Subject: [Homestead] More wonderful planning by White House for Afghanistan
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:41:38 -0500
Thanks to White House planners, 87% of world opium supply comes from
Afghanistan, up from six or seven percent when equally good planning let
a wounded Osama Bin Laden escape unimpeded from Tora Bora.
What is the White House going to do? Unless Bush outsources planning to
India or Pakistan and borrows more from Saudi Arabia, Japan and China,
not a damned thing.
Crop spraying draws controversy in Afghan drug fight
The US may scrap or divert $152 million earmarked for aerial poppy
eradication in Afghanistan this year.
By Halima Kazem | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Shortly after becoming Afghanistan's first
democratically elected president, Hamid Karzai declared war on one of
his country's most lucrative exports: opium. Three months on, the
president has won an early skirmish over tactics by prevailing upon the
US to shelve plans for aerial spraying of Afghan poppy crops.
Crop spraying is a major part of Washington's war on drugs in Latin
America. But in Afghanistan, where income from the crop is crucial to
many farmers, spraying has proved controversial.
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Last November, the Karzai government protested when, without its
knowledge, fields in two Afghan provinces were sprayed with a
"mysterious substance." Both the US and British governments denied any
involvement, but Afghan government officials say the US military
controls that airspace.
The US had earmarked $780 million this year for Afghanistan's drug
fight, including $300 million for eradication and $152 million for
aerial spraying due to start in March. Now, the US State Department is
reportedly reworking the budget proposal, possibly removing funds for
spraying.
"We don't know the side effects of spraying. Also, Afghans are not used
to seeing this kind of thing [spraying], it could be seen as an attack
on the people not just the poppy crops. That is a dangerous road to
take," says Gen. Mohammed Daud, Head of the Anti-Narcotics Department at
the Ministry of Interior.
By ruling out crop spraying, the government has removed one of the few
quick methods of combating the opium trade. But many analysts say that
development efforts, such as finding alternatives for farmers, are more
likely to succeed in the long run.
"[Spraying] is a ridiculous and shameful misallocation of resources,
reflecting the political agenda of a few people in Washington," says
Barnett Rubin, a professor at New York University and former adviser to
the UN in Afghanistan. "Fortunately, faced with the united opposition of
the Afghan government and the severe doubts of much of the US government
and all US allies, they are now backing off and may reprogram funding
for aerial eradication to alternative livelihoods."
According to a recent UN report, Afghanistan pumps out 87 percent of the
world's opium and its heroin derivatives. The drug is planted in all 34
provinces of the country and can bring in 10 times the income of other
crops. The trade in 2004 reaped $2.8 billion, up more than 20 percent
from the previous year, and now makes up an estimated 60 percent of
Afghanistan's legal economy.
Drug trafficking has also become a major source of income for Al Qaeda
and the Taliban, a fact that has deepened US concerns.
"Virtually anything in Afghanistan that is funded by something other
than foreign aid is funded by drug profits. According to reports, drug
income in the south is sometimes split among various tribes, with a
portion going to local Taliban," says Mr. Rubin.
The US military has so far shied away from playing a more active role in
combating drugs in Afghanistan. Analysts say that US military
involvement could overly tax its forces, and prove more expensive and
time-consuming than mobilizing the Afghan government to tackle the problem.
Afghanistan currently has 1,000 trained and active counternarcotics
personnel, about 600 of whom are in the provinces, burning and
destroying poppy fields on the ground.
But officials say at least 4,000 officers are needed to actively monitor
and destroy poppy farms, and another 5,000 to control the country's
porous borders.
While ruling out crop spraying, Karzai is advocating another
controversial tactic. In a recent press conference Karzai told reporters
that he was considering offering amnesty to former drug traffickers with
the hopes that they will lead the Afghan government to the bigger drug
lords.
"We are discussing the amnesty issue. We need to make sure that the plan
doesn't backfire on us and the big drug lords slip out of our hands,"
says General Daud.
However, in a country without any kind of formal national identification
system, verifying drug traffickers and the identities of drug lords will
be a major challenge. And with some 2.3 million Afghans involved in the
drug trade the task becomes harder.
Some members of Karzai's Cabinet suggest a "bottom up" approach to the
poppy dilemma. Afghanistan's newly appointed counternarcotics minister,
Habibullah Qaderi, believes that subsidies and cash incentives should be
given to encourage farmers to drop poppies and plant other cash crops.
Qaderi has suggested that the Afghan government pay the farmers involved
in cultivating opium at least double the market price for crops such as
rice, wheat, and cotton. But subsidies could cost upward of $1 billion
for one year, more than has been promised by the US government for the
entire antinarcotics effort over three years.
"We can't really beat a $2 to $3 billion-a-year industry with this type
of money," said Omar Zakhilwal, chief policy adviser at the Ministry of
Rural Rehabilitation and Development.
Afghanistan's long drought compounds the difficulty of finding
alternative crops. Poppies require very little water to thrive.
Rubin also warns against eradicating poppy farms too quickly or before
taking out the traffickers and the drug lords, as many farmers are still
financially indebted to their "bosses" and could revolt against the
Karzai government.
"You cannot eliminate 40 percent of the total economy [60 percent of the
legal economy] in one of the poorest countries in the world through law
enforcement," Rubin says. "And you also cannot do it in one year, or in
five years. Economic shrinkage is one of the surest predictors of
instability and conflict."
The Afghan government is especially concerned about maintaining security
going into parliamentary elections that are scheduled for this spring.
[Homestead] More wonderful planning by White House for Afghanistan,
tvoivozhd, 01/25/2005