Weaning Afghanistan off drugs

The Afghan opium economy continues to grow and the trajectory is unlikely to change. The United Nations reported that opium production increased 17% in 2007 and that the 2008 harvest will be "staggeringly high". But international efforts will be stymied until counter-narcotics efforts become more comprehensive, and a UN-backed court is set-up to try drug offenders.

The amount of Afghan land used for opium is now larger than the corresponding total for cocoa cultivation in Latin America, although it still occupies only 4% of Afghanistan's arable land. In the supposedly poppy-free provinces in the north, traders have moved up the value chain - from cultivation to processing - or into cannabis and hashish. With narcotics threatening to negate all of Afghanistan's post-2001 achievements, the Afghan government and its international helpmates seem at a loss of what to do.

Opium has been grown in Afghanistan for centuries. But it has only been since the late 1980s - in conditions of increasing poverty, insurgency, poor governance, and the disappearance of cultivation in neighboring countries - that "narcotics entrepreneurs" have pushed opium cultivation from a subsistence strategy by poor farmers to a top-down, criminally-intended, billion-dollar enterprise.

The link between opium and insurgency is not as direct as sometimes imagined. True, opium cultivation and insurgent violence are correlated geographically, and opium now provides the insurgents with a portion of their revenues. True, this portion may have increased as NATO pursues a decapitation strategy, trying to kill high-level insurgents. But the Taliban, al-Qaida and the more than 14 other insurgent groups have many sources of revenue; and while an indisputable correlation exists between instability and opium cultivation, the causality derives from insecurity, not the other way around.

What is certain, however, is that counter-narcotics efforts have undermined counter-insurgency by undermining support for the Afghan government. To date, international strategies have lacked an in-depth understanding of the opium trade and inadequate incentives for those involved. Five other problems have beleaguered the counter-narcotics effort: a deteriorating security situation, a limited Afghan desire to tackle the problem; an over-emphasis on building Potemkin institutions; an over-reliance on crop eradication; and an inability to deliver the alternative livelihoods expected by ordinary Afghans.

If a counter-narcotics effort is to be successful, a game-changing approach is needed. First, the international community must forego the idea that it can sequence coercive and development activities; it is simply not possible given the conditions now or in the foreseeable future. Better therefore not to promise development in exchange for poppy eradication or think conditionality can work.

Second, the international community needs to take aerial eradication off the table and make clear that traffickers, not farmers, are the problem. Because Afghan farmers do not use chemicals, aerial eradication will likely be blamed as the cause of disease, premature deaths or crop destruction, which is a regular but unrelated occurrence in Afghanistan, as in any developing country. The Afghan government, already mistrusted, would suffer from any backlash, thus turning an insurgency into an insurrection.

Instead, the government should focus on rolling out the Afghan state, prioritizing the provision of security to local farmers. The international community, in turn, should focus on building local capacity to maintain security and deliver basic services.

This will not be easy. Often the insecurity comes from the corrupt Afghan police, the reform of which is a sine qua non of an improved counter-narcotics policy. Reforms have, until now, seen little change and drastic solutions should be on the table, including dismantling the Ministry of Interior entirely, placing the police force under the Afghan National Army, or setting up a new gendarmerie-style police initially under the army.

A "stability-first" policy will allow the gradual introduction of basic services and access to licit sources of income. A premium should be on improving access by farmers, especially poor and landless ones, to markets, land, water, credit, food security and employment. True, rich and land-owning farmers will not change their behavior. But the alternative is likely to pauperize farmers and remove the consent the Afghan government now enjoys.

Crucially, this should be coupled with arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these "narcotics entrepreneurs" are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change. Though, this should be done under the nomenclature of anti-corruption - which Afghans care about - and not of counter-narcotics, which most Afghans think is a Western focus.

Here the Afghan government must be forced into action. If President Hamid Karzai refuses, a special UN-backed narcotics court should be set up to help him. In fragile democracies, some crimes are too hard to handle. This realization led to the creation of specialized war crimes UN courts for Bosnia, Cambodia and Sierra Leone. In Afghanistan, the drugs trade is such an issue. Trying Afghans in US courts will not have the same effect.

There are no silver bullets to this multi-dimensional challenge. The most effective counter-narcotics outcome will require a targeted, realistic, well-resourced strategy grounded in an acceptance that a long-term reduction in the production of Afghan opiates will only be achieved by delivering local security, stronger Afghan institutions, rural development and by bringing key drug barons and their governmental backers to justice.