[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The New Surge in Afghanistan: Drug Production

Fri Oct 24 09:17:10 EDT 2014

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/24/the-new-surge-in-afghanistan-drug-production/

Will Any One Be Held Accountable?
*The New Surge in Afghanistan: Drug Production*
by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Voutenay sur Cure, France.

All news coming out of Afghanistan is depressing, and it seems the 
country is collapsing more deeply into chaos day by day.  The new 
President, Ashraf Ghani, is a good man with progressive ideas for his 
people — but he’s taken over a country that has been wrecked by over a 
decade of war and Olympic-style corruption.  One of the worst  
developments has been the enormous surge in production of opium poppies 
which, according to the UN and John Sopko, the US Special Inspector 
General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, has hit "unprecedented" heights.

Mr Sopko, arguably the least popular person in official Washington (and 
therefore, by definition of that accolade, an honest man), told 
secretary of state John Kerry and defense secretary Chuck Hagel that 
"the recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question 
the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts 
[to control and reduce production]."  But the "prior efforts" by the US 
and other foreign forces in Afghanistan have been so flawed as to be 
absurd.  If the catastrophe wasn’t so serious it would be hilarious.

The State Department came back at Sopko saying "Essentially, poppy 
cultivation has shifted from areas where government presence is broadly 
supported and security has improved, toward more remote and isolated 
areas where governance is weak and security is inadequate," which is 
misleading to the verge of mendacity.   Then the Defense Department went 
further down the track of shameless blame-ducking by declaring that  "In 
our opinion, the failure to reduce poppy cultivation and increase 
eradication is due to the lack of Afghan government support for the effort."

Mr Sopko records that in 2001-2014 the US spent over seven billion 
dollars on counter-narcotics programs in a country that now produces 80 
percent of the world’s opium.  During the thirteen years of frantic 
money-chucking there were indeed various US efforts to control drug 
production, and exactly seven years ago I recounted how and why these 
exertions were doomed to failure.  Here is a shortened (not "redacted") 
version of the piece with some explanatory figures given in square brackets:

     The Flat Drug World.   October 13, 2007

     Ever heard of Mr Loren Stoddard?  I’m tempted to advise you to Stay 
That Way, but to give an illustration of how absurd and disastrous are 
Washington’s policies in Afghanistan it is of interest to consider his 
performance.  Bush of Washington sets an example by being ignorant of 
many things, and Stoddard of Kabul follows him by being magnificently 
uninformed about Afghanistan.

     In spite of his lack of knowledge of the country and its customs 
and culture Mr Stoddard has been made Director of USAID’s Afghanistan 
program. Before this he "helped Wal-Mart move into Central America" when 
he was USAID Supremo in that unfortunate region. So of course he is 
superbly qualified to direct American aid projects in a country of which 
he is profoundly ignorant.  Stand by, Wal-Mart, for a leg-up from your 
devoted admirer.

     With tongue firmly in cheek, David Rohde of the New York Times 
reported that "On Wednesday [August 21, 2007], Mr. Stoddard and Rory 
Donohoe, the director of the American development agency’s Alternative 
Livelihoods program in southern Afghanistan, attended the first ‘Helmand 
Agricultural Festival.’ The $300,000 American-financed gathering in 
Lashkar Gah [population 45,000] was an odd cross between a Midwestern 
county fair and a Central Asian bazaar, devised to show Afghans an 
alternative to [growing] poppies."

     The head of the UN’s anti-drugs office, Mr Antonio Maria Costa, 
said recently [May 31, 2007] that "Helmand province is on the verge of 
becoming the world’s biggest drug supplier, with the dubious distinction 
of cultivating more drugs than entire countries such as Myanmar, Morocco 
or even Colombia."  But never fear, Mr Antonio Maria Costa :  the USAID 
Batman has arrived, cape flying, eyes agleam, with Robin Donohoe in tow, 
to bring Washington’s anti-poppy culture to the admiring citizens of 
Lashkar Gah.

     The fatuous duo of Stoddard and Donohoe "arrived [and] walked 
through the festival surrounded by a three-man British and Australian 
security team armed with assault rifles. ‘Who won the cow? Who won the 
cow?’ shouted Mr. Stoddard, 38, a burly former food broker from Provo, 
Utah.  ‘Was it a girl or a guy?’ After Afghans began dancing to 
traditional drum and flute music, Mr. Donohoe, 29, from San Francisco, 
briefly joined them."  (Knowing a little bit about the tribes in the 
region I can imagine their reaction to that little bit of cross-cultural 
activity.)

