NEWS

Poppy Eradication in Afghanistan Ineffective, Expert Says

By Stephanie Berrong
10/23/2009 -

The Obama Administration’s proposed counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, which focuses on interdiction and rural development rather than poppy crop eradication, if implemented well, will enhance counterinsurgency and counterterrorism objectives, an expert told a Senate caucus on Wednesday. 

 
In testimony before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, Brookings Institute Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown said counternarcotics policies up to this point have complicated counterterrorism and counterinsurgency objectives, jeopardized state-building efforts, and have been counterproductive at suppressing the narcotics trade.
 
“During 2007 and 2008, the Afghan drug economy reached levels unprecedented in the history of the modern drug trade at least since World War II, and so far has escaped efforts of the international community and the Afghan government to contain and reduce it,” according to her testimony.
 
Speaking at a Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center conference at George Mason University later in the day, she pointed to the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar as an example of the unintended negative consequences of eradication. “For decades, Nangarhar has been one of the dominant producers of opium poppy,” she said. “But over the past two years, as a result of governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s suppression efforts – including bans on cultivation, forced eradication, imprisonment of violators, and claims that NATO would bomb the houses of those who cultivate poppy or keep opium, cultivation went down to almost zero. This has been hailed as a major success to be emulated throughout Afghanistan.”
 
But in fact, she said, the ban has driven many local families into debt. According to her testimony:
 
As legal economic activities failed to materialize, many coped by resorting to crime, such as kidnapping and robberies, others by seeking employment in the poppy fields of Helmand, yet others by migrating to Pakistan where they frequently end up recruited by the Taliban. The population became deeply alienated from the government, resorting to strikes and attacks on government forces, and districts that were especially severely economically hit, such as Khogiani, Achin, and Shinwar, have become no-go zones for the Afghan government and NGOs. Although those tribal areas have historically been opposed to the Taliban, the Taliban mobilization there has taken off to an unprecedented degree. The populations began allowing the Taliban to cross over from Pakistan, and intelligence provision to Afghan forces and NATO has almost dried up. Tribal elders who supported the ban became discredited, and the collapse of their legitimacy is providing an opportunity for the Taliban to insert itself into the decision-making structures of those areas. And all such previous bans in the province, including in 2005, turned out to be unsustainable in the absence of legal economic alternatives, and poppy cultivation inevitably swung back.
 
Felbab-Brown urged lawmakers to have patience for the new policy to show sustainable results, saying “it will take many years and easily decades."
 
She recommended that eradication be a part, not the focus of counternarcotics policies, but only in areas that are free from violent conflict and where sufficient legal economic alternatives are available to the population; that interdiction efforts focus on reducing the corrupting power of criminal organizations; and that policymakers consider the effects of success. She said measures should also be adopted to prevent the displacement of the narcotics economy to Pakistan.
 

♦ View her other recommendations and her complete testimony here. Read the testimony of other witnesses at the hearing here.

♦ Photo of Canadian troops advancing through Afghan poppy field by paulmmay/Flickr

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