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<font size=4><b>Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Afghanistan as a Drug War
<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225/tomgram:_alfred_mccoy,_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war__/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war__/<br>
</a>Posted by <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/mccoy/">Alfred
McCoy</a> at 4:10pm, March 30, 2010. <br><br>
A front-page <i>New York Times</i> article by Rod Nordland on the
aftermath of a recent U.S. Marine offensive in Helmand Province, opium
poppy-growing capital of the planet,
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html">
began</a> 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
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62G3K020100317">
implements</a> his strategy for pushing back the Taliban in southern
Afghanistan and securing the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27kandahar.html">
embattled</a> southern city of Kandahar and its environs.<br><br>
Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62R0QH20100328?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews">
more than 90%</a> 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,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175154/alfred_mccoy_surveillance_state_usa">
TomDispatch regular</a> 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
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia">
suppress</a> his classic book (since updated with a chapter on
Afghanistan),
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade</a>. 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
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/taming-dragon.html">
here</a> or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod,
<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817">
here</a>.)<i> Tom<br><br>
</i></font>
<dl>
<dd>Can Anyone Pacify the World's Number One Narco-State?<br>
<dd>The Opium Wars in Afghanistan<br>
<dd>By <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/alfredmccoy">Alfred W.
McCoy</a><br><br>
</b>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/world/asia/14marja.html">
dashed</a> through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town's
mud-walled compounds.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/asia/02marja.html">
announced</a> 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."<br><br>
<dd><a name="more"></a>For these poppy growers and thousands more like
them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with
it a perilous threat: opium eradication.<br>
<br>
<dd>Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html">
strangely unaware</a> that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin
capital -- with
<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/100204/helmand-counterinsurgency-heroin">
hundreds of laboratories</a>, 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."<br><br>
<dd>Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National
Security Adviser James L. Jones
<a href="http://thepage.time.com/pool-reports-obama-in-afghanistan/">
assured reporters</a> 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."<br><br>
<dd>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</i> 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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise
in Afghanistan's opium harvest -- from just 250 tons in 1979 to
<a href="http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2007/unisnar1013.html">
8,200 tons</a> 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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/129577">has supported</a> 500,000
Afghan families, nearly 20% of the country's estimated population, and
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/magazine/22afghanistan.html">
funds</a> a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the
countryside.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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?<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>CIA Covert Warfare, Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs: the
1980s<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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</i> 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</i> 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.<br><br>
<dd>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</i> guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas
inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a
revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Druglords, Dragon's Teeth, and Civil Wars: the 1990s<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>The Return of the CIA, Opium, and Counterinsurgency: 2001-<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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</i> ban on
opium growing -- without any means of enforcing it against the power of
these resurgent local warlords.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175019/ann_jones_the_afghan_reconstruction_boondoggle">
into the pockets</a> of Western experts, private contractors, and their
local counterparts.)<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/world/asia/16drugs.html">
regarded</a> 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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/world/asia/16drugs.html">
said</a> 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.<br><br>
<dd>After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's drug
production had swelled to unprecedented proportions. In August
2007, the U.N.
<a href="http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2007-08-27.html">
reported</a> 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
<a href="http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/pressrels/2007/unisnar1013.html">
now produced</a> 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's
GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's
Federal Narcotics Service
<a href="http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/100317/world/afghanistan_russia_crime_drugs_diplomacy">
estimated</a> 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.<br><br>
<dd>Indeed, opium's influence is
<a href="http://www.cigionline.org/blogs/2010/3/battle-marjah">so
pervasive</a> that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's
police chief, the defense minister, and
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html">the
president's brother</a>, have been tainted by the traffic. So
cancerous and crippling is this corruption that, according to
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/afghanistan-corruption-cr_n_429411.html">
recent U.N. estimates</a>, 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."<br><br>
<dd>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,"
<a href="http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-01-24/news/0901230216_1_afghanistan-narcotics-senior-officials">
commented</a> Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "we have to go after
the drug labs and the druglords that provide support to the Taliban and
other insurgents."<br><br>
<dd>In mid-2009, the U.S. embassy
<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/100119/afghanistan-corruption-us-investigation?page=0,0">
launched</a> 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
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8295405">ordered</a> the
U.S. military to "kill or capture" 50 Taliban-connected
druglords who were placed on a classified "kill list."<br><br>
<dd>Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact,
<a href="http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2009/September/afghan-opium-production-in-significant--decline.html">
declined somewhat</a> -- 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.
<a href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31918&Cr=afghan&Cr1">
estimates</a> at 5,000 tons per annum.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=33727&Cr=afghan&Cr1=">
not optimistic</a> 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.<br><br>
<dd>Ending the Cycle of Drugs and Death<br><br>
</b>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/world/asia/02prexy.html">
cost</a> 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.<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/world/asia/03afghan.html">
illiterate</a>, drug-addicted
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175220/tomgram%3A_pratap_chatterjee%2C_failing_afghanistan%27s_cops_/">
Afghan police</a> and
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175128/ann_jones_us_or_them_in_afghanistan">
army</a> 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
<a href="http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/37013616/The-Folly-of-Afghan-Opium-Eradication">
so disastrously</a> under a $150 million contract in 2005, would simply
plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and destabilizing
the Kabul government further.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<dd>Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of
</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1556524838/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade</a>,
which probes the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations
over half a century. His latest book,
</i>
<a href="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</a>, 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
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/taming-dragon.html">
here</a> or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod,
<a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817">
here</a>.<br><br>
</i>
<dd>Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy<br><br>
<br><br>
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