Afghanistan’s narcotics problems grow worse

Introduction

Two months after taking office in 2009, President Obama gave a televised address that laid out sweeping goals for U.S. financial, military, and technical assistance to Afghanistan, including developing an economy there “that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.”

Since 2001, Washington has committed a total of roughly $10 billion to its ambitious counternarcotics effort in that country. But mostly due to reversals in the last two years, all that spending appears to have had little enduring impact, and Afghanistan’s prospects for finding its fiscal footing outside the drug trade are now slim, an independent federal auditor told the Senate’s Caucus on International Narcotics Control on Jan. 15.

“The situation in Afghanistan is dire with little prospect for improvement in 2014 or beyond,” Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko told the caucus, recounting “the opinion of almost everyone I spoke with” about the growing role of narcotics in the country’s economy during a November visit there.

In blunt testimony to the caucus chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Sopko cited statistics that cast an unflattering light on the costly U.S. effort, which is now winding down as the Obama administration prepares to pull additional troops from the country.

From 2012 to 2013, the value of Afghanistan’s narcotics trade increased 50 percent, and it now accounts for 15 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Poppy cultivation has reached record levels, with acreage now three times the level in 2002 and equivalent to plantings on land 12 times the size of the District of Columbia. Opium production alone increased nearly 50 percent in the last year. More than five percent of the Afghan populace is now addicted to opiates. Moreover, half of the existing poppy fields are now located in Helmand Province, the principal locus of the U.S. miltary’s “surge” during Obama’s first term.

This grim news is a boon to the Taliban, which is now drawing at least $155 million a year from narcotics-related activities, and investing the funds in insurgency, according to United Nations estimates. “The Taliban is involved in taxing opium poppy farmers; operating processing laboratories; moving narcotics; taxing narcotics transporters … [and] providing security to poppy fields, drug labs, and opium bazaars,” Drug Enforcement Administration chief of operations James L. Capra said in written testimony to the caucus.

Sopko warned that this booming narcotics trade is undermining the country’s stability, threatening the health of its people, eroding the rule of law, and adding further to official corruption — essentially threatening much of what the United States has tried to accomplish there over the past decade, at a total cost of more than $70 billion and 2,300 U.S. military deaths.

Afghanistan now produces more than 80 percent of the world’s opium. But the Obama administration seems uninterested in shifting course. Its spending on the Pentagon’s office of counternarcotics for work in Afghanistan is slated to decline by 20 percent this year, and in-country staffing by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security is dropping by half.

The military airlift and protection that DEA officers need to operate are mostly evaporating, Capra and other witnesses acknowledged. A special Afghan air unit, created with nearly a billion dollars in U.S. funding, only has a quarter of the personnel it needs, and few pilots rated to fly with the night vision goggles considered essential to counternarcotics raids. Total Afghan drug seizures in the first nine months of last year amounted to 121 metric tons, compared with an estimated 5,500 tons of opium alone produced over the entire 12 months.

The DEA’s anguish is palpable.

Capra said the military drawdown and staffing decreases will “significantly impact the scope of DEA’s operations.” While the Afghanistan government is still not capable of doing what its foreign partners have done to combat narcotics, specialized Afghan units have acquired important capabilities “at great cost,” after “years of great sacrifice by DEA personnel and an enormous expenditure of U.S. government resources,” he said. The erosion of this capability, he added, “puts at risk the U.S. strategic objective of achieving a stable and secure Afghanistan.”

Erin Logan, the Defense Department’s principal director for counternarcotics and global threats, similarly was not optimistic. In her written testimony, she said “the drawdowns in U.S. and coalition military forces will likely lead to increased drug production and corresponding instability in Afghanistan and the region.”

Sopko was particularly critical in his testimony of the fact that – despite Obama’s lofty words in 2009 — counternarcotics has been a steadily declining priority for the administration’s policy appointees. The boots-on-the ground experts he spoke to during his visit all “told me that they are very worried that the United States and its coalition partners are not sufficiently focused on counternarcotics,” he said.

The Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent analysis group funded by aid donors in Kabul, seconded that view in report last September. “Policymakers,” it said, “seem to have lost all appetite for talking about the production and trade of opium.”

The official U.S. disdain may stem partly from the sheer magnitude of the task and the endemic obstacles to its achievement in one of the poorest nations on earth, where poppy-growing has long been a cultural and financial mainstay. As William Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics, cautioned in his written testimony for the hearing, “there is no silver bullet” to solve the narcotics problem, which surged amid chaotic conditions after the US intervention.

But the Obama administration seems aware — without specifically acknowledging it — that its vaunted “whole of government” approach to the problem, adopted in 2010 and meant to cultivate good governance practices and enhance counterinsurgency efforts in lieu of outright poppy eradication, hasn’t yet turned the corner on the drug trade and isn’t likely to anytime soon.

That approach was formulated after a 2009 visit to Afghanistan by the Pentagon’s policy chief Michelle Flournoy, who warned Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that only a more integrated and comprehensive civilian-military aid program would work. Counternarcotics, she said in a memo to Gates that he quotes in his new book, “Duty,” was only one of four “competing — and often conflicting — campaigns” during the Bush years.

There is some evidence that the surge — the addition of 21,000 U.S. troops and increased development investments at the beginning of Obama’s first term — made a difference. In Helmand, poppy cultivation declined by nearly 40 percent from 2008 to 2011, a circumstance attributed by experts mostly to the heightened foreign presence, Sopko said.

But by 2012, Gates had become convinced, he states in his book, that counternarcotics was a specialized mission that should be reexamined in light of declining resources. A U.S. troop pullout that began in 2011 accelerated in 2012, roughly the period when international experts and the Defense Department itself said the narcotics market expanded again.

Since then, Sopko testified, seizures of both narcotics and illicit chemicals have declined and counter-drug operations have dropped by nearly a third. He suggested that soon, DEA agents will be confined to Kabul, and decried what he called the administration’s decision to cut DEA personnel arbitrarily and then tailor its strategy to the number of agents remaining, rather than pick a proven strategy first and then decide how many to retain.

“No one at the [U.S.] Embassy could convincingly explain to me how the U.S. government counternarcotics efforts are making a meaningful impact,” Sopko said, adding that he was surprised to learn that little effort had been made over the past decade to examine carefully what worked and what didn’t among the Western programs. How can the program succeed with fewer personnel if it has failed up to now?, he asked. He raised the possibility that Afghanistan will become a “narco-criminal state” if a more sound strategy is not pursued.

Sen. Feinstein told the witnesses that “there is little good news” and cautioned that the grim statistics will be ignored “at our peril.” She also said “we’re looking for ideas,” and urged in particular that the DEA find a way to collaborate with its counterparts in Russia and Iran, where a significant portion of Afghanistan’s heroin moves.

The task of defending the administration’s policies fell mostly to Brownfield, who cautioned that counter-drug strategies can take years to bear fruit, and said “I do not share” the pessimism expressed by so many others. He said that while he cannot promise success this year or next year, the United States and its partners have put in place “a sustainable and adaptable” program to keep building the Afghanistan government’s ability to handle its drug problems.

I wish, he added, that it was a simple matter of writing up a strategy and having a checklist.

This article was co-published with Foreign Policy.