Opium, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror

Part 2. After the Invasion

A few years after 9/11

In this New Yorker article from April, 2004, Seymour Hersh describes the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afganistan, which included a sharp increase in opium production throughout much of the country. Whatever the other consequences of "regime change" in Afghanistan, the international heroin trade based on Afghan opium has flourished under the weak political control of the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai. This small and remote nation now accounts for 93 percent of the world's opium production.

In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country’s future to CNN’s Larry King. “They have elected a government. . . . The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds,” Rumsfeld said. “There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it’s not going to be a perfectly tidy place.” Nonetheless, he said, “I’m hopeful, I’m encouraged.” And he added, “I wish them well.”

A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week’s international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a “terrorist breeding ground” unless there is a significant increase in development aid....

Heroin is among the most immediate—and the most intractable—social, economic, and political problems. “The problem is too huge for us to be able to face alone,” Hamid Karzai declared last week in Berlin, as he appealed for more aid. “Drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of the Afghan state.” Drug dealing and associated criminal activity produced about $2.3 billion in revenue last year, according to an annual survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a sum that was equivalent to half of Afghanistan’s legitimate gross domestic product. “Terrorists take a cut as well,” the U.N. report noted, adding that “the longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country.”

The U.N. report, published last fall, found that opium production, which, following a ban imposed by the Taliban, had fallen to a hundred and eighty-five metric tons in 2001, soared last year to three thousand six hundred tons—a twentyfold increase. The report declared the nation to be “at a crossroads: either (i) energetic interdiction measures are taken now . . . or (ii) the drug cancer in Afghanistan will keep spreading and metastasise into corruption, violence and terrorism—within and beyond the country’s borders.” Afghanistan was once again, the U.N. said, producing three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium, with no evidence of a cutback in sight, even though there has been a steady stream of reports from Washington about drug interdictions. The report said that poppy cultivation had continued to spread, and was now reported in twenty-eight of the nation’s thirty-two provinces.

Most alarmingly, according to a U.N. survey, nearly seventy per cent of farmers intend to increase their poppy crops in 2004, most of them by more than half. Only a small percentage of farmers were planning any reduction, despite years of international pressure. Many of the areas that the U.N. report identified as likely to see increased production are in regions where the United States has a major military presence.

Despite such statistics, the American military has, for the most part, looked the other way, essentially because of the belief that the warlords can deliver the Taliban and Al Qaeda. One senior N.G.O. official told me, “Everybody knows that the U.S. military has the drug lords on the payroll. We’ve put them back in power. It’s gone so terribly wrong.” (The Pentagon’s Joseph Collins told me, “Counter-narcotics in Afghanistan has been a failure.” Collins said that this year’s crop was estimated to be the second largest on record. He added, however, that the Afghan government is planning to “redouble” its efforts on narcotics control, and that the Pentagon is “now putting more money into it for the first time”—seventy-three million dollars.)

Today

Three years after Hersh's hard-hitting story, it is increasingly apparent that U.S. policy in this region has contributed to a drug problem of unprecedented proportions. After a drop in Afghan opium production in 2005, the cultivation of this crop resumed its explosive growth and has now reached levels over twice as high as before 9/11. Clearly, the War on Terror in Afghanistan and the surrounding region has produced some serious set-backs for the War on Drugs. The following passage from the Forward of the most recent United Nations report on opium production in Afghanistan describes the current situation in that beleaguered nation.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007

The world's leading drug producer

In 2007, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium poppies, an increase of 17% over the last year. The amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for coca cultivation in Latin America (Columbia, Peru and Bolivia combined).

Favourable weather conditions produced opium yields (42.5 kg per hectare) higher than last year (37.0 kg/ha). As a result, in 2007 Afghanistan produced an extraordinary 8,200 tons of opium (34% more than in 2006), becoming practically the exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug (93% of the global opiates market). Leaving aside 19th century China, that had a population at that time 15 times larger than today's Afghanistan, no other country in the world has ever produced narcotics on such a deadly scale...

The Taliban today control vast swathes of land...along the Pakistani border. By preventing national authorities and international agencies from working, insurgents have allowed greed and corruption to turn orchards, wheat and vegtable fields into poppy fields.

It would be an historic error to let Afghanistan collapse under the blows of drugs and insurgency. This double threat is real and growing, despite a foreign military presence in the tens of thousands, billions of dollars spent on reconstruction, and the huge political capital invested in stabilizing a country that has been in turmoil for a third of a century.