US's Afghan policies going up in
smoke By Ann Jones
On
the fifth anniversary of the start of the Bush
administration's war in Afghanistan, Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld wrote an upbeat op-ed in the
Washington Post on that hapless country's "hopeful
and promising" trajectory. He cited only two items
as less than "encouraging": "the legitimate worry
that increased poppy production could be a
destabilizing factor" and the "rising violence in
southern Afghanistan".
That rising
violence - a full-scale onslaught by the resurgent
Taliban - put Afghanistan back in the headlines
this summer and
brought consternation to
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
governments (from Canada to Australia) whose
soldiers are now dying in a land they had been led
to believe was a peaceful "success story".
Lieutenant-General David Richards, the
British commander of NATO troops that took over
security in embattled southern Afghanistan from
the US in July, warned at the time, "We could
actually fail here." In October, he argued that if
NATO did not bring security and significant
reconstruction to the alienated Pashtun south
within six months - the mission the US failed to
accomplish during the past five years - the
majority of the populace might well switch
sympathies to the Taliban.
But coming in
the midst of NATO anxieties and Taliban assaults,
what are we to make of Rumsfeld's "legitimate
worry" about Afghan poppy production, which this
year will provide 92% of the world's heroin
supply? And what are we to make of President
George W Bush's presidential determination, issued
just before Afghan President Hamid Karzai's
September visit to Washington, that the Afghan
government must be "held accountable" for that
poppy harvest; that it must not only "deter and
eradicate poppy cultivation" in the country, but
"investigate, prosecute and extradite all the
narco-traffickers" in the land?
Undeniably, the poppy trade and the
resurgence of the Taliban are intimately
connected, for the Taliban, who briefly banned
poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain US
diplomatic recognition and aid, now both support
and draw support from that profitable crop. Yet
Western policies aimed at the Taliban and the
poppy are quite separate and at odds with each
other. While NATO troops scramble, between
battles, to rebuild rural infrastructure, US
advisers urge Afghan anti-narcotics police to
eradicate the livelihood of 2 million poor
farmers.
So far the poppy-eradication
program, largely funded by the US, hasn't made a
dent. Last year, it claimed to have destroyed
15,380 hectares of poppies, up from 4,850 the year
before; but during the same period overall poppy
cultivation soared from 104,000 hectares to
165,000.
When the Bush administration
invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were
grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the US
occupation that followed the defeat of the
Taliban, poppy cultivation spread to every
province, and overall production has increased
exponentially ever since - this year by 60%.
Still, the counterproductive eradication
program succeeds in one thing. It makes life
miserable for hundreds of thousands of small
farmers. What happens to them? The Senlis Council,
an international drug-policy think-tank, reports
that the drug-eradication program not only ruins
small farmers but actually drives them into the
arms of the Taliban, who offer them loans,
protection and a chance to plant again. Big
farmers, on the other hand, are undeterred by the
poppy-eradication program; they simply pay off the
police and associated officials, spreading
corruption and dashing hopes of honest government.
In 2002, Bush announced, "We must reduce
drug use for one great moral reason. When we fight
against drugs, we fight for the souls of our
fellow Americans." There's a profusion of ironies
here. The US in the 1980s fought a proxy war
against the Soviet Union on Afghan soil,
encouraging Islamist extremists (then "our"
soldiers) and helping to set the stage for the
Taliban.
Now, another Republican
administration sets Afghan against Afghan again in
a kind of cockamamie proxy war supposedly for the
souls of American heroin addicts. Since when have
Republicans wanted to do anything for American
drug addicts but lock them up?
This is the
kind of weird "foreign policy" you get when your
base is keen on the war on drugs and there's a lot
of real stuff you can't talk about outside the
Oval Office - or, sometimes, in it. Like, to take
an example, the way the Taliban now control the
Pakistani border city of Quetta, a subject that
went politely unmentioned recently when Bush
entertained Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf and Afghanistan's Karzai at the White
House.