     The phrase "was it a girl or a guy" used by the sophisticated Mr 
Stoddard is only one indication of his profound ignorance of the country 
in which he heads an agency responsible for billions of dollars of US 
taxpayers’ money, of which he wasted 300,000 on a futile jamboree.

     If Mr Stoddard imagines for one second that women in Lashkar Gah in 
Helmand Province (or anywhere else in Afghanistan) can own cows, he is a 
fool.  If he thinks that a woman could enter a raffle to win a cow ("a 
generator, cow and goat were raffled off") he is demonstrating a 
staggering lack of knowledge of regional custom for which he can be 
offered only deep sympathy. There were no women at Mr Stoddard’s absurd 
‘Festival’. Women don’t go to social gatherings in Afghanistan.  Mr 
Stoddard obviously doesn’t know that even the wife of the President of 
Afghanistan, a medical doctor, does not appear in public.

     And it isn’t just Mr Stoddard’s ignorance of national customs that 
is so laughable.  He "cited American-financed agricultural fairs, the 
introduction of high-paying legal crops and the planned construction of 
a new industrial park and airport as evidence that alternatives [to 
poppy growing] were being created."

     The man is in cloud-cuckoo land.  An industrial park?  —  in a 
province where electricity is a rarity and there is no commercial 
infrastructure of any description?  One could be forgiven for imagining 
that Mr Stoddard might have been inhaling products inducing a high 
credibility threshold.

     There are no "high-paying" legal crops in Helmand province. Some 
nuts are exported to the Gulf, but generally people grow enough plants 
(wheat, barley, fruit, vegetables) for their own sustenance and to sell 
a bit to their neighbors and use most of their fields to grow poppy 
because the warlords and the criminals (many of both being government 
ministers)  pay reasonably well.

     Sure, some cash ends up in the hands of the evil and disgusting 
Taliban religious fanatics who move between Pakistan and Afghanistan, 
killing at whim the while and blowing themselves up in murderous 
futility; but drug money isn’t nearly the insurrectionist problem the 
would-be mind-benders would have us believe. The billions of dollars 
(not just millions; we’re talking real money here) [2 billion dollars in 
2012;  3 billion in 2013] created from Afghanistan’s poppies go to 
thuggish Afghan warlords and Afghan army generals; to many members of 
President Karzai’s own government (some of whom are thuggish warlords 
and generals) ; to Uzbek, Pakistani, Iranian, Tajik, Turkmen and, 
increasingly, Han Chinese middle-men in the west of the PRC (big problem 
on the rise there for China); to Pakistani tribals who have been 
smuggling drugs since time was invented; to freelance ruffians of all 
descriptions, and, above all and most lucratively, to Western criminals 
who appear immune to the efforts of US and British law-enforcement 
agencies to put them behind bars.

     Within Afghanistan the stink of drug corruption is as obvious and 
calamitous as it is in London or New York.  But nobody is going to rock 
the sleaze boat in Afghanistan.

     The anti-drug effort in Afghanistan is a farce. There is talk at 
the moment [October 2007] of aerial spraying to eradicate the crop in 
Spring next year. Of course that would play right into the hands of the 
insurgents who have already convinced much of Afghanistan’s population 
that occupation by foreign forces is simply a rerun of the years when 
troops of the former Soviet Union went round blitzing villages.

     If the nations with troops in Afghanistan are serious about 
eradicating the drug trade they would combine their best brains (which 
automatically excludes Mr Stoddard) and produce a workable plan (not a 
fatuous "seamless package" [the USAID phrase of the time]) to wipe out 
poppy, jail the drug thugs and introduce controlled compensation. Mind 
you, it’s all very well to blame the Afghans for producing poppies, 
opium and heroin. What they are doing is meeting market demand. After 
all, there would be no drug production in Afghanistan if there wasn’t a 
welcoming market in the drug-loving prosperous West. The drug world is 
very flat indeed.

* * *

That was the state of Afghan drug production in 2007.  And as we hear in 
2014 from the UN and the admirable Mr Sopko it has since surged to 
staggering proportions.  But is anyone going to be held accountable for 
the waste of 7.6 billion dollars of US taxpayers’ money?  Or — of much 
more importance — for the lives of all the thousands of soldiers who 
have died or been maimed for nothing in the horrible useless Afghan War?

Don’t hold your breath on that one.

Brian Cloughley lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

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