Does Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld know about this? Why not? And shouldn't we be asking them?
Karzai's next hurdle: eradicating opium
U.S. officials consider using troops to quash Afghan drug trade
10:22 PM CDT on Wednesday, October 27, 2004
By JIM LANDERS / The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON – With Afghan President Hamid Karzai's election victory in hand, U.S. and Afghan officials are focusing on Afghanistan's opium poppies as the next major challenge.
Reports soon to be published by the CIA and the United Nations show opium poppy cultivation is soaring, along with laboratory production of heroin. The opium-based drug trade accounts for more than half of Afghanistan's economy and most of the financing for remaining al-Qaeda and Taliban forces.
Pentagon and State Department policy planners are trying to decide whether U.S. troops should play a role beyond intelligence in eradicating the drug trade, now left to the fledgling Afghan army and police under the supervision of British forces."This is a huge challenge for the new government," said Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. "We've been thinking a lot about this issue in the course of the last several weeks and months, and we're on the verge of embracing a more robust strategy to deal with this problem."
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly spoken of the threat drug trafficking poses to Afghanistan's future, and his election triumph gives him greater authority for moving against it.
But Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan specialist at New York University, said a successful strategy for curbing the drug trade has to start with cutting off security alliances with drug traffickers, and with the recognition that using U.S. forces to eradicate poppy fields could make enemies of Afghan farmers.
"There's no way we can eliminate this as long as we are publicly allied with major traffickers – which we are," he said.
"Some have even been arrested by the U.S. military with trucks full of heroin and let go."
Mr. Karzai has moved against some powerful regional leaders with ties to the drug trade, but others who were allies in the early stages of the war against the Taliban remain in power, even within Mr. Karzai's Cabinet, Mr. Rubin said.
British officials say they expect opium production will start falling next year now that most of the pieces are in place for a sustained campaign against drugs. They share some of Mr. Rubin's concerns about alienating farmers by emphasizing eradication, which some members of Congress are pressing on the Bush administration.
Finding the carrot
U.S. officials won't say what role the military might play in curbing the Afghan drug trade. But crop eradication has to be part of the overall strategy, said Patrick Fine, director of the Afghan office of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"There has to be a carrot, and there has to be a stick that makes growing poppy very risky," he said. "Right now, with the Afghan police and army, if you are caught, your crops will be ripped out. Farmers will see the alternatives are better because of this risk of eradication."
For some Afghan poppy farmers, it's hard to get out of the opium business. Mr. Fine and Mr. Rubin agree that many Afghan farmers are sharecroppers who need land and credit to raise food crops. Drug traffickers, the only source of rural credit in much of Afghanistan, provide land and money for seeds and fertilizers in exchange for notes promising delivery of cash that can only be raised through opium sales.
Farmers unable to pay are either killed, beaten or forced to hand over their daughters, Mr. Rubin said.
"There's no court system to protect them. If they don't supply that cash, they are threatened by armed men and either turn to crime or give their daughters to traffickers," he said.
The British strategy involves offering other sources of credit, tools and training in rural Afghanistan. Eradication efforts coupled with compensation haven't worked, however, because they encouraged other farmers to plant opium looking for the same rewards.
Offering farmers alternatives to opium hasn't been easy. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the Afghan government surveyed farmers this year and found opium poppies yielded an average of $12,700 per hectare (2.4711 acres), while wheat and other farm products yielded $222 per hectare.
The survey found opium poppies growing on 80,000 hectares across Afghanistan. The reports pending at the United Nations and CIA show another big increase this year, U.S. officials say.
Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles estimates poppy cultivation has hit 100,000 hectares, which could translate into an increase in Afghan opium production of 20 percent to 40 percent.
Last year, Afghanistan produced an estimated 3,600 metric tons of opium, or roughly three-fourths of the world supply.
"We stand in the darkness of a long shadow," Mr. Charles told a congressional committee last month. "We and the Afghans can see the way forward, and there is increased urgency to the mission, but there remain challenges."
Big picture
Mr. Fine, who oversees $1.9 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds for Afghanistan, said poppy growers need help that goes beyond planting wheat instead of opium poppies.
"You need to look at food processing, at the ways to add value, not just other crops," he said. "You need to get money into the rural economy to create jobs through public works, like building roads."
So far, U.S. assistance has restored irrigation for 285,000 hectares of farmland, built more than 1,000 kilometers of rural roads and rebuilt 119 village markets.
Moral suasion also plays a role, Mr. Fine said. Afghanistan's religious leaders issued a fatwa, or scholarly decree, last summer saying opium growing was against Islam.
The U.N. survey found that nearly all opium poppy growers realize they're breaking the law, however. The main reason they keep growing poppies is economic necessity, the survey found.
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