The Opium Wars in Afghanistan

In ways that have escaped most observers, the Obama
administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in
Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President
Obama finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on
February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marja in southern
Afghanistan's Helmand Province. As a wave of helicopters descended on
Marja's outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. Marines dashed
through fields sprouting opium poppies toward the town's mud-walled
compounds.

After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander General Stanley A.
McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice-president and
Helmand's provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the
general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing
government to remote villages just like Marja.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers,
however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some
unexpected, unscripted anger. "If they come with tractors," one Afghani
widow announced
to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will
have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy."

For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of
government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous
threat: opium eradication.

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely
unaware that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin capital --
with hundreds
of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick
houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade
heroin. After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand Province produce a
remarkable 40% of the world's illicit opium supply, and much of this
harvest has been traded in Marja. Rushing through those opium fields to
attack the Taliban on day one of this offensive, the Marines missed
their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as
they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerrillas whose guns and
wages are funded by those poppy plants. "You can't win this war," said
one U.S. Embassy official just back from inspecting these opium
districts, "without taking on drug production in Helmand Province."

Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul Sunday, National Security
Adviser James L. Jones assured
reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan
President Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the
fight to the narco-traffickers." The drug trade, he added, "provides a
lot of the economic engine for the insurgents."

Just as these Marja farmers spoiled General McChrystal's media event,
so their crop has subverted every regime that has tried to rule
Afghanistan for the past 30 years. During the CIA's covert war in the
1980s, opium financed the mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as
President Ronald Reagan called them) who finally forced the Soviets to
abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist client state.

In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the
country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and
profiting from opium -- and then, ironically, fell from power only
months after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the US
military intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the
government in Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose
guerrillas have taken control of ever larger parts of the Afghan
countryside.

These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise
in Afghanistan's opium harvest -- from just 250 tons in 1979 to 8,200
tons in 2007. For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest
has accounted for as much as 50% of the country's gross domestic product
(GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90% of the world's
heroin supply.

The ecological devastation and societal
dislocation from these three war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply
into the Afghan grain that it defies solution by Washington's best and
brightest (as well as its most inept and least competent). Caroming
between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total eradication, the
Bush administration dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and
in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the
government of its ally, President Karzai. In recent years, opium
farming has
supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly 20% of the country's
estimated population, and funds
a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the
countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in
poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for
all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or
rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to
establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit and by
definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If
the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done,
then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still
grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each
step in the chain of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting,
labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security
for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in
Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past
nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three
Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30
years -- the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s
(fueled at its start by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001,
the U.S. invasion, occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each
of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its
Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of benign
neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one
narco-state.

CIA Covert Warfare, Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs:
the 1980s

Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA
covert war against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret
operations that it conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia which
stretch for 5,000 miles from Turkey to Thailand. In the late 1940s, as
the Cold War was revving up, the United States first mounted covert
probes of communism's Asian underbelly. For 40 years thereafter, the CIA
fought a succession of secret wars along this mountain rim -- in Burma
during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In
one of history's ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China
and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia's opium zone along this
same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the
region's highland warlords.

Washington's first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union
invaded the country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the Afghan
capital. Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan
administration worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a
ten-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.

This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold
War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet
conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile
highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate
recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug
trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its
own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much
of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which
soon became a powerful and ever more problematic ally.

When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as
overall leader of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington -- with few
alternatives -- agreed. Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2
billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to
Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at
unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival
resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990,
the Washington Post published a front-page article charging
that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin
laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the
CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the
Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing
region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural
areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a
revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they
sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's
protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium production grew
ten-fold -- from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years of covert
CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. Attorney General
announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the
American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani
heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside
Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2
million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington
just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country
with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million
landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in
tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among
themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally cut
its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan's ISI
continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term
goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.

Druglords, Dragon's Teeth, and Civil Wars: the 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in
a lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power. It was almost as
if the soil had been sown with those dragons' teeth of ancient myth
that can suddenly sprout into an army of full-grown warriors, who leap
from the earth with swords drawn for war.

When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the
communist regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three
years, Pakistan still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn,
unleashed his artillery on the besieged capital. The result: the deaths
of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans. Even a slaughter of such
monumental proportions, however, could not win power for this unpopular
fundamentalist. So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban and in
September 1996, it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the
Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of
the capital.

