Intercepting Wood in Kunar

Soldiers intercepting shipments of timber on donkeys in Kunar. Oh yes:

KONAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan, June 8, 2009 – Task Force Chosin soldiers from 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, have been making a difference in disrupting timber smuggling in this lush area near the Pakistan border.

Konar has been a route of transit for smuggling goods from the Korengal Valley into Pakistan, an activity that helps to fund enemy operations.

“The enemy funds their operations a number of ways,” Army Lt. Col. Mark O’Donnell, Task Force Chosin commander, said. “They smuggle illegal gems, opium and timber.”

In the months following the fall of the Taliban, many insurgents fled to Pakistan, where they continue to operate and help to fund insurgency operations in Afghanistan. Various resources that fund weapons for enemy groups operating in Afghanistan are imported across the border.

Timber, O’Donnell explained, is used mainly for expensive, ornate furniture produced exclusively in Pakistan. Before the task force arrived, he added, timber smugglers operated with impunity.

“Mostly, the units before us did not have the troop strength that we have to combat the problem,” O’Donnell said.

Now, I’ve been introduced to some of the Chosin guys, and I deeply respect and admire them (I tried desperately to go visit them during my embed earlier this year but could not make all the scheduling work out, much to my deep disappointment). They have a hornet’s nest of a problem in the Korengal, and I really want them to succeed.

However, intercepting timber shipments doesn’t do that. Smuggling is illegal, and it fuels the fighting in the Korengal—LTC O’Donnell is absolutely right in saying that. The challenge is, there’s no way for the locals to use that timber legally. The government owns it, or so it says, but won’t allow people to harvest it without government permission… which is not forthcoming. When CJ Chivers was embedded with the guys up in the Korengal (part of his astoundingly good, Pulitzer-worthy reportage), he noted:

The Korangalis have fought, the officers say, in part because they support the Taliban and in part because they are loggers and the Afghan government banned almost all timber cutting, putting local men out of work.

So, let’s review: As Mohammad Hossein Emadi eloquently explained (pdf) in a paper 18 months ago, the government Afghanistan owns all the natural resources in the country. Its natural resources, especially timber, are severely stressed. At the same time, exploiting those natural resources is often the only way for communities to make money. Even so, the Afghan government has no real means of leasing access, harvesting quotas, or even cadastres of land to local communities for exploitation. It seems to have no problem giving enormous contracts to operate copper mines, but it can’t figure out how to create an institution by which communities can lease access to the land they live on and cultivate.

Thus, harvesting timber for income becomes illegal. You have timber smugglers, and with them timber “lords,” who are wealthy men who profit handsomely from the large scale denuding of Afghanistan’s countryside. Christian Bleuer wrote probably the best overview of just how pernicious the problem of timber smuggling truly is, from a political, economic, and environmental perspective. It is quite literally a disaster.

And Kunar is not the only area facing the problem of a glut of natural resource rents. In Khost province, one of the most violent in Afghanistan for many years, many if not most community-level conflicts are over access to poorly (or unclearly) allocated natural resources. In fact, a great deal of violence we often write off as “insurgent” in origin actually has its roots in battles over access to resources—whether ISAF handouts in Kandahar, CERP funds in the Tagab, stands of fruit trees in Sabari, or lucrative security contracts in Shindand.

Put another way: because of the last eight years of not developing Afghanistan’s institutions to a meaningful degree, such that there is still no reliable land office whereby one can delineate private versus government land, or purchase rights to resources for economic development, or even establish autonomous, community-driven projects, we have left many communities in many parts of the country with no other choice than “insurgent” activity to generate income. They’re literally forced to become brigands to buy food.

That’s not to reduce this to absurdity and imply that all we need is a little community-drive development and all will be good: there must be a strong and consistent security presence in the area, and the men of Chosin are doing a fabulous job of it. But it seems that going after timber smuggling, rather than the reason there is timber smuggling in the first place, is jumping the gun. There are other factors contributing to the steady flow of technically illegal timber shipments across the Pakistani border—some economic (e.g., price), some political, some ideological thanks to years of ideological calcification over the issue. But, absent a grander effort to undermine the reasons behind illegally harvesting timber in the first place—and unfortunately that’s just not something people talk about when they talk about Kunar, so I have no idea if it exists—then TF Chosin is probably addressing the wrong problem in the wrong order.

Some closing questions to ponder:

• To what extent is violence in North-central Kunar driven by protection of the timber trade? Is it as huge an influence as journalism makes it out to be, or are there other exogenous factors influencing resistance to a Coalition/GIRoA presence?
• Follow up question: if, suddenly, the people of the Korengal Valley, and all of Afghanistan, could lease access to timber stands provided they harvested them in a sustainable way, and if they could generate income without falling afoul of the government’s broken bureaucracy, would that actually end or even vastly reduce the area’s militancy?
• Given the nature of the timber trade, is it analogous in structure to the opium trade in the south? And if so, could similar analytical and theoretical models explain the behaviors of the actors involved, including on the enforcement end?
• Are the bureaucratic and institutional issues surrounding timber/illegal natural resource exploitation and opium cultivation actually coming from the same place? Is that a valid comparison? If so, how, and what are possible solutions?

More on this later. It’s a huge problem, and one that does not lend itself to easy answers.

See Also: The Role of Property Rights in Counterinsurgency.

Tagged as: Afghanistan