Iraq and Afghanistan

Today’s paper points again to the extreme difficulty of controlling opium production in Afghanistan. The country has now become the leading producer of opium in the world. Only three percent of its irrigated land actually produces opium, but return from this crop can be as much as thirty times that of wheat, the traditional crop. The results are what we have noted in many other hard drug producing countries, particularly in South America. In Colombia, drug production and the drug trade have made impossible the institutionalization of democracy and the “freeing” of the country as far as the majority of the rural people are concerned.

The drug trade in Afghanistan has produced hundreds if not thousands of instantly wealthy persons, and provided them with armed retinues. In the province on the southwestern tip of the country discussed in today’s paper, the whole economy has been essentially taken over. The trade here is primarily through Iran into Europe. The Iranians are doing their best. They have financed the building of many Afghan police stations on the border to help. But whatever successes the control programs have, the drugs keep coming. The warlords controlling much of the country outside the cities are financed in large part by drugs. And as fast as drug/war lord is replaced or removed others take his place. Kabul has said that it will move energetically against the trade. With the help of the British they are eradicating crops and arresting growers and traders. The problem is that facing hunger, eradication makes more enemies than friends, both for foreigners and the government.

Out of a population of 30,000,000, nearly 80% live an essentially subsistence existence in rural areas (perhaps 2,000,000 of these are still refugees, primarily in Pakistan, but most will return to rural areas). Twelve percent of the country is listed as “arable”, but much of this has returned to desert in recent years due to overgrazing, erosion, and drought. The average rainfall is twelve inches. Dry farming with this rainfall at this level on rocky soils often fails. Small irrigated patches along creek beds provide the major sustenance. Only three percent of the country remains forested. An agricultural revival program is being pursued with foreign assistance, irrigation channels are being reopened. More of this should be done. But for most Afghans it won’t be enough to give them a living even in spare Afghan terms.

We must come up with an approach that does more than eradicate opium or try to force people back into growing cotton or subsistence crops. The first fact that must be faced is that most rural Afghans do not have enough land to support themselves in an average year raising food crops. They need a cash crop to make it through the hard years. Second, Afghanistan does not have enough water or arable land (nor a good enough transportation system nor viable potential markets) to make possible another cash crop with anything like the return of opium. The solution for Afghanistan must come through a rapid change from a barely functioning rural subsistence economy to a rural economy based on small manufacturing (as a first step to an eventual change from a rural to an urban society). This is obviously easier said than done. But the Afghan government and its friends should not keep butting their heads against the geographical facts of the country. If we were not so enamored of a free trade regime that transfers production from the wealthy countries primarily to China, we could conceive of ways to guarantee markets for certain chosen items for, let us say rural Colombians and Afghans, with the European Community, Russia, and the United States buying predetermined amounts of what is produced. We then could invest in getting such production started and building the required infrastructure. (The next job is to figure out what production might be viable.)