With British press filling with stories of the British military’s inferiority in Helmand, it is important to examine very closely what the plan is for the U.S. Marines heading to the south this summer. Dexter Filkins has just such a report, and it is not promising:
American commanders are planning to cut off the Taliban’s main source of money, the country’s multimillion-dollar opium crop, by pouring thousands of troops into the three provinces that bankroll much of the group’s operations.
The plan to send 20,000 Marines and soldiers into Helmand, Kandahar and Zabul Provinces this summer promises weeks and perhaps months of heavy fighting, since American officers expect the Taliban to vigorously defend what makes up the economic engine for the insurgency.
While I cannot come up with a tagline as witty as Andrew Exum, I did notice that Filkins buried the lede here:
But because the opium is tilled in heavily populated areas, and because the Taliban are spread among the people, the Americans say they will have to break the group’s hold on poppy cultivation to be successful…
Then there is the problem of weaning poppy farmers from poppy farming — a task that has proved intractable in many countries, like Colombia, where the American government has tried to curtail poppy production. It is by far the most lucrative crop an Afghan can farm. The opium trade now makes up nearly 60 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, American officials say. The country’s opium traffickers typically offer incentives that no Afghan government official can: they can guarantee a farmer a minimum price for the crop as well as taking it to market, despite the horrendous condition of most of Afghanistan’s roads.
The hidden story here is, the Marines are planning on cutting out 60% of rural Afghanistan’s economy. And their solution—mentioned two paragraphs later—is $250 million for irrigation projects and wheat subsidies. There is also the problem of the supposed funding of the Taliban itself. (I’ve discussed this before.) If opium is a major source of funding for the Taliban, then it is a critical component of the security strategy to settle the country. If not—if, for example, the use or even coercion of farmers is opportunistic to Taliban methods (i.e. they can separate locals from the government by coercing them into cultivating poppy)—or if opium is a relatively small component of Taliban funding, then the urgency of “what to do” changes somewhat: it is still an important problem, then, but not a world-changing one.
Actually getting at numbers for the Taliban’s funding is rather difficult outside of intelligence circles. For starters, it isn’t clear that opium represents even a majority of Taliban funding: U.S. and NATO officials have now admitted (finally) that donor money from unnamed Gulf States rivals or even exceeds what the Taliban get from drug running.
The specific role of opium in funding the Taliban isn’t clear, either. In 2003, for example, they were bragging about receiving support from Russia and Iran, as well as wealthy Arab donors. The Russia and Iran charge is dubious, though not 100% impossible. Reporting both before the Neo-Taliban reconstituted itself (see, for example, this Congressional Research Service report [pdf] from October, 2001, or the widespread reporting of the Northern Alliance areas as the primary regions of cultivation) and after (see, for example, this Carlotta Gall report), it is not crystal clear that opium funds a majority of Taliban operations. The Gall report in particular buries this nugget 10 paragraphs down:
The increase in cultivation was mainly a result of the strength of the insurgency in southern Afghanistan, which has left whole districts outside of government control, and the continuing impunity of everyone involved, from the farmers and traffickers to corrupt police and government officials, Mr. Costa said.
To assume opium only goes to fund the Taliban is to misconstrue the nature of the problem. Ignoring the copious evidence from the east that opium cultivation is unrelated to a growing insurgency, there is evidence—put forth by the U.S. military, no less, that opium funds about 40% of the Taliban’s operations. And while Mr. Costa, the head of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, the agency that monitors opium cultivation in Afghanistan, notes the correlation of insurgency and cultivation in the South—an opportunistic relationship—he is careful not to draw causation:
But he did not blame only the Taliban for the increase. He specifically accused the former governor of Helmand Province, Sher Muhammad Akhund, of encouraging farmers to grow more poppies in the months before he was removed from office. The result was an increase of 160 percent in that “villain province” from its harvest last year, he said, the highest rise in the country.
“There is evidence of major pressure exerted by him in favor of cultivating opium,” Mr. Costa said.
This isn’t to argue that opium is not a major problem, but that the question of who benefits from its cultivation is not nearly as simple as saying “THE TALIBAN.” This is important, because when you argue the necessity to alter the economic relationships that have solidified over the last twenty years or so, you’re arguing a much bigger question than just poppies.
Unfortunately, this thinking seems not to have reached the planners for the Afghan troop surge. Going after the opium industry, with a clearly inadequate plan to replace income lost from poppy, the issue of neverending salaam debts will grow to a crisis. That is, if the farmers choose to do nothing and not fight back the Marines.
The biggest shortcoming to this plan for the south is that it happens all at once. A single summer is not sufficient to wean an entire region off the one crop most responsible for generating income. An economy of any size simply cannot be adjusted that rapidly without massive shocks and displacement—and opposition. The U.S. economy just shrank by 6.1% the last three months, and look at the hand-wringing and near-panic in some circles is has generated. $250 million in infrastructure and grain subsidies is not enough to adjust for lost opium income which the U.S. military admits supplies the Taliban (by far not the only recipient of income from opium) $300 million a year. The results of this campaign, if actually successful, will be catastrophic.
Final Considerations: We’re talking a lot about opium here. But one of the unsung heroes of the drug war is cannabis. That’s right—weed has replaced opium in much of the North, the former stronghold of Afghanistan’s opium cultivation. We have very little information on the funding streams from cannabis cultivation. What about that?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
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The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 04/30/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
I’m a bit confused by the logic here. Surely the source of the rents is not the issue. The fact of opium production is incidental to the insurgency. The people are the resource the Taliban are exploiting, not the plant. What matters it to the Taliban if they are taxing the product of food, flowers or narcotics?
And our response is to… raise the cost of opium production, so that the people become poorer and there are consequently less rents to extract. That’s what I call population-centric!