During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned
heavily on opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest
to 4,600 tons by 1999. Throughout these two decades of warfare and a
twenty-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself was slowly
transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem -- with herding,
orchards, and over 60 food crops -- into the world's first economy
dependent on the production of a single illicit drug. In the process, a
fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.

Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where
clouds arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is
an arid land. Its staple food crops have historically been sustained by
irrigation systems that rely on snowmelt from the region's high
mountains. To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan tribesmen herded
vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles every year to summer
pasture in the central uplands. Most important of all, farmers planted
perennial tree crops -- walnut, pistachio, and mulberry -- which thrived
because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are remarkably
resistant to the region's periodic droughts, offering relief from the
threat of famine in the dry years.

During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated
the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of
the orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with
firepower, the Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society's
economic jugular, violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan
warfare by cutting down the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of
Kabul.

All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a veritable
Gordian knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole
solution. Like Alexander's legendary sword, it offered a
straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any aid
to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their orchards,
Afghan farmers -- including some 3 million returning refugees -- found
sustenance in opium, which had historically been but a small part of
their agriculture.

Since poppy cultivation requires nine times more labor per hectare
than wheat, opium offered immediate seasonal employment to more than a
million Afghans -- perhaps half of those actually employed at the time.
In this ruined land and ravaged economy, opium merchants alone could
accumulate capital rapidly and so give poppy farmers crop loans
equivalent to more than half their annual incomes, credit critical to
the survival of many poor villagers.

In marked contrast to the marginal yields the country's harsh climate
offers most food crops, Afghanistan proved ideal for opium. On
average, each hectare of Afghan poppy land produces three to five times
more than its chief competitor, Burma. Most important of all, in such
an arid ecosystem, subject to periodic drought, opium uses less than
half the water needed for staples such as wheat.

After taking power in 1996, the Taliban regime encouraged a
nationwide expansion of opium cultivation, doubling production to 4,600
tons, then equivalent to 75% of the world's heroin supply. Signaling its
support for drug production, the Taliban regime began collecting a 20%
tax from the yearly opium harvest, earning an estimated $100 million in
revenues.

In retrospect, the regime's most important innovation was undoubtedly
the introduction of large-scale heroin refining in the environs of the
city of Jalalabad. There, hundreds of crude labs set to work, paying
only a modest production tax of $70 on every kilo of heroin powder.
According to U.N. researchers, the Taliban also presided over bustling
regional opium markets in Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, protecting
some 240 top traders there.

During the 1990s, Afghanistan's soaring opium harvest fueled an
international smuggling trade that tied Central Asia, Russia, and Europe
into a vast illicit market of arms, drugs, and money-laundering. It
also helped fuel an eruption of ethnic insurgency across a 3,000-mile
swath of land from Uzbekistan in Central Asia to Bosnia in the Balkans.

In July 2000, however, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar suddenly
ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in a desperate bid for
international recognition. Remarkably enough, almost overnight the
Taliban regime used the ruthless repression for which it was infamous to
slash the opium harvest by 94% to only 185 metric tons.

By then, however, Afghanistan had become dependent on poppy
production for most of its taxes, export income, and employment. In
effect, the Taliban's ban was an act of economic suicide that brought an
already weakened society to the brink of collapse. This was the
unwitting weapon the U.S. wielded when it began its military campaign
against the Taliban in October 2001. Without opium, the regime was
already a hollow shell and essentially imploded at the bursting of the
first American bombs.

The Return of the
CIA, Opium, and Counterinsurgency: 2001-

To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully
mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns
and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and
its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban's
opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse
of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting
in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a Tokyo
international donors' conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai, the new
Prime Minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued a pro
forma ban on opium growing -- without any means of enforcing it
against the power of these resurgent local warlords.

After investing some three billion dollars in Afghanistan's
destruction during the Cold War, Washington and its allies now proved
parsimonious in the reconstruction funds they offered. At that 2002
Tokyo conference, international donors promised just four billion
dollars of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the economy over
the next five years. In addition, the total U.S. spending of $22 billion
for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply
toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for
agriculture. (And as in Iraq, significant sums from what
reconstruction funds were available simply went into
the pockets of Western experts, private contractors, and their
local counterparts.)

Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when,
during the first year of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's opium
harvest surged to 3,400 tons. Over the next five years, international
donors would contribute $8 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium
would infuse nearly twice that amount, $14 billion, directly into the
rural economy without any deductions by either those Western experts or
Kabul's bloated bureaucracy.

