The Road Less Taken

Some frightening statistics:

• In 2006, opium production in Afghanistan rose 61% over 2005


• Profits from drug trafficking is now equivalent to one-third of the nation's GDP


• over 90% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan

This despite an aggressive eradication program and a fatwa against growing opium issued by Afghanistan's official clerics. And yet, the industry is booming. This year will be another record harvest. Drug lords, including members of Afghanistan's government, can expect lucrative profits and little fear of arrest considering that the vast majority of the government's counter-narcotics budget is devoted to eradication, not counter-trafficking. But eradication works a little like whack-the-mole: you destroy a field and it pops up somewhere else (opium poppies grow fast and need little care). In many cases, the mole and the whacker are also business partners so the whacking is selective; the game is fixed. I saw this first hand when one of my police sources gave me a heads up on an eradication mission heading out from Kabul into Nangarhar Province. My fixer and I followed them and caught up to the eradication team just after they'd ploughed through a field in an area literally carpeted with opium. One field, less than an acre, was destroyed. The rest were left alone. I spoke with the farmer, a distraught father of 3 who said he would not be able to feed his family now that his only source of income was gone. I asked him why his field had been destroyed and not the others. "I couldn't afford to pay the bribe to the police," he said.

And so it goes in Afghanistan. The power brokers get fat while the vast majority of the rural poor suffer. Eradication is a cover for profiteering (some government sources tell me that the next man in line to take over the Ministry of Anti-Narcotics is himself a drug lord). It has only worked once - in Thailand where destruction of opium fields was run in parallel with a massive alternative livelihoods program. Afghanistan has no such program, nor will it in the foreseeable future, not while the government is so corrupt and any industry with the potential to make money is greedily controlled by a select few - mining for example, potentially a multi-billion dollar industry in mineral-rich Afghanistan; but rather than building it up, expanding local capacity and giving locals the opportunity to benefit from it, the government has banned mining without a license, turning instead to foreign companies who can afford to pay the exorbitant fees for mining rights. Who benefits? Government officials who now rub elbows with multinational corporations eager to gain a foothold in Afghanistan's neglected mining sector.

It sounds hopeless, but it's not. There are alternatives, alternatives that require creative thought and courage. The problem is, foreign governments, especially the U.S., want the problem solved NOW. "Let's get it done," they say in their typically balls-and-brawn way. "Crush the industry. This is a War on Drugs!" Unfortunately, that's just not the way it goes in Afghanistan.

Solving Afghanistan's drug problem requires a multi-pronged approach. Eradication should be a part of the solution, not the holy grail. Domestic expansion of other sectors, like mining, so that the people of Afghanistan themselves are beneficiaries is another piece of the puzzle. A third should be trying to divert some of the industry to legal medicinal use, a licensing program of the type that has been so successful in places like India and Turkey. This is a controversial approach. Its critics, including the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), say Afghanistan is too unstable to run a legal opiate industry. They also point out that there is no shortage of opiate-based drugs (morphine and codeine) in the world and flooding the market with Afghan opium would risk destabilizing the tenuous balance between demand for painkillers and supply. The overflow would be diverted to the illicit industry. These are legitimate concerns, but unwarranted.

In terms of stability, this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Afghanistan's instability is in large part due to its illicit drugs. Eradication is increasing instability by alienating poor farmers. Licensing opium would not only reduce the amount of opium feeding the illicit market but also create a working relationship between rural Afghans and the government. The countryside is the primary source of instability in the country. Bringing villages into a cooperative enterprise with the government would increase stability. Of course, this would have to happen over time - you can't simply dive into a nationwide licensing program. Instead, you start with pilot projects, village by village. In a tribal culture like Afghanistan's, that's the way progress will work: one village signs up, it benefits, other villages see this benefit and want to repeat it. The only successful development programs in Afghanistan work on this model, in other words, within the existing culture.

Lessons can be learned from the Taliban's experience with opium. In 2000, they managed to stop opium cultivation virtually overnight. Their method: fatwas issued by their leaders, who happened to be respected by the people. Government affiliated clerics can issue all the fatwas they want but it won't make an iota of difference if they have no credibility with the people. Working at the village level means working with local clerics, men who have sway, whose voices carry some weight. You will never convince these men to tell their people to stop growing opium when opium is, in many cases, the only source of income. But what you can do is convince them to cooperate with a government licensing program. The most powerful tool at the Afghan government's disposal is the village mullah, but instead of building relationships with these men, they're destroying them.

Does the world need more morphine? There are two ways to look at this: first, the viewpoint UNODC and other organizations take is that the current supply of opium is meeting world demand. To me, this doesn't make any sense when 74% of the world's supply is consumed by the 7 richest countries (mostly by the U.S.). How could it be that the remaining 26% is enough to meet the needs of Africans and Asians when AIDS and cancer are on the rise? Well, from the UNODC's perspective, it is. Are they implying that there is less of a demand for palliative care in developing nations? That's preposterous. The fact is, in these countries there is a lack of knowledge among medical practitioners about the benefits of opiate-based drugs to treat the sick. The drugs aren't being prescribed. The World Health Organization as well as UNODC both agree that this is the case. They also agree that morphine and codeine are legitimate drug treatment regimes. So, another way to assess this apparent balance between supply and demand is that it is a false equilibrium, that in fact, if medical knowledge is increased in the developing world, the demand for these drugs would skyrocket.

Afghanistan has the potential to meet that future demand. But it will take a global effort to make that potential a reality. One organization (who will remain nameless) trying to convince the world to take this approach seriously has met with brutal resistance. They've been threatened with arrest, with eviction from Afghanistan and even death at the hands of the drug lords. But this was not always the case. When they first proposed the licensing option to the Afghan government, the response was positive. Afghanistan's Minister for anti-narcotics at the time was all for it. "He was ready to sign an agreement to start a pilot licensing project," my source told me. "He told us he would sign the agreement after he returned from a trip to Washington. He came back and suddenly the whole project was off the table."

No surprise. The U.S. has a lot invested in the current opium licensing regime. As it stands, it has an agreement with Turkey and India wherein American pharmaceuticals are required to buy 80% of their opium from these two countries (the 80-20 rule). Expanding the licensing regime to include Afghanistan threatens this agreement. So the U.S. position, which ultimately guides Afghan policy, is political (both Turkey and India are critical allies of the U.S.).

So while the U.S. plays at realpolitick, the world's poor die in pain and Afghanistan comes apart at the seams. The road less traveled sits empty while the American-constructed highway heading for war (War on Terror, War on Drugs) is stuck in a traffic jam. That's the reality, and it sucks.