Tue, May 25, 2010 page5

• FEATURE : Afghan farmers at war’s epicenter play both sides

  HORNETS NEST The lush foliage of a pomegranate orchard, which troops encourage farmers to grow instead of poppies, provide great cover for insurgents and explosives

  • AFP
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  Lush pomegranate orchards provide perfect cover for the Taliban, who have turned what should be the fruit basket of Afghanistan into one of the hottest spots of the long insurgency.

  In the past year, the crude bombs that are the Taliban’s battlefield talisman have been responsible for the deaths of all foreign soldiers patrolling this valley from 13 bases on each side of the Arghandab River, the US military said.

  Arghandab, 20km from Kandahar city, capital of the eponymous province in southern Afghanistan that the insurgents regard as their fiefdom, is at the epicenter of a war well into its ninth year.

  

  A US soldier from 2nd Platoon Bravo Company 5/2 ID Stryker Brigade Combat Team 1-17 Infantry Batallion patrols through pomegranate trees at Shahwali kot, Afghanistan, on May 8.

  PHOTO: AFP

  The district produces half the 100,000 tonnes of pomegranates grown in Afghanistan each year, but is better known for the harvest of improvised explosive devices (IED), that seem as thickly seeded as the fruit trees.

  US troopers on patrol around the villages near Forward Operating Base (FOB) Arghandab point to culverts along canals irrigating the orchards as favorite corners for Taliban ambushes.

  An explosion across the river to the east was “probably an IED,” one said.

  “Someone might have stepped on it. Or it could have been a controlled detonation,” he said. “Either way, we’re finding them.”

  Almost 60 percent of the more than 200 foreign troop deaths in Afghanistan this year were caused by IEDs, the independent icasualties.org Web site says.

  In Arghandab, a village school has become a proxy battleground between the Taliban and pro-government forces, said US Army Sergeant Stephen Decatur, as he described last month’s find of “nine medium-to-small, 20 to 50 pound [9kg to 23kg] jugs of home-made bombs planted around the school yard.”

  “In January, over the course of 10 days, they found hundreds and hundreds of pounds of explosives and IEDS,” he said, adding that some of the bombs contained up to 136kg of explosives.

  “There are a lot of advantages to being in Arghandab, mainly because there is so much agriculture — pomegranate orchards have a lot of cover from observation from the air and close air support,” he said.

  As US and NATO forces prepare the slow strangulation of the insurgents over the coming summer months, Afghanistan’s Western supporters are, finally, trying to address the economic fundamentals fueling the fight.

  More than 70 percent of Afghanistan’s population are tied to the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, experts said. The CIA put unemployment in 2008 at 35 percent and inflation last year at 30.5 percent.

  Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium and the US$2.8 billion a year illicit industry helps drugs gangs pay the Taliban for armed muscle to protect production and distribution routes.

  With the realization that the insurgency is largely economic rather than ideological — and that many Taliban foot soldiers are simply unemployed men who need the fighting fee to feed their families — Western donors have started channeling their efforts to the grass roots of Afghan society.

  In Arghandab, Washington’s international aid arm USAID believes its program to teach Afghan farmers modern techniques for boosting quality and yield has the flow-on benefit of improving security.

  The head of the local council of elders, Haji Mohammad agreed, told reporters the project was creating jobs that gave the fighting-age men of the area an alternative to picking up a gun for US$20 a day.

  Since the introduction of USAID’s Afghanistan Vouchers for Increased Production in Agriculture project, Arghandab’s pomegranate yield has leapt by 75 percent, to between 15kg and 20kg of fruit per tree, he said.
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