I’ve had my doubts about US policies in Afghanistan, and
still do. But one aspect of the fight there is improving. The US is redirecting
its anti-heroin/poppies efforts. I had earlier commented (here):
We cannot both “win” in Afghanistan and eradicate the poppy/opium trade there. That would be expecting too much. Too much of the economy is dependent upon the opium trade. Any political process to create a stronger, better central government will have to face that fact.
In yet another post, I quoted John Robb on the futility of then US drug policies in Afghanistan (here):
…the advocated approach appears to be heavy handed and will
focus on crop eradication and firefights with the Taliban…. The likely
outcome is a much hotter insurgency in Afghanistan, as the number of fighters
swell due to newly impoverished farmers, and a spread of the violence to
previously pacified areas as groups move to find new areas to grow….
Now a more workable approach is emerging. As Thom Shanker and Elisabeth Bumiller report in their NY Times article “U.S. Shifts Afghan Narcotics Strategy” (here):
The American-led mission in Afghanistan is all but abandoning efforts to destroy the poppy crops that provide the largest source of income to the insurgency, and instead will take significant steps to wean local farmers off the drug trade — including one proposal to pay them to grow nothing.
The strategy will shift from wiping out opium poppy crops, which senior
officials acknowledged had served only to turn poor farmers into enemies of the
central government in Kabul. New operations are already being mounted to attack
not the crops, but the drug runners and the drug lords aligned with the insurgency.
Ultimately, farmers must be persuaded to plant other crops, including wheat
for domestic consumption and pomegranates and flowers for export, officials
said.
Michael G. Vickers, the Pentagon’s top civilian official for
counter-insurgency strategy, said Thursday that the specifics of the new
antidrug effort still needed to be worked out, but that a decision had been
reached on the new focus.
“We are reorienting our counternarcotics strategy rather significantly for
Afghanistan to put much less emphasis on eradication and to shift the weight of
our effort to interdiction,” Mr. Vickers said.
The new strategy will “particularly focus on going after those targets where
there is a strong nexus between the insurgency and the narcotics trade, to deny
resources to the Taliban,” he told a group of reporters.
Mr. Vickers, who was the principal C.I.A. strategist for arming anti-Soviet
forces in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, also predicated that there would be
“more focus on other agricultural initiatives” in the coming year.
One short-term solution being urged by senior Defense Department and
military officials would be to pay Afghan farmers not to plant poppies in the
next growing season.
“To the degree we don’t do that, we are at risk for a continuing of both poppy growth as well as sustaining the insurgency, since profits go to the Taliban,” a senior military official told a small group of reporters earlier this week…..
This new policy may have the finesse to work. At least it should not be
making us more enemies.
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