Resolving the contradiction

That opium growing comprises between one-third and one-half of the GDP of Afghanistan is an embarrassment for the US and its NATO allies, because their international aid distributions represent much of the remainder. Afghanistan’s runaway success in international criminal activity is hard to square with rhetoric describing it as an “emerging democracy”.

Resolving the contradiction inherent in simultaneously eradicating opium growing and distributing international aid is probably impossible, but that has not stopped Washington from pursuing both policies. Joel Hafvenstein’s Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, which recounts the author’s November 2004 to May 2005 stint as the Helmand province manager for Chemonics International, a private USAID contractor, is a vehicle used to expose the policy perversity fundamental to the American effort.

Hafvenstein describes the $2.7 million aid program that he managed as a last minute make-work project to reduce the economic harm to farmers from opium eradication. Unless they were paid wages for pick and shovel work, the loss of income from the Afghan government’s destruction of some of their opium fields would make farmers available for recruitment by the resurgent Taliban.

Afghanistan’s post-2002 emergence as the Saudi Arabia of opium is inextricably linked with the Bush administration’s tragic failure to finish off the Taliban after driving them out of Kabul in 2002. By 2004, soaring opium production was such a scandal that some attempt at opium eradication was required as a public relations measure. That public relations gesture then necessitated efforts to relieve the resulting economic hardship on Afghan farmers.

The basic political problem is that drug eradication programs alienate almost everyone. As Bob Kramer, one of Hafvenstein’s veteran colleagues, comments:

I’ve worked with all four of the big USAID counter-narcotics programs now - Bolivia, Columbia, Peru, here - and I hate it. First we force the host governments to accept a program they don’t believe in. Did you ever hear about the Peruvian Congress declaring coca their national plant and planting coca bushes in the atrium of the Congress building? That happened while I was there … Once the eradication starts, you lose the communities as well. You can get them interested in whatever alternative you’re touting, until the government starts taking out their crops. Then nothing works (p.92).

Attitudes about drug use vary across cultures. As the author notes, the people of southern Afghanistan view hashish and opium smoking as minor and common peccadilloes but see drinking alcohol as immoral and dangerous (p.125). Western hypocrisy further undermines whatever local support might exist for opium eradication.

Although Hafvenstein does not discuss economic rent seeking from the opium trade or international aid, as such, he does discuss their economic and political consequences.

Both opium and international aid generate economic rents or “windfall” income for some in Afghanistan. Like elites in countries with exploitable oil and gas deposits or important sites of religious pilgrimage, Afghan elites need do comparatively little to realise economic benefits from international aid and the opium trade.

International aid is distributed in Afghanistan both to alleviate the mass poverty caused by decades of war and to support a client government installed by the United States and its NATO allies. Opium is profitable because the criminal justice systems of foreign countries attempt to enforce drug prohibition. Neither accepting international aid nor growing opium requires making the capital investment and accepting the comparatively low returns involved in producing food crops, manufacturing or mining. Economic rents are addictive.

Corruption is the most obvious consequence. Government officials not directly involved in the production and smuggling of heroin produced from opium may look the other way because of bribery and fear of violent retribution. Barely trained and recruited because of their ethnic, family and personal ties, Hafvenstein describes Afghanistan’s Ministry of the Interior as, “a warren of bribe-taking and ethnic nepotism” (p.246) and its national police as a, “balkanised, tribal, predatory mess” (p.190).

Corrupt provincial governors, many of them warlords with their own militias, blame the Taliban for the violence caused by their anarchic struggle for profits from opium trade. Corruption attributable to opium is ubiquitous. Hafvenstein even discovered that his own project operated under the protection of Helmand’s provincial governor, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, a warlord opium trafficker whose police force was recruited from his militiamen (p.111-112).

Helmand was the location for a massive public works project in the 1950s, when the US government financed the construction of irrigation systems for cotton growing. In addition to repairing roads across the province, the author’s pick and shovel crews laboured to rehabilitate those 1950s era irrigation systems. Ironically, the repaired roads and irrigation systems would then facilitate opium growing and shipment.

The economic distortions resulting from opium growing and international aid are an important part of the story told in the book. Opium growing not only discourages other agricultural crops because it is more profitable, but also because of the so-called “Dutch disease”, in which dependence on a single successful commodity attracts foreign investment, which then drives up the exchange rate, and as a consequence disadvantages producers of other export commodities (p.235-236).

Infusions of international aid cause economic distortions because expat aid managers typically live well by comparison with the majority of the population. Computer supply stores, travel agencies, gourmet groceries and restaurants are opened to serve the expat community. As has been true of other Third World capital cities occupied by the forces of international aid, real property prices in Kabul soared. Something comparable happened to ambitious Afghan youth, who sought out better paid jobs as staff in the international aid NGOs rather than starting their own businesses or beginning careers as professionals (p.94).

The least convincing material in Hafvenstein’s otherwise insightful memoir is its brief discussion of alternatives to current policy.

He argues against attempting to transform Afghanistan’s illicit opium crop into a legal opium crop, as was done in India and Turkey (p.255). He is correct that legal opium growing produces far less income for farmers and is perhaps correct that it would contribute little to meeting the needs for medicinal opiates of Third World’s pain sufferers because they cannot afford to buy them.

What he fails to question is the wisdom of drug prohibition in the wealthy countries, the policy that makes drug crops more profitable than other agricultural crops in the first place. Until the fundamental futility and perversity of drug prohibition is challenged, economic distortion, government waste, official corruption and criminal violence are inevitable.