- Ann Jones
Sunday, December 17, 2006
<>A little more than five years since the start of the Bush administration's Afghan war, the "ousted" Taliban is back in full flower, and so is the notorious Afghan poppy. There's no doubt the two are intimately connected. The Taliban, which briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid, now both supportts and draws support from that profitable crop; Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin.
Yet Western policies designed to eliminate the Taliban and the poppy are at odds with each other. While NATO troops scramble, between battles, to rebuild rural infrastructure, U.S. 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 United States, hasn't made a dent. Last year, it claimed to have destroyed 38,000 acres of poppies, up from 12,000 the year before; but during the same period overall poppy cultivation soared from 104,000 hectares to 165,000 hectares (or 408,000 acres).
When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American 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 percent.
Still, the counterproductive eradication program succeeds in one thing: It makes life miserable for hundreds of thousands of small farmers and their families.
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, which offers them loans, protection and a chance to plant again. Big farmers, on the other hand, are undeterred by the eradication program; they simply pay off the police and associated officials, spreading corruption and dashing hopes of honest government.
In 2002, President 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 United States 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 the Bush administration sets Afghan against Afghan again: For what? The souls of American heroin addicts? Or the Republican Party, for whom the "war on drugs" is a moral crusade?
While Bush claims the moral high ground, other administration officials worry more pragmatically that the drug trade may destabilize the country and the region.
Paradoxically, many a person on the street in Kabul points to the poppy as the source of jobs, wealth, hope and such stability as President Hamid Karzai currently enjoys. Karzai himself often promises to rid the 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.
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.
Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, the CIA sponsored anti-Soviet Islamist extremists, and to finance its covert operations, it fostered the drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs.
As Alfred McCoy reports in "The Politics of Heroin," Afghan mujahedeen -- 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 United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration made use of our old Islamist allies, paying them millions of dollars to hunt Osama bin Laden, a task to which they appear not to have been entirely devoted. Asked in 2004 why the United States wasn't going after drug kingpins in Afghanistan, an unnamed U.S. official told a New York Times reporter that the drug lords were "the guys who helped us liberate this place in 2001," the guys we relied on to get bin Laden.
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 $3 billion this year; but international traffickers in the global marketplace will make 10 times as much, at the very least.
The small percentage 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 percent 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 United States designated in the past five years for Afghan reconstruction, most of which never reached the country anyway.
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 American campaign of defoliant aerial spraying of poppy fields that killed poppies and sickened children and livestock. The United States still denies responsibility for that episode and similar aerial attacks that devastated livestock in Helmand province in February 2005.
When word came that the Quran had been dumped in a Guantanamo toilet, Nangahar farmers were among the angry Afghans who rioted in Jalalabad. For them, the desecration of their holy book was the last straw. They were already furious about the tomatoes. They had 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.
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.
One expert the administration sent to Kabul to assess the "drug problem" admitted as much. "The only sensible way out is to legalize drugs," he said in an interview early in 2004. "But nobody in the White House wants to hear that."
Sure enough, in November 2004, President Bush, backed by the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and powerful Republican congressmen like Henry Hyde of Illinois, suddenly increased U.S. funds committed to the conventional Afghan war on drugs sixfold to $780 million, including $150 million for aerial spraying.
So you see what weird, self-defeating policies a government such as ours can develop when its ideology silences those who might give it good advice. When it can't face facts, it attacks the very people whose hearts and minds it hopes to win. When it spends billions to tear down the lives of poor Afghans even as our 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 last 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). Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
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