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[I might mention that I am an individual who suffers from severe chronic
pain and is unable to obtain opioid painkillers due to government
policy. And I have been pointing out the possibility of buying Afghan
opium and using it to manufacture opioid painkillers for years.--DC]

http://www.slate.com/id/2201622/
fighting words
How To Win Afghanistan's Opium War
The best way to deprive the Taliban of drug profits? The United States
should buy Afghanistan's poppy crop instead of trying to eradicate it.
By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, at 1:31 PM ET

I used to know Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Her Majesty's ambassador in
Kabul, and I have no reason to doubt that he was quoted correctly in the
leaked cable from the deputy French ambassador to Afghanistan that has
since appeared in the Parisian press. I think that he is right in saying
that while there cannot be a straightforward "military victory" for the
Taliban and other fundamentalist and criminal forces, nonetheless there
is a chance that a combination of these forces can make the country
ungovernable by the NATO alliance. He may also be correct in his
assertion that an increase of troops in the country might have unwelcome
and unintended consequences, in that "it would identify us even more
strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets" for the
enemy.

If Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated one point over another, it is
that the quantity theory of counterinsurgency is very unsoundly based.
If a vast number of extra soldiers had been sent to Baghdad before the
disastrously conducted war had been given a new strategy and a new
command, then it would have been a case of staying in the same hole
without ceasing to dig (and there would have been many more "body bags"
as a consequence of the larger number of uniformed targets). As it is,
we have learned so many lessons in Iraq about how to defeat al-Qaida
that we have the chance to apply them in Afghanistan. This is exactly
the reverse of the glib and facile argument that used to counterpose the
"good" Afghan war to the evil quagmire in Mesopotamia.

Speaking of quagmires, here are a few admittedly quantitative figures
(taken from the testimony before Congress of Mark Schneider of the
well-respected International Crisis Group). He quoted Adm. Mike Mullen
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying that suicide bombings in
Afghanistan were up 27 percent in 2007 over 2006, commenting that Mullen
"should have added that they are up 600 percent over 2005, and that all
insurgent attacks are up 400 percent over 2005." To darken the
statistical picture further—this testimony was given last spring—one
must also count the number of attacks on World Food Program convoys, on
relief workers, and on prominent Afghan women. All of these show a
steady upward curve, as does the ability of the Taliban to operate
across the Pakistani border and to strike in the middle of the capital
city as well as other cities, most notably its old stronghold of
Kandahar. The final depressing figure is the index of civilian
casualties caused by aerial bombardment from NATO forces: This year will
show a large increase in these, as well, and that is one of the chief
concerns underlying Sir Sherard's bleakly expressed view that the
current U.S.-led strategy is "destined to fail."

Innumerable factors combine to constitute this depressing assessment,
and many of them have to do with the sheer fact that Afghanistan,
already extremely poor, scorched its own earth further in a series of
civil wars and ethnic rivalries. I remember flying from Herat to Kabul
on a U.N. plane a few years ago and being depressed by the rarity of
even a splash of greenery in the mud-colored landscape. Thirty years
ago, what was Afghanistan's most famous export? It was grapes, usually
made into exceptionally fine raisins that were esteemed throughout the
subcontinent. It was a country of vines and orchards. Now, even the
vines and trees have mostly been cut down for firewood. Iraq could well
be immensely rich in a decade or less: Afghanistan will be well-down
even in "Third World" economic terms for a very long time to come.

This is why it is peculiar of us, if not bizarre and quasi-suicidal, to
insist that its main economic lifeblood continues to be wholly
controlled by our enemies. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime tells us
that last year Afghanistan's poppy fields, on 193,000 hectares of land,
produced 93 percent of all the world's opium. The potential production
could be as high as 8,200 metric tons. And, unsurprisingly, UNODC also
reports that the vast bulk of the revenue from this astonishing harvest
goes directly to the Taliban or to local warlords and mullahs.
Meanwhile, in the guise of liberators, NATO forces appear and tell the
Afghan villagers that they intend to burn their only crop. And the
American embassy is only restrained by the Afghan government from
pursuing a policy of actually spraying this same crop from the air! In
other words, the discredited fantasy of Richard Nixon's so-called "War
on Drugs" is the dogma on which we are prepared to gamble and lose the
country that gave birth to the Taliban and hospitality to al-Qaida.

Surely a smarter strategy would be, in the long term, to invest a great
deal in reforestation and especially in the replanting of vines. While
in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell
their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal
elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to
smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown
away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of
which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we
allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this
purpose.) Why not give Afghanistan the contract instead? At one stroke,
we help fill its coffers and empty the main war chest of our foes while
altering the "hearts-and-minds" balance that has been tipping away from
us. I happen to know that this option has been discussed at quite high
levels in Afghanistan itself, and I leave you to guess at the sort of
political constraints that prevent it from being discussed intelligently
in public in the United States. But if we ever have to have the
melancholy inquest on how we "lost" a country we had once liberated,
this will be one of the places where the conversation will have to start.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2201622/

--
Dan Clore

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