[News] Afghanistan as a Drug War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Afghanistan as a Drug War

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war__/
Posted by <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/mccoy/>Alfred McCoy at 
4:10pm, March 30, 2010.

A front-page New York Times article by Rod Nordland on the aftermath 
of a recent U.S. Marine offensive in Helmand Province, opium 
poppy-growing capital of the planet, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html>began this 
way: "The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja 
has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of 
arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan 
officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest."  Given the nature 
of Afghanistan -- the planet's foremost narco-state -- such 
conundrums are only likely to multiply as war commander General 
Stanley McChrystal 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62G3K020100317>implements his 
strategy for pushing back the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and 
securing the 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27kandahar.html>embattled 
southern city of Kandahar and its environs.

Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62R0QH20100328?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews>more 
than 90% of the world's opium, the raw material for the production of 
heroin, it's not surprising that drug-trade news and war news 
intersect from time to time.  More surprising is how seldom poppy 
growing and the drug trade are portrayed as anything but ancillary to 
our Afghan War.  Fortunately, 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175154/alfred_mccoy_surveillance_state_usa>TomDispatch 
regular Alfred McCoy has been focused on the drug trade -- and the 
American role in fostering it -- in Southeast, Central, and South 
Asia for a long time.  In the Vietnam era, the CIA actually tried to 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia>suppress 
his classic book (since updated with a chapter on Afghanistan), 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The 
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.  He's 
been following the story ever since, and now for TomDispatch he 
offers what may be the first full-scale report that puts the drug 
trade in its proper place, right at the center of America's 30-year 
war in Afghanistan.  It's a grim yet remarkable story, full of 
surprises, that makes new sense of the bind in which the U.S. 
military now finds itself in that country.  (And check out the latest 
TomCast audio interview in which McCoy discusses just who is 
complicit in the Afghan opium trade by clicking 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/taming-dragon.html>here or, 
if you prefer to download it to your iPod, 
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817>here.) 
Tom

Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State?
The Opium Wars in Afghanistan
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy>Alfred W. McCoy

In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama administration is 
now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan 
from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President 
Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on 
February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern 
Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on 
Marja's outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. 
Marines 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14marja.html>dashed 
through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town's mud-walled compounds.

After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander General Stanley A. 
McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice-president and 
Helmand's provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for 
the general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing 
government to remote villages just like Marja.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, 
however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some 
unexpected, unscripted anger.  "If they come with tractors," one 
Afghani widow 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/asia/02marja.html>announced 
to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will 
have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy."

For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of 
government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous 
threat: opium eradication.

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html>strangely 
unaware that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin capital -- 
with 
<http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/100204/helmand-counterinsurgency-heroin>hundreds 
of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick houses, 
regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade 
heroin.  After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand Province 
produce a remarkable 40% of the world's illicit opium supply, and 
much of this harvest has been traded in Marja. Rushing through those 
opium fields to attack the Taliban on day one of this offensive, the 
Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the 
Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant 
guerrillas whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants. 
"You can't win this war," said one U.S. Embassy official just back 
from inspecting these opium districts, "without taking on drug 
production in Helmand Province."

Indeed, as  Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National Security 
Adviser James L. Jones 
<http://thepage.time.com/pool-reports-obama-in-afghanistan/>assured 
reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan President 
Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to 
the narco-traffickers." The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of 
the economic engine for the insurgents."

Just as these Marja farmers spoiled General McChrystal's media event, 
so their crop has subverted every regime that has tried to rule 
Afghanistan for the past 30 years. During the CIA's covert war in the 
1980s, opium financed the mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as 
President Ronald Reagan called them) who finally forced the Soviets 
to abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist client state.

In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the 
country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting 
and profiting from opium -- and then, ironically, fell from power 
only months after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the US 
military intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the 
government in Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose 
guerrillas have taken control of ever larger parts of the Afghan countryside.

These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise 
in Afghanistan's opium harvest -- from just 250 tons in 1979 to 
<http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2007/unisnar1013.html>8,200 
tons in 2007.  For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has 
accounted for as much as 50% of the country's gross domestic product 
(GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90% of the world's 
heroin supply.

The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three 
war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that 
it defies solution by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its 
most inept and least competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium 
crop and demanding its total eradication, the Bush administration 
dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped 
create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the government of 
its ally, President Karzai.  In recent years, opium farming 
<http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577>has supported 500,000 Afghan 
families, nearly 20% of the country's estimated population, and 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html>funds 
a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in 
poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation 
for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or 
rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to 
establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit and by 
definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. 
If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have 
done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still 
grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each 
step in the chain of production.  Crop loans are necessary for 
planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and 
security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium 
economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided 
for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown 
narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three 
Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 
years -- the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 
1990s (fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 
2001, the U.S. invasion, occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns. 
In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking 
by its Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of 
benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's 
number one narco-state.

CIA Covert Warfare, Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs: the 1980s

Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA 
covert war against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret 
operations that it conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia 
which stretch for 5,000 miles from Turkey to Thailand. In the late 
1940s, as the Cold War was revving up, the United States first 
mounted covert probes of communism's Asian underbelly. For 40 years 
thereafter, the CIA fought a succession of secret wars along this 
mountain rim -- in Burma during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and 
Afghanistan in the 1980s. In one of history's ironic accidents, the 
southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided 
with Asia's opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA 
into ambiguous alliances with the region's highland warlords.

