Fear of fighting and economic ruin hold back bid to stamp out opium

Victoria Burnett and Peter Spiegel
Financial Times
4 January 2005

On a balmy December Saturday in the southern Afghan city of Jalalabad, Zalmay Khalilzad stood before an assembly of farmers. The weather was perfect for planting and the US envoy to Afghanistan had come, armed with a blunt warning and 500kg of wheat seed, to persuade them to grow something other than opium poppies. "Illegal drugs pose a mortal threat to Afghanistan's future," Mr Khalilzad told the crowd of 150 farmers in a garden of tangerine trees and tall palms. "Corruption follows illegal drugs as surely as night follows day."

The meeting was an opening salvo in America's new campaign to fight the Afghan opium industry. The US will spend $780m (Ç579m, £410m) this year on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan, up from $130m in 2004 and about $35m the year before. The sharp rise in funding is a measure of Washington's belated appreciation of the danger posed by the opium industry, which has boomed since the Taliban regime fell three years ago. But as they gear up for the big crackdown, Afghan, US and British officials continue to wrestle with the question of how best to beat an industry that employs 2.3m Afghans and earned $2.8bn last year, equivalent to about 60 per cent of Afghanistan's legal gross domestic product. Britain has taken the lead role among Afghanistan's allies in fighting the drug problem but has failed to reduce output, much to the frustration of the US.

At the centre of the debate is the balance between carrot and stick. The Afghan Interior Ministry has proposed an ambitious 120-day programme to clear 60,000 hectares in 11 provinces but some Afghan and western officials worry that aggressive eradication would ruin the local economy and prompt violence. The US is backing off from a proposal to eradicate using crop dusters - an efficient but politically provocative method that has been rejected by Hamid Karzai, the president. Reports that mysterious aircraft had sprayed crops in southern Afghanistan prompted Kabul to warn Britain and the US sharply against pursuing policies without its sanction.

Another debate is the role of thousands of US-led and Nato-led troops. Some Afghan and western counter-narcotics officials wish to expand that role. Senior Nato officials and leaders of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan insist that their remit is limited to providing emergency protection and destroying drugs or labs when they find them. "We're not going to have troops hopping around the countryside, stomping out drugs. We've got other things to do," said Colonel David Lamm, chief of staff for the 18,000-strong US-led coalition that is fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Officials involved in a tense debate inside the Pentagon on the US military's role in eradicating poppy fields said there was broad agreement that the burgeoning drug trade might corrupt the fledgling Karzai government. But a split has opened between military officers, worried that an onslaught on the trade could unsettle the country ahead of parliamentary elections, and Pentagon civilians who fear that drug revenues could be used to influence the vote.

"Central Command would prefer not to be in the eradication business," said Lieutenant General Lance Smith, Centcom's deputy commander. "We have spent a lot of capital in trying to build relationships with the people and now this has the potential for us to do things that wouldn't be popular."

The government and the US have launched a campaign to persuade farmers to abandon poppy cultivation voluntarily. In an emotional speech, Mr Karzai recently told an audience of 500 provincial leaders that the drug trade brought shame on Afghanistan and was against the principles of Islam. The US plans to pay about 125,000 people in three poppy-growing provinces - Nangahar, of which Jalalabad is the capital, Helmand and Badakhshan - to do other jobs and to offer support in the form of seeds and fertiliser. The US says it will also fund long-term development. Officials concede nothing can compete economically with the lucrative crop, which yielded about $4,600 per hectare last year, according to United Nations estimates - more than 10 times the income from wheat.

Some officials are optimistic that the tide of the swelling opium industry will turn this year. Bill Rammell, Britain's minister for counter-narcotics, expected opium output to shrink in 2005 as a strategy took shape. Haji Sayed Amir, a Nangahar farmer who attended the meeting in Jalalabad, said he would carry to his village Mr Khalilzad's message to abandon poppy-growing. Then he would wait and see what else the US had to offer. "If they don't co-operate this year then I will grow poppy again next year," he said.

Citation: Victoria Burnett and Peter Spiegel, "Fear of fighting and economic ruin hold back bid to stamp out opium," Financial Times, 4 January 2005; Original URL: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a4703f96-5df5-11d9-ac01-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html