While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush
administration downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to
Great Britain and police training to Germany. As the lead agency in
Allied operations, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department regarded
opium as a distraction from its main mission of defeating the Taliban
(and, of course, invading Iraq). Waving away the problem in late 2004,
President Bush said
he did not want to "waste another American life on a narco-state.''
Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, U.S. forces worked
closely with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.

After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's drug
production had swelled to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007,
the U.N. reported
that the country's record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an
area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185
tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now
produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP
and 93% of global heroin supply.

In this way, Afghanistan became the world's first true "narco-state."
If a cocaine traffic that provided just 3% of Colombia's GDP could
bring in its wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of
corrupting that country's government, then we can only imagine the
consequences of Afghanistan's dependence on opium for more than 50% of
its entire economy.

At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's
Federal Narcotics Service estimated
the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion. Only
$500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers, $300
million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the
drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a
nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

Indeed, opium's influence is so pervasive
that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's police
chief, the defense minister, and the
president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous
and crippling is this corruption that, according to recent
U.N. estimates, Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion
in bribes. Not surprisingly, the government's repeated attempts at
opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the U.N. has
called "corrupt deals between field owners, village elders, and
eradication teams."

Not only have drug taxes funded an expanding guerrilla force, but the
Taliban's role in protecting opium farmers and the heroin merchants who
rely on their crop gives them real control over the core of the
country's economy. In January 2009, the U.N. and anonymous U.S.
"intelligence officials" estimated that drug traffic provided Taliban
insurgents with $400 million a year. "Clearly," commented
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "we have to go after the drug labs and
the druglords that provide support to the Taliban and other insurgents."

In mid-2009, the U.S. embassy launched
a multi-agency effort, called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, to cut
Taliban drug monies through financial controls. But one American
official soon compared this effort to "punching jello." By August 2009, a
frustrated Obama administration had ordered the
U.S. military to "kill or capture" 50 Taliban-connected druglords who
were placed on a classified "kill list."

Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact, declined
somewhat -- to 6,900 tons last year (still over 90% of the world's
opium supply). While U.N. analysts attribute this 20% reduction largely
to eradication efforts, a more likely cause has been the global glut of
heroin that came with the Afghan opium boom, and which had depressed the
price of poppies by 34%. In fact, even this reduced Afghan opium crop
is still far above total world demand, which the U.N. estimates
at 5,000 tons per annum.

Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts
next month, indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some U.S.
officials who have surveyed Helmand's opium heartland see signs of an
expanded crop. Even the U.N. drug experts who have predicted a
continuing decline in production are not
optimistic about long-term trends. Opium prices might decline for a
few years, but the price of wheat and other staple crops is dropping
even faster, leaving poppies as by far the most profitable crop for poor
Afghan farmers.

Ending the Cycle of Drugs and Death

With its forces now planted in the dragon's teeth soil of
Afghanistan, Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending
cycle of drugs and death. Every spring in those rugged mountains, the
snows melt, the opium seeds sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters
takes to the field, many to die by lethal American fire. And the next
year, the snows melt again, fresh poppy shoots break through the soil,
and a new crop of teen-aged Taliban fighters pick up arms against
America, spilling more blood. This cycle has been repeated for the past
ten years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely.

Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding
Afghanistan's rural economy -- with its orchards, flocks, and food crops
-- as high as $30 billion or, for that matter, $90 billion dollars, the
money is at hand. By conservative estimates, the cost
of President Obama's ongoing surge of 30,000 troops alone is $30
billion a year. So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would create
ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan, making
it possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without
joining the Taliban's army.

Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has
no realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of
Afghanistan's agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now
numbers about 120,000 soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban's growth
into an omnipresent shadow government and an effective guerrilla army.
The idea that our expanded military presence might soon succeed in
driving back that force and handing over pacification to the illiterate,
drug-addicted Afghan
police and army
remains, for the time being, a fantasy. Quick fixes like paying poppy
farmers not to plant, something British and Americans have both tried,
can backfire and end up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation.
Rapid drug eradication without alternative employment, something the
private contractor DynCorp tried so
disastrously under a $150 million contract in 2005, would simply
plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and
destabilizing the Kabul government further.

So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this
deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain
outcome -- for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or
we can begin to withdraw American forces while helping renew this
ancient, arid land by replanting its orchards, replenishing its flocks,
and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined in decades of war.

At this point, our only realistic choice is this sort of serious
rural development -- that is, reconstructing the Afghan countryside
through countless small-scale projects until food crops become a viable
alternative to opium. To put it simply, so simply that even Washington
might understand, you can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer
a narco-state.