This article (cited by Raw Story)US-led soldier among scores killed, Afghan district falls caught my attention the other morning, and led me to ruminate on how the US can gracefully triumph in Afghanistan.
If there is a "right" conflict in which to be engage, this is it. Afghanistan is struggling to merge from medieval levels of poverty with it's national character intact. This is an effort the United States should support because it's success may change conflict dynamics both within Afghanistan, and within critical neighboring countries of Pakistan and Iran. And unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is a place where many if not most of its people would welcome a NATO-led victory against the warlords, Taliban and corrupt government officials.
The question, "Why should the US be in Afghanistan at all?" is a valid one, upon which I will not dwell too long. Briefly:
- The US set the stage for Afghanistan's current plight, we have an obligation to follow through on our promises and intentions;
- Afghanistan has been a base for radical anti-American activity in the past, activity that has profoundly altered our ability to work in the world. It must not revert to that status again;
- The people of Afghanistan are by and large sympathetic to values that we hold dear: the welcome of strangers, the strength of family, the love of liberty, and freedom of commerce. While many traditional attitudes are not palatable to us, (treatment of women and hostility to religions other than Islam), these are attitudes that have fluctuated over time and can be mitigated by more modern approaches to the issues which gave rise to the attitudes, primarily, poverty and ignorance.
Afghanistan is very "American" in that it is historically an extremely multicultural society, and many tensions can be best described by cultural, ethnic and religious differences between ethnic and cultural groups. While the US doesn't have a lock on how to peacefully resolve ethnic and religious tension, we have a pretty good track record when compared to the rest of the world, and we're still learning and experimenting.
Helping Afghanistan create a functioning state, (or states) is a difficult mission. One could argue that Afghanistan was never a functioning state within it's current borders. The concept of "reconstructing" Afghanistan is misleading: we are attempting to create an entity that never existed in the past. The various major groups that comprise Afghanistan have always been in conflict, or in loose alliances, ready to turn against each other depending on the circumstances.
Precisely because we are not "reconstructing" anything in Afghanistan (surely we do not want to reconstruct the Soviet-backed regimes that existed prior to the Taliban), achieving success will require that the US will have to become a lot smarter in it's approach to intervention. Why? Because the root of the conflict in Afghanistan is economics, culture, and history, but economics most of all. And if we in the US are smart, we will realize that although our military is very strong and can be useful, our ability to use commerce to influence behavior can be a more potent technique achieving behavior modification in the region.
Which brings me to the core of my rumination: The US should focus primarily on the economic aspects of reconstruction in Afghanistan, while continuing to deploy troops to provide the security necessary to allow economic activity to develop and thrive. The Petraeus approach in Iraq is fundamentally correct, but in Afghanistan, it will need an extra twist (perhaps requiring some fundamental domestic changes here in the US) to be effective: NATO has to become the major player in the purchasing of opium grown in Afghanistan.
There are too few resources in Afghanistan to sustain a society that has room to peacefully address and resolve conflict. Wealth and influence in this environment tends to be a zero-sum game. The conflict dynamic of Afganistan will not change until this condition is addressed.
The media portrays "The Taliban" as some sort of unified force, but rather it is a number of factions allied only in their opposition to foreign occupation and corrupt government officials and groups. (In Afghanistan you also have the curious dynamic of the police forces and the army allied with different factions, leading to surprising interactions between the two forces). The Taliban's primary strength draws from three sources: their faith (and the clarity of professing their faith); their ruthlessness, and their profits from poppies. Their secondary strength is that they represent an alternative to corrupt government officials (who also derive their strength from ruthlessness and poppies).
Its virtually impossible to describe the poverty of Afghanistan to anyone who grew up in the United States. The average annual income hovers around $300 per year. As soon as children can walk, they work. Gasoline is sold in half- and one-liter soda bottles (and gasoline distributors use donkey carts to move barrels of fuel from depots on the outskirts of town to the center of town, then decant the results into whatever bottles they can find). The predominant heating fuels are kerosene and wood, which by 3 pm every day, creates an foggy atomospheric soup composed of soot, dust and dried shit (from the open air sewers) that gets in everything and coats your lungs and noses. Afghanistan is poor, and that's it's main problem.
Flying over the country you notice that while most of the country is barren, there are pockets of agricultural production, mostly located around watersheds. One of the most practical crops to grow are poppies. They don't require much water or fertilizer, they don't require good roads or transportation to get the results to market, and they bring in a relatively high market price.
The production of opium in Afghanistan leverages a lot of local strengths. As World Bank states, "Depending on the situation of a rural household, the opium economy may be a source of land and credit, seasonal employment, a virtually guaranteed market, high financial returns, and secondary multiplier effects (e.g. demand for goods on local bazaars, construction, etc" To replace opium as a mainstay of the economy of Afghanistan will require reinventing all of these functions, a daunting and perhaps impossible task.
