As a follow up to my post “Angling for Failure,” in which I complain about the DEA exporting Colombia to Afghanistan as part of a “success strategy” (and how obviously silly that is), is this piece on the Dutch Provincial Reconstruction Team operating in Uruzgan.
In fact, even inside Tarin Kowt it is easy to come across poppy fields. One of the owners, Nazeer, does not want to go as far as to say Munib is personally involved:
“The governor simply has no power to do anything against it. Jan Mohammed was a much more powerful and respected figure here, who owns all kinds of property in Uruzgan.”
The senator is clearly not happy with the fact that the Dutch are working with Munib.
“This is a guy who is making plans with the Taliban. I think he sometimes uses Dutch troops for his own fights, by giving them wrong information about who to bomb.” …
In Kabul, in government and diplomatic circles, you often hear that Afghanistan is now at a tipping point: Either the Afghan people will believe NATO will really be able to make a difference, or they will turn against them as they might see NATO as yet another occupying force that is also responsible for many civilian casualties. And Afghan history teaches us that such a force would be better off leaving, before it has to do so on crutches.
Note that patience is rapidly wearing thin—as I reported last August, the population is finally developing a deep sense of war fatigue after 30 years of constant warfare. But also note that poppy is a pervasive problem, and shortsighted eradication campaigns end up creating far more innocent civilian casualties than any sort of meaningful reduction in opium cultivation (and this is the most likely explanation for the unacceptably high number of civilian casualties in the past few weeks).
But what else does opium do? Outside the major enforcement zones, which just happen to be in the south—Uruzgan, Helmand, Kandahar, Zabol—opium is weirdly good for the local economy: like any other cash crop, it creates a new class of consumers, which can then drive demand and spark economic development. Take a look at this surreal, narrated slide show from Herat. While it’s true those mansions are gaudy beyond belief (could Afghans actually be more tacky with consumption than Russians?), it also says something about perceptions: you don’t build like that if you are anticipating any fighting, whether it be Taliban marauders, a NATO unit on a sweep, or a DynCorp unit spraying poppy fields.
In other words, the opium problem isn’t quite as dire as it’s made out to be, apart from the areas of heavy fighting. While the other effects it has on the government—endemic corruption, mafia-style rule, unfortunate links to the strange new international blackmarket market/terrorism nexus—are there, they are much easier to deal with than the constant fighting, and don’t result in randomized, high-casualty violence.
So it is the Taliban, then, that need the greatest attention for eradication—not opium. By focusing so much on the drug trade, especially with such limited resources, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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As someone who has worked in rural areas of Afghanistan for substantial periods, I always found it incredibly hard to preach “alternative crops” to subsistence farmers. Insofar as opium is a problem, it’s a problem for middle class European kids, not dirt-poor Afghan peasants.
And honestly has anyone really looked closely at Taliban income streams? Does the poppy harvest really figure that heavily? I suspect not.
Absolutely they are…opium funds a substantial portion of Taliban operations.
Alex –
From my understanding, it does, but to varying degrees. In some areas, the opium is controlled, harvested, and shipped by the Taliban, whereas in other areas the Taliban basically runs security for other drug concerns. Making matters more complicated is rumors that they banned opium in Waziristan in 2003.
So while opium is a big part of their funding, it’s also probably not the majority, or I think you’d see a more concerted strategy on their part to incorporate it into their structure. Most of their money comes from the same places it always has: rich sheiks in the Gulf, channeling it through ISI.
Sebastian,
It’s unfortunate that the Afghan farmers don’t see farming opium as a problem for them. The amount of addicts in Afghanistan is rather disturbing. It would be nice to imagine that they realize the importance of shifting away from a product that is destroying their communities. Actually, I think they do realize what’s going on. It would be hard to miss all the glazed-eyes, disconnected looks and the Chiva pipe vendors at the bazaar.
Afghanistanica: The glazed eyes and the disconnected look come from malnutrition, war trauma and the generally grim day-to-day life, not from opium.
And Alex, while I don’t have stats on TB income streams, I doubt that you or anyone else does either. My hunch is that the real cash comes from the same streams that it always has- bored, rich Wahabbi revolutionaries and Pakistani geopolickers. I bet there are just as many Mujahiddin, ex-communists and just plain old gangsters profiting from the opium as there are Taliban.
I say let them grow their gulesorkh. Who cares? Heroin is mostly a European problem. America’s got transfats to deal with! Who do we bomb for that?
Malnutrion, war-trauma AND opium addiction are all problems for Afghans in Afghanistan. Try to separate acknowledging the scale of the drug problem from whatever political motivations causing you to deny it is a problem.
RE: “I say let them grow their gulesorkh. Who cares? Heroin is mostly a European problem.”
I suppose the families of addicts and their victims care. And I care about both poor Afghan farmers and the victims of drug abuse in Europe and Asia. I imagine I’m not the only one holding these sentiments.
Afghanistanica, don’t get me wrong, drug addiction is a terrible thing, and I don’t mean to sound casual about it.
However I still agree with Joshua that our experience with “War on Drugs” policies at the production market level has been miserable, and it seems to me if you were to make a list of priorities of how to patch up Afghanistan, worrying about opium production would rank near the bottom.
How about the fact that women’s literacy rates in rural levels is virtually negligible, that Kalashnikovs are still ubiquitous, that it still takes the better part of a week to drive from Herat to Kabul, that war criminals still cling to high-ranking positions in government, etc etc.
For opium, given the sheer volume of other challenges, I’d take the Peter Tosh route: legalize it and tax it. Get Merck and Phizer up in there.