Opium As Afghan Metaphor

By Steve Hynd

Opium production in Afghanistan has a long history, writes Lex at Scolars and Rogues:

In 1953, a follow up to the Paris Convention designated seven nations as legal, export producers and allowed any nation to produce a domestic supply.  The major producer nations left off the list ignored the convention. One country appealed the decision and asked for an export license, �arguing opium was a vital cash crop supporting up to 90 percent of the population�. (Booth, 188) That country was Afghanistan, and the appeal was denied.

So it is incorrect to say that Afghanistan has an opium problem because of the violence that has wracked the nation since the late 1970�s; the violence and instability has only exacerbated the �problem�. A rugged, landlocked nation without significant transport infrastructure that receives seasonal rains has few options in cash crops that are saleable beyond local markets.

And what few other cash crops Afghanistan did export have been destroyed by Western meddling. Between the 50s and 70s Western advisors introduced a Helmand Valley Authority, build a lot of dams and canals and tried several times to reengineer the ancient Afghan agricultural system. In his 2002 paper on the subject [PDF] (H/t Moon of Alabama), Prof Nick Cullather wrote:

The Helmand scheme ... came under American supervision in 1946 and continued until the departure of the last reclamation expert in 1979, outlasting the theories and rationales on which it was based. It was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an �integrated� development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority. Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history.

Morrison Knudsen, the Halliburton of their time, made a mint out of the project, which had both Afghan and American millions poured into it over the decades. "From 1946 on, the salaries of Morrison Knudsen�s advisers and technicians absorbed an amount equivalent to Afghanistan�s total exports." But a lack of planning and absence of oversight meant that waterlogging and salinization of farmland meant that Afghanistan actually lost arable ground and wheat yields dropped to the lowest per acre in the world.

The opium poppy grows well in dry climates and alkaline and saline soils. It was all that was left to Afghan farmers. U.S. meddling partly created the opium growing explosion in Afghanistan and made it difficult to roll back the clock. You can bet that the farmers of Helmland haven't forgotten, even if the COINdinistas advising the Pentagon and the interventionist hawks at State haven't got a clue.

Lex writes:

If our commitment to Afghanistan is genuine, then our priorities must be rearranged. Attacking the opium trade is, in the long term, futile... For every problem there are an infinite number of solutions and the problem of opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no different. Unfortunately, it appears the US has settled on the worst solution: lots of money for bullets and paramilitary drug war adventures.

With the U.S. also apparently helping out the non-Taliban norco-warlords by removing their competition, is it any wonder Afghans cite the occupation as the number one reason for joining the insurgency? Sending more troops can only hinder, not help.