By Steve Hynd
Ever had the feeling that most anti-terrorism measures are motivated more by PR efforts than actual effectiveness? This story won't make you rethink that.
Afghanistan on Friday banned the use of a fertilizer chemical also used to make bombs, giving farmers and other holders a month to turn in their supplies.
President Hamid Karzai's office issued a decree banning the use, production, storage, purchase or sale of ammonium nitrate. The decision was made after an investigation showed militants had used the chemical in a series of bombings, according to a statement. Violators who fail to turn in supplies will face court action, it said.
Fertilizer explosives were used in attacks that include the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people, and the 1995 attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City with a 2-ton bomb that killed 168.
NATO-led forces already have been confiscating the chemical compound, urging Afghan farmers to use fertilizer containing urea nitrate instead.
The trouble is, urea nitrate is even easier to use for making bombs than the chemical it will replace, needing only a blasting cap, heat or flame to make it go boom instead of a large charge detonator and having roughly the same explosive potential.
Urea nitrate is a fertilizer-based high explosive ,it has been used in improvised explosive devices in Israel, Iraq, and various other terrorism acts elsewhere in the world, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.It has a destructive power similar to better-known ammonium nitrate explosives, with a velocity of detonation between 11,155 ft/s (3,400 m/s) and 15,420 ft/s (4,700 m/s)
Urea nitrate is apparently also 5% more expensive and 20% less effective as a fertilizer per ton due to atmospheric leaching of nitrogen during its chemical breakdown in the soil into forms plants can directly use.
So, that's an epic counter-terrorism fail. Replacing a cheaper and more effective fertilizer with one that's both more expensive and easier to use as a bomb. I wonder if some Afghan minister owns the company that imports urea nitrate.
Anyway, someone should call bullshit. Especially when one of the new objectives from the State Depts' "Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Development Strategy" (PDF), rolled out with great fanfare by H.R. Clinton yesterday, is "Rebuilding Afghanistan's Agricultural Sector".
Update: According to NATO's Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was recently generating some contoversy for his own outspoken opinions, "as little as 5% of the nitrate fertilizer entering Afghanistan goes to legitimate use". I'd love to know where Flynn got that figure, as according to the UN the Afghan government hasn't assembled statistics on nitrate use in years.
Oh, and back in 2008 Pakistan's "The News" reported that cross-border smuggling of urea nitrate had pushed the cost up beyond the means of common Afghan farmers. Someone's planning to get rich here, and it's not the farmers or anyone engaged in legitimate trade.
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