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Read her full testimony below or download it here. Any errors and opinions are not those of the Department of Defense and are attributable solely to the authors. I am a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC where I specialize in counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, conflict mitigation and post-conflict stabilization policies, illicit economies, organized crime and urban violence. I last conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan in the fall of As an independent think tank, The Brookings Institution does not take institutional positions on any issue. In the following testimony, I first provide an overall description of the current drug and security situation in Afghanistan. Next I describe the actors in the Afghan drug economy, militants and powerbrokers linked to the Afghan government. I then describe the threats the drug economy generates and elaborate the economic and political significance of the Afghan drug economy. In the following section, I review counternarcotics efforts since , including eradication, interdiction, alternative livelihoods, and demand reduction efforts. In the final section, I draw out policy prospects, implications, and options. Perhaps nowhere in the world has a country and the international community faced an illicit drug economy as strong as the one in Afghanistan. Moreover, neither opium poppy cultivation nor heroin production is a new, post phenomenon; each were engaged in robustly during the Taliban era and before. The decreases in poppy cultivation and opiate production that have periodically taken place over the past two decades have largely been the result of the saturation of global and local drug markets, poppy crop disease, inauspicious weather such as drought, or temporary coercive measures in certain parts of Afghanistan that could not be sustained economically or politically and rapidly broke down. The structural drivers of the Afghan poppy economy, including, critically, insecurity, political power arrangements, and a lack of ready economic alternatives, remain unchanged or have intensified. Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted during most of the s not only failed to reduