Jonathan Landay has the latest. Obviously, our priority over there should be stopping the Taliban, not stopping poppy growers. If Afghanistan were to become a stable, heroin-exporting country that didn't play host to radical anti-American terrorists that'd be a pretty good outcome in the scheme of things. Heroin use is a real problem, but it's not the biggest problem in the world, and there's no good reason to think that crop eradication programs in Afghanistan are an effect way of tackling the problem anyway.
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Herbicide in Afghanistan
26 Oct 2007 07:10 pm
Comments (20)
Good point Matt. By the way, if we're so keen on spraying crops overseas, why can't we do it in CA, OR, WA whre marijuana is endemic (actually the $ value has overtaken the cocaine traffic)? This double standard is killing me.
The war on drugs, from the air, is a good business proposition for our contractors. Since the war on drugs is a political sure thing there is nothing that can stop it. That it can't possibly succeed is almost as irrelevant as the political result on the ground in Afghanistan.
Obviously, our priority over there should be stopping the Taliban, not stopping poppy growers.
Actually, our priority should be going after Al Qaeda. Going after the Taliban should be primarily important as a means to that end.
if you cut out the poppies, you eliminate a major source of the funding of all the folks who hate us over there -- starving the beast isn't a bad thing. It's not the drug addict that I'm worried about. It's the guys who buy weapons with cash earned in the drug trade.
I didn't read the Landay article, but the problem with the above-quoted approach is that for Afghan farmers, the choice is between growing poppies--which brings in real money--and growing food crops--which brings in no money to speak of. So by destroying the opium crop, we're impoverishing (and pissing off) a major segment of the Afgahn people.
A better solution would be for the US to buy the opium from the farmers (and then burn it, I guess--is there a valid medical use for opium?) although I suspect this is, politically, a non-starter.
Crop eradication has been pretty much a failure everywhere it's been tried. The Taliban was OK at it back when we paid them to, because they eradicated the farmers as well as the crops. I suppose we could pay off the Taliban, bring them into a coalition, and pay them off even more to go on another killing spree, but that seems like kind of a bad idea. I wonder how long the narrative of Taliban as misunderstood stooges of the evil al Qaeda will take to roll out.
One grievance of Iran is that we protect opium growers in Afghanistan and as a result Iran is flooded with heroine. Iran offered to finance a crop substitution scheme, ad the offer was refused.
Imagine that China occupies Mexico, ignores the drug production and heroin floods American cities.
Return of opium wars?
Well, I actually went over and read the Landay article. From it:
"Opium production and heroin trafficking are fueling epidemic corruption and providing the Taliban with an estimated $30 million to $100 million per year for their war..."
$30 to 100 million? Is that it? The figure seems nonsensically small. (If the dollar amount really is that tiny, my earlier argument for simply buying up the opium crop becomes even stronger.)
if you cut out the poppies, you eliminate a major source of the funding of all the folks who hate us over there
And a major source of funding for eveyone else over there, including a lot of people on our side, too.
"(and then burn it, I guess--is there a valid medical use for opium?)"
Yes. Morphine is made from opium, although it can also be made synthetically. In fact, some have already proposed setting up Afghanistan as a legitimate supplier of opium for medicine. It's better than spraying.
What fostert said. The plan to buy Afghan opium to make painkillers like morphine for the third world has been debated in the UK (NYTimes on it here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E0DE103FF937A25753C1A9619C8B63) and it seems like a good idea to me.
In the 1970s, when the US was hit with a wave of cheap Heroin from Turkey and India, we actually made deals with the governments of those countries to license opium farmers and buy their crops to make painkillers. No reason why we couldn't do that now (if we buy more than is medically useful just destroy the rest). It would build the Afghan economy and, by creating incentives for farmers to license themselves and participate in a government compensation program could help extend the rule of law in that country and undermine extralegal authorities like the Taliban and garden-variety drug traffickers.
Sorry, messed up the URL above. Here it is for real: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E0DE103FF937A25753C1A9619C8B63
"And a major source of funding for eveyone else over there, including a lot of people on our side, too."
Actually, I suspect it was a major reason why we went to war with the Taliban. They had bought up (or seized) the crop and were (allegedly) stockpiling it, waiting for the market to drive the price up.
Somebody on "our side" didn't like that. It's almost a certainty that the Northern Alliance didn't like it - almost all of those warlords are into the drug trade. And equally certainly most of the politicians in Pakistan were in on it.
