Poppy Fields Forever?

Some analysts and international aid groups believe the West should simply strip the warlords of their power and replace them with outsiders loyal to Kabul. But this is naive. The warlords have to be accommodated. The international community cannot afford to fight the popular victors of the war, no matter what unsavoury activities these groups are involved in.

Instead, Western countries with forces in Afghanistan—primarily Canada, the United States, Japan, Britain, and Germany—are taking an incremental approach designed to strengthen Afghan governance without attacking the poppy fields directly. The formation of a legitimate central government and the election of Karzai in the fall of 2004 was a significant first step, as will be the parliamentary and provincial elections this September, in which several thousand candidates are expected to run for 250 positions. Karzai’s election was followed by the creation of a multi-ethnic national army and a program that gradually removes heavy weapons belonging to warlords and demobilizes their armies.

One site I visited in Konduz was packed with artillery, tanks, combat vehicles, and helicopters. This equipment belonged to the forces that took Taloqan and then Konduz from the Taliban. Western countries would have had great difficulty dislodging such well-armed militias, putting foreign troops in the same boat as the Soviets in the 1980s or the British in the 1830s and 1850s.

The Western forces’ goal is to reduce the local power of the chieftains without triggering a civil war. This has to be done with some care: the warlords cannot just be pensioned off and left to their own devices. There has to be a buy-in. The demand being made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, among others, to prosecute these same leaders for war crimes is as naive as it is destabilizing.

There is ample room for mistakes here. And this is where the narcotics issue comes in. Growing poppies is a lucrative business, and one that hundreds of former fighters have entered. These are small, well-armed groups and, though they are incapable of mounting a co-ordinated insurgency, they are still a parallel power and have killed several members of Afghanistan’s fledgling anti-narcotics force. They can also influence the outcome of the September elections. In fact, at one point the governor of the central Ghor province was forced to flee when he spoke out against the growers. Said one farmer: “The only person in Ghor who said not to grow opium was the governor.”

Until the government is able to train and deploy a large number of troops and narcotics police (and this is dependent on a stable security situation), the growing of poppies and the flow of heroin will not be reduced. Still, in what may be an indication of a broader attack on the poppy fields to come, the international community has been assisting the narcotics police. In Konduz, while I was there, three raids were conducted by unmarked helicopters. Labs were blown up and at least six people seized. The long-term effects of these counter-narcotic operations are unclear. The Afghan judiciary has not yet evolved in pace with other enforcement efforts, so what can authorities do with the growers they arrest?

As the black skull in Feyzabad asks them to, Afghans will ultimately have to decide what they want to do about narcotics. Canadian troops, by leaving the safety of Kabul behind for the wilds of Kandahar, are helping buy Karzai time to prove that a democratic government can build a country that is not based on opium production. The alternative is another Colombia.