American and western assessments of the security situation in Afghanistan have become more positive in recent months (see Carlotta Gall, Optimism on Afghan Security, International Herald Tribune, 8 March 2005). The United States military has reported a fall in attacks against their units from ten to fifteen a week to around five a week. This partial improvement in security at an annual cost to the United States alone of $10 billion had started to encourage some aid organisations to return to parts of the country they had abandoned because of the risk to their workers.
This trend was thrown into sharp relief by the murder of a British development specialist, Steven MacQueen, in Kabul on 7 March. According to Afghan security informants, assailants followed him from a restaurant, used two 4x4 vehicles to block his car, and shot him. MacQueen had worked with the rural development ministry for two years and had had been due to leave the country within a few days. Kabul sources report that he was deliberately targeted.
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A single incident may not be enough to reverse the renewed optimism of some aid agencies, which are reluctant to believe that it represents the start of a new campaign against the several thousand expatriates working in the country and, by extension, against the government of President Hamid Karzai. If it proves to be so, the prospects for continued post-war reconstruction will certainly diminish further. But even if it does not, the project Steven MacQueen was working on when he died a rural credit scheme designed to free farmers from dependence on growing opium reflects a serious potential source of instability in Afghanistan: the massive increase in opium production since the United States and its allies terminated the Taliban regime in November 2001.
No blood for poppies
The Taliban movement that came to power in Kabul in 1994 had varying attitudes to the drug economy. In 2000-01 it embarked on a vigorous, and sometimes vicious, programme of suppression of those growing and exporting poppies, the raw material of opium that is then refined to produce heroin. The result was a near collapse in poppy cultivation. Its revival under Hamid Karzai has created pockets of prosperity in some rural areas, and the combination of this new dependence alongside memories of the previous period may be a factor in the relative decline of support for the Taliban among Afghans there.
The extent of the opium poppy boom is remarkable. Afghanistan is returning to levels of production typical of the chaotic period after the withdrawal of Soviet military forces in 1989. According to United Nations sources, opium poppy cultivation from 2003-04 increased by 64%; around 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) are now under cultivation. The most recent UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, Afghanistan: Opium Survey 2004, finds that Afghanistan now accounts for 87% of the worlds illegal production of opium.
A key feature of opium cultivation is that it is undertaken by many thousands of farmers on small plots of land, rather than by tied workers on large estates who might more easily be controlled by government forces. On the basis of the 2004 estimate, 2.3 million people in over 330,000 households are involved in production, 10% of the Afghan population (see Judy Dempsey, In Afghanistan, a renewed holy war against opium, International Herald Tribune, 7 March 2005).
The export value of the crop to Afghanistan is around $2.8 billion, approximately 60% of the gross domestic product of the country. For individual growers it brings high, quick rewards: opium yields a gross income of about $2,000 per acre ($800 per hectare) about twelve times as much as the income from wheat growing. This and the highly dispersed pattern of production suggest that the industry could only be halted by the provision of profitable alternative work (backed perhaps by subsidies) to small farmers.
Next stop Bogota
In Colombia, it has become common practice for a single cartel to dominate all four phases of the trade growing, refining, trafficking and, to an extent, even retailing. The drug industry across Afghanistan has not yet reached that level of sophistication, but the trend is very much in that direction. Drug warlords attracted by the prospect of hugely increased profits are now seeking to exert control over the whole process. Antonio Maria Costa, head of UNODC, reports that from the mid-1990s to 2004 the proportion of opium refined into heroin before export from Afghanistan increased from 20% to around 80%.
Paul Rogers March 2005 global security briefing for the Oxford Research Group is Endless war: The global war on terror and the new Bush administration. For details, click here
When the United States and its allies planned the overthrow of the Taliban after 9/11, a number of governments involved in the campaign were alert to the problem of opium production in Afghanistan; some even cited the need to choke the industry as a subsidiary reason for waging war. Any such expectations have been dashed. The war and its aftermath left Afghanistan internally unstable, its regions dominated by powerful warlords. But the countrys deepest problem - of which the postponement of parliamentary elections on 17 March is only one signal - is that international commitment to post-war reconstruction and development has been wholly inadequate in relation to the scale of the devastation inflicted by three decades of crushing conflict.
If this situation is not addressed, it seems possible that the price of subduing Taliban insurgency may be the promotion of Afghanistan to a position as the worlds leading producer of heroin. If that happens, it will be a serious indictment of countries that heralded post-Taliban Afghanistan as the beginning of a period of secure, sustainable development.
