Is surging really the best way to undo Afghanistan's artificial food chain?
(Psst: If you hate reading long articles, the short answer is 'no' )

This post references the article: ‘Maladaptive traits in invasive species: in Australia, cane toads are more vulnerable to predatory ants than are native frogs’ in Functional Ecology, written by Georgia Ward-Fear, Gregory P. Brown, Matthew J. Greenlees and Richard Shine, which is not in the public domain. So you can't click on a strategically highlighted word and make it appear. But I have access to it. So there. Page numbers are provided instead.





~ 2. The problem ~
In the 1930s the Australian state of Queensland indeed had a big problem. Its valuable sugar cane was under assault from two destructive species of beetle, the French's Cane Beetle and the Greyback Cane Beetle. Their larvae would feed on the roots and stunt or kill the crop.



In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its increasingly unpopular satellite government. The United States and its allies reacted with outrage. US President Carter branded it "the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War."



~ 3. The solution to the problem ~
The chosen response to the pestering beetles was the cane toad (bufo marinus), native to Central and South America. Hawaii had imported cane toads for the purpose of pest control and had claimed success. So in 1935 a box of around 100 of the amphibians was delivered from Hawaii to Australia with the aim of repeating this success.



In 1979 President Carter authorised funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan and the subsequent Reagan administration took the ball and ran with it. It sent billions of dollars to the neighbouring Pakistani dictatorship of General Zia al-Huq so that Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its equivalent of the CIA, would then fund Islamist warriors, known as the mujahadeen. It also collaborated with Saudi Arabia to help import foreign fighters into the country. British politicians looking back shouldn't feel too smug either; MI6 were heavily involved too.


Reagan, alongside his partner in Afghanistan's war for freedom: the staggeringly undemocratic Zia al-Haq, who took power in a coup and had his predecessor hung.

~ 4. Promoting the solution to the problem ~
These toads would eat anything and would no doubt eliminate the beetles and save the sugar crop, earning them a place in Australian hearts alongside its other freakish animals, whose very existence makes the debate between evolution and (un)intelligent design that extra bit more bizarre.



Speaking of unintelligent design, President Reagan had great faith in these “freedom fighters”. And what better seal of approval could there be in the 1980s than that of the great man himself?

Idi Amin's, perhaps.

~ 5. Perfecting the solution ~
The toad population was kept in captivity and allowed to swell to 3000 in number. This expanded population was then released into the Australian wild.



The Afghan cause attracted foreign Muslims willing to participate in jihad, and across the Islamic world prisoners were released by governments hopeful they would travel to Afghanistan and meet a sticky end. The CIA also arrived on the scene, to hand these mujahadeen potent Stinger missiles to take down Soviet gunships. In addition it coordinted training in kidnapping and car bombings. “[We created a whole cadre of trained and motivated people who turned against us. It's a classic Frankenstein's monster situation”, an American official later admitted.

~ 6. The problem with the solution ~
To say this plan backfired is an understatement. Soon the imported cane toads would become one of Australia’s greatest menaces and would force upon their hosts an unwelcome demonstration of amphibious blowback.


Among the prisoners released was the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, inside for his involvement in the murder of Anwar as-Sadat. Zawahiri would become al-Qaeda’s key ideologue and team up with Osama bin-Laden, who also made his way to Afghanistan to help run a parallel jihadi programme to the CIA operation. These men were outside US control, but that hardly mattered at the time. The CIA's partners in the ISI had its Islamist biasses and with the knowledge of both the Reagan and Zia administrations, funnelled its money to the most extreme fighters, such as Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a zealot who threw acid in the eyes of unveiled women and who was on close terms with many of Afghanistan's biggest extremists.


Two friendly young men with a photo of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar

~ 7. The point where the solution becomes a bigger problem than the original problem ~
The toads were ravenous. For virtually every organism apart from the beetles it was hired to dispose of. They ate everything from bird eggs to insects. They also ate the harmless native frogs. Over the past 70 years, more than 100 indigenous species have disappeared or have been pushed to the edge of extinction.


Cane toad killing a native frog. Nature has no Geneva Conventions.


Kabul during the Afghan civil war. Much like the child in King Solomon's ruling, the people that this city belonged to wanted it back in one piece.



