I go to Afghanistan and The New Yorker prints a scary article before I've been gone a week. My colleague had a phone call from her parents who suggested that perhaps she ought not to be in such a dangerous place. Just to reassure everybody out there in radioland: Kabul is secure and we're not going anywhere else. Of course, lots of other parts of the country are secure too, but you know journalists, nothing sells like a little displaced fear.
Hersh's article is pretty good, but he doesn't ask some of the questions I'd really love to see asked in public. For example, he has this to say about heroin.
" Heroin is among the most immediate—and the most intractable—social, economic, and political problems. “The problem is too huge for us to be able to face alone,” Hamid Karzai declared last week in Berlin, as he appealed for more aid. “Drugs in Afghanistan are threatening the very existence of the Afghan state.” Drug dealing and associated criminal activity produced about $2.3 billion in revenue last year, according to an annual survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a sum that was equivalent to half of Afghanistan’s legitimate gross domestic product. “Terrorists take a cut as well,” the U.N. report noted, adding that “the longer this happens, the greater the threat to security within the country.”The U.N. report, published last fall, found that opium production, which, following a ban imposed by the Taliban, had fallen to a hundred and eighty-five metric tons in 2001, soared last year to three thousand six hundred tons—a twentyfold increase. The report declared the nation to be “at a crossroads: either (i) energetic interdiction measures are taken now . . . or (ii) the drug cancer in Afghanistan will keep spreading and metastasise into corruption, violence and terrorism—within and beyond the country’s borders.” Afghanistan was once again, the U.N. said, producing three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium, with no evidence of a cutback in sight, even though there has been a steady stream of reports from Washington about drug interdictions. The report said that poppy cultivation had continued to spread, and was now reported in twenty-eight of the nation’s thirty-two provinces.
Most alarmingly, according to a U.N. survey, nearly seventy per cent of farmers intend to increase their poppy crops in 2004, most of them by more than half. Only a small percentage of farmers were planning any reduction, despite years of international pressure. Many of the areas that the U.N. report identified as likely to see increased production are in regions where the United States has a major military presence. "
Once there was a farmer. He grew wheat to feed his family. Sometimes he even grew enough to take into market to sell to other people so that they too could feed their families.
Then there was a war. It lasted a long time. Many other farmers ran away from their farms and some were killed or their farms were badly damaged and they could no longer produce very much food. But the farmer we know did not run away. He stayed on his land and continued to grow wheat to feed his family. Sometimes he even grew enough to give some as a present to the local warlord.
Finally, the war ended around our friend's farm because the Taliban conquered the area and imposed a harsh security. At least the fighting had finally stopped. Around the country, though, there were not enough working farms to feed all the people anymore. But the farmer worked hard and he at least continued to feed his own family though times were very tough. Sometimes he even grew enough to tithe to the Taliban.
One day, the Taliban were driven out. The markets opened up again. At last, thought the farmer, I will be able to sell my excess wheat again instead of "giving" it away. He worked harder than ever all that season and, though water was still scarce, he had a very good crop. He took it into town to sell only to find that the price of wheat in the market was half of what it had cost him to grow it!
How could this be?
The United States bought excess wheat from its farmers and donated it to the World Food Programme, who transported the food from America to Afghanistan to give to hungry people.1
The farmer returned to his farm, burned off the chaff, and planted poppies.
. . .
Serious about drugs? Among other good options, stop the agricultural subsidies to North American and European farmers. Otherwise, you reap what you sow.2
1 How much do you suppose it costs to buy wheat from American farmers and then to transport that wheat from the heartland of the US to a US port and onto a ship that sails to Karachi in Pakistan where the wheat is loaded onto trucks which drive up and up to Afghanistan? How many people are employed in all the steps along the way and why can't we find something more productive for them to do?
2 This appears to be the Biblical metaphor of the week. Farmers who grow drugs are often not entirely rational economic actors. They are - quite often - willing to make somewhat less money than they make selling drugs if they can instead grow food. Strange, but true. Perhaps we should be looking for policies which support farmers, local traders, and merchants rather than policies which support the systems of interdiction. Economic activity generates other opportunities, as well as tax revenue. Additional police and soldiers, on the other hand, consume resources much better spent elsewhere and put nothing back in. But they will buy American made helicopters.
Posted by Martial