Page 2 of 2 The opium wars in Afghanistan
By Alfred W McCoy
Since poppy cultivation requires nine times more labor per hectare than wheat,
opium offered immediate seasonal employment to more than a million Afghans -
perhaps half of those actually employed at the time. In this ruined land and
ravaged economy, opium merchants alone could accumulate capital rapidly and so
give poppy farmers crop loans equivalent to more than half their annual
incomes, credit critical to the survival of many poor villagers.
In marked contrast to the marginal yields the country's harsh climate offers
most food crops, Afghanistan proved ideal for opium. On average, each hectare
of Afghan poppy land produces three to five times more than its chief
competitor, Burma. Most
important of all, in such an arid ecosystem, subject to periodic drought, opium
uses less than half the water needed for staples such as wheat.
After taking power in 1996, the Taliban regime encouraged a nationwide
expansion of opium cultivation, doubling production to 4,600 tonnes, then
equivalent to 75% of the world's heroin supply. Signaling its support for drug
production, the Taliban regime began collecting a 20% tax from the yearly opium
harvest, earning an estimated $100 million in revenues.
In retrospect, the regime's most important innovation was undoubtedly the
introduction of large-scale heroin refining in the environs of the city of
Jalalabad. There, hundreds of crude labs set to work, paying only a modest
production tax of $70 on every kilo of heroin powder. According to UN
researchers, the Taliban also presided over bustling regional opium markets in
Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, protecting some 240 top traders there.
During the 1990s, Afghanistan's soaring opium harvest fueled an international
smuggling trade that tied Central Asia, Russia, and Europe into a vast illicit
market of arms, drugs, and money-laundering. It also helped fuel an eruption of
ethnic insurgency across a near 5,000 kilometer swath of land from Uzbekistan
in Central Asia to Bosnia in the Balkans.
In July 2000, however, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suddenly ordered a ban
on all opium cultivation in a desperate bid for international recognition.
Remarkably enough, almost overnight the Taliban regime used the ruthless
repression for which it was infamous to slash the opium harvest by 94% to only
185 tonnes.
By then, however, Afghanistan had become dependent on poppy production for most
of its taxes, export income, and employment. In effect, the Taliban's ban was
an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society to the
brink of collapse. This was the unwitting weapon the US wielded when it began
its military campaign against the Taliban in October 2001. Without opium, the
regime was already a hollow shell and essentially imploded at the bursting of
the first American bombs.
The return of the CIA, opium and counter-insurgency
To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully mobilized
former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and cities
across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local allies
created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban's opium ban and reviving the
drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were
reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and
Nangarhar. At a Tokyo international donors' conference in January 2002, Hamid
Karzai, the new prime minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued
a pro forma ban on opium growing - without any means of enforcing it against
the power of these resurgent local warlords.
After investing some $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction during the Cold
War, Washington and its allies now proved parsimonious in the reconstruction
funds they offered. At that 2002 Tokyo conference, international donors
promised just $4 billion of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the
economy over the next five years. In addition, the total US spending of $22
billion for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply
toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for
agriculture. (And, as in Iraq, significant sums from what reconstruction funds
were available simply went into the pockets of Western experts, private
contractors, and their local counterparts.)
Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during the
first year of the US occupation, Afghanistan's opium harvest surged to 3,400
tonnes. Over the next five years, international donors would contribute $8
billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium would infuse nearly twice that
amount, $14 billion, directly into the rural economy without any deductions by
either those Western experts or Kabul's bloated bureaucracy.
While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush administration
downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to Great Britain and
police training to Germany. As the lead agency in allied operations, Donald
Rumsfeld's Defense Department regarded opium as a distraction from its main
mission of defeating the Taliban (and, of course, invading Iraq). Waving away
the problem in late 2004, president Bush said he did not want to "waste another
American life on a narco-state". ' Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency
operations, US forces worked closely with local warlords who proved to be
leading druglords.
After five years of the US occupation, Afghanistan's drug production had
swollen to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the UN reported that the
country's record opium crop covered almost 20,000 hectares, an area larger than
all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tonnes at the start of
American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tonnes of opium,
a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.
