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Presented by Vanda Felbab-Brown,
Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Thank you for the introduction. It is great to be here on this distinguished panel and among the other distinguished participants of the conference. I would also like to thank the organizers for putting together this conference on an issue of great importance for the future of Afghanistan and with implications for the global effort to curb the international drug trade with illicit narcotics and against terrorism.
There are multiple links between the illegal drug economy and conflict. The ability of belligerent groups – be they guerrillas, terrorists, or warlords – to penetrate the illicit economy greatly increases the strength and staying power of such groups. The first benefit belligerent groups derive from illicit economies (not simply narcotics, but other illegal economies) is monetary. The profits they acquire are frequently very large, in the tens of millions of dollars a year. With this money, they can finance their weapons acquisition. This relationship is well-known and accepted. However, apart from weapons, belligerent groups derive two additional important benefits from their sponsorship of an illicit economy. They derive direct military advantages – since their logistics and procurement is greatly simplified by the ease of weapons acquisition due to the income from illicit economies, they can optimize their military tactics with their overall strategy. For example, they no longer need to attack military and police outposts to procure weapons. Instead, they can concentrate on other, more military effective strategies. Most importantly, however, belligerent groups, such as warlords, derive great political capital, great legitimacy with the local population, from their sponsorship of the illicit economy. This is because the population frequently has no alternative source of livelihood and is thus economically dependent on the illicit economy.
Paradoxically, counternarcotics efforts frequently complicate counterterrorism and counterinsurgency objectives, and can also undermine democratization in fragile situations. Afghanistan is precisely a place where counternarcotics policies that are insensitive to local conditions and fail to address underlying economic causes will undermine counterinsurgency and stabilization policies – be they against the remnants of the Taliban or against any potential renegade power elites. Repressive politics toward drugs compromise intelligence-gathering, alienate rural populations from the central government, and allow local renegade elites to successfully agitate against the central government. Out of the three common counternarcotics strategies—eradication, interdiction, and alternative development— eradication poses potentially disastrous risks for Afghanistan’s political stabilization while interdiction greatly complicates counterterrorism objectives. Meanwhile, the obstacles to successful alternative development are enormous.
Let me now discuss the standard policy options and their relationship to counterinsurgency and political stability.
Eradication
Despite efforts by Washington and Kabul to persuade local Islamic clerics to issue a fatwa against drug production, eradication – the destruction of opium poppy plants - remains an unpopular counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan. This is hardly surprising, given that eradication frequently deprives populations of their sole source of livelihood.
Eradication drives the local population into the hands of regional warlords—even if they now call themselves politicians or have secure government jobs—strengthening the centrifugal forces that historically have weakened Afghanistan as a state. Local power elites can capitalize on popular discontent with eradication and accuse the national government of selling out to foreign interests. Armed resistance to eradication teams needs to be expected. Moreover, the alienation of the peasants is likely to grow as the government, or the international community militarily put down the armed resistance to eradication.
Aerial eradication, for example with a fungus, would somewhat reduce the physical danger the eradication teams face. Yet spraying – always extremely unpopular with populations in drug-producing countries - would further alienate the Afghan people and invite local strongmen to start shooting at eradication planes. The counternarcotics teams would defend themselves, and military conflict would further escalate. Again, the central government would suffer a great legitimacy cost while local elites who oppose eradication would see their political legitimacy greatly enhanced, thus further weakening the state.
The announced amnesty for the Taliban also has the potential to further complicate eradication efforts and exacerbate the conflict dynamics. Even if the Taliban ostensibly agree to the terms of amnesty, the Taliban activists returning to their villages will remind the population of the “good times” before 2000 when the Taliban sponsored the illicit economy and poppies bloomed unharmed. The Taliban can thus exploit the popular frustration with eradication and agitate against the central government in an effort to rebuild its base. Moreover, any unequal enforcement of eradication, which could result from varying levels of security in different regions, will result in the perception of ethnic and tribal favoritism, augmenting ethnic divisions. Whether such claims are accurate does not matter to those ethnic political entrepreneurs that seek to exploit tribal and ethnic divisions and insecurities.
In short, given the vast poverty and in the absence of large-scale rural development that is effective and already making a positive difference to people’s lives, not simply promised to take place in the future, eradication is very politically explosive.
Interdiction, which means stopping the traffic, doing lab busting, and the prosecuting traffickers carry fewer negative consequences than eradication, since it does not directly harm the larger local population. Nevertheless, interdiction and lab busting are problematic in the case of Afghanistan. First, in the absence of larger economic development, interdiction, like eradication, is of only limited effectiveness in reducing drug production. The adaptability of traffickers, coupled with the vast territory and difficult terrain in which interdiction teams must operate, make it very difficult to catch any substantial portion of drugs.
