The Silk Road; Can We Afford Not to be in Afghanistan
Text by Darryl Spencer | Fall 2010
If it doesn’t sound utterly foreign - it should. For it is a country that has never been conquered. Not by Alexander nor by the centuries of invasions from Pakistan, Iran, Russia or even by the British during their 3½-century occupation of India. The Russians thought that by stepping into Afghanistan in 1979, six years after the overthrow of the king in a pro-western upheaval, they livepage.apple.comcould pretend to be restoring the stability of a country on their southern border. Secretly, however, they hoped to achieve an ancient dream: a southern route to the Persian Gulf and the seven seas. This decade-long campaign in Afghanistan became Russia’s Vietnam, which ended with their withdrawal and humiliation, leaving Afghanistan a country in name only: a collection of feuding tribes and religious factions as stubborn and resistant to outside influence as the Scots-Irish hillbillies of my native Appalachia.
Afghanistan. Its not at all like that other country we’re always hearing about. Iraq sits at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the very “cradle of civilization,” who by the 1950s had an established infrastructure and highly Westernized elite. Iraq had not welcomed visitors after 1958 when an anti-Western republic replaced the monarchy that the British had installed in 1932. But by 1979 the United States installed the anti-Iranian military leader Saddam Hussein as president, signaling an untenable Volte-face with Iraq’s neighbors. But when Iraq invaded the American friendly Kuwait, the gloves were off as we began looking for new allies and another “special relationship” in perhaps one of the most strategic regions of the world.
But we were talking about Afghanistan: who has somehow remained Terra Incognita in spite of having foreigners on their borders for a millennia. The Silk Road stretched from Europe to Turkey and straight through Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan into India, the Himalayas, Tibet and Nirvana where a generation of young people from America, Europe, and Australia went for adventure and enlightenment.
Afghanistan’s role in 20th century drug production is so well known that Wikipedia notes that since the reduction of the Taliban in 2001, opium production in Afghanistan has steadily increased. Here we find the sort of conundrum that makes this part of the world so inscrutable: the Taliban, an arch-Islamist organization, actually made serious inroads into opium production before the US-led invasion in late 2001. True, they forbade education and outside employment of females, and tried to make Afghans more Moslem than the Wahhabi Saudis. Yet along with our attempt to reduce the power of the Taliban since we entered the area searching for Osama bin Laden, the country has again become the greatest illicit opium producer in the world. During the period of Afghanistan’s “special relationship” with the West, there has been more opium poppy cultivation in each growing season than in any one year during Taliban rule. And by 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. The enormous income from opium poppies is divided about equally among opium farmers, district officials, insurgents, warlords, drug traffickers and, of course, The Americas.
