As with so many of the Helmand towns where the British are present, the bazaar in Sangin is officially “thriving.”
Indeed, recent visitors have to admit that there are signs of commerce in the long thin strip of shops. But the rest, says David Gill, a photographer who visited Sangin three times last year, is like “a ghost town in Death Valley where you drive through and all you see is a sign flapping in the wind.”
The district is officially the country’s most lethal place for foreign forces, responsible for more than 10 percent of daily casualties of the entire NATO mission, as a result of its particularly poisonous mix of drugs and tribal warfare. With lots of water and fertile land, Sangin is perfect for growing the poppies currently being harvested for their opium sap.
Sangin is also well suited as a trafficking hub because of its proximity to the national ring road, putting cities such as Herat and Kandahar in easy reach.
The drugs industry has every reason to fight against attempts to assert government control, making natural allies of the insurgents in the district.
The Afghan government is in no position to assert itself against such powerful narco-traffickers who hopelessly compromise what little government capacity does exist. A Kabul-based diplomat last year said the district had only 50 Afghan policemen and about 350 soldiers.
The abusive and corrupt police force, whose members think nothing of beating and stealing from local people, has been a constant problem, with the British seen as the enforcement mechanism for deeply corrupt Afghan authorities.
Drugs and weak government are further complicated by a complex tribal situation. The fighting between armed factions during Afghanistan’s civil war in the 1990s helped to fragment and weaken traditional tribal authority.
“The picture that emerges is one where a minority tribe controls the government and the majority, which is not in government, control the heroin. Everyone else gets angry and joins the Taliban,” says one Kabul diplomat with knowledge of Helmand.
The people of Sangin blame inter-tribal fighting and the drug trade for the dire security situation, but also hold the foreign soldiers responsible for the chaos. Two farmers currently staying in Lashkar Gah, who did not want to be named, said the behavior of the British is by the far the biggest problem.
“The Taliban do not even have a bakery that they can give bread to the people, but still most people support the Taliban — that’s because people are sick of night raids and being treated badly by the foreigners,” one said.
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