A complicating factor in Afghanistan is the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency objectives of the U.S. and Afghan governments. Both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts require good local human intelligence. The local warlords/ power-holders who have so far been relied upon to provide the intelligence without which no counterinsurgency and counterterrorism effort can be effective are unlikely to provide such intelligence to those who are destroying their business. This is one reason why the U.S. military had been only a reluctant participant in counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan until 2004. An alternative intelligence-gathering approach would develop new ties to the population overall – perhaps via village elders, bypassing the local warlords and militia commanders. Developing such ties will take time. But if the effort were successful, drug interdiction would become more feasible. And it would be vastly less destabilizing than eradication.
Alternative Development: A Necessary, but Rarely Successful Strategy
Comprehensive alternative development is a requirement for the success of any durable strategy to reduce the production of illicit crops. Alternative development cannot mean only crop substitution, such as encouraging Afghan peasants to grow saffron or pomegranates. Even though these crops may be lucrative, price profitability is only one factor driving the cultivation of illicit crops. Other structural economic conditions, such as the state of infrastructure, market instability, and availability of credit, play crucial roles. For alternative development to succeed, it must encompass building infrastructure; distributing new technologies, such as fertilizers and better seeds; marketing assistance to help the rural population sell their products on domestic or international markets; and developing local microcredit, to name a few of the most elementary components. In other words, alternative development really is comprehensive rural development. However, alternative development is a very-long term process that has rarely been successful. Apart from requiring substantial funding, patience, and commitment over many years, one crucial condition for a large-scale success of alternative development is a stable security situation. The government must disarm warlords and insurgents—whether through defeat or integration into the political process before alternative development can succeed on any large scale level. Moreover, the central state must be present in rural areas at both the security and the social level.
Unfortunately, in the context of Afghanistan’s counterrorism, stabilization, and democratization efforts, the narcotics problem today has no rapidly effective policy solution. Pressure to find a quick fix – such as in the form of eradication – will make things only worse – both with respect to stability and the narcotics problem itself.
State-building must come before the narcotics epidemic can be controlled. Counternarcotics efforts should concentrate on strengthening the Afghan state’s capacity, through its own military and police, to subdue any uprisings and renegade warlords, to carry out interdiction against labs and traffickers, and promote judicial capacity to indict and prosecute traffickers. This must take place alongside an effort should be speeding up economic reconstruction efforts, especially rural development.
Apart from its very poor record in suppressing the cultivation of illicit crops for the purposes of limiting the drug trade and drug consumption, eradication has never managed to weaken the belligerent groups to the point of defeating them or even substantially reducing their power. In the case of Burma, for example, where the opium/heroin illicit economy has funded various belligerent groups for six decades, a drastic reduction of the illicit economy in the early 1990s did not put these groups out of business. The local warlords there had just switched to exploiting another illicit trade, this time with amphetamines, a synthetic narcotic drug. Belligerent groups rarely rely on narcotics for their entire income. For example, the Taliban’s profits from the illegal traffic with legal goods under ATTA were comparable to its profits from the drug trade. Belligerent groups can frequently easily find other illicit sources of revenue. But while eradication is unlikely to substantially physically weaken armed belligerent groups, it will greatly enhance their political legitimacy, and thus substantially complicate the state effort to suppress such groups. Given widespread poverty and in the absence of alternative livelihood for large segments of the population, eradication only drives the population into the hands of warlords, insurgents, and terrorists, losing the hearts and minds of the people, thus making it very difficult – if not altogether impossible – for the state to successfully prosecute its counterterrorism and counterinsurgency objectives. The state cannot rely on eradication to defeat such groups. These groups either have to be defeated militarily and integrated into the political process.
Counternarcotics policymaking will have a profound effect on Afghanistan’s future. Doctrinaire adherence to standard counternarcotics policies and strategies irrespective of the local security and social conditions will likely heighten Afghanistan’s drug crisis and contribute to the state’s destabilization. Only patience, a careful calibration of traditional counternarcotics policies to the evolving local situation, a willingness to try innovative approaches, and a steady commitment to alleviating Afghanistan’s poverty, a real effort to win the hearts and minds of the people, in other words, a real effort to win the hearts and minds of the population, can result in the strengthening of the Afghan state, an increase in security, and a sustainable long-term reduction of the illicit opium economy.
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