Why the Afghanistan War is Unwinnable-Heroin Demand in the West

Following on from numerous attempts to show how the sacrifice of British troops was for a higher purpose and why willpower was essential to victory, General Stanley McChrystal in 2009 admitted the whole strategy up until now had been a mistake. His replacement by General Petreus this year will make no difference to what I wrote here last year in 2009

McChrystal portrayed the recent strategy of western forces as the equivalent of a lumbering bull attacking a matador's cape, gradually tiring and finally being killed off.

The tone of some propaganda has gone from heroic uplift to question begging and hand wringing irrelevance,

First, the US and UK need to set clear benchmarks for what constitutes success. It cannot be, as US special envoy Richard Holbrooke remarked, that victory in Afghanistan is like pornography in that "you know it when you see it".

The second step is to question the underlying liberal assumptions that have guided Nato's mission in Afghanistan thus far.....To escape the Afghanistan trap we may need to give up some of the liberal mantras that motivated our interventions there and elsewhere.

The final step is to have a public discussion about the strategy and resources that will allow us to achieve some kind of acceptable outcome in Afghanistan. The worst liberal mantra is the War on Drugs which completely undermines anything else the USA and Britain can do in Afghanistan and that is not something that either is prepared to give up on.

The situation in Afghanistan cannot improve no matter what is done as regards military strategy. It's all about the white stuff.

General McChrystal revised strategy by shifting " the focus from the eradication of the poppy crop, which alienated farmers, to attacking drug traffickers".

The Times reports,

British and other coalition troops are now mandated by Nato to hunt trafficking cartels linked to the Taleban.

There have been nearly 260 drugs convictions this year, compared with none last year. Yet even with this progress, it is estimated that some $100 million a year from the trade is being channelled to the Taleban.

So destroying the crop where it leads to large falls in the opium supply has been a major factor in Taliban recruitment. Yet busting the traffickers won't work either because opium is still the most lucrative commodity for export.

As Misha Glenny in the Washington Post in 2007 argued the problem starts with prohibition because even if drugs traffickers are busted the huge demand for drugs in Europe and North Africa that it is impossible to police.

Even though opium production went down as well as the price in 2008 large amounts are stored all over Afghanistan in anticipation of rising prices. The demand within the bored and decadent consumer societies of the West make it worth it.

If the global price goes down it is simply because there's a glut on the world market. It has little to do with any transient victory in the War on Drugs.

As Glenny writes,

Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits. A confidential strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet and later leaked to the media offered one of the most damning indictments of the efficacy of the drug war. Law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the 700 tons of cocaine and 550 tons of heroin produced annually. According to the report, they would have to seize 60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable for the traffickers.

The USA has consistently blocked any scheme to permit Afghan farmers to grow opium legally. Though the 'focus' has moved away from poppy eradication, there is still no initiative from the US ( at least publicly ) about the alternative.

Glenny actually wrote this for the Guardian in July 2008 and it is still as true now as then,

Afghanistan provides the most dramatic example of how our drugs policies are undermining strategic interests in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. In 2003 the Taliban was a defeated force and the west had the first opportunity in more than a century to help the country with a proper economic development programme.

Afghanistan was forgotten by all except the remnants of the Taliban. They seized the opportunity by refinancing themselves - largely through the 10% tax they impose on the opium trade. Now, according to the UN drugs tsar, Antonio Maria Costa, the Taliban is earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year from opium.

And the weapons they are buying with these funds are rendering Nato's war there unwinnable. We are heading for an Afghanistan that will be home to Islamic militants and an unstoppable heroin industry with Nato going home, its tail between its legs

Not one article since the rising deathtoll in Helmand has once looked at either the role of opium nor of the fact that the desire to 'stay the course' is connected to the deal, first mooted in the 90s, to build the TAP pipeline down past Kandahar.

However, Holbrooke, who knows how to work with drug trafficking insurgents from his time supporting the KLA in Kosovo, might be working on a covert plan to try and get those involved in opium onside.On June 27 2009 the FT reported,

The US counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan is to undergo a U-turn with money previously spent on controversial opium poppy eradication shifting to agricultural development, Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told an international conference on Saturday.

Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister who chaired the conference in the port city of Trieste, quoted Mr Holbrooke as saying the US would spend “several hundred million dollars” in promoting production of legal crops and cut back funding for eradication.

The promotion of "legal crops" though is hardly going to overcome the problem that Glenny emphasises: the scale of the demand for drugs.

Mr Frattini suggested one alternative to growing opium poppies might be resumption of production of an ”excellent Riesling” white wine that had been made there many years before from Afghan vines.

It would take many years to develop a viticulture capable of producing excellent white wines. The profits would not be as high either and the market is already crowded with good wine. There is also the small point that the dominance of Islamic puritanism in Afghanistan would not take kindly to making alcohol.

There will also be fierce resistance from others in Afghanistan who made a fortune from opium. The recent elections were fraudulent ,rigged and conducted through intimidation due to the scale of opium interests. An FT report ( August 29 2009 ) states,

Mr Karzai's embrace of warlords accused of conducting massacres or running opium cartels to win votes from their followers has further strained his relations with Washington.