As a follow-up to Thomas Schweich’s bizarre CYA from this week’s New York Times magazine, here is a panel he attended at the US Institute of Peace almost exactly one year ago:
“Security and political will are the central part of a strategy for success,” according to Schweich, who said that if you “combine political will with security, you can eliminate poppies in almost any area.” Strategies need to incorporate a more “coordinated effort between civilian operations and military operations” in order to bring about that greater security, and a larger effort on the part of Afghan political officials.
Someone should tell Colombia. But he goes on:
According to UNODC, 86.6 tons of opium and 7.7 tons of heroin were seized in 2005. This represented about 3.4 percent of the country’s opium output, up from 0.4 percent in 2003. Schweich said that such numbers indicate that interdiction appears to be the most reliable means to attack the drug problem. He discussed the need to work more closely with the Afghan authorities to build up the justice sector in order to expand interdiction efforts. So far, “the criminal justice task force in Kabul has been very successful,” he said. One thousand cases have gone through the system since 2001, with a 70 percent conviction rate. Many drug-related criminals in the country are still at-large, however, and need to be brought to justice.
Interdiction doesn’t even work in the U.S. Why will it work in Afghanistan, which has far more exfiltration routes, far more corruption, and far more willing accomplices along the border in supposedly friendly nations like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan? This policy is disconnected from reality.
Schweich goes on to explain that eradication—especially aerial spraying—is an essential means of coercion when farmers don’t voluntarily switch from growing opium when “a farmer has been offered an alternative and declines.” That’s true to a certain extent, though it still ignores that in most areas of Afghanistan opium cultivation underpins a vast agricultural economy, and alternatives simply do not provide enough income to fully replace opium—especially in near-drought conditions.
In fact, given the restrictions against USAID providing direct cereal crop assistance, finding actual suitable alternative crops is an enormous problem. And it won’t be solved any time soon, unless we can suddenly make all of Afghanistan start growing crocuses and harvesting saffron without a global price depression. Which makes eradication a last-phase effort that should be years away from being enacted… otherwise we risk turning a vast swath of rural Pashtuns violently against us—something we should want to avoid.
Indeed, I don’t understand why we should listen to Schweich at all. He thinks all we’re lacking is security and the will to eradicate and magically cleanse Afghanistan of all corruption, and then we’ll have a healthy and productive rural economy.
Well, Mr. Schweich. I really want a pony too. Get in line. Or at least come up with a new idea that, you know, actually works.
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