commentary Why Afghanistans’ Drugs Are Our Problem

But a „Plan Afghanistan“ on the lines of „Plan Colombia“ would be a disaster

The girls of Kabul are increasingly adopting the headscarf over the burqa. The daring ones even imitate chic urban Iranians, in sheer silk or floating chiffon squares, barely anchored by a chignon or pony-tail. Two years ago, just after the downfall of the Taliban, most did not even dare to venture outside of their houses; rare was the sight of a ghostly blue-grey burqa flitting along in the shadows. Today, you can see them strolling down the capital’s noisy thoroughfares in twos and threes, chatting and laughing: it is one of the most touching signs of Afghanistans’s new freedom.

Yet that freedom has other, tragic aspects, which do not reveal themselves to the casual observer. The UN’s drug experts in Kabul are deeply concerned about the increase in drug use by the city’s young women. Not opium, but heroin, usually injected into the body. It means, they say, that a male relative is already addicted and is passing the drugs along. And that the fierce social control exercised by Afghan families and the clan system is crumbling. Not only are opium and its derivatives the country’s chief export industry – they are destroying its social fabric.

All the more reason, then, to be alarmed about the latest report on the Afghan drug economy (to be found under www.unodc.org ). These are the naked facts: Afghanistan’s drugs economy is now worth 2.8 billion dollars, 22 % more than in 2003. 131,000 hectares of soil were sown with poppy seed, 64 % more than last year. 2,3 million Afghans live off the drugs economy, a tenth of the total population. This year’s harvest of 4200 tons (17 % up from 2004) might have been larger still, had it not been for drought and crop diseases.

The only good news is that farmgate prices for raw opium have fallen from $283 to 92 per kilogram. But even that is relative. The past two years’ record harvests resulted in a desperately-needed cash infusion into Afghanistan’s impoverished economy (at a time when lavishly pledged donor funds were barely trickling into the country). Much of that went into the deep pockets of warlords and drug traders – and, presumably, fertilized the flash crop of grandiose villas now mushrooming up all over Kabul. Yet the building frenzy is apparent even in remoter areas, where concrete is an unattainable luxury. All over the country, imposing mudbrick compounds are being built, irrigated fields are greening, trucks filled with produce and consumer goods thunder along the highways: clearly, the drug economy has had a generalized welfare effect. But the latest price decline, as a new brief by AfghanistanWatch ( www.tcf.org/afghanistanwatch ) reports, means that farmers who last year got forty cents for every drug dollar, now are left with only twenty; whereas the traffickers’ income increases from sixty to eighty cents. In other words: traffickers are getting richer, and farmers – the vast majority – are dropping back into poverty.

The international community (as diplomats and UN officials in Kabul admit freely, albeit behind closed doors) has done far too little to prevent Afghanistan from turning into a narco-state before our eyes. Britain, which is in charge of anti-drug policy, has been training Afghan police in counter-narcotics interdiction. According to the Kabul goverment, these units have destroyed about 130 drug labs; yet much more effort is needed. A number of governors have presided over the torching of poppy fields, TV cameras in attendance – although locals are eager to point out that the plots in question tended to belong to personal enemies or had already been harvested. The emir Ismail Khan, aka the „Lion of Herat“, peremptorily ordered his farmers to grow saffron instead of poppies; he has since been deposed.

Finally, the military governor of Kunduz province, Daud Khan, has been made the Interior Ministry’s new drug czar. Given the fact that he was the strongman of a province which remains the main trading hub for opium coming out of the poppy-rich Northeast, his progress will be watched with interest – not least by the German Bundeswehr soldiers currently patrolling the five northeastern provinces at the behest of NATO, and resolutely ignoring all crops of a colour other than regulation beige or green.

The U.S. government, meanwhile, announced a „five-pronged“ counternarcotics plan on the day before the UN report was published. It intends to spend $780 million over the coming year in public awareness campaigns (1), helping to build an effective local justice system (2), supporting alternative livelihoods (3), interdiction, i.e. nabbing the product after it leaves the farmgate (4), and eradication, meaning crop destruction (5).