Like the way Pakistan reluctantly
hands over some al-Qaeda operatives to the US, but
winks at routine Taliban cross-border traffic into
Afghanistan. It also makes deals with Talibanized
elders in its own tribal area of Waziristan, long
thought to be a haven for al-Qaeda and perhaps
Osama bin Laden himself. Like the fact that no
nation fights harder against the Afghan drug trade
than axis-of-evil enemy Iran, while the United
States' "staunch ally" Pakistan lends support to
the trade and to the Taliban as well.
If
we must worry about poppy production while all
hell breaks loose in southern Afghanistan and
suicide bombers strike Kabul, the capital, is
there a more "legitimate" or effective way to
worry?
A blooming business
First, we can forget entirely any concern
for American heroin addicts. It has been exactly
100 years since public officials first met in
London to ban the international trade in opium. A
century of cracking down on poppy production from
Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle to Central Asia's
Golden Crescent to Mexico has verified one basic
fact of agricultural economics. When supply is cut
somewhere, another poppy-growing area quickly
arises to meet the demand.
Wipe out
poppies in Afghanistan tomorrow and - faster than
you can say "mission accomplished" - American
addicts will be shooting up heroin from Pakistan
or Thailand or the moon. This is a certain fact.
But none of that phony compassion for
America's drug addicts factors into Rumsfeld's
"legitimate worry". He's concerned about the
"destabilizing" effect of the drug trade itself -
on the Karzai government, Afghanistan and the
Central Asian region.
Paradoxically, many
a man on the streets of Kabul points to poppy as
the source of jobs, wealth, hope and such
stability as Karzai currently enjoys. Karzai
himself often promises to rid government and
country of drug lords, but as a Pashtun and a
realist, he keeps his enemies close. His strategy
is to avoid confrontation, befriend potential
adversaries and give them offices, often in his
cabinet.
Like Musharraf in Pakistan,
Karzai walks a tightrope between domestic politics
and US demands for dramatic actions - such as
ending the drug trade - clearly well beyond his
powers. The trade penetrates even the elected
parliament, which is full of the usual suspects.
Among the 249 members of the wolesi jirga
(lower house) are at least 17 known drug
traffickers in addition to 40 commanders of armed
militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men
facing serious allegations of war crimes and
human-rights violations, any or all of whom may be
affiliated with the poppy business. For years the
Kabul rumor mill has traced the drug trade to the
family of the president himself.
Through
many administrations, the US government is itself
implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the
Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) fostered anti-Soviet
Islamist extremists, and to finance their covert
operations it fostered the drug trade as well.
Before the US-and-Pakistani-sponsored
mujahideen took on the Soviets in 1979,
Afghanistan produced only a very small amount of
opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all.
By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army of
occupation, it was the world's top producer of
both drugs. As Alfred W McCoy reports in The
Politics of Heroin, Afghan mujahideen - the
guys president Ronald Reagan famously likened to
"our founding fathers" - ordered Afghan farmers to
grow poppy; Afghan commanders and Pakistani
intelligence agents refined heroin; the Pakistani
army transported it to Karachi for shipment
overseas; while the CIA made it all possible by
providing legal cover for these operations.
After the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001,
the Bush administration made use of the United
States' old Islamist allies, paying them millions
of dollars to hunt bin Laden, a task to which they
do not appear to have been entirely devoted. Asked
in 2004 why the US wasn't going after drug
kingpins in Afghanistan, an unnamed US official
told a New York Times reporter that the drug lords
were "the guys who helped us liberate this place
in 2001", the guys the US is still relying on to
get bin Laden.
Interviewed by the British
newspaper The Independent, a US soldier offered
another reason: "We start taking out drug guys,
and they will start taking out our guys."
Reluctant to interfere with the United States'
drug-lord allies in the "war on terror" or risk
the lives of US soldiers in such a dustup, the
Bush administration went after small farmers
instead.
Early on, the British, who were
responsible for international anti-narcotics
operations in Afghanistan, tried to persuade
Afghan farmers to take up "alternative
livelihoods" - that is, to grow other crops - even
though no other crop requires less work or
produces a fraction of the profits of poppy. Not
that the farmers themselves get rich. Within
Afghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw
direct income from poppy, profits may reach US$3
billion this year; but international traffickers
in the global marketplace will make 10 times as
much, at the very least.
