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July 29, 2008

Exclusive: A Modest Proposal for Afghanistan

John Howard

By all accounts, the opium trade in Afghanistan is the greatest source of funding for both al Qaeda and the Taliban. Critics of the Bush Administration - like the always reprehensible but predictable Robert Sheer - barely concealing their glee, are now referring to Afghanistan as a “narco-state.” (Why any American would be gleeful at the success of those who are killing our soldiers, is difficult to fathom, but that is another subject for another time. And they wonder why some of us consider them less than patriotic.)

That drug trade is flourishing. The cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan has nearly doubled in just the last year. Afghanistan now provides 92% of the world’s opium poppies. Protected to a small degree by Afghani warlords who profit handsomely by the trade, farmers find themselves at knife’s point at all sides. They are threatened by Taliban terrorists who demand they continue growing poppies and force them to pay a form of tax. They pay tribute to warlords. Their crops are destroyed by American-backed Afghani troops who want to cut off the funding sources that continue to drive the insurgency. And suggestions that they sow alternative crops are not sufficiently backed by government protection to make the change viable or safe.

Farmers who have seen their crops destroyed by the government crackdown on the drug trade have been force to give their daughters (so called “Opium Brides”) to those from whom they have borrowed money, because they cannot pay it back. At the same time, there are few alternative means of income available to farmers and middlemen that can generate the sort of revenue that the poppy trade can. Money and opportunity are not plentiful in Afghanistan, so the temptation to seize the possibility of, if not riches, at least solvency from the cultivation of a traditional crop, is too much for many to resist.

The poppy trade generates an estimated $3.1 billion in revenues – equal to half of the legal Afghani economy. It is unclear how much of that gets into the hands of al Qaeda and the Taliban, but reasonable estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars; plenty to fund a vigorous insurgency where living is cheap and to purchase sophisticated weapons and communications equipment.

Our response has been to pressure the Afghan government to engage in a war against drugs even as it is fighting for its survival against dangerous and vicious Islamic radicals. The integral connection between the insurgency and the cultivation of poppies requires what is essentially a two front war; a bad idea, goes the conventional wisdom, on a good day.

It also puts the Afghan government and the United States at cross purposes with the very people on whom long-term stability depends: the rural population and the warlords. It is well established that the warlords are loyal to nothing but their own power and wealth. When it suits their purposes, they support the government. When the government gets in the way of their profits, they support the insurgency.

The government can hardly expect support from farmers who have effectively had to prostitute their daughters to pay creditors because their crops have been destroyed by that same government. The destruction of their best cash crop not only robs them of their livelihood and their solvency, it can destroy something more precious to them: their families. It also cannot expect that the warlords, whose sole interests are to self and tribe, will be supportive of a strong government that can extend its power nationally if that government impinges on their power and profit.

The American war on drugs is our response to an American problem driven at least in part by a moral objection to drug use. The horrors visited on our nation in the 1960s by the fashion of drug abuse and the concomitant dramatic increase in crime of all types left a deep and lasting wound. Our knee jerk response to the cultivation of crops that are the raw materials for drugs is the eradicate them. This response internationally has warped our foreign policy and threatens our project in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, our need to stem the funding of Islamic terrorism has intersected with our war against drug abuse within our own borders.

But the two efforts need not work at cross-purposes with one another. The opium poppy is the source for the production of morphine and codeine, two widely prescribed drugs, those that are most effective for the treatment of pain. With the rise of the middle class in the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, there is an increasing demand for better medical treatment. The World Health Organization considers morphine and codeine among the most important pain treatment drugs and estimates that there will shortly be a world shortage of those drugs. Indeed, we have experienced such shortages in the past, resulting in increased prices and less effective health care.

The United States currently gets 80% of its legal medicinal opium from India and Turkey and Australia is attempting to revive its poppy farming capability to compete in the world market. The cultivation of opium poppies is legal in many parts of the world and is not even subject to licensure in some, such as Hungary.

Our war against the poppy growers of Afghanistan is not only counter-productive to our effort in that nation, but represents a lost opportunity. We certainly can afford to pay much more for the poppy crops of Afghanistan than al Qaeda and the Taliban. We should, therefore, shift our policy from eradication to purchase. We should develop and implement a program through the Afghani government that establishes a department for the exploitation of this particular natural resource, not unlike the Oil Ministries of other Middle Eastern nations that would organize and manage the poppy crops and provide support, by way of protection, for farmers who engage in poppy farming.

This would result in the creation of an entire industry with all the trappings, organization and control that goes with an organized effort and entrepreneurial activity. It would drive out corruption and freelancing and make it more difficult for outlaws to exploit an effort that will continue in any event. With the assistance of American and European drug companies, this industry could be developed and managed for the benefit of Afghanistan and the world health effort. Excess supply, if any, could be provided to Third World nations through the United Nations purchased as a type of foreign aid.

The Afghani government should, with our encouragement and logistical support, engage the warlords in the effort so they see that their long term opportunity for profit rests more with the United States and the Afghani government than with others who will not be able to compete, financially, with the prices paid by American companies anxious to expand their sources of legal medicinal opium. This would not only break warlords away from support of the Taliban, it would ensure that they would, like the Awakening Councils in Iraq, step up with arms and fighters, to protect their profits against Taliban interference. This would go a long way toward bringing peace to the entire country; engage the warlords in the idea of an organized government and actively involve them in the building of a nation, all through an appeal to their self-interest.

The Taliban and al Qaeda, for their part, would not be able to compete with this effort economically and would lose the hearts and minds of the rural people and farmers of Afghanistan. Local organizations would arise to protect the possibility of wealth and economic progress. Support for the Taliban would evaporate as the people saw their future success lying with the government rather than with the terrorists. Economic stability would begin to take root in those areas in which poppies are grown and the tension between the residents and the government would dissipate.

The result would be to starve international terrorism. So long as Islamic terrorists have the ready availability of cash by illicit drug sales, they will continue their murderous activities. We have already seen how this works in Columbia. The FARC would long since have disappeared had it not had the ability to fund itself with the drug trade. Hugo Chávez’s current contributions are of recent vintage for a movement that is 40 years old. Cutting off the source of the FARC’s wealth has always been United States policy. We are simply transplanting that policy to Afghanistan rather than in giving some thought to how we can co-opt the trade that supports the terrorists with the purchase of resources we certainly need and surely can use.

In addition, the worldwide illicit trade in opium would be severely disrupted as sources of supply would disappear. This would have the desired effect in the United States as the cost of illicit heroin and other poppy based illegal drugs would geometrically increase as supply shrinks.

The result could be increased stability in Afghanistan not only in violence but economically. The people would be safer, richer and less subject to the solicitations of those who would deny them their freedom and attack us.

This approach solves our problem in winning the support of the people. It starves the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies. It offers stability where there is none. It engages the necessary independent balkanized warlords in the project of nation building. It disrupts the world market in illegal opium products. It stabilizes the government of Afghanistan. It provides a new source of important legal medicinal opium It secures resources that will be increasingly necessary and it organizes the industry.

Who knows? At some point, the opium industry could be the defining legal business of Afghanistan and the source of its greatest wealth. Then idiots like Robert Sheer can argue that the war in Afghanistan was just about our desire to control the poppy industry for the benefit of American pharmaceutical companies.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.

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