Think tank: US drug war in Afghanistan creates more Taliban

A US anti-narcotics program in Afghanistan has raised tensions, undermined security and endangered Australian and Dutch soldiers' lives, a respected international foreign policy think tank has warned. The Senlis Council claims the US Government brushed aside Australian and Dutch concerns to ram through an ill-conceived poppy eradication program in Oruzgan province, which has undermined military reconstruction efforts and created a pool of new Taliban sympathizers. The council -- whose members include respected medical, legal and foreign policy experts -- advocates international support for a poppy-for-medicine licensing scheme in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is the world's biggest opium producer and the source of most of the world's heroin. In an exclusive interview with The Australian, Senlis president Norine Macdonald QC said a forced eradication program two months ago by US security contractors DynCorp had destabilized the security situation in Oruzgan. Special Air Service Sergeant Mathew Locke, 33, was shot and killed by Taliban insurgents last Thursday, making him the second Australian combat fatality in Afghanistan in less than three weeks amid escalating violence in the war-battered south-central province. Sergeant Locke was leading a patrol, part of a major coalition operation to clear Taliban extremists from an area around the provincial capital, Tarin Kowt. Macdonald said the Dutch, who have administrative control over the province, had opposed the poppy eradication plan on the grounds it would undermine security. Despite the objections of the Dutch Development Minister who visited Oruzgan to reassure the local government of his opposition to the plan, US contractors and members of the Afghan police went ahead with the operation, which ran into immediate trouble, she said. Their doomed effort is documented in a July 9 feature story published in the New Yorker magazine written by Jon Lee Anderson, a journalist who accompanied the DynCorp team and was caught up in a deadly gun battle with the insurgents. The article strongly suggests that a suicide attack that targeted an Australian army patrol near Tarin Kowt was the result of tensions stirred up by the counter-narcotics program and its impact on impoverished local farmers. Asked if DynCorp's operations in Oruzgan had increased the security risk for Australian soldiers, Macdonald replied: "It absolutely has. It's a failed counter-narcotics policy and it undermines the military presence." US plans for aerial spraying in the province would only further aggravate local tensions, she warned. The Australian sought without success a response from Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, the Australian Defense Force and DynCorp.