This leads to a possible "conspiracy theory" - some Pakistani ISI boys feed Al Qaeda the plan to attack the US, give them support (like the $100K sent to Mohammed Atta by an ISI officer), get the CIA to give them support (their contractors have been in the drug trade since day one), they do it, the US attacks the Taliban, it's happy days for the drug trade again. The ISI and the CIA roll in the dough.
A CIA plane allegedly used for "rendition" crashed south of the border with a couple tons of cocaine a while back. They're still trying to find out who actually owns it. Good luck with that.
There was a rumor one of Porter Goss's relatives operating out of Switzerland was deeply involved in the drug trade out of Afghanistan. That's about as tight a connection to the CIA as you could get.
Justin K- thanks for the link. I couldn't remember when or where I had read the story. That said, if the government were to burn the opium, I'd be more than happy to help out. For safety reasons, I'd have to burn it in small quantities. And, naturally, I'd have to inhale the smoke to protect any innocent bystanders. It would be a tough job, I know, but I'm willing to take a hit for the team.
I don't like anything that starts out with the word "Herbicide....."
This may be the first time I would ever suggest the use of a mission statement to help steer the ship. It seems to me, that part of the problem with the Bush terms has been in part the inability for all people to understand what the ultimate goals are. In other words, I am sure that somewhere along the line, someone within either the State Department or other government bureaucracy decided that this was a problem (i.e. – poppy production and heroin). So – why not eradicate the poppies, just as we do in cocoa in Colombia. Well, had they had the requirement to devise only policies that will endear the Afghan population to the new government and the American presence within the country, this policy would have been DOA.
As for buying the product – not a good idea. You are essentially just going to push up demand for poppies, pushing up the supply, making America have to buy more and more. Again – if you deal with drug problems on a demand side basis versus supply side, suddenly you can care a whole lot less about what foreign countries are growing. The big problem is there is less money to made by large contractors for treatment than there is for America to purchase planes, equipment and resources to fight proxy wars against drug cartels.
Don't forget there's no herbicide that will just kill poppies. So not only are you going to kill the illegal opium trade, you're going to kill people's legitimately grown food crops, in all likelihood. Starve the people to save them! Hey, it worked well in Vietnam...
Poppy eradication primarily hurts the farmers. Opium is stable, so it can be and is stored for years. If we spray a major percentage of this years crop, the traffickers will sell their reserves at premium prices while the growers get nothing.
The solution is rather simple, but expensive.
You have to offer development aid on village level, and assure the market for legitimate crops. That means putting a lot of local people on payroll to resore (and expand) irrigation systems, offer small loans to replant orchards etc. I mention orchards because producing nuts and dried fruits has a big tradition there. You need a lot of money and a lot of people.
Iran would be ready to provide big aid because they are the biggest market for Afghan heroine. Iranians also speak a similar language, and can buy the crops. They would increase their influence on the local level, but so what? Afghanistan is on crossroads from nowhere to nowhere so to speak, without any strategic value for us. And given that most of Afghans are Sunni, Iran's influence cannot be dominating anyway while engaging them in a project in which we have the same interest can smooth other problems.
What will not work are solutions from airplanes. Herbicides are killing other plans and cause severe health problems; certain percentage of sprayed people develop severe allergies and skin diseases, and thus you cannot just spray everything down there that is red in the spring.
One should also remember that there is big overproduction of opium, so destroying say, half of the crop just brings supplies to some balance with demand and does not dent the drug problem.
You have to offer development aid on village level, and assure the market for legitimate crops.
WHAT?!! That's COMMUNISM!
Oh, wait:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Agriculture/BG1542.cfm
Also, in response to market-oriented critics of the plan of the US buying up opium: I think it's important that the cost of such a program be balanced against the ongoing cost (high) of existing military operations in Afghanistan. We're already spending a pile o' money over there--if we can defeat the Taliban more cheaply by outbidding them on the opium market, I say we should do it.
Comments closed November 09, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Matt, if you cut out the poppies, you eliminate a major source of the funding of all the folks who hate us over there -- starving the beast isn't a bad thing. It's not the drug addict that I'm worried about. It's the guys who buy weapons with cash earned in the drug trade.
Posted by Mark Adams | October 26, 2007 7:55 PM