With apologies to Gretchen Peters, the seeds of terror do not lie in the poppy but in the asymmetric war between the awesome military might of a grouping of foreign powers and a coterie of primitive, reactionary and backward, but indigenous political forces within Afghanistan.

It is easy enough to demonise the Taliban and their partners in crime, Al Qaeda, but not to understand the persistence of these forces in the political, social and moral life of the Afghans. President Obama and his friends, including India, are up against the truth that dawned on Mary McCarthy, as recounted in her remarkable little book Vietnam, that “Charlie (that is the Viet Cong, VC or Victor Charlie) can say Yankee go home; but Yankee cannot say Charlie go home because Charlie is already home”.

That, in essence, is the dilemma faced by the NATO allies in Afghanistan. To avenge the attack by Al Qaeda on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001 (9/11), the Americans launched an all-out war on Afghanistan targeted at Al Qaeda and the Taliban but directed essentially at capturing or killing one man, Osama bin Laden. No one knows whether Osama is dead or alive—indeed, whether, in fact, he died eight years ago, either as a result of American bombing or of kidney failure, but if the NATO allies are growing weary of the chase and the Americans, after close to a decade, are drawing down their military occupation of Iraq to facilitate the release of resources to persist with their war in Afghanistan, it only validates the point that if the Americans have their Drones and Daisy Cutters, and can say “Oops! Sorry” over killing hundreds, indeed, thousands of innocent Afghans in “collateral damage”, their opponents have an equally potent weapon: the poppy.

... contd.