Pubdate: Thu, 8 Jan 2009
Source: Washington Times (DC)
Copyright: 2009 The Washington Times, LLC.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/A1kAshhc
Website: http://www.washingtontimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/492
Author: James Nathan
Note: James Nathan, a former Foreign Service officer, is the Khalid 
bin Sultan Eminent Scholar at Auburn University.
Cited: Senlis Council http://www.senliscouncil.org/modules/P4M
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Taliban
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Senlis (Senlis Council)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)

ENDING THE TALIBAN'S MONEY STREAM

At the start of the Afghan war, the British government implored the 
Bush administration to bomb Afghanistan's heroin labs and opium 
storehouses. The United States refused. America's Afghan partners in 
the struggle against the Taliban were involved in the drug trade. 
They were crooked, but useful.

In 2004, Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared a "jihad on the 
cultivation of drugs." Europeans guffawed. European intelligence had 
already named both the head of the Afghan Central Bank and Mr. 
Karzai's "anti-corruption czar" as "drug lords." And Mr. Karzai's 
youngest brother, Ahmed Wali, was named as a trafficker in early 2005 
in U.S. intelligence documents discovered by CBS' "60 Minutes." In 
fact, there has never been a "drug lord" arrested in post September 
11th Afghanistan. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in 2005 
found more than nine tons of opium in the office of Sher Muhammad 
Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand Province. Under British pressure, 
Mr. Akhundzada was removed, but the next year, Mr. Karzai found a 
place for him in the Afghan Senate.

In April 2006, John Walters, director of the White House Office of 
National Drug Control Policy, enthused to reporters that "enormous 
progress" had been made in eradication of opium crops in Afghanistan. 
But by the end of 2007, U.S. officials estimated that Afghanistan had 
monopolized the world's supply of opium and heroin, with 93 percent 
of world supply.

"Eradication" was America's answer to the explosion of Afghanistan 
opium. The policy of paying day workers to attack poppy fields of 
farmers, with everything from sticks and weed whackers to tractors, 
backfired. "Hearts and minds" were lost. Eradication was billed to 
American taxpayers by contractors at up to $90,000 an acre - for a 
crop with a "commercial" value averaging less than $2,000, per farmer.

In sum, America's effort at Afghan drug control, seemed, in the words 
of one expert, Peter Bergen, "bananas." Few serious alternates to 
eradication were advanced except by a London based non-governmental 
organization, Senlis, which has suggested small-scale pilot programs 
of licensing villages for production of medically useful opiates. The 
Senlis approach has the backing of the European Parliament and many 
in the Canadian and British governments. But a reading of Senlis' 
proposals reveals an amazingly complicated scheme that would hardly 
impact the Taliban and drug lords in any meaningful way for years.

The State Department dismissed Senlis' work out of hand, noting 
"Afghanistan would be obligated to purchase opium stocks, resulting 
in the crops' exponential expansion." A proposal, much like a 2002 
suggestion by the British intelligence (MI6) to buy Afghanistan's 
entire opium crop, was considered by the State Department's Bureau of 
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the start of 
2008. The State Department's conclusion was that it would be 
"incredibly costly" - some "one billion dollars" - to buy all the 
opium on the Afghan market.

Placed beside the $200 billion Afghanistan has already exacted from 
American taxpayers, the cost of purchasing all Afghanistan opium 
hardly seems outsized. Currently, opium gum fetches about $50 a 
pound. The largest crop in Afghanistan's history was 8,200 tons, in 
2007. A year's worth of Afghan crop at twice the going rate would go 
for $2 billion to $2.5 billion. But even if the cost were $5 billion, 
the price would not seem untoward, especially given the paucity of 
alternative; and given the fact that opium, corruption, and the rise 
of the Taliban are single pieces of the same sorry cloth.

Ambassador Thomas Schweich, the State Department's top 
counter-narcotic officer, argues a crop purchase program is not 
feasible "because no other crop [comes] even close to the value of 
poppies, [and] we needed the threat of eradication to force farmers 
to accept less-lucrative alternatives." But Mr. Schweich's point is 
belied by the years of research. The world's most respected 
investigator on the matter of Afghan opium farming, David Mansfield, 
issued a report for the British government detailing his two decades 
of stunningly thorough surveys. Mr. Mansfield found that poppies, in 
marked contrast to the attitude of farmers in Turkey and India where 
the crop can legally be grown for medicinal purposes, repulse 
overwhelming majorities of Afghan farmers. Inevitably, Afghan crop 
choices are complex market decisions - a function, Mr. Mansfield 
writes, of price, credit, the availability of water, and the chance 
of getting a crop to market.

What if the United States purchased all the Afghan opium crops? And 
what if wheat, fruits, vegetables, and all other kinds of crops grown 
in Afghanistan were actually supported with fertilizers, markets, 
credit, irrigation, and technical support at every level, at the same 
time? The expense would be considerable. It would be cheaper, 
however, than a "multigenerational war" the Bush administration has 
long assured Americans was in the offing.

Purchasing the whole opium crop of Afghanistan, at whatever price, 
would take the crop away from the traffickers without cutting more 
than half the economy out of Afghanistan. If opium crops were 
pre-emptively purchased, the traffickers and Afghanistan's most 
corrosive corruption would be directly confronted. The huge supply 
could be purchased by Americans who are specially cleared, and be 
stored in the United States, perhaps by Security Council resolution 
assigned to the United Nations under American control for future 
medical emergencies.

The plan to buy entire Afghan opium crops would require renegotiation 
of several longstanding agreements, but if opium gum were purchased 
before it fell into the hands of traffickers, much of the most 
baneful corruption in Afghanistan would lose its footing. Would a 
purchase program completely eliminate the insurgency, or deprive the 
Taliban of all income? Perhaps some opium fields would be grown in 
ever more remote areas along the Pakistan frontier. The Taliban might 
well shake down those it can or steal from them, or go into other 
illicit lines of work. Then, however, the Taliban would be not 
pretenders of truth and faith, but revealed as the gangsters they are.

The latest American intelligence reports now confirm Afghanistan is 
on a "downward spiral." It is past time to pull up.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake