Southern Afghanistan NATO’s problem now

KABUL, Afghanistan – Southern Afghanistan, homeland of the Taliban and hub of the global heroin trade, is spinning out of control.

Islamic militants are launching suicide attacks, corrupt authorities are undermining the central government and a disgruntled population is hooked on growing opium.

On Monday, fixing Afghanistan’s biggest problem area falls to NATO, the Western military alliance. It promises to be the toughest combat mission in NATO’s 57-year history, and a stern test for a powerful force with surprisingly little experience in fighting.

“A lot of different forces are coalescing to drive the coalition out,” said Joanna Nathan, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. “It’s not just Taliban. It’s a complex alliance of people who don’t want to see the rule of law in Afghanistan.”

The future of Afghanistan as a Western-style democracy could ride on the success or failure of the 8,000 mostly British, Dutch and Canadian forces that have moved into the southern region. Five years after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban regime that hosted al-Qaida, the country is in danger of again becoming an international terrorist haven.

And with the Arab-Israeli conflict raging and Iraq mired in daily violence, failure in Afghanistan would leave the West in disarray on three important battlegrounds in the war on terror.

The credibility of the 26-nation Western military alliance, established in 1949 to deter the Soviet bloc, is also at stake. While it has engaged in peace missions and aerial bombing campaigns such as in Kosovo in 1999, NATO has limited experience in ground combat.

Francesc Vendrell, the European Union’s special representative for Afghanistan, said Wednesday that because of the concerns over Afghanistan’s future, NATO must not fail. “We are not going to tolerate any kind of haven for terrorists in Afghanistan,” he said.

During the past year, Taliban-led militants regained effective control over large tracts of their southern heartland. They have adopted destructive terrorist tactics seen in Iraq and have launched major attacks, this month even managing to briefly control two southern towns – unprecedented during the previous four years.

Another pressing concern is the drug trade. Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 90 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material of heroin. Much of it is grown by poppy farmers in the south.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in Western anti-narcotics assistance, diplomats expect opium output to increase this year, and they say provincial government officials and police are still involved in trafficking.

U.N. special representative Tom Koenigs said the insurgency is fueled by international terrorist networks. Other officials say militants include a hard core of Taliban, students from religious schools in neighboring Pakistan, Afghan villagers who are paid to fight, and drug militias.

NATO takes over command of the south from the U.S.-led anti-terror coalition that was deployed in 2001, primarily to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida associates.

The coalition has made strides in quelling militancy in the east, where al-Qaida leaders are possibly hiding along the border with Pakistan. But it has failed to prevent an alarming spike in Taliban activity in the south.

That appears to be largely because it lacked troops on the ground.

For much of 2005, one 3,600-strong U.S. brigade was responsible for security in southern and western Afghanistan, said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick.

Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold where nearly a quarter of Afghanistan’s opium is grown, had just 120 U.S. troops last year. Since this spring, about 4,000 British troops have deployed in Helmand as part of the shift to NATO control, sparking intense fighting.

“We have moved into areas that previously had no real coalition forces and as a result, we’ve rattled cages of Taliban and drug lords,” spokesman Capt. Drew Gibson said by phone from Helmand.

Military officials say the Taliban have taken heavy losses. According to the U.S. military, more than 600 militants have died in the south in an operation launched June 10 with 10,000 Afghan government and foreign forces.

But the fighting also has claimed at least a dozen British and Canadian soldiers, sparking criticism that NATO is being sucked into an unwinnable battle in a country where the Mujahedeen, or holy warriors, defeated the might of the Soviet army in the 1980s.