But to date, reinventing the economy of Afghanistan has been the approach of NATO and it's proxy, the Karzai administration. The results of this joint eradication effort has been record opium production, more funds in the hands of the "Taliban", the strengthening of the nonofficial (i.e. nontaxable) economy, and a national economy that is no closer to supporting it's people.
There was a rash of articles in 2006 and 2007 on this issue, but little has been done to address this fundamental problem. National and international attention has focused on dealing with the symptoms of this problem (the resurgance of the "Taliban" and the violent struggle for control of the drug trade) rather than dealing with the problem itself, hence this little essay.
While Sen. Obama is expanding his perspective on Central and Middle Eastern issues, perhaps he and his staff might consider making a committment to become the primary consumer of opium grown in Afghanistan over a period of five years, and then use the resulting purchasing power to exercise supply control after that, (similar to how Wal-Mart exercises control over its supplier).
Measures similar (but not as radical as this) have been proposed by both academics and policymakers (See the references from Der Speigal and the Boston Globe, below), but to date debate on this issue has not seriously included the option for NATO (or its proxy) to be the primary consumer of opium. The British-based Senlis Council is advocating a program of small-scale "Poppy for Medicine" projects which aim to teach local producers how to create morphine tablets from their poppies for sale to pharmaceutical companies.
This initiative seems a little complicated (relies on a sustained educational effort and presumes a market for questionable quality morphine tablets), and is admittedly small scale. To make progress, NATO and the government of Afghanistan need to be thinking about addressing the problem at the scale of the problem: Setting up a national purchaser who will pay the best price for raw opium. This will drive out other competition and dry up their sources of funds for weapons and training. Further, this approach may (with many qualifications) provide an opportunity to recruit former opponents into resuming their role as intermediary, but for a larger, more powerful entity (think, Yahoo! employees becoming Microsoft employees -- shudder!).
The option to create an national opium co-op for Afghanistan, has been, to date, a nonstarter in national policy circles. Most policymakers and programs have focused on some level of eradication or interdiction. With little success. The interdiction and eradication effort strikes me as being as effective as a group of people attempting to hold hands, circling my town, to shoo away the deer that invade our town nightly. Ain't gonna happen. And if it works a couple times, you aren't going to sustain the success.
Why not work with the existing supply-demand dynamic and use policy judo to subtly, over a period of many years, introduce practices that lead to more constructive civic behavior?
This approach would require some significant readjustments in US and European policies, but would at least have a shot at gaining control of the funding stream that's arming the violent factions opposed to the Karzai government. Remove the opportunity for large-scale violence while introducing non-violent methods for resolving disputes (e.g. laws, working civil and criminal courts) and Afghanistan might have a shot at emerging from its current situation.
Of course the "readjustments" would be significant, but they don't require Americans die to make them happen:
- We'd have to get over our collective aversion to long-term committments to countries and regions. (This I don't really understand: we're committed to the region one way or another. Why not try to create an outcome that works for us?)
- We'd have to get over our aversion to getting into the drug business on a national scale, and duke it out with big pharma over this issue.
- We'd have a fight with law enforcement and military interests who have a long-term finanical interest in continuing failed interdiction efforts.
- And finally, we'd have to really address what to do with all that opium and how it will affect global markets for opiate derivatives. There are a few studies that indicate that some of the largest markets for pharmaceutical opium derivatives grown in the region are relatively local: China and India. But who really knows if this is the case?
Without getting a effective handle on Afghanistans poppy problem/opportunity, we're going to be seeing a lot more of these skirmishes (and local defeats) that result in a couple Americans or European soldiers getting killed, and Afghan police, army forces, and civilian population demoralized.
REFERENCES:
John Reid warns of Taliban resurgence: Think Tank blames current counter-narcotic policy (Senlis Council): http://www.senliscouncil.net/...
Afghanistan: Gaining Momentum (Parameters, US Army): http://www.carlisle.army.mil/...
"A Better Strategy against Narcoterrorism" (MIT): http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...
Opium Wars (Wall Street Journal): http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...
Afghanistan Drug Industry and Counter Narcotics policy (World Bank): http://web.worldbank.org/...
Afghanistan Opium Crop to Set Record (Wash Post): http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
NATO to Legalize Afghanistan's Opium? (Der Speigal): http://www.spiegel.de/...
Opium for the people: Extraordinary move to legalise poppy crops: http://opioids.com/...
Opium Production in Afghanistan (wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The Taliban’s Opium War (New Yorker): http://www.newyorker.com/...
"Afghanistan and Opium" (Boston Globe): http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...