After the USSR pulled out various warring factions ripped Afghanistan apart over their varying visions of Afghanistan’s future. Hikmatyar, whose US aid was immediately terminated upon fulfiling his function, began pulverising Kabul with rockets while a bewildering flurry of power struggles, coalitions and defections took place under invariably bloody conditions. The mujahideen no longer had a common purpose and Afghanistan was now flooded with trained killers. In 1996 they were swept aside by an organised new force, the Taliban, a predominantly Pushtun force of Sunni (more specifically Deobandi) Islamists, who managed to seize most of Afghanistan with a degree of support from those desperate for stability.

~ 8. There's no escaping the new problem ~
Australia qualifies as a ‘mega-diverse’ nation, ranked 12th in the world for the range of its flora and fauna. Yet along with the ever present threat of bush fires, the presence of insatiable predators put this diversity in jeopardy. Australia’s isolation only made things more dangerous.

Within the confines of Afghanistan the Taliban implemented a remarkably strict interpretation of Islam. Other religions were banned, women became second class citizens, the Hazara suffered several massacres and Shiites were persecuted.



~ 9. Further problems we can thank the solution for ~
The toads spread across the country and established themselves. While they continued their ecologically-threatening consumption against those species smaller than itself, the poison inside the cane toads made them a deadly threat to any would-be predators, who would just have to learn to leave them alone.


It's safe to say they're both going to die

Opposition was stamped out with extreme brutality, from the public execution of captured Soviet era President Najibullah at the start of their reign to the perfidious al-Qaeda assisted assasination of opposition military commander Ahmed Shah Masood on 9 September 2001. Dissent, which now included such revolutionary acts as educated girls, was driven underground and people lived
in fear.

Taliban, with Soviet era President Najibullah. Comparatively enlightened when it came to the rights of women

~ 10. No problem? ~
The cane toad was largely confined to north-eastern Australia until the 1980s, a problem for Queenslanders but maybe not the rest of the country. But the cane toad soon spread to inhabit a fifth of the country– and began wiping out new species.


Cane toad distribution throughout Australia (invasiveanimals.com)

The Clinton administration largely let the Taliban be, while under Bush the Taliban made substantial gains from a complicated relationship dominated by a Unocal bid to build a strategically routed pipeline project. Even as human rights groups decried the Taliban’s misogynistic policies and the global public watched aghast at the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, the Bush administration was financially rewarding their new policy of erradication of the opium poppy. And in mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan.


~ 11. Yes. Problem ~
The increased reach of the expanding cane toad population made it impossible to ignore. It was everybody’s problem now as it pushed from its base in Queensland in a southerly direction. And to the west.



~ 12. The solution to the problems of the solution ~
The cane toad had pushed its luck too far and now had to go. Engineering a virus was considered, but it looks like the latest solution, proposed in the British journal Functional Ecology, is to train meat ants to eat the toads. The meat ant is immune to the cane toads' poison, and with the right encouragement might end their reign of terror.



In its campaign to unseat the Taliban, the Bush administration joined forces with the Northern Alliance, who had been fighting the Taliban from the north of Afghanistan, hopefuly to install a just and peaceful regime in their place (fingers crossed, boys...)

~ 13. Potential pitfalls and problems with the solution to the problems with the previous solution ~
The meat ants have a reputation for aggression, making them ideal killers. The hope is that they will eradicate the cane toads without harming the long-suffering frogs.



However, the Northern Alliance themselves had a diverse but consistent track record of extreme brutality, most of it directed at each other. Members in the alliance included Masood’s Jamiat forces, responsible for abduction and murder of Hazara civilians; the legendarily savage Pushtun Gul Agha Sherzai; the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, famous for tying opponents to tank tracks; Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, who coordinated a massacre in the Kabul neighbourhood of Afshar; and Abdul Karim Khalili’s Wahdat faction, found by HRW to have wilfully killed civilians by firing indisciminately into Kabul in its battle against Sayyaf’s Ittihad faction. The Afghan women’s rights group RAWA declared they were fundamentalists, little better than the Taliban. By now it should be of little surprise that many of these individuals found their way into the next government, with Khalili a star pupil, becoming one of the two vice-Presidents.



~ 14. The solution to the problems with the new solution: ignore the problem (it worked so well the last time...) ~
“Might this be a mismatch between the invader and its newly invaded range, whereby the morphology, locomotor ability and/or behaviour of cane toads renders them vulnerable to a predator that poses little danger to native anurans?” p.1


RAWA condemned the aid given to the Northern Alliance. But the protests of this group that had battled for women’s rights for over twenty years was drowned out by the invading powers’ sudden interest in the rights of Afghan women and renewed insistence that they knew what was best for its population.

