By Steve Hynd
We've written a fair bit here about what we all believe to be Obama's disasterous non-plan for the Af/Pak region, a plan that is simply Bush-lite without a benchmark for progress in sight and without any kind of exit plan. But credit where it's due, the Obama administration has finally gotten something right.
The U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told the Associated Press that poppy eradication -- for years a cornerstone of U.S. and U.N. drug trafficking efforts in the country -- was not working and was only driving Afghan farmers into the hands of the Taliban.
''Eradication is a waste of money,'' Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy.
''It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication,'' he said. The Afghan foreign minister also attended the G-8 meeting.
Instead, the US is to concentrate on assisting farmers who abandon poppy cultivation, boosting efforts to fight trafficking and promote alternate crops.
While Holbrooke did not provide the AP with a dollar figure for the new U.S. commitment, he told the G-8 ministers that Washington was increasing its funding for agricultural assistance from tens of millions of dollars a year to hundreds of millions of dollars, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy, the current G-8 president.
''We're essentially phasing out our support for crop eradication and using the money to work on interdiction, rule of law, alternate crops,'' Holbrooke told the AP.
...The G-8 ministers along with Afghan counterpart Rangin Dadfar Spanta issued a statement at the end of their three-day summit Saturday saying it was urgent to find alternatives for farming communities where ''narco-trafficking and extremism are endemic.''
They said sustainable farming was key to Afghanistan's and Pakistan's future in that it would boost incomes, create jobs, improve rural development and lower regional tensions.
''Food insecurity and chronic poverty are root causes of civil instability and forced migration,'' the statement said.
As Fester noted back in December, US policies of eradication have been a disaster in Columbia too.
Newshoggers alumni Libby Spencer is happy with the policy change: "I could have written that statement. Come to think of it, I did -- too many times to count," but she, I'm sure, is aware that previous, lower key, promises of alternative crop development in Afghanistan have been plagued by a failure to follow through. Hopefully, now that these alternatives are official policy rather than piecemeal experiments, the funding and resourcing will come.
Have to give Holbrooke grudging credit for how strong his statement was.
ReplyDeleteHate to pop anyone's bubble, but the reason we are doing poppy eradication now is that we already tried alternative crops and it didn't work. The farms are small, soil is poor, water is scarce, growing season is short, and transportation is difficult, so farmers cannot thrive growing food crops. We switch them to wheat and, as soon as we leave the area, they rip the wheat out and replant poppies that will provide enough income for them to live on.
ReplyDeleteWhat this "new policy" illustrates is that we don't even learn from our own mistakes. These guys go in there like the lords of creation with all of the answers, not asking even the simple questions like, "what have we tried so far?"
While i applaud the plan to stop the eradication program, i'll withhold full judgment until i see the actual results of the new plans.
ReplyDeleteBillH has several good points, and i'm sure that the government agronomists discuss them with each other in depth. The transport issue will be the most difficult to solve, though i suspect that the other issues will be difficult to address because US development schemes always look at the issues from the wrong perspective. They'll try to build an export based agriculture system dependent on Western cash crops, heavy irrigation, and chemical fertilizers.
If successful, the average Afghan farmer will no longer be in the clutches of opium traffickers; instead, he'll be in the clutches of American ag companies who will sell him expensive seed (which he won't be allowed to save), pesticides, and fertilizers. The combination of these costs and his plot size will make profitability unlikely.
The end result will be the same situation with a different middleman. Considering the actual state of American agriculture, that the US should be dispensing agricultural advice is laughable and dangerous.