The Bush administration probably didn’t actively intend to turn Aghanistan into the very model of a narco-terrorist state, but they clearly had no plan to avoid doing so.

In 2001, opium was a non-factor in Afghanistan’s economy, after the Taliban banned the crop the previous year in a failed effort to improve diplomatic relations with other countries and, possibly, reap more substantial tax revenue from traffickers moving their now more valuable stockpiled product in Taliban territory.

Since the US invasion that ousted the Taliban, the crop has steadily grown in importance. In 2005, it accounted for a third of the country’s gross domestic product. Last year it is estimated to have accounted for more than half, outstripping foreign aid as the single largest source of income, with nearly 15% of the population involved in its production and more than twice as many acres under cultivation as during the production peak during the Taliban years.

Afghanistan now produces an estimated 93% of the world’s opium supply; the harvests have been so good—8,200 tons last year, nearly double the pre-2001 record and up by almost a third from 2006, which was itself a record harvest—that supply exceeds demand, and traders are stockpiling thousands of tons to prop up prices and guard against any downturns in production caused by either weather or military and law enforcement efforts. The Taliban have reconsidered the 2000 edict that opium is against Islam, and are happily financing their resurgence with proceeds from the drug. Drug-fueled government corruption at the local, provincial and national levels is epidemic. According to the 2007 UN Office on Drugs and Crime Afghanistan opium survey (Acrobat document), despite some success in stifling production in northern Afghanistan, the country has more acreage devoted to illicit drug production than Colombia, Peru and Bolivia combined.

A 2006 report from the World Bank and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, when opium constituted only about a third of the economy, cited the drug trade as among the key factors in stabilizing the country’s economy: “After decades of hyper-inflation, the new currency that was introduced by the reformed central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank, DAB) at the end of 2002 has remained stable, largely thanks to foreign exchange reserves earned through narcotics exports, remittances and the expenditures of foreign organizations.”

What that means is that the main sources of cash reserves for Afghanistan, in descending order, are opium, foreign aid, and money returned to the country by emigrees (some of which is also opium-related). The finding highlights the dilemma faced by opponents of the trade, and explains at least in part the reluctance on the part of the US and other interventionists to tackle the problem in any meaningful way. Without opium Afghanistan would be much poorer than it already is and, as the World Bank report notes, much less economically stable. At the same time, the economic dominance of the trade makes nation-building all but impossible. It finances the Taliban, warlords and criminal organizations, all of whom make aid projects hazardous in much of the country, especially the Taliban-dominated south; it corrupts government, military and law enforcement officials; it aligns many of those dependent upon it, from farmers and laborers on up, against anyone who tries to put a dent in it.

And because the most vulnerable, and therefore easiest to target, components of the trade are the farmers and laborers at the bottom of it, the efforts that have been made to quash cultivation generally hurt those with the least resources and fewest alternatives. Although poppy farming is traditional in some families, it is a refuge of last resort for many others—families living on a dollar a day can earn anywhere from five to 15 times as much from poppies as from wheat or other commodity crops. Afghanistan’s government is unable to make up the difference, and the NATO countries leading the eradication effort are unwilling to do so.

As in Iraq, the lack of security and consequent hazards of reconstruction mean that the government is spending only a relatively small portion of the money it has available for those projects. The most recent UN report says that the central government has invested less than half what it had planned to spend on infrastructure, hospitals, schools and the like. That failure magnifies the importance of opium in the regions that aren’t getting government aid, which strengthens the economic and political positions of the opium traffickers, which makes government spending and related efforts to derail the opium economy even more difficult.

The $4 billion opium contributes to the Aghanistan economy is a lot of money, especially relative to the size of the country’s economy, but the trade generates even more, and to similarly pernicious effect, in neighboring countries and throughout Europe and the Middle East. With every transaction, opium gains value. It’s worth more when it comes out of a processing lab as morphine or heroin than when it went in. It gains value every time it crosses a border, every time bulk shipments are broken into smaller quantities by dealers, every time the end product, heroin, is cut to reduce the purity and increase the quantity. At every step in the process, cops, border guards, military personnel and government officials get their cuts. The final value, according to the UN is anywhere from $200-$400 billion dollars, 50 to 100 times what the crop generates within Afghanistan.

Even dismissing the tiny 2001 opium crop as an anomaly due to the Taliban’s ban on poppy farming, the transformation since the US invasion is astonishing. Between 1990 and 2000, Afghanistan never accounted for more than about 40% of the world’s opium-producing acreage; Myanmar (formerly Burma) was the biggest producer, with Afghanistan second and Laos a distant third. Since the invasion, cultivation in Afghanistan has increased from 80,000 hectares in 2002, just shy of the previous record of about 90,000 in 1999, to 193,000 in 2007, with corresponding increases in crop size.

