TARGET THE DRUG LORDS, NOT THE FARMERS

For eight years, NATO forces and their local allies have been battling
Taliban militia and terrorists. But who are the Taliban, exactly? Many
Canadians still do not know. In the second instalment of "Know Thine
Enemy," a four-part series presented in partnership with the
Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Vanda
Felbab-Brown explains the relationship between the war against the
Taliban and the war against drugs.

The new U. S. counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, recently
unveiled in Rome by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's
special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, represents a courageous
and welcome shift in American policy. Instead of focusing on
eradication, the new strategy promotes legal alternatives for farmers
by emphasizing rural development and the interdiction of drug
traffickers.

The new policy is courageous because it breaks with the decades-long
history of U. S. counternarcotics policies abroad -- involving
intensive eradication, regardless of whether such a suppression policy
did in fact enhance local counterinsurgency and sustainably reduce the
cultivation of illicit crops.

Results from both Asia and Latin America show that these eradication
policies have been a failure. In Peru, during the 1980s, eradication
fuelled the Communist Shining Path insurgency by cementing the bond
between the coca farmers and the guerrillas. (The Peruvian government
finally managed to defeat the Shining Path in the countryside when it
abandoned eradication.) In Colombia, the leftist guerrilla group
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been severely
weakened as a result of U. S. military assistance to Colombia's armed
forces. But it was the military's ability to pin down FARC columns and
prevent their movement, not eradication, which curtailed the FARC's
physical resources. Eradication actually has alienated cocaleros from
the military, and has motivated them to deny intelligence on the FARC
to government operatives, despite the fact that the FARC's popularity
is at an all-time low.

In Afghanistan too, the eradication policy has proved ineffective in
both reducing the extent of poppy cultivation, which in 2007 and 2008
reached levels unprecedented in the history of the modern drug trade,
and in curtailing Taliban funding. Instead, eradication has driven
large segments of the rural population into the hands of the Taliban.
Although the Taliban's ideology does not appeal to most ordinary
people, the Taliban was able to exploit eradication to offer itself as
a protector for the villages and tribes that are dependent on poppy
cultivation for essential livelihood.

The recently announced drug policy is appropriate because it meshes
with the new counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan. U. S. General
Stanley McChrystal has announced that the surge of American troops in
Afghanistan is designed to provide greater security for the
population. Instead of chasing the insurgents in far corners of the
country and leaving the population vulnerable to Taliban return and
reprisals, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces will clear
areas of the Taliban and stay for as long as it takes to resurrect
governance and development. Intensified eradication, such as the
aerial spraying that some in the Bush administration repeatedly
advocated, would have fundamentally undermined this strategy. By
destroying the population's sole source of livelihood, eradication
would have negated what the new "surge" strategy promises to do:
secure the population and give it hope for the future, and hence also
a stake in siding with the Afghan government against violent extremists.

As always, however, the angel and the devil are in the details, and
the new strategy is not without potential pitfalls. Interdiction,
which in Afghanistan will target Talibanlinked traffickers, is
important because such law enforcement is the primary means of
ensuring that the coercive and corrupting power of drug trafficking
organizations does not threaten the state. Diminishing their power is
all the more urgent in Afghanistan since a sense of impunity and abuse
of power pervades the country. However, it is important that
non-Taliban linked traffickers are also targeted, so that interdiction
does not send a signal that the best way to be a trafficker in
Afghanistan is to be a member of the Afghan government. (Many have
already discovered the advantages of running the drug trade from
positions of law enforcement and counter-narcotics). Interdiction also
needs to be tailored carefully to the building of effective and
un-corrupt law enforcement capacity in Afghanistan, so that if it
triggers turf wars among traffickers (as in Mexico), the state is
ready to deal with it.

Ultimately, rural development is the key to reducing the illicit
economy and its multiple pernicious effects in Afghanistan, and the
Obama administration is right to make it the centrepiece of the new
policy. But it is a long-term painstaking process that needs to
counteract the structural drivers of poppy cultivation. Security is
critical: Without it, rural development won't have a chance to take
off. The development efforts need to assure legal microcredit, roads,
fertilizers, irrigation and access to land for the farmers.

But the focus on new crops needs to go beyond subsistence. Wheat
especially is not the way to go in Afghanistan. All of the arable land
of Afghanistan could be planted with wheat, but due to population
density, the people would still be lacking in subsistence. Because
wheat is also far less labour-intensive than poppy, it could employ
only about 15% of the population engaged in poppy cultivation and harvesting.

Four decades of experience with alternative livelihoods around the
world show that the focus needs to be on assured import and export
markets and value-added chains, which in the case of Afghanistan means
diversified high-value high-labour-intensive crops, such as fruits,
vegetables, and saffron. While the correct strategy, rural development
will take time. Strategic patience is as necessary for success in
counternarcotics, as in counterinsurgency. - Vanda Felbab-Brown is a
Foreign Policy Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.