Afghanistan (30 page)

The Options

A country such as Afghanistan simply cannot afford to destroy half of its rural GDP
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in the middle of an existential conflict, even if it is opium-based. But the Afghanistan Compact committed Kabul to “a sustained and significant reaction in the production and trafficking of narcotics with a view to complete elimination.” Thus Afghanistan and the coalition find themselves at an ideological and practical impasse.

Narcotics cultivation is not politically popular among Afghans. Anyone who has talked with Afghans—including those with no political affiliation or geopolitical understanding—can attest to how much they want Afghanistan to be a country like any other. They are willing to embrace international standards, including a willingness to counter narcotics cultivation and trafficking rather than proclaim Afghan exceptionalism to international norms. Even when foreigners suggest that the Afghans should not be made to pay for the vices of wealthy foreigners, and that narcotics prohibition has probably done more harm than good in the developed world, it is ultimately the questionable status of narcotics under Sharia that renders Afghans unwilling to defend it. Afghans are not willing to challenge the world for a crop of doubtful Islamic legitimacy. Polling in 2009 showed that only twelve percent of Afghans polled in opium-dependent Helmand province and three percent nationwide believe opium cultivation is justified.
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Eradication targeted on poppy crops in the field has been the most controversial of the drug-war tactics. It has been used effectively by Afghan law enforcement, backed up by coalition non-military specialists. The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified the poppy-free status of Balkh province, achieved in 2006, as a success for eradication.
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The provincial governor, Ustad Mohammed Atta, a veteran anti-Taliban commander and a former warlord, disagreed with this characterization. He claimed that the lack of overall economic development has undercut the positive effects of eradication and that the end of opium cultivation has actually led to a decline in income for many people in that province.
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While eradication had been previously advocated by the US as an effective tactic, in June 2009 it was announced that interdicting narcotics supplies and cultivating alternative crops would be stressed instead.
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US policy shifted to de-emphasize eradication because, unless it is linked to an effective rural reconstruction program, it had the potential to create additional recruits for the insurgents. The US had considered cultivation eradication as just one element of an integrated counter-narcotics strategy, as has been set out in Afghanistan’s current National Drug Control Strategy (NDCS). The change reflected an emerging consensus
that the impact of eradication efforts was felt by farmers and rural laborers rather than those further up the value-added chain. GEN Petraeus said “We are reducing eradication, which often gets the little guy, while increasing the pressure against the big guys.”
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Ambassador Richard Holbrooke added that he believed eradication “did not reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar.”

Most US-funded eradication in Afghanistan has been carried out manually, in large part because US proposals in 2004–08 to use herbicides applied manually supplemented by aerial spraying in remote areas were rejected by the Afghan government. Eradication efforts have been a vehicle for corruption (which is one of the reasons the US had pushed for aerial spraying). Reports of the poppy fields of poor farmers being burned out while their better-connected neighbors’ fields down the road remained intact have been commonplace.
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Widespread corruption weakened the credibility of enforcement efforts.
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Winning the Conflict

Stable, non-corrupt governance in rural Afghanistan appears to be the most effective counter to narcotics. However, it remains out of reach in much of the country. This is just one facet of the solution. Effective counter-narcotic policy needs to provide a substitute for practically everything the traffickers provide and their clients currently need. This includes marketing infrastructure, credit against future crops, and help with growing crops.
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Simple crop substitution by donating seed and fertilizer is not sufficient.

Alternative livelihoods, if security, infrastructure, and markets permit their implementation, can effectively replace opium cultivation in a number of areas. This is because the narcotics buyers set the amount paid artificially low, so that the Afghan farmer receives just enough to ensure that he receives more cash and is able to employ more people (allowing him to establish patronage) than he would with any other crop, thus providing a marginal incentive but not so large that these farmers are wedded to poppy-farming into perpetuity; the traffickers rely on the cycle of debt created by credit payments for future crops to have that effect. The fact that the rising food prices of 2008 encouraged some Afghan farmers to
replace poppies with wheat shows that crop replacement can be done. However, transitioning from a poppy-based economy in those parts of rural Afghanistan where it has dominated agriculture is likely to take longer than a few years and will require institutions and infrastructure that are currently lacking outside of those provided by the traffickers. As of 2008, the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics was working with the Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Rehabilitation on microfinance schemes that could be applied in opium-producing provinces and could start the first step of replacing the traffickers’ use of credit to control the local economy. Kabul and its coalition supporters should use existing institutions such as the
hawala
system to provide alternatives to narcotics financing, help jumpstart social and economic development at the grassroots level and would give those who run the system a legal stake in success in Afghanistan, making them less vulnerable to the temptations of drug money and cooperation with terrorists and insurgents.

Subsidizing legal crops, if done through a mechanism where there is some assurance that the farmer will be able to earn a decent living and that the funding will not vanish through corruption, has some potential to reduce the appeal of opium. “If commodity prices stay up for wheat, it can replace poppy,” said GEN David Petraeus in 2009.
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But by 2008–10, the corruption of the Afghan government made approaches such as agricultural price supports for legitimate farmers almost impossible to implement.