It’s not clear how much thought the Bush administration gave to the problem before the invasion. Contemporary news accounts suggest that it was very little, and that at least initially, the Americans were willing to turn a blind eye to the trade because it helped fund and jolly the warlords who provided most of the intelligence and cannon fodder for the initial strikes against the Taliban (much as the CIA winked at drug operations of the Mujahadeen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Contras in Nicaragua during the dirty war, and a host of players in Southeast Asia during Vietnam, and etc.).

As the magnitude of the problem became apparent, something that happened very quickly, the administration apparently decided on an approach that involved drafting its NATO partners—primarily the Brits—and the new central government to handle the situation and then complaining loudly about the lack of progress while threatening, and obviously failing, to take the problem in hand themselves. The Karzai government opposes coercive measures against farmers and aerial defoliation but has no money to pay farmers not to grow, the Brits refuse to consider the obvious solution of simply purchasing the crop themselves and taking it out of circulation and, regardless the official line, US and NATO forces at the operational level know that they cannot crack down too hard on poppy farmers and opium functionaries in Taliban territory without losing whatever sympathy and support they enjoy from the locals.

So, at the beginning of 2008, we find sober predictions that the war with the Taliban is only now beginning in earnest, and widespread concerns that the western forces there are undermanned and ill-equipped for the fight. A November 2007 report (Acrobat document) from the Senlis Council, a think tank active in Afghanistan, says that the Taliban now have a permanent presence in more than half the country.

The Taliban has proven itself to be a truly resurgent force. Its ability to establish a presence throughout the country is now proven beyond doubt; research undertaken by Senlis Afghanistan indicates that 54 per cent of Afghanistan’s landmass hosts a permanent Taliban presence, primarily in southern Afghanistan, and is subject to frequent hostile activity by the insurgency.

The insurgency now controls vast swaths of unchallenged territory including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries. The Taliban are the de facto governing authority in significant portions of territory in the south, and are starting to control parts of the local economy and key infrastructure such as roads and energy supply. The insurgency also exercises a significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime
change.

The depressing conclusion is that, despite the vast injections of international capital flowing into the country, and a universal desire to ‘succeed’ in Afghanistan, the state is once again in serious danger of falling into the hands of the Taliban. Where implemented, international development and reconstruction efforts have been underfunded and failed to have a significant impact on local communities’ living conditions, or improve attitudes towards the Afghan Government and the international community.

The war was imagined by the Bush administration to have been won by now. Troops in the country were meant to be providing security for redevelopment initiatives, not fighting a major and growing insurgency. But the US essentially abandoned the country in favor of the Iraq invasion after 2002, and instead of providing security and training, NATO troops have found themselves in the throes of a hot war.

A petulant Robert Gates vented on our NATO allies during an interview with the Los Angeles Times, when he said that “[m]ost of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap.” Gates later explained that by “most of the NATO forces,” he didn’t mean anyone in particular, but commanders of the British, Dutch and Canadian troops conducting the bulk of the anti-Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan took the criticism personally and were quick to point out both that the US hasn’t been remarkably successful under similar circumstances in Iraq, and that the lack of success in Iraq has a direct bearing on the inability of the US to place more, presumably superior, troops in Afghanistan.

So it is that as we approach the 7th anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban are in a stronger position than at any time since they retreated from Kabul. They have six years of experience with US and NATO tactics, they appear to have consolidated their position inside Pakistan, their allies in Pakistan appear to be making gains against that country’s government, and they have their share of the multi-billion dollar opium trade to help finance their efforts and subvert those of their opponents. Although it’s always dangerous to take seriously anything that appears about al Qaeda in the press, the concensus on that organization seems to be that thanks to its Pakistani haven, it is once again engaged in training terrorists and participants in various insurgencies.

The US will remain entangled in Iraq, with all that that entails, for at least another two years, depending upon how thoroughly the Bush administration handcuffs their successors and how dedicated those successors actually are to ending that debacle. Proposals to increase the size of the US military are similarly years from fruition, and NATO countries are resisting calls to increase their own contributions to the effort. There is universal agreement among just about everyone except the Taliban that more western troops are needed in Afghanistan, and equally universal agreement that those troops simply aren’t to be found.

Meanwhile, the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons that the Bush administration named as cause to invade Iraq actually exists in Pakistan, and is being exacerbated by our failures in Afghanistan. If there is a military solution to the problem, the Bush administration have ensured that reaching it will be extraordinarily difficult.

There has never been an American administration so deeply and universally incompetent on national security issues as the Bush administration. The lone upside to the devastation is that the next president, assuming a baseline degree of sanity, will be required to exercise considerable non-explosive creativity to begin cleaning things up. Best of luck to us all.

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