One of the constant obstacles to making significant progress in Afghanistan is figuring out how to handle the opium trade. The knee jerk reaction is to defoliate, burn and arrest our way to a solution but given the abysmal track record of that strategy thus far in the War on Drugs there’s no reason to think that we’ll have better luck with those tactics in Afghanistan.
In fact, there are a number of complicating factors that not only make the prospect of getting farmers to stop growing poppies really, really unlikely but our ‘go to’ tactics will most likely make the security situation in Afghanistan worse and undermine what little authority the Karzai government has.
LTC John Glaze recently wrote a monograph for the Strategic Studies Institute titled “Opium and Afghanistan: Reassessing U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy” which highlights these challenges and makes some recommendations. He cites the following facts:
- opium production in 2006 was 6,100 metric tons, up from 4,100 metric tons in 2005
- an Afghan farmer can make 17 times more profit growing opium poppy than wheat
- Poppy is also drought resistant, easy to transport and store, and, unlike many crops, requires no refrigeration and does not spoil
- less than 4 percent of arable land in Afghanistan was used for opium poppy cultivation in 2006, revenue from the harvest brought in over $3 billion—more than 35 percent of the country’s total GNP.
- Almost 10% of Afghanistan’s population is involved in poppy cultivation or processing
- In many cases, farmers are simply unable to support their families growing traditional crops; and because most rural farmers are uneducated and illiterate, they have few economically viable alternatives to growing opium poppy
Once, while conducting security interviews for Afghans looking to work on our base, a man told me:
“Without this job I can either buy food so my family can eat or firewood to keep them warm but not both.”
When faced with choices like that, how many of us would refuse to do something illegal like growing poppies? Perhaps more importantly, if driven to this level of desperation, what would we think about people (who don’t have to face the same level of deprevation) who swoop in, destroy our prospect of providing food and shelter for our families and just as quickly disappear, leaving nothing more than a destroyed crop?
Glaze says (and I agree with him) that it’s no coincidence that the Taliban is proving to be more difficult to defeat and, in fact, seems to be gaining support in areas throughout the country at the same time traditional anti-narcotics methods are being used. Essentially, we’re pushing the farmers of poppies into the arms of the Taliban. If no insurgency can exist without the sympathy of the local population, our drug policy looks a lot like a Taliban subsidization plan.
So why would we follow a policy which is clearly counterproductive?
- Our entire national policy for the past 30 years regarding drugs has been one which views drug production and use and an overwhelmingly criminal problem. The underlying narrative is that coercion is the best (and likely only) way to impact the narcotics trade (the Vlahos article I wrote about yesterday has utility here - our ‘rule sets’ preclude anything else other than what we’re currently doing)
- Perhaps even more telling was a quote Glaze found by an Assistant Secretary of State for Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs: “[T]he simple truth is that eradication is much easier…” than other methods of reducing narcotics production/distribution.
We (the law enforcement community, politicians, the public) have so bought into the idea that progress in narcotics can be defined by arrests, drugs seized, acres of crop defoliated that we have no other metrics to gauge our success or failure. My opinion is that those criteria are about as effective as body counts were during Vietnam.
Glaze makes a number of recommendations which sound reasonable yet I’m not sure how politically feasible they are (remove the ROE restrictions on European troops? More humanitarian funding?).
Another idea I’ve seen kicked around once or twice is the interesting (yet politically suicidal) plan of getting the Western nations to come together and buy up the entire opium crop from Afghan farmers. By cornering the opium market (Afghanistan produces something like 90% of all the world’s opium) you have the potential to do a few things:
- Cut off funding for the Taliban (which gets about 70% of its revenue from poppy cultivation/production/trafficking)
- Drive a wedge between farmers and the Taliban
- Reduce supply on the illicit narcotics market around the world. This would have several follow on benefits like raising costs (and therefore making heroin/opium use more costly and treatment more attractive) and fostering competition between narcotics networks
Of course, such a plan couldn’t work over the long term but when combined with opportunities for farmers to grow other crops (plus the infrastructure and transportation resources to get their crops to market and many of the other things Glaze recommends) you could get some real results.