Large-scale conversion of Afghanistan’s opium crop to licit uses has been suggested.
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This course of action has been opposed by other countries such as Turkey and India that are currently involved in licit opium for morphine production. Poppy has potential use as a biofuel. Licensing opium production, if serious legal, political, economic, efficiency, security, and religious obstacles could be overcome, has the potential to weaken the threat posed by the current illicit traffic and possibly alleviate the pressure to find another replacement crop.
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Zalmay Afzali said in 2008 of Counter Narcotics policy, “You cannot do this by force. The Afghan farmer listens. You tell him it [narcotics] brings a chaotic situation to his family. Force is not the answer.”
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Targeting the Afghan farmer as the most vulnerable part of a value-added chain that runs from there to the addicts of Europe and America runs the
risk of benefiting the insurgents. Military action against laboratories and refineries or even the suppliers of precursor chemicals and the transporters of narcotics themselves all represent options far more likely to yield better results than crop eradication that targets the poppy fields. Degrading the ability to pay and transfer money would also be a powerful blow to the traffickers. It is also less likely to drive the local Afghans into the arms of the insurgents, especially if there is an ability to re-insert Afghan governance into former opium-dependent areas. Whatever tactics are employed, they are likely to prove ineffective unless accompanied by a parallel move to address Afghanistan’s overarching culture of corruption, especially in Kabul, targeting and removing officials that are heavily involved in narcotics trafficking. This corruption is widely believed to reach all the way up to the highest level officials in Kabul, including the Ministries of Interior and Counter Narcotics, as well as in provincial and district governments and in the security forces.
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Corruption spreads by enabling Afghanistan’s narcotics networks to be effectively supported by the state at all levels across the country. Wealthy (and politically connected) Afghans and outsiders with links to narcotics are not targeted, but should be. An extradition treaty with the US remains a moot issue with the Afghan parliament, as many of its members would be reluctant to see such people dragged off to the US in handcuffs, even if extradition would be a powerful weapon against narcotics traffickers, known terrorists, and others who are involved in this widespread ring of crime and corruption.

Rural Afghanistan requires an effective narrative showing that cultivation is
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reconcilable with Islam nor with the Afghan tradition of self-definition based on the weighty pillars of the concepts of honor and respect. This narrative must also be backed up by demonstrating that they will not suffer, either at the hands of the insurgents or from lack of income or credit, if they turn away from opium, and then the coalition and Kabul must be prepared to protect them from those two things; otherwise the betrayal that these people will feel will be very real and unforgivable. In the longer term, prediction of success in the conflict against narcotics can best be indicated not by a decrease in the acreage under poppies, for that can change with the next growing season, but with achieving security and economic viability in rural Afghanistan.
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The problem with creating poppy-free provinces is the same problem facing the creation of insurgent-free areas. It can be done, but the real challenge is keeping it that way—just as, in the past, coalition ground forces have managed to force Afghan insurgents from an area, only to find that there is no capability to backfill this new power vacuum with effective government and security forces. When the coalition ground forces are needed elsewhere, the insurgents just move back in. When a province or district is said to be poppy-free, it needs to fill this vacuum with an economically viable alternative, not just crops but credit, markets, and infrastructure. Otherwise, like the insurgents, the poppies will find their way back in and—more dangerous still—they may be welcomed anew by the local Afghans as having provided something that the government and the foreigners did not. Narcotics pose their own unique challenges, but they do still feed into the insurgency, and both can be countered by the eventual creation of a secure, legitimate uncorrupt government and a viable economy. Just as the insurgency is fed by narcotics-generated funds, narcotics require the insurgency to continue to prevent Counter Narcotics efforts being effective. Eliminate one and you are halfway to eliminating the other. Fail at one, and the impact is twofold.

In narcotics, as is the case elsewhere, in Afghanistan the root issue tends to be about the concept of legitimacy. To defeat narcotics requires that opium cultivation, trafficking, and the corruption it entails be de-legitimatized in both Afghan and Islamic terms. To remove the conditions that have allowed the concentration of opium cultivation in the south requires an increased military presence that will have to be followed up by effective governance, including a demonstrated ability to provide alternative livelihoods and protect those that take these up from further violence or retribution from traffickers and their insurgent allies. In parts of southern Afghanistan, the insurgents manage to provide the local inhabitants with what most Afghans want and the Kabul government and its foreign allies cannot assure: a chance to work their fields and make a living in peace. They would rather the crop not be opium, but when there is no alternative that provides this security, many see it as a necessity. There needs to be a concrete strategy and policy in place that offers incentives for cooperation and penalties for resistance; only in this way can there be hope of effectively curtailing both problems.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“
It is not enough to do one’s best. What is required is that one does what is necessary for success.”

—Winston Churchill

“The general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fit for them.”

—Edmund Burke

S
hattered states have taken decades to recover and reestablish themselves after less punishing histories. When the Taliban fell in 2001, Afghanistan was suffering from damage—physical, societal, economic—caused by the conflicts of 1978–2001. Since then, recovery has been slow and uneven. The effect of the gains made in the generations before 1978 have faded. Internal strife, reflecting both long-standing ethnolinguistic and cultural divisions and the pervasiveness of corruption, combined with poor government and limited economic development, now threaten the future of Afghanistan that was wrested from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2001.

A Land Defined by Conflicts

Afghanistan has seen impressive achievements in the years since the fall of the Taliban. The majority of Afghans remain proud of their
achievement in creating the new constitution and the instruments of government and civil society, but this pride alone is not sufficient to secure an Afghan future. Other sources of national pride, however small, are seized upon by Afghans of all groups, such as the first-ever winning of an Afghan Olympic medal by Ruhollah Nikpai, who won the bronze in men’s taekwondo in 2008. An ethnic Hazara, he was cheered by Afghans from all groups.