What Do They Think of Poppies?

Permit me a brief scan of some Afghan media outlets, and their opinion of the counternarcotics schema being pushed by the U.S. (forgive the multiple links to AfghanWire, which requires registration—they are the best source of translated local Afghanistan news) First up is an impassioned editorial in Cheragh, complaining about the poppy spraying:

… an American delegation will arrive in Kabul [soon] to persuade Mr. Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that crop-spraying – especially a substance called glycophet – is quite safe. This is happening while the international community, and especially the United States of America, have better solutions to this phenomenon. One of the solutions is that agriculture in Afghanistan should be mechanised and that farmers and gardeners should be helped in finding markets for their products. The army of the unemployed should also be dissolved and appropriate work opportunities should be found for them so that the mafia will not be able to misuse them. Otherwise crop-spraying will bring disasters and many dangers to Afghanistan’s agriculture and to the residents of the areas that are exposed to crop-spraying.

A brief Google search didn’t get me anything on glycophet (though I did find something called glyphosate, a common herbicide used in coca spraying in Colombia), but the reported sickness from the herbicides have been quite literally driving men into the Taliban’s arms, if reports are to be believed. While glyphosate is supposedly safe for human consumption, at least in moderate amounts—something that, if it is the primary chemical used in Afghanistan, would call into doubt the cause of supposedly spray-induced illnesses—the State Department reported a few years back that the EPA had registered concern over the toxic effects of certain glyphosate compounds used in the coca spraying in Colombia. Poppy, however, is much easier to kill than coca, so there is a much lower concentration of glyphosate in poppy sprays. So there may not be a real health problem, merely one of perception. People don’t like random planes spraying them with chemicals.

The perception, however, is deeply troublesome. Regardless of the actual causation, if locals see a correlation (however spurious) and join the Taliban in response, the counternarcotics effort is in big trouble, because it stops being about helping people and starts being about careless foreigners and their puppet government ruining the lives of ordinary Afghans for no real reason.

The real problem with spraying first and trying development later, as is the current strategy, is that it basically leaves thousands upon thousands of people poor, potentially starving, and with little recourse should they happen to become sick. This problem is compounded by the extreme difficulties of launching development projects in the remote areas where the poppy is grown and sprayed. As a result, there is deep frustration over the program. This frustration has spilled over after the recent G8 meetings.

The day after the G8 – the group of eight industrial modern countries – criticized the Afghan government for having failed in its fight against narcotics, the Afghan government in turn criticized the international community for not having a clear and specific policy for the elimination of drugs in Afghanistan and that accordingly the government’s efforts against drugs had seen no tangible result over the last 6 years. We must ask ourselves who is really to blame: the Afghan government or the international community?

The real answer, of course, is both: the Afghan government for being so corrupt, and the international community for being so unimaginative. We can do better, because we know other countries have done better. It is the blind reliance on crop spraying, bulldozing, and other traditional, failed counternarcotics tactics that is creating a lot of the strife; not a lack of will or resources.

As a side note, it’s worth noting that no one seems to actually like growing poppies, they just don’t have any other way of feeding themselves or making money.