~ 15. The solution takes effect. No more problems? ~
“Could we exploit the vulnerability of these invasive toads to predatory ants, as a means to reduce toad populations in Australia?” p.9



The combination of massive US military power and the Northern Alliance ensured that the Taliban were quickly routed and presumed gone for good. A government under friend of the CIA and self-proclaimed puppet, Hamid Karzai, was established and Afghanistan was stabilised as much as a passive media required before Iraq became the world’s new worthy cause.


It's safe to say only one thing's gong to die here

~ 16. More wishful thinking about solutions to the problems that originated from the solution to the problem ~
“Fundamentally, predatory meat ants posed little danger to most of the native frogs we tested because the frogs are nocturnally active whereas the ants are primarily diurnal. Outside their activity period, frogs typically remain well-hidden. Thus, during times of ant activity (by day), frogs were safely ensconced in vegetation or shelters where ants (as open-habitat specialists) were unlikely to penetrate. In cases where ants and frogs came into contact, frogs generally moved away (often into the water, a safe refuge against ants) and thus, were unlikely to allow ants to approach close enough to attack. If seized, the native frogs were able to escape by leaping away” pp.7-8


Gambling always seems less profligate when you use someone else's money.

In many areas of Afghanistan sharia law was not eliminated. The war dragged on and the Taliban, along with other, more extreme Islamists, made a resurgence to escalate a war that has again sent civilians ducking for cover. The Obama administration expressed its dissatisfaction with Karzai’s stewardship, implying they would tinker with the government structure so as to bypass a man increasingly seen as a relic from the Bush era. Karzai, for his part, recently oversaw legislation that effectively permitted spousal rape, as a fundamentalist administration cemented itself to once again betray the aspirations of Afghans. Afghanistan is enveloped in a health crisis and the foreign intervention is massively unpopular, especially due to NATO airstrikes and their predictable civilian casualties.



~ 17. Predictable problems with the solution to the previous problems that had been created by the solution to problems previous to those ~
And when the ants get out of control, what then? A surge of course!

In late March Obama announced plans for a surge in Afghanistan to quell the high levels of violence in a country that had been declared liberated by early 2002, having capitulated to the maddeningly peristent and prominent view that such a strategy was a success in what was actually a thoroughly ethnically cleansed Iraq in 2007. He also initiated the funding and armament of local militias, the “Afghan Protection Force”, drawing from the unemployed in Wardak province. Middle East expert Juan Cole’s response: “You wonder how long it will be before the Karzai government is engaged in firefights with them”

~ 18. Reconsidering how we choose our solutions ~

From The Guardian:

"Professor Ian Lowe, an environmental scientist at Griffith University in Queensland, and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the search for a magical biological bullet was absurd.'The delusion that you can have effective biological control still seems very strong in Australia. People talk about managing environmental systems as if it's no more complex than managing a jam factory. We should have learned from the cane toad that the cure is often worse than the disease,' he said.”

Afghanistan has been conquered and reconquered again and again, yet has resisted all attempts to be taught what is best for it, from the USSR's satellite PDPA government to the mujahadeen to the Taliban to the Northern Alliance. And now a surge. People will still insist that things are better now that the Taliban are out of power, but picking between these regimes is as much use as picking your favourite flavour of poison. The people of Afghanistan don't want poison at all.
NATO’s European contingent has baulked at the idea of sending more forces to Afghanistan to stabilise a situation that is getting wildly out of control, and Obama’s switch of focus from Iraq to Afghanistan has prompted speculation that this will be his very own disastrous foreign military endeavour. Any solution that fails to address grievances and power imbalances in Afghanistan, and that involves dumping a new set of saviours on its people without consulting them will not only fail, but create new forms of misery. Mother nature herself teaches us this.



THE END

References for the cane toad project (and good luck with that) came from:

Georgia Ward-Fear, Gregory P. Brown, Matthew J. Greenlees, Richard Shine, 'Maladaptive traits in invasive species: in Australia, cane toads are more vulnerable to predatory ants than are native frogs', Functional Ecology, March 2009, published online on 31 March 2009




  ¶ posted by the leech at 4/04/2009