As you may have seen by now, today's episode of Inside Afghanistan features the Afghan soldiers' unsettling habit of smoking massive amounts of hash and/or opium the second there's a lull in the fighting. We asked Ben whether or not he agreed that this generally seems like a terrible idea.Vice: There's a long history of soldiers taking things like speed to improve their fighting, but smoking weed in combat seems really counterintuitive, right?
You'd think so, but as I say to one of the main soldiers in the series with Jack, "Normally, that would make you more cautious, wouldn't it?" And he said "Yeah, it would make me more cautious, but it makes these guys even more brave." They just smoke for a few minutes then they get up and run toward the bullets. There was one day--it was the first time we were attacked while I was with the company. One of the Brits dove into a ditch and started firing, and the Afghan next to him stood up eating an apple.Everywhere you go that's fertile you see hash and opium poppies all around you. I can't remember any time when I was in fertile ground that I couldn't see poppies. The British Army has openly said, "We are not going to eradicate any opium poppies. You are not going to see British soldiers with flamethrowers in fields. We'll try to persuade them to farm other things instead." That's their policy, and the result of that is for the last three years there has been a record opium harvest every single year.There's a lone mint farmer outside a town called Lashkagar, which lots of journalists get taken to. The officials are saying they're convincing more and more people to farm mint, safron, wheat, pomegranate--all these schemes they think might one day replace opium. But as I said, it's hard to do when there's been a bumper harvest every single year.As for policing the ANA soldiers, they've just given up by this point. One story a soldier told me was about how when they first started training them, they tried to get the ANA soldiers to stop smoking weed. So the Afghan soldiers sat around a table, piled all the weed in the middle, then lit the pile and inhaled the smoke because they thought that didn't count as smoking. The British soldier who told me it comes in ready to shout and scream at them for breaking the rules, and one of the guys runs out the back door and jumps into his jeep to escape, but he put it in reverse and reversed his jeep into a river.There are lots of things they went out there planning to do that have fallen by the wayside. Another one was lad magazines, like FHM, stuff like that. The army said don't show these to the Afghan solidiers; they're Muslims, it'll offend them, we have to be sensitive, etc. Well, the Brits bribe the Afghan soldiers to do things for them like polish their boots or perform chores by giving them the latest copy of FHM. The rules change once you've been out there a few weeks.