In this way, Afghanistan became the world's first true "narco-state". If a
cocaine traffic that provided just 3% of Colombia's GDP could bring in its wake
endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that country's
government, then we can only imagine the consequences of Afghanistan's
dependence on opium for more than 50% of its entire economy.
At a drug conference in Kabul in March, the head of Russia's Federal Narcotics
Service estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion.
Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers; $300 million
goes to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug
mafia", leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose
total GDP is only $10 billion.
Indeed, opium's influence is so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from
village leaders to Kabul's police chief, the defense minister, and the
president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and
crippling is this corruption that, according to recent UN estimates, Afghans
are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes. Not surprisingly, the
government's repeated attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly
compromised by what the UN has called "corrupt deals between field owners,
village elders, and eradication teams".
Not only have drug taxes funded an expanding guerrilla force, but the Taliban's
role in protecting opium farmers and the heroin merchants who rely on their
crop gives them real control over the core of the country's economy. In January
2009, the UN and anonymous US "intelligence officials" estimated that drug
traffic provided Taliban insurgents with $400 million a year. "Clearly,"
commented Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "we have to go after the drug labs
and the druglords that provide support to the Taliban and other insurgents."
In mid-2009, the US embassy launched a multi-agency effort, called the Afghan
Threat Finance Cell, to cut Taliban drug monies through financial controls. But
one American official soon compared this effort to "punching jello". By August
2009, a frustrated Obama administration had ordered the US military to "kill or
capture" 50 Taliban-connected druglords who were placed on a classified "kill
list".
Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact, declined somewhat
- to 6,900 tonnes last year (still over 90% of the world's opium supply). While
UN analysts attribute this 20% reduction largely to eradication efforts, a more
likely cause has been the global glut of heroin that came with the Afghan opium
boom, and which had depressed the price of poppies by 34%. In fact, even this
reduced Afghan opium crop is still far above total world demand, which the UN
estimates at 5,000 tonnes per annum.
Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts next month,
indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some US officials who have
surveyed Helmand's opium heartland see signs of an expanded crop. Even the UN
drug experts who have predicted a continuing decline in production are not
optimistic about long-term trends. Opium prices might decline for a few years,
but the price of wheat and other staple crops is dropping even faster, leaving
poppies as by far the most profitable crop for poor Afghan farmers.
Ending the cycle of drugs and death
With its forces now planted in the dragon's teeth soil of Afghanistan,
Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending cycle of drugs and
death. Every spring in those rugged mountains, the snows melt, the opium seeds
sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters takes to the field, many to die by
lethal American fire. And the next year, the snows melt again, fresh poppy
shoots break through the soil, and a new crop of teenaged Taliban fighters pick
up arms against America, spilling more blood. This cycle has been repeated for
the past 10 years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely.
Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan's rural
economy - with its orchards, flocks, and food crops - as high as $30 billion
or, for that matter, $90 billion, the money is at hand. By conservative
estimates, the cost of President Obama's ongoing surge of 30,000 troops alone
is $30 billion a year. So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would create
ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan, making it
possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without joining the
Taliban's army.
Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has no
realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of Afghanistan's
agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now numbers about 120,000
soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban's growth into an omnipresent shadow
government and an effective guerrilla army.
The idea that our expanded military presence might soon succeed in driving back
that force and handing over pacification to the illiterate, drug-addicted
Afghan police and army remains, for the time being, a fantasy. Quick fixes like
paying poppy farmers not to plant, something British and Americans have both
tried, can backfire and end up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation.
Rapid drug eradication without alternative employment, something the private
contractor DynCorp tried so disastrously under a $150 million contract in 2005,
would simply plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and
destabilizing the Kabul government further.
So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this deadly soil
with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome - for both the
United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or we can begin to withdraw
American forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its
orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined
in decades of war.
At this point, our only realistic choice is this sort of serious rural
development - that is, reconstructing the Afghan countryside through countless
small-scale projects until food crops become a viable alternative to opium. To
put it simply, so simply that even Washington might understand, you can only
pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a narco-state.
Alfred W McCoy is the JRW Smail professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the conjuncture of illicit
narcotics and covert operations over half a century. His latest book, Policing
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the
Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas counter-insurgency
operations on the spread of internal security measures at home.
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