Afghanistan

  The post-2001 Afghanistan government in Kabul, however, has not wavered from its commitment to make narcotics cultivation and trafficking illegal. Not only Afghan law but traditional justice systems do not accept the claims by cultivators and traffickers that either poverty or the desire to extract revenge on the infidel occupiers justify cultivation of a substance considered prohibited by international standards and the Koran alike. Yet the fact remains that one of the most important reasons for the rise of narcotics cultivation in many areas of Afghanistan after 2001 was the lack of alternatives, which Kabul and its foreign supporters have found providing problematic. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), some 98 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy cultivators would be willing to turn to another crop if it provided as much as half as much as they earned from their current crop.244 The reason why opium cultivation has become concentrated in seven southern provinces with a strong insurgent presence is that this makes presenting alternatives impossible, and so the cultivation continues.

  The Nature of the Threat

  As with most activities in Afghanistan, it is difficult to generalize about narcotics cultivation and trafficking, which has historically varied greatly between and even within provinces.245 In parts of Afghanistan, even the good guys grow poppy. In places such as Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the cultivation is so widespread and ingrained in the local economy that no major landowner or local official can avoid dealing with cultivation. If there was no cultivation, there would be few viable alternative sources for income or services in much of those war-torn areas. The strength of the insurgency in those areas means that Kabul and its supporters are in no position to offer an alternative to the crop that provides insurgents with much financial support.

  “The Taliban and other groups are not running the drug trade but work in service of it,” in the words of Gretchen Peters.246 All of the terrorist and insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan are involved to a greater or lesser extent in narcotics. The Afghan Taliban is the largest single Afghan group involved in narcotics, but Haqqani and HiH are also known to be involved. In some areas, insurgents are participants in the narcotics-based violence. Elsewhere, traffickers have their own armed men. In 2005–06, HiH was widely believed to have murdered crop substitution aid workers in Helmand.247 Other groups involved are basically criminals that have adopted Islamic names and alliances as a matter of convenience. As with everything else in Afghanistan, there is no central command and there is extensive, often violent, competition between groups, with many Afghans trying to call in Afghan security forces or coalition airstrikes on rivals to give them a greater market share. Many insurgent commanders that have been killed or captured were targeted in this way, indicating the tensions between different insurgent groups and terrorists and insurgents and the traffickers.

  Afghan groups appear to have control over the opium traffic within the borders of Afghanistan. Afghan insurgents offer protection for growers and opposition to counter-narcotics efforts in exchange for funding. They seek to use the traditional Afghan approach to patronage relations to create a culture of dependency. Since 2005–06 more and more laboratories and refineries dedicated to opium have moved in to take advantage of the insurgency. After the 2007 increase in the crop, large-scale stockpiling of opium by traffickers appears to be taking place, to prevent flooding the market and as insurance against the time when Afghanistan may not be able to produce, if the counter-narcotics efforts can be extended throughout the country.248 By 2008–09, the insurgency was taking a more hands-on role in this process, as the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups are now being reported as running their own laboratories and providing protection and transportation for those laboratories run by outside traffickers, who pay for this service.249 Since cultivation of the poppies from which opium is extracted attracts less money than those actions higher up the value-added chain such as refining or sales, the traffickers set the farmgate price so that they usually pay the Afghan farmers only a little more than they would get with a legal crop, usually wheat. This means that if a farmer or laborer can earn four dollars a day or more from a legal crop, the appeal of opium will be undercut.250 Yet there is in many areas none of the infrastructure necessary for legal commodities to succeed in the global market the way Afghanistan’s poppies have done.

  The opium traffickers have, in many cases, created the only thing resembling a social support network in much of southern Afghanistan. Narcotics traffickers also provide other vital services for their farmer clients, including providing credit. Others provide capital equipment or maintain services, including health clinics in some areas. Since the economy of rural Afghanistan has traditionally run on credit and, with the population largely too high in debt by 2001 to borrow further, this has been an area where crop substitution programs were often not adequate, giving narcotics traffickers an additional hold over the cultivators. After years of drought, warfare, and the impact of the Taliban, rural Afghanistan faced a total lack of new credit. There was no one willing or able to extend credit. Traditional sources of credit—kinship and patronage—were almost at maximum capacity, leaving many Afghan farmers desperate.

  While lending money at interest is impermissible under Sharia (or legal codes based on it), a buyer, including a narcotics trafficker, may pay a farmer in advance for crops through a Salam contract. These contracts were written so that the farmer could never actually pay off the debt, so that each year he would become more heavily indebted. Because the debts are usually denominated in kilos of opium (especially in provinces such as Kandahar and Helmand), price rises increase each farmer’s debt. This created a cycle that, once the farmers were in debt, they could not get out of and to even stay even required delivering increasing amounts of opium, further binding them to the narcotics cultivators.

  Because debts may remain even if the cultivation of opium is halted, suppression of opium (and removal of the source of credit) has often led to other social ills, such as debt bondage and child labor, which increased notably in Nangarhar in 2007–08 as opium cultivation was reduced. Elsewhere, especially in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, opium traffickers have guarded their investments by forcing the cultivator to bear the risks of falling prices. The drop in opium prices in 2008–09, as with earlier price reductions, led to widespread hardship, including families without possessions having to turn over children to creditors.251

  Relapses in areas that had halted growing opium for a few years have proved common, both after the Taliban’s 2001 prohibition and in the case of several provinces that the UN declared opium-free in 2005–07.252 Other opium-free provinces, especially Nangarhar, have the potential to relapse if the security situation deteriorates. Security and viable alternative livelihoods are conditions that must precede any effective eradication of Afghanistan’s narcotics. In 2007–10, where security has been present, the cultivation of narcotics has been reduced, even in provinces threatened by insurgents such as Nangarhar, although the possibility of a relapse if market prices shift remains a threat. To combat this, the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) was, in 2009, aiming to implement a new agricultural program to prevent poppy-free provinces from relapsing.253 It will be years before it can be implemented and its effectiveness assessed. Narcotics traffic goes through many such poppy-free provinces, but the corruption that keeps this trade flowing has given local leaders, including warlords, a degree of independence from Kabul’s authority, allowing them to conduct business as usual. By 2005, a senior US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official in Kabul estimated that 90 percent of the police chiefs in Afghanistan were involved in corruption through narcotics.254 This is not a comforting statistic for a country trying to establish rule of law. Narcotics money has rendered much of the culture of corruption financially self-sustaining, even in areas where no poppy is currently being grown. There are multiple levels of Afghans, ranging from the ANP to local patrons and members of parliament, to be paid off. “Corrupt state actors move
more than insurgents” is the view of Gretchen Peters, former AP correspondent in Pakistan.255

  The Impact of the Threat

  The economic impact of narcotics is perhaps the most powerful one, more so than its role in financially aiding the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups. In 2007–08, narcotics cultivation and trafficking was estimated to be about half the size of Afghanistan’s legal gross domestic product (GDP).256 The UNODC reports: “Opium permeates much of the rural economy, with critical links to employment generation, access to land and credit. Opium markets, prices and traders populate the Afghan landscape and provide important signals for economic actors. Drug money is a very important, often dominant ingredient in the informal financial transfer system (hawala), which is also the main vehicle in Afghanistan for payments and transfers of funds, including remittances and much aid. Through protection payments and connections the drug industry has major linkages with the local administration as well as high levels of national government.”257 The concentration of opium cultivation in southern provinces has made it increasingly intertwined with the insurgency.

  While terrorist and insurgent propaganda seeks to justify opium cultivation and traffic as striking a blow against the infidels, in reality it is Muslims that have suffered. Since 2001, addiction rates have soared in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and central Asia (Kazakhstan reportedly has over two million addicts), not Europe or America. “Over one million Afghans are now using. The park near the cinema [in central Kabul] is full of needles. 2009 will show increasing addiction,” according to one UNAMA official.258 By 2008 Afghanistan had established 17 health facilities for treating addicts.259 Iran, after waging a large-scale “war on drugs” since the 1980s which included large-scale clashes between paramilitary forces and well-armed traffickers, has now evolved its own “culture of corruption” which is being used by Afghanistan’s terrorists and insurgents.260 The Iranian government remains opposed to Afghanistan-based narcotics trafficking, which they see as supporting the insurgency. Iran estimates 2,500 tons of opium entered the country from Afghanistan in 2008, 700 tons of which are used in Iran and over 500 tons of which were seized (some of this later being resold).261

  In previous years, corruption fed narcotics cultivation, especially in the years following the fall of the Taliban in 2001 when police checkpoints and extractive officials made legal crops in much of southern Afghanistan noncompetitive with those from northern Afghanistan, let alone imported from Pakistan. Today, narcotics cultivation both causes corruption and is caused by it.

  The real money is made by the refiners and traders, providing value-addition along the chain of trafficking that stretches from Afghanistan to addicts in London and New York. Some of the money is evident in the large houses of politically connected Afghans in Kabul and Dubai. Most of it never comes to the everyday Afghan in any form; even those involved in cultivation usually sink further into debt. What does come to Afghanistan goes to the insurgents. The insurgents tax the opium trade for support—most readily apparent in a ten percent tax (ushr) usually paid in kind at the farm gate—and receive money paid for protection by traffickers of opium fields, laboratories, and trafficking. Drug laboratories and refineries inside Afghanistan and Pakistan are both usually taxed by local insurgents. In March 2009, GEN Bantz Craddock, USA, then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that of the 60 billion dollars created by the narcotics trade in Afghanistan, some 4 billion remained in Afghanistan, but this went largely to the insurgents. Zalmay Afzali, spokesman to the Ministry of Counter Narcotics in Kabul in 2008, estimated the total Afghan opium income at five billion dollars, of which just a third of one percent (0.3 percent) went to the farmers.262 “The real drug traffickers are not in Afghanistan,” he said. In 2007, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the insurgents, major traffickers in their own right, earned 156 million dollars in ushr, 133 million dollars in taxes on refineries, over 250 million in protection fees, and tens of millions in benefits to the insurgents through access to equipment and support services funded by the traffickers and also used by them.263 In 2009, estimates on the Afghan Taliban’s income from narcotics ranged from 70 to 400 million dollars.264

  There have been many instances where shared economic interests in opium have brought the insurgents and the rural population together.265 Ali Shah Mazlumyar, a tribal elder from Marja District of Helmand province, said: “The [poppy eradication] campaign destroyed lands belonging to pro-government farmers. . . . Then the Taliban showed those farmers that they could protect them. So even the pro-government farmers took up arms and stood with the Taliban when the interior ministry came.”266 Zalmay Afzali said that Afghans “have to face eradication at several levels. Resistance comes not from the farmer, but from the terrorists. Seventy seven policemen were killed doing eradication in the most recent [2008] growing season, many by landmines and suicide bombs, things that farmers do not do.”267 There is a considerable contingent that does not want Afghan narcotics cultivation to cease even if the proverbial magic wand could replace opium with an alternative crop that yields as much and employs as many people per hectare. This sentiment means that creating viable agricultural alternatives is likely to require more than mere crop substitution.

  In Search of a Viable Counter-Narcotics Approach

  The failures of the US and its coalition partners to address narcotics cultivation and trafficking after the fall of the Taliban contributed greatly to the reemergence of terrorism and insurgency in the Vortex. The UK was initially responsible for counter-narcotics after the fall of the Taliban, under the US-developed system of sectorial “lead countries.” However, in addition to inadequate resources, this approach took the narcotics problem out of its larger social and economic contexts, which any potential solutions must also address. Being seen by coalition members and Afghans alike as a British responsibility essentially ensured that the problem would get out of hand. In reality, it is impossible to treat narcotics as a problem independent from the creation of governance and a viable economy in rural Afghanistan. The British were not the “lead country,” nor were they given the proper resources to deal with the broader social and economic context of restoring a legal economy to rural Afghanistan, nor were they prepared to address the demobilization of Afghan fighting men, both former Taliban and their opponents. Yet all these factors proved to be critical in the reemergence of narcotics.

  As a result of the limitations of this initial effort, the US took a larger role in counter-narcotics, allocating some 1.468 billion dollars in 2005–08 compared to 1.545 billion dollars by the UK; yet the US effort was described by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as “the most wasteful and ineffective program I have seen in 40 years in and out of government.”268 About half of the US effort was devoted to eradication efforts. Because the US emerged as the largest donor, eradication efforts came to dominate the efforts by Afghans and foreign supporters alike. Most of the US eradication efforts focused on the poppy fields, rather than potential targets higher up the value-added chain.

  The successor to these initial policy limitations emerged with the June 2007 Rome Conference on the Rule of Law in Afghanistan that resulted in aid pledges for 360 million dollars from a wide range of donor countries and international organizations and in a timetable for establishing a National Justice Program being set. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1817 in June 2008 to curb narcotics exports and the flow of precursor chemicals. The NATO decision at its 2008 Budapest conference to become more involved in counter-narcotics operations made it possible for ISAF forces to target transport, chemicals, and laboratories, as well as high-value individuals (including chemists, mainly from Pakistan and Iran, who have been recruited). “We need more involvement of international forces,” said Zalmay Afzali, Ministry of Counter Narcotics spokesman, in 2008.269

  But implementation of effective counter-narcotics operations did not follow the decision at Budapest. Many coalition
members are limited by their own national law or policy from using military forces in Counter Narcotics missions, regardless of NATO policy. Many Europeans are still not convinced of the urgency of the problem, despite the fact that their countries are the end-destinations of much of this Afghan opium; they are reluctant to let their troops be used even against laboratories and convoys, let alone growers.270 And so many countries participating in the coalition retain their national caveats preventing their forces from acting against narcotics in Afghanistan; others have to refer back to their home parliaments where political realities are unlikely to permit action. The potential cost in operations funds and casualties of operating against narcotics has deterred many coalition members. In Afghanistan, the rumors circulating among the population cited this as further evidence that the US and the West were not really interested in making things better in Afghanistan.

  The ability to reduce the number of provinces engaged in narcotics cultivation has reflected an increase in Afghan law enforcement presence and the availability of internationally supported programs providing alternative livelihoods, especially for farmers who are making use of crop substitution. As of 2008–10, there have been some moves against major Afghan figures (“kingpins”) in narcotics trafficking by the Kabul government, with 1,700 corruption cases opened as of October 2008. Yet on the whole, neither Kabul nor its foreign allies have been willing to target mid- and high-level Afghan officials or others close to them for involvement in narcotics. The political cost of such action is seen as being too high by many Afghans.