It's hard not to admire the blunt talk of Gen. Rick Hillier, Canada's chief of defence staff. "One of the things that I found when I was the commander on international operations," he told the Citizen recently, "was the most dangerous thing of all was the individual who visited the theatre of operations for 48 hours and then left as an instant expert with the solution to everything, which invariably was wrong."
Gen. Hillier was responding to a report recently released by the Senlis Council, a European think tank specializing in drug issues, which claimed the situation in Afghanistan is worsening because the forced eradication of poppy crops is turning farmers against the authorities. "We don't have everything right in Afghanistan. We know that," continued Gen. Hillier. "Each day we change the way we do business just a little bit, and we'll continue to do that until the day we come home from the mission."
I haven't been to Afghanistan, not even for 48 hours. But I do know a thing or two about drugs. And if Gen. Hillier will forgive the impertinence, I'd like to suggest to him that he is wrong.
Not about the particulars on the ground. I'll defer to him on that. But he's wrong in thinking that operational changes will decide whether the mission in Afghanistan succeeds or fails. What we see today is in large part the creation of a far more fundamental policy choice, one that was made long ago. If that policy isn't reconsidered, Canadian soldiers will continue to die. The mission will fail. And there will be nothing Gen. Hillier or any other soldier can do about it.
The policy is what might be called the globalization of drug prohibition.
In the United States and Canada, alcohol and narcotic prohibition were introduced together, early in the 20th century. But only narcotic prohibition was elevated into international agreements, largely at the behest of the United States. After the Second World War, the U.S. became particularly aggressive in getting countries to sign on to the international system and adopt domestic drug policies in line with American norms. By the 1960s, drug prohibition spanned the globe.
That's when Richard Nixon had a bright idea.
"Narcotics are the modern curse of American youth," Nixon declared in the 1968 election. To win what he dubbed "the war on drugs," he proposed to work with the governments of countries that grow drug crops and wipe out the whole illicit trade at the source.
This had never been done before but it made some superficial sense. Most heroin in the United States came from Turkey, where it was illegally diverted from the licit opium industry and shipped via Marseille (the "French Connection") across the Atlantic. Fix the problem in Turkey and the drug would disappear from American streets.
It worked. The White House got the Turks to co-operate and the flow of drugs quickly dried up. Problem solved.
For about a day, that is. The law of supply and demand kicked in and opium production started to grow rapidly in other regions, particularly "the Golden Crescent" -- Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A few months ago, Gen. Hillier said that Afghanistan was "a relatively advanced country" prior to the Soviet invasion. Here's what a 1976 White House policy document said about the poppy situation in that relatively advanced country: "Afghanistan has an extremely difficult problem in controlling the production and trafficking of narcotics. Many areas are highly inaccessible; subsistence farmers value the opium crop as a source of income; and Afghan tribesmen traditionally have looked upon smuggling as a way of life. Additionally, the police and other law enforcement agencies have a limited ability to act effectively in Afghanistan's more isolated tribal areas where there are no modern means of communication."
The U.S. government funded Afghanistan's anti-narcotic efforts, but to no effect. (The documents quoted here can be found in their entirety in The Quest for Drug Control by historian David Musto.)
If the situation was bleak in 1976, it soon got much worse. Political turmoil was followed by the Soviet invasion, a decade of war against the invaders, and another half-decade of civil war. Afghanistan's meagre infrastructure was destroyed and a country that had never had a strong, effective central government became almost ungovernable. The elimination of poppy growing, impossible in 1976, became a pipe dream.
The Taliban's alleged success in suppressing poppy growing is sometimes cited as proof to the contrary, but that's nonsense. Production was reduced for barely a year -- long enough to boost the price on the Taliban's opium stockpile but not long enough for market forces to kick in. Had the ban stayed in place longer, it would have failed: Not even the savagery of the Taliban can defeat the most powerful law of economics.
That law is what Richard Nixon didn't understand. But a White House policy adviser did. "The likely result" of the elimination of Turkish heroin sources, he wrote in an internal memo, "would be disruption for a time, and then a resumed flow from other sources." Don't bother, the memo concluded.
Nixon didn't listen. And the history of the last three-and-a-half decades -- as the United States, the United Nations and others spent tens of billions of dollars fighting plants and economics -- unfolded just as that memo said it would.
So what has this history of failure taught the world's leaders? Not much, apparently. Everyone from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to NATO's top commanders agrees that the poppy trade fuels most of Afghanistan's woes -- corruption, crime, warlords, terrorists and insurgents -- and that poppies, not the Taliban, are the greatest threat. But no one is talking about real alternatives to Richard Nixon's bright idea.
Some critics suggest more financial support to encourage farmers to grow legal crops. The Senlis Council wants farmers to be permitted to sell opium for the legal painkiller market. A few say Western governments should just buy the entire crop.
But from the perspective of economics, none of this matters. Both sticks and carrots -- eradication and financial incentives -- are designed to artificially reduce the flow of opium to the black market. If either tool succeeds, it will cause black-market prices to rise, and rising prices will spur renewed production in existing growing regions or elsewhere.
Where could the poppies go? Afghanistan is a big country full of desperately poor farmers. There's plenty of room for poppy growth to shift, and plenty of people to grow it.
And what if, by some act of divine intervention, poppy-growing were driven entirely from Afghanistan? First, the price would explode. Then, like night follows day, poppies would spring up throughout the region. Maybe it would be Tajikistan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. But more likely, there would be a resurgence in Iran and Pakistan.
My money would be on Pakistan. The northwest of Pakistan is a traditional opium-growing region only tenuously controlled by the Pakistani government. Its border with Afghanistan is, in places, no more than a line on the map and it would be no great trouble for warlords, terrorists and smugglers to move operations east.
Now imagine what would happen if the Afghan poppy industry pitched tent in Pakistan -- a country notorious for political instability, religious extremism and nuclear weapons.
I'm not the expert Gen. Hillier is, but it seems to me that no matter how bad the situation is in Afghanistan, that would be a hell of a lot worse.
This is a riddle with no solution, a knot that cannot be untied. It is folly to keep trying to do what is clearly impossible. Like Alexander the Great, a man who once conquered Afghanistan, we must cut the damned knot in two.
In official circles, there are plenty of doubts about the international regime of drug prohibition but they are only discussed quietly, over drinks, never on the record. Too many institutions owe their existence to the war on drugs, too many careers are built on it. Heresy is punished.
To denounce the status quo as the unsalvageable disaster it is, to call for a serious discussion of alternatives, would take a person of uncommon courage and blunt talk.
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2006.07.12
COLUMN: Dan Gardner
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment