OBAMA AND THE AFGHAN NARCO-STATE

To understand why the war in Afghanistan, now in its eighth year, is not
going well for the United States and its NATO allies, take a look at two
statistics. One is Afghanistan's ranking on an international index
measuring corruption: 176 out of 180 countries. (Somalia is 180th). The
other is Afghanistan's position as the world's Number 1 producer of
illicit opium, the raw material for heroin. The two statistics are
inextricably linked and, a year ago, prompted Richard Holbrooke, the man
President Barack Obama has just picked as special envoy for Afghanistan,
to write: "Breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential or all
else will fail.

Holbrooke, who was not in government service at the time, took particular
issue with the counter-narcotics strategy the Bush administration pursued
in Afghanistan. "The ... program, which costs around $1 billion a year,
may be the single most ineffective policy in the history of American
foreign policy," he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. "It's not
just a waste of money. It actually strengthens the Taleban and Al-Qaeda,
as well as criminal elements within Afghanistan.

Exactly what the Obama administration intends to do about that, and how it
might break the narco-state, has yet to be articulated. Sending more
troops to fight a growing insurgency does not necessarily translate into
progress towards dismantling the "narco-state," eliminating corruption or
cutting down on the opium production whose proceeds help finance the
Taliban.

The counter-narcotics strategy Holbrook criticized so harshly centers on
the eradication of drug crops, and has been the main weapon in the "war on
drugs" the United States has been waging for decades around the world.
That war failed to curb the production of illicit drugs and often proved
counter-productive. In Bolivia, for example, Evo Morales, a left-wing
opponent of the United States, rose to political prominence and finally
the presidency because he rallied a protest movement against US-sponsored
attempts to wipe out the cultivation of coca leaf, the raw material for
cocaine.

De-emphasizing eradication in Afghanistan would amount to an implicit
admission of the failure of policies pursued since the 1970s by both
Democratic and Republican administrations. Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, described
Afghanistan as "our greatest military challenge right now" but said there
could be no purely military solution - not even with the additional 30,000
troops Obama plans to dispatch over the next 18 months.

So if there's no purely military solution, what are the chances of
progress on the political front? An unnamed White House official sounded
hopeful this week that the United States could push Afghan President Hamid
Karzai into extending government control beyond the capital and stepping
up the fight against corruption. It is the same Karzai who declared jihad
(holy war) on the drugs trade in 2004, a few days after he was sworn in as
Afghanistan's first democratically elected leader. That holy war made no
dent in opium production and corruption blossomed.

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle," Thomas Schweich, a former top
anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, wrote in the New York Times last
summer. "The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure
improvement; the US and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's
friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his
problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

In other words, Karzai is not part of the solution, he's part of the
problem. As to solutions: One novel idea on opium-and-corruption comes
from James Nathan, a political science professor at Auburn University in
Alabama and former State Department official. He argues in a forthcoming
paper that the most efficient way to tackle the problem would be for the
United States or NATO to buy up the entire Afghan opium crop.

Purchasing the whole crop would take it away from the traffickers without
cutting more than half the economy of Afghanistan," Nathan said in an
interview. "Such a purchase would directly confront Afghanistan's most
corrosive corruption. It would end the Taliban's money stream." And the
cost? By Nathan's reckoning, between $2 billion and $2.5 billion a year,
no pocket change but not a large sum compared with the around $200 billion
the US taxpayer has already paid for the war in Afghanistan. The idea may
sound startling but its logic is not far from the farm subsidies paid to
US and European farmers.

On a more modest scale than Nathan's buy-it-all idea, a European think
tank, the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), is
lobbying for an alternative to traditional counter-narcotics policies
dubbed Poppy for Medicine. That involves granting international licenses
to poppy farmers in Afghan villages, where the crop would be turned into
opiate-based medicines such as morphine or codeine, and then shipped out
to the legal market.

It would place Afghanistan alongside Turkey (where the United States
helped to introduce a similar program in 1974), India and Australia as
legal producers of opium. Could it work? When ICOS, formerly known as the
Senlis Council, first came up with the idea, the State Department
cold-shouldered it. But that was before Obama, who promised to listen to
new approaches. Both the buy-it-all and the licensing concepts deserve a
hearing.