Afghanistan's Opium War: Corrupt government officials empower Taliban

  British soldiers patrol poppy field in Helmand province (Reuters)

It sure makes it quite challenging for the Afghanistan government to crackdown on the illegal opium trade when it’s being fueled by members of the Afghanistan government. These derelict officials have put the entire country’s security at risk by promoting opium and heroin trafficking while hindering opium eradication efforts, because opium profits are one of the major funding sources of the Taliban movement, which enables the anti-government militant group to grow exponentially in terms of size and lethality.

The Taliban siphon millions of dollars off the top of the opium market, which is a $2.3 billion industry, accounting for roughly 22% of Afghanistan’s total GDP. It isn’t too difficult for the Taliban to “tax” the opium that farmers continually harvest considering nearly all the opium is cultivated in Taliban-controlled areas in the south and west. But not only are government officials, direct or indirectly, funding a war against their own government, they are funding a war against their own people and their own society.

A nation addicted
According to a story in today’s edition of Outlook Afghanistan, the number of drug addicts in Afghanistan is now estimated to be over one million in a country with a population of 30 million. Poverty, unemployment and illiteracy are said to be the leading causes of the opium usage, but availability is also a major driver.

Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world’s opium and the drug is sold openly across Afghanistan, including in the shadows of Kabul, the country’s capital. The scourge has spread throughout the country and has proliferated like wildfire since 2001, seeping through every layer of society. Husbands who are addicted encourage their wives to take opium, and they have even pushed it onto their children, especially when they are in pain.

Corruption at every turn
Afghanistan’s Counter-narcotics Minister General Khodaidad implicated people at all levels of government who were profiting off the drug - from the lowly police recruit to government officials who had been running major smuggling networks. This includes large numbers of senior officers in the Afghan National Police, ministers in Hamid Karzai's government, and Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's own brother.

Afghan law enforcement officials like to point to the fact that opium poppy cultivation is down 22 percent to 123,000 hectares (2.471 acres) and opium production is down 10 percent from the previous year. However, prices are at a 10-year low as well because demand has slackened. So, the reduction has less to do with counter-narcotics efforts and more to do with the basic laws of economics.

The dilemma for the counter-narcotics team is that one cannot simply eradicate poppies from the field, because that would be inhumane and would drive farmers to even lower levels of poverty, pushing them right into the waiting hands of Mullah Omar and his henchmen. The switching costs are much too high for the average Afghan farmer because the selling price of opium is one to five times greater than that of the next best crop which is wheat.

Taliban and the rise of narco-cartels
Poor Afghan farmers pay the Taliban protection money and the Taliban funnels the opium via the narco-cartel network into Pakistan for export world wide. Expert Gretchen Peters, author of "Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban”, says that once inside Pakistan, the Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) coordinate the transportation of the drug using Pakistani army trucks.

The Taliban once objected to opium cultivating and trading and considered it evil because it was forbidden by Islam. But its funny how the almighty dollar can change things. According to the Director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa:

A marriage of convenience between insurgents and criminal groups is spawning narco-cartels in Afghanistan linked to the Taliban. Drug money is addictive, and is starting to trump ideology.”

Perplexing market pricing
Mr. Costa contests that the narco-cartels, Taliban and government officials are also manipulating world market prices by hoarding stockpiles of heroin and opium. The big mystery is that world demand for opium remains stable (at around 5,000 tons), which is several thousand tons lower than is produced in Afghanistan every year. Yet, prices are not crashing, which indicates that a large amount of opium is being withheld from the market. Mr. Costa asserts:

Stockpiles of illicit opium now probably exceed 10,000 tons - enough to satisfy two years of world (heroin) addiction, or three years of medical (morphine) prescription. Where is it, who is hoarding it and why? Intelligence agencies should defuse the ticking-bomb of opium stockpiles before these become the source of potential sinister scenarios.”

Solutions
The UNODC has seen some success in Helmand province, where most of Afghanistan’s opium is cultivated, because production is down about one third. As mentioned, much of it can be explained by market fluctuations but some of it is the result of successful law enforcement.

Costa says it can be attributed to a combination of “carrots and sticks”, including strong leadership; a more aggressive counter-narcotics offensive; terms of trade that are more favorable to legal crops; and "food zones" to promote licit farming.

The counter-insurgency strategy going forward should also put more of a focus on targeting key links in the opium drug smuggling network and heroine production chain and less on farmers. Afghan and NATO forces, including portions of Obama’s surge, need to trace the supply chain and seize the precursors or raw materials of heroin, such as the chemicals needed for the extraction of morphine and heroin from opium, such as ammonium chloride and acetic anhydride, as well as finding and destroying the labs where this manufacturing occurs.

Perpetual war, perpetual profit
Costa stresses that if we don’t win the opium battle, all the steps taken to date to eradicate illicit opium trade will be for nothing and the Taliban will surely succeed: "It would be an historical error to allow this undeniable progress to be undermined not in the opium fields of poor farmers, but in the killing fields of suicide bombers”.

And until this is done, don’t expect things to change. Sam Kiley of the GlobalPost characterized the sad situation, inferring that constant war is a key element for the major players to continue to control the opiate business segment:

An outbreak of peace is the last thing that those who profit from opium, the drug lords, the Taliban and senior members of Karzai's own administration would like to see.

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Obama strikes back: U.S. drones kill 17 extremists in Pakistan

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