he said, up-armored Humvees strain Army helicopters.

So “the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command may order thousands of rugged, high-tech, high-speed vehicles that can climb mountains, rescue fallen comrades and lead quick-strike as­sault teams in combat,” Defense News‘ Kris Osborn reports. “Service officials are eyeing pro­totypes and early versions of sev­eral existing vehicles, including ones that can hit 100 mph on roads. [Army] engineers are also exploring individual technologies that may give vehicles the suspen­sion to handle rigorous terrain at high speed.” (The picture, above, is of a Chenoweth strike vehicle, used by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War)

Iraq War: April had Highest U.S. Death Toll Since Last August

BAGHDAD – Fighting in Baghdad’s Shi’ite slum of Sadr City made April the deadliest month for Iraqi civilians since last August and for U.S. troops since last September, figures obtained on Wednesday showed.

Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed 968 civilian deaths in April, the most in eight months. On Wednesday the U.S. military reported the deaths of five more of its soldiers in Baghdad, raising its monthly toll to 49.

Most of the U.S. and Iraqi deaths were in the capital, where U.S. and government forces have been fighting Shi’ite militants loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the tightly-packed Sadr City slum and other Shi’ite areas.

U.S. forces said they killed another 16 fighters in gunfights, tank battles and strikes from drone aircraft, following heavy fighting on Tuesday in which they killed 34.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown against Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia a month ago in the southern city of Basra, said on Wednesday the government would disarm the fighters by force if they refuse to lay down their weapons.

Two hospitals in Sadr City said they alone had received the bodies of 421 Iraqis killed and treated more than 2,400 wounded since late March. Many of the dead and wounded have been civilians, caught in the crossfire in the crowded slum.

Some of the heaviest fighting has taken place in the past three days, with militiamen taking advantage of blinding dust storms that ground U.S. attack helicopters to launch large-scale ambushes of U.S. and Iraqi positions.

U.S. forces have responded with tank fire and surface-to-surface missiles, destroying buildings.

Thirty-four bodies and 112 wounded victims were brought to the two Sadr City hospitals in the last 24 hours, hospital officials said.

U.S. forces reported three soldiers killed in Baghdad overnight and another two killed on Wednesday afternoon.

April’s U.S. death toll is the highest since September 2007, when 65 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq, according to official figures tracked by icasualties.org, an independent website.

The tolls for both soldiers and civilians are still far lower than a year ago, however. In April 2007, 104 U.S. service members and 1,506 Iraqi civilians were killed.

U.S. commanders say the sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and Shi’ites that characterized earlier years remains sharply lower. But the uprising by Shi’ite militia over the past month has reversed a long trend of declining violence.

MALIKI SETS CONDITIONS

Maliki aimed some of his toughest language yet at the Shi’ite fighters on Wednesday, singling out the Mehdi Army by name and grouping it with Sunni Arab groups like al Qaeda as organizations that must be dissolved.

He set down four conditions — that militias disarm, stop interfering in state affairs, stop running their own courts and hand over wanted fugitives — or face a military assault.

“To refuse these conditions means the continuation of the government’s efforts to disarm them by force,” Maliki said at a news conference inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone government and diplomatic compound.

“There is no alternative to these conditions. The alternative is the continuation of force and clashes until we reach the end, to get rid of the weapons and the gangs who are carrying weapons.”

Maliki, himself a Shi’ite, launched a crackdown against Mehdi Army fighters last month in the southern city of Basra.

After initial setbacks, the Basra offensive appears to have been a success in driving fighters from the streets there. But the militiamen remain in control of much of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

Severe Treatment for Marine Drug Abuse

U.S. Marines caught using illegal drugs often face harsh punishment from the military, according to counselors, veterans’ advocates and military defense attorneys. Marines have been kicked out of the service with loss of benefits, or even thrown in jail despite their claim that they turned to drugs to cope with their battlefield experiences in Iraq.While the Marine Corps does provide substance abuse and counseling, experts say rehabilitation often loses out to punishment and discipline.
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