Washington's first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union 
invaded the country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the 
Afghan capital. Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, 
the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan's military 
dictatorship in a ten-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.

This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold 
War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet 
conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile 
highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond 
immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the 
international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this 
covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, 
the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service 
Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more 
problematic ally.

When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as 
overall leader of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington -- with few 
alternatives -- agreed. Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some 
$2 billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to 
Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at 
unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival 
resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 
1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging 
that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin 
laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the 
CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the 
Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing 
region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas 
inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a 
revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they 
sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the 
ISI's protection.  Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium 
production grew ten-fold -- from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just 
two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. 
Attorney General announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the 
source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and 
Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of 
local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts 
soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington 
just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country 
with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million 
landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in 
tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among 
themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally 
cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan's 
ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its 
long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.

Druglords, Dragon's Teeth, and Civil Wars: the 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in 
a lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power.  It was almost 
as if the soil had been sown with those dragons' teeth of ancient 
myth that can suddenly sprout into an army of full-grown warriors, 
who leap from the earth with swords drawn for war.

When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the 
communist regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three 
years, Pakistan still backed its client Hekmatyar.  He, in turn, 
unleashed his artillery on the besieged capital.  The result: the 
deaths of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans. Even a slaughter of such 
monumental proportions, however, could not win power for this 
unpopular fundamentalist.  So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban 
and in September 1996, it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight 
the Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the 
north of the capital.

During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned 
heavily on opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the 
harvest to 4,600 tons by 1999. Throughout these two decades of 
warfare and a twenty-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself 
was slowly transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem -- with 
herding, orchards, and over 60 food crops -- into the world's first 
economy dependent on the production of a single illicit drug. In the 
process, a fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.

Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where 
clouds arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan 
is an arid land.  Its staple food crops have historically been 
sustained by irrigation systems that rely on snowmelt from the 
region's high mountains. To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan 
tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles 
every year to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important 
of all, farmers planted perennial tree crops -- walnut, pistachio, 
and mulberry -- which thrived because they sink their roots deep into 
the soil and are remarkably resistant to the region's periodic 
droughts, offering relief from the threat of famine in the dry years.

During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated 
the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of 
the orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with 
firepower, the Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society's 
economic jugular, violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan 
warfare by cutting down the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.

All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a veritable 
Gordian knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole 
solution.  Like Alexander's legendary sword, it offered a 
straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any 
aid to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their 
orchards, Afghan farmers -- including some 3 million returning 
refugees -- found sustenance in opium, which had historically been 
but a small part of their agriculture.

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 tons, 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 U.N. 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 3,000-mile 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 metric tons.

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 U.S. 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 Counterinsurgency: 2001-

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 three billion dollars 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 four billion 
dollars of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the economy 
over the next five years. In addition, the total U.S. 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 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175019/ann_jones_the_afghan_reconstruction_boondoggle>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 U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's opium 
harvest surged to 3,400 tons. 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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/world/asia/16drugs.html>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/world/asia/16drugs.html>said he 
did not want to "waste another American life on a narco-state.'' 
Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, U.S. forces worked 
closely with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.

After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's drug 
production had swelled to unprecedented proportions.  In August 2007, 
the U.N. 
<http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2007-08-27.html>reported 
that the country's record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an 
area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 
185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan 
<http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2007/unisnar1013.html>now 
produced 8,200 tons 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 this month, the head of Russia's 
Federal Narcotics Service 
<http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/100317/world/afghanistan_russia_crime_drugs_diplomacy>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 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 
<http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2010/3/battle-marjah>so pervasive 
that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's police 
chief, the defense minister, and 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html>the 
president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic.  So cancerous 
and crippling is this corruption that, according to 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/afghanistan-corruption-cr_n_429411.html>recent 
U.N. 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 U.N. 
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 U.N. and anonymous U.S. 
"intelligence officials" estimated that drug traffic provided Taliban 
insurgents with $400 million a year. "Clearly," 
<http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-01-24/news/0901230216_1_afghanistan-narcotics-senior-officials>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 U.S. embassy 
<http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/100119/afghanistan-corruption-us-investigation?page=0,0>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 
<http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8295405>ordered the U.S. 
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, 
<http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2009/September/afghan-opium-production-in-significant--decline.html>declined 
somewhat -- to 6,900 tons last year (still over 90% of the world's 
opium supply). While U.N. 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 
U.N. 
<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31918&Cr=afghan&Cr1>estimates 
at 5,000 tons per annum.

Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts 
next month, indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some 
U.S. officials who have surveyed Helmand's opium heartland see signs 
of an expanded crop. Even the U.N. drug experts who have predicted a 
continuing decline in production are 
<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33727&Cr=afghan&Cr1=>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 teen-aged Taliban fighters 
pick up arms against America, spilling more blood. This cycle has 
been repeated for the past ten 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 
dollars, the money is at hand. By conservative estimates, the 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/world/asia/02prexy.html>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/asia/03afghan.html>illiterate, 
drug-addicted 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175220/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_failing_afghanistan%27s_cops_/>Afghan 
police and 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175128/ann_jones_us_or_them_in_afghanistan>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 
<http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/37013616/The-Folly-of-Afghan-Opium-Eradication>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 J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>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, 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Policing 
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of 
the Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas 
counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security 
measures at home. To check out the latest TomCast audio interview in 
which McCoy discusses just who is complicit in the Afghan opium 
trade, click 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/taming-dragon.html>here or, 
if you prefer to download it to your iPod, 
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817>here.

Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy





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