The drug trade in the New Afghanistan

One of the many failures of the mainstream press the last few years was the poor and negligent coverage of the still-ongoing war in Afghanistan.  Those who make some effort to follow the news from there are aware that the pro-American national government holds limited power, and is still completely dependent on NATO troops to maintain what power he has, which is mostly restricted to the capital city of Kabul.

Cultivation of opium poppies is a booming business there, and a mainstay of the economy.  A fluctuating number of US troops, 12-18 thousand in recent months still are theoretically hunting Al Qaeda there.  But most of the war news that comes out consists of those depressing reports of how US forces just dropped a 500-lb. bomb on a rural village - and of course killed a few "terrorists."  Most effective governmental power is held by provincial and local warlords.  The country is not a democracy in any sense that Americans would recognize as such.

And yet the administration routinely cites Afghanistan as a successful democracy, with little challenge in the press, or even from the opposition party.  Maverick McCain the other day held up the Afghan national army, which is a barely-functioning entity, as a model of building a diverse and effective military force.

This recent article is one more example of an analysis of the particular problem of the opium trade there: Afghanistan: When Counternarcotics Undermines Counterterrorism by Vanda Felbab-Brown Washington Quarterly Autumn 2005. It's interesting in the broader context of counterterrorism and anti-drug operations.  But the practical realities with which it's grappling are just so far off the rosy myth of administration speeches that it's amazing.  For instance, she writes:

Even as U.S. officials point to the real estate boom and business activity visible in many Afghan cities as a sign of progress, the reality is that such progress is in large part financed by profits from the drug industry.

Felbab-Brown challenges the notion that supports Western (largely US and British) counternarcotics operation there, the idea that Al Qaeda is benefitting signficantly from the narcotics trade there.  As she explains, much of the kinds of benefits that guerrilla groups in places like Peru or Colombia get from various parts of the drug traffic involving some control of territory, such as imposing taxes on growers or transporters.  And there's little reason to think at this point that Al Qaeda controls any significant amount of territory in Afghanistan.  Groups like the Taliban and more localized terrorist/guerrilla groups do.

Money laundering may be one source of revenue Al Qaeda could tap into in the Afghan narcotics trade.  But Felbab-Brown notes that many of the publicly-available material on money laundering often lumps Al Qaeda with the Taliban, and so it's hard to estimate how much Al Qaeda may actually be getting.

The opium business in Afghanistan has the effect of strenthening the warlords who are very involved with the business, provides opportunities for organized crime and breeds corruption in government.  And, although many farmers are dependent on the poppy for income:

[I]n the long term, large-scale drug production has severe negative economic impacts, contributing to inflation, encouraging real estate speculation and a rapid rise in real estate prices, and undermining currency stability.

Felbab-Brown cautions that counterterrorism and counternarcotic efforts are not necessarily complementary.  They can even be contradictory.  Attempting to eradicate the crops can be especially damaging to the counterinsurgency operations:

Eradication drives the local population into the hands of regional warlords,even if they now call themselves politicians or have secure government jobs, strengthening the centrifugal forces that historically have weakened Afghanistan as a state. Local warlords can capitalize on popular discontent with eradication by claiming something such as "the evil Karzai government, having sold out to the foreign infidels, is impoverishing the rural people and forcing them into semi-slavery." Predictably, the Afghan government eradication teams that actually attempted to carry out their orders, rather than simply accepting bribes, have frequently met with armed resistance from peasants, even in the restricted and relatively safe areas where they have been deployed.

The other standard counternarcotics strategy, interdiction with its related operations such as destroying drug labs, is not that effective, she argues, unless there is a good alternative economic-development program in place, which there is not in Afghanistan.  And she writes:

A complicating factor in Afghanistan is the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency objectives of the U.S. and Afghan governments. Both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts require good, local human intelligence. The local warlords are unlikely to provide such intelligence to those who are destroying their business. This was one reason why the U.S. military had been only a reluctant participant in counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan until 2004 and why, for several years after the fall of the Taliban, it failed to destroy many of the heroin labs and stashes it uncovered. For example, a prominent warlord and the chief of police in Jalalabad, Hazrat Ali,despite being a key drug trafficker, was on the U.S. military's payroll afterthe September 11 attacks to help fight Al Qaeda. Ali's cooperation facilitated U.S. troop operations in the area under his control. As Major James Hawver, a reservist in Jalalabad in 2002, commented, "He was sort of our benefactor. He let it be known that if anybody messed with us, he'd deal with them."

I would add that reliance on shaky local allies has been a key part of Rummy's Afghan approach from the very beginning.  They wanted the US to have a "light footprint" there in Afghanistan, where a "heavier footprint" (more US troops) could have done far more damage to Al Qaeda in the short run.

Felbab-Brown also puts little stock in the strategy of offering amnesty to traffickers.  A program of alternative economic development that provided farmers and others who live from the drug traffic suitable subtitute means of livlihood would be the preferable strategy.  But, at best, that is a long-term prospect.

Unfortunately, in the context of Afghanistan's counterterrorism, stabilization, and democratization efforts, the narcotics problem today has no rapidly effective policy solution. After the fall of the Taliban, the United States deployed a minimum number of troops to Afghanistan for postconflict peacekeeping in order to preserve troops for the war against Iraq, undermining reconstruction and counternarcotics efforts. Postconflict Afghanistan had thelowest ratio of international peacekeeping troops to population as well as to the area of territory compared to other postconflict regions, despite the presence of many heavily armed warlords and a vast amount of small arms floating among the population. Despite the success of Afghanistan's October 2004 presidential election, the central government is still weak and absent from large swaths of its territory. Had the United States deployed a much larger number of troops in Afghanistan, it would not have needed to rely on local warlords to help capture Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to such a large extent. Washington could have helped Kabul subjugate the warlords early on, leaving both the Kabul government and the international community much better equipped to undertake comprehensive counternarcotics policies, including eradication.

Felbab-Brown's article also has some useful historical background on the Taliban's drug policy:

The Taliban profited immensely from drug production in territories under its control, as did the Northern Alliance in its regions. After an initial year of religious zealousness to try to eradicate the burgeoning poppy cultivation in 1994-1995, the Taliban decided that eradication was both financially unsound and politically unsustainable. The fundamentalist religious movement progressively shifted its attitude toward tolerating poppy cultivation, then to levying a 10-20 percent zakat, or tax, on cultivation and processing, and finally to actively encouraging poppy cultivation and even teaching farmers how to achieve greater yields. Profits from the opium trade, estimated at $30-200 million a year, were roughly comparable to the Taliban's profits from illegal traffic of legal goods under the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement and constituted a major portion of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and income. In 2000-2001, whenthe Taliban finally declared poppy cultivation illegal to placate the international community, receive recognition as a legitimate government, boost opium prices, and possibly also consolidate its control over Afghanistan's drug trade, it had already stored enough heroin to maintain its money supply without new poppy cultivation for many years. (my emphasis)