10/26/14, "Afghanistan’s Unending Addiction," NY Times Editorial Board
"Over
the last dozen years, the United States has poured $7.6 billion into
combating Afghanistan’s opium production, and the results are now clear:
The program failed.
This
effectively leaves the Afghan economy heavily dependent on criminal
enterprises, rising corruption that undermines efforts to promote
democracy, and increased drug addiction among the Afghan people. The
uncontrolled opium trade also provides the Taliban with up to $155 million annually, or more than one-quarter of the total funding for its antigovernment insurgency.
Yet
this crisis is receiving far too little attention at a time when
primary responsibility for the counternarcotics program shifts from the
United States and its partners to the newly installed government of
President Ashraf Ghani.
In a speech at Georgetown University
last month, John Sopko, the special inspector general in charge of
assessing American programs in Afghanistan, said: “By every conceivable
metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction
and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and
addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”
The
problem, as quantified by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
and other agencies, appears to be getting worse. In 2012, Afghanistan
produced 95 percent of the world’s opium, with much of the product going
to Iran, Europe and Russia. The following year, Afghan farmers grew an
unprecedented 209,000 hectares (more than 516,000 acres) of opium poppy, outpacing the previous high of 193,000 hectares in 2007.
The
value of last year’s yield was $3 billion, up from $2 billion in 2012, a
50 percent increase in a single year. One province, Nangarhar, was
declared “poppy-free” by the United Nations in 2008, but between 2012
and 2013, it had a fourfold increase in production.
The
narcotics program embraced multiple strategies, including interdicting
drug traffickers, eradicating poppy fields, strengthening the Afghan
legal system to prosecute drug dealers, persuading farmers to grow
alternative crops and establishing treatment programs for addicts. The
Pentagon, one of the lead agencies in the effort, has pinned the failure
to reduce cultivation largely on a lack of support from the Afghan
government.
It must also be said, however, that American, European, Afghan and United Nations officials at times sabotaged their own mission by bickering over how the money should be spent and where best to focus resources.
It
seems unlikely that the new and still fragile Afghan government will
soon do better on poppy eradication than the United States and its
allies, whose forces in Afghanistan are expected to be reduced to 15,000
by the end of the year. The one bright spot is that Mr. Ghani seems to
have a vision for what needs to be done. His campaign platform frankly
acknowledged that legal farming in Afghanistan is less profitable and
less efficient than the drug trade because it lacks an organized system
of markets, financing, skilled workers and irrigation equipment. He has
pledged to modernize farming and develop new markets for legitimate
crops and other products.
The
American embassy in Kabul has said that the United States will help him
in these efforts. The allies must pitch in as well. But one early order
of business is to figure out where the counternarcotics strategy went
wrong — why so much investment over the years has produced so little. An
honest evaluation is a necessary first step to constructing a strategy
that works and gives the new government a realistic shot at a building a
productive economy and a stable nation."
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