How To Win The Drug War In Afghanistan – Analysis

By M. Ashraf Haidari

This past November, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its annual survey of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan for 2017. As ever, the survey’s findings are hardly surprising. They reflect the periodic fluctuations in the amount of opium poppy cultivated and produced in the country. Last year, the cultivation increased to 328,000 hectares and production to nine thousand metric tons—a 87 percent increase over 2016.

Indeed, drug production and other challenges currently facing Afghanistan, the United States, and their common allies are cumulative. They did not spring up overnight. They have been evolving since the Taliban were driven from power in late 2001. In the case of narcotics trafficking, failure to properly assess the problem’s causes and effects is encouraging misperceptions.

The narcotics problem in Afghanistan has been cultivated by the past four decades of war, destruction and human suffering. We know from international experience that global demand for narcotics finds supply in environments where state institutions are weak, where general instability is high, and where poverty is rife.

However, where the writ of the government is weak or has grown weaker, poppies have bloomed, despite the presence of U.S. and NATO forces. In fact, 95 percent of all of Afghanistan’s opium is grown in just eight provinces in the southwest, east, and northeast (Helmand, Kandahar, Farah, Nimroz, Uruzgan, Nangarhar, Balkh, and Badakhshan). In these areas, there has been a growing Taliban presence, and organized criminal groups remain strong.

Afghans understand that if they do not eliminate drugs, then drugs will harm their health and eliminate their livelihoods. Of course, fighting narcotics is not Afghanistan’s business alone, nor can the Afghan government do it by itself unless it receives help from its allies and those who join Afghanistan in the belief that narcotics is a common enemy of the whole international community—one that takes millions of young lives across the world every year, one that spreads HIV/AIDS, one that finances urban violence and crime, and one that increasingly fuels global terrorism and annually provides $200 million for the Taliban’s brutal terrorist activities in Afghanistan.

On the whole, Afghan opium fuels a global trade in heroin that generates over $60 billion in profits for corrupt officials, drug traffickers, organized criminal groups and insurgents, according to the U.S. Department of State. The U.S. government seems to understand the need for a comprehensive solution. Former President Obama once stressed a need for nonmilitary forms of assistance: “To advance security, opportunity, and justice—not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces—we need agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers. That is how we can help the Afghan government serve its people, and develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.”

Quick fixes such as forced eradication of poppy crops merely target the effects of poppy production—not its underlying causes. We know from international experience that eradication alone is ineffective. Decreases in cultivation in one area can simply lead to increases in another, and news of impending eradication efforts can provoke growers to disperse cultivation over a larger area, much like investors diversifying portfolios to hedge risk. Counter-narcotics efforts, then, must be enacted contemporaneously across the country in a strategic manner.

Above all else, farmers must be given the opportunity and necessary resources to grow alternative crops. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that most Afghan farmers are sharecroppers, whose landlords dictate what they can grow. Consequently, the high-value opium poppy is the crop of choice.

Liberating farmers from this cycle of dependence requires that they have access to both land and alternative financing, in particular micro-credit. Further, to make alternative crops more lucrative to farmers, investments in infrastructure are needed. In addition to supplies of water, seed and fertilizer, farmers must have access to reliable farm-to-market roads or to cold-storage facilities to preserve products for later export. Today, besides the increasingly insecure ring road connecting Kabul to outlying provinces, Afghanistan lacks a farm-to-market road system, and only a small number of Afghans have access to electricity.

Once effective alternatives are available, farmers would have an incentive to try to transition away from poppy cultivation without paying a financial penalty. An initial grace period could be extended, beyond which noncompliant farmers would face crop eradication and criminal prosecution.

For example, in the western province of Herat, farmers, who have been helped switch away from growing poppy to saffron (a comparatively high-value crop), have done remarkably well. The Afghan Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) recently announced that Afghan farmers have earned $18 million in revenue from nearly eleven tons of saffron ($18,00/kg) produced last year, surpassing the estimated harvest. Even so, however, the Taliban threaten farmers not to grow licit crops, while some countries in the region, which also produce saffron, manipulate the saffron market against a fair competition, effectively discouraging Afghan farmers to grow the crop on a larger scale.

To be effective, counter-narcotics efforts must target all players in the long chain of the opium trade, including traffickers, distributors and dealers, who pull in about 80 percent of the export value of Afghan narcotics. Essential to the prosecution of these kingpins is a functional justice sector, with coordinated law enforcement and judicial activities. Inadequate compensation, training, and equipment currently limit the ability of the Afghan policemen and judges from effectively combating this threat.

However, even if the above problems were gradually resolved with international support, transnational drug traffickers would continue to permeate Afghanistan’s borders and undermine the rule of law in the absence of coordinated prosecution and enforcement efforts among Afghanistan, its neighbors and consumer countries. As President Ashraf Ghani once said: “Using and smuggling of narcotics is a universal problem, similar to international mafia who through smuggling narcotics, subsidize the corrupt elements in various countries.”

The tenets of Islam, Afghan culture, and the Afghan legal system all prohibit the production, consumption and trafficking of drugs. Poor Afghan farmers would honor these tenets if they were given a legal and viable option. As UNODC’s annual surveys demonstrate, periodic declines in poppy cultivation could be reversed if the Afghan government does not deliver an effective combination of carrots to aid poor sharecroppers and sticks to enforce the law against high-value drug traffickers as the main drivers of drug production in Afghanistan.

The international community, led by the United States, must review and effectively double their counter-narcotics efforts on the global and regional levels, and to recommit firmly to providing Afghanistan with long-term law enforcement and alternative development resources necessary to win the drug war.