Iraq and Afghanistan

The United States has decided to more directly interfere militarily with the growing, refining, and shipment of opium in Afghanistan. Before now, American forces were supposed to only interfere when they came across drugs in the course of other work. Now they will specifically target the problem. The current consensus is that 85% of the world's opium now originates in the country (seems doubtful, but the figure is repeated often). The U. S. government feels that its intervention will be judged a failure if it ultimately leaves with the country effectively in the hands of narcotics lords.

The problem is that we have tried this approach before against the growers and distributors of opium and its derivatives (such as heroin), as well as other drugs such as cocaine. Success has been difficult in every case. But to the extent that we have succeeded, the growing, refining, and distribution of the drug simply shifts to new countries and new routes. As long as we do not make a significant dent in the market in the developed world, prices will stay high, and some people, somewhere, will supply the needs.

Meanwhile, what is happening in the country? The poorest countries turn to opium or other drugs because they are so much more profitable than alternatives. As long as such countries were really composed of autochthonous villages that produced the food and clothes they consumed, there was no market and drug income was unnecessary. If the crops failed, the people starved. But today everyone is a consumer, even the peasant in a distant Afghan valley. The people feel they need some income both to cover the shortfall in local production of foodstuffs and to buy the "necessities" of the outside world, whether these be new medicines or Nikes. Once they enter this world, they find that they can both assure their food supply and obtain more goods from the outside world if they drop their subsistence crops and take up a cash crop. In Afghanistan, this has led to a very large percent of the people changing from the culture of wheat to that of opium.

The only ways the government and the United States know to change the equation are to kill the opium crops, punish people for growing opium, and arrest opium dealers and refineries, thereby reducing the chance for farmers to gain from their illicit crops. Whether in Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia, the end result is that large parts of the rural population become estranged from the government, seeing it as the enemy. When the United States takes a more direct part, then the United States becomes the enemy, with the local government being seen as the tool of the United States. This problem is exacerbated when the inevitable happens: people are killed in the course of anti-drug missions in the country, and people claim (sometimes with justification) that the destruction of crops has poisoned their fields, sickened their animals, contaminated their foodstuffs, and even killed their children.

It is true that we do not wish to leave behind another Colombia. But it is also true that we do not want to undermine democracy in Afghanistan by making it seem that the supporters of democracy (local and foreign) are the enemies of the people. Nor do we want to simply drive the drug problem elsewhere in the developing world.

The solution, as many have said, lies in giving the people viable alternatives to growing opium. But except on a very small scale, these viable alternatives have not really worked out. It seems to me that before we start to tighten the screws militarily on the production of opium in Afghanistan, we should do more than we have to develop these alternatives, whether they be new crops (and ways to market them) or new ways to make a living, such as expanding light industry. I realize that this is all easier said than done. But the emphasis of the antidrug effort simply must be changed.