Over the last dozen years, the United States has poured $7.6 billion into combating Afghanistan’s opium production, and the results are now clear: The program failed.
This effectively leaves the Afghan economy heavily dependent on criminal enterprises, rising corruption that undermines efforts to promote democracy, and increased drug addiction among the Afghan people. The uncontrolled opium trade also provides the Taliban with up to $155 million annually, or more than one-quarter of the total funding for its antigovernment insurgency.
Yet this crisis is receiving far too little attention at a time when primary responsibility for the counternarcotics program shifts from the United States and its partners to the newly installed government of President Ashraf Ghani.
In a speech at Georgetown University last month, John Sopko, the special inspector general in charge of assessing American programs in Afghanistan, said: “By every conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”
The problem, as quantified by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other agencies, appears to be getting worse. In 2012, Afghanistan produced 95 percent of the world’s opium, with much of the product going to Iran, Europe and Russia. The following year, Afghan farmers grew an unprecedented 209,000 hectares (more than 516,000 acres) of opium poppy, outpacing the previous high of 193,000 hectares in 2007.
The value of last year’s yield was $3 billion, up from $2 billion in 2012, a 50 percent increase in a single year. One province, Nangarhar, was declared “poppy-free” by the United Nations in 2008, but between 2012 and 2013, it had a fourfold increase in production.
The narcotics program embraced multiple strategies, including interdicting drug traffickers, eradicating poppy fields, strengthening the Afghan legal system to prosecute drug dealers, persuading farmers to grow alternative crops and establishing treatment programs for addicts. The Pentagon, one of the lead agencies in the effort, has pinned the failure to reduce cultivation largely on a lack of support from the Afghan government.
It must also be said, however, that American, European, Afghan and United Nations officials at times sabotaged their own mission by bickering over how the money should be spent and where best to focus resources.
It seems unlikely that the new and still fragile Afghan government will soon do better on poppy eradication than the United States and its allies, whose forces in Afghanistan are expected to be reduced to 15,000 by the end of the year. The one bright spot is that Mr. Ghani seems to have a vision for what needs to be done. His campaign platform frankly acknowledged that legal farming in Afghanistan is less profitable and less efficient than the drug trade because it lacks an organized system of markets, financing, skilled workers and irrigation equipment. He has pledged to modernize farming and develop new markets for legitimate crops and other products.
The American embassy in Kabul has said that the United States will help him in these efforts. The allies must pitch in as well. But one early order of business is to figure out where the counternarcotics strategy went wrong — why so much investment over the years has produced so little. An honest evaluation is a necessary first step to constructing a strategy that works and gives the new government a realistic shot at a building a productive economy and a stable nation.
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