The small
proportion of profit that stays in Afghanistan
enriches mainly the kingpins: warlords, government
officials, politically connected smugglers. But as
drug lords build mansions in Kabul - ornate
"Pakistani Palaces" of garish tile and colored
glass - they create jobs and a booming trade in
all sorts of legal goods from cement to pots and
pans. What's more, that small in-country profit
adds up to an estimated 60% of Afghanistan's gross
domestic product, or more than half the country's
annual income. It's also more than twice as much
as the US designated in the past five years for
Afghan reconstruction, most of which never reached
the country anyway.
You have to ask: What
if the drug trade could be stopped? What about the
destabilizing effect of that?
Fear of
flowers As things stand, the poppy farmer
makes a decent living. Poppies enable him to hold
on to his scrap of land. He can feed his family
and send his children to school. Nevertheless, two
years ago some poppy farmers in Nangahar province
were actually persuaded to give up poppy for
tomatoes. They were pressured by an aggressive US
campaign of defoliant aerial spraying of poppy
fields that killed poppies and sickened children
and livestock. The US still denies responsibility
for that episode and similar aerial attacks that
devastated livestock in Helmand province in
February 2005.
When word came that the
Holy Koran had been dumped in a Guantanamo toilet,
Nangahar farmers were among the furious Afghans
who rioted in Jalalabad. For them the desecration
of the Koran was the last straw. They were already
furious about the tomatoes. They'd harvested good
crops, then watched them rot because a promised
bridge they needed to get their tomatoes to market
hadn't been built. Remarkably, the Nangahar
farmers still gave "alternative livelihoods" one
more try, but they made too little money to feed
their children. This year they announced they're
planting poppies again.
A field of poppies
in bloom is a beautiful sight - especially in
Afghanistan, where the plant's brilliant greenery
and its white and purplish flowers stand against a
drab landscape of rock and sand, visual testimony
to the promise of human endeavor even in the worst
of circumstances. It may be that Afghan farmers
contemplate their fields as metaphor, Afghans
being great lovers of poetry. But they're
practical and desperate as well, so they came up
with a plan.
Afghan farmers officially
proposed to British anti-narcotics officials that
they be licensed to grow poppy and produce opium
for state-owned refineries to be built with
foreign aid donations. The refineries, in turn,
would produce medicinal morphine and codeine for
worldwide legal sale, thereby filling a global
need for inexpensive, natural painkillers.
(Recently hospitalized in the US, I can testify
that morphine works exceedingly well, though it's
expensive because, unlike heroin, it's in short
supply.)
The farmers got nowhere with this
proposal, although it's hard to think of any plan
that could more effectively have bound the rural
peasantry to Karzai's feeble central government,
stabilizing and strengthening it. Now, the Senlis
Council has proposed the same plan, but again it's
unlikely to fly. It's not just that Big Pharma
would resent the competition. Think about the
Republican base for which "legal drug" is an
oxymoron.
In November 2004, in fact, Bush,
backed by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon
and powerful Republican congressmen like Henry
Hyde of Illinois, suddenly increased US funds
committed to the conventional Afghan war on drugs
sixfold to $780 million, including $150 million
designated for aerial spraying. Hyde, still on the
case as chairman of the House Committee on
International Relations, recently suggested
shifting the focus from farmers to "kingpins", but
no one in the administration is ready to call off
the war.
Two years ago in Kabul I
interviewed an American consultant sent by the
Bush administration to assess the "drug problem"
in Afghanistan. His off-the-record verdict: "The
only sensible way out is to legalize drugs. But
nobody in the White House wants to hear that." He
admitted that the sensible conclusion would not
appear in his report.
So you see what I
mean about the weird policies a government such as
the United States' can develop when it can't talk
about real facts. When it cozies up to people it
professes to be against. When it attacks people
whose hearts and minds it hopes to win. When it
pays experts to report false conclusions it wants
to hear. When it spends billions to tear down the
lives of poor Afghans even as NATO allies pray for
a break in battling the Taliban so that - with
time running out - they can rebuild.
Ann Jones spent the better part
of the past four years in Afghanistan, working on
education and women's rights - and watching. She
wrote about what she saw in Kabul in Winter:
Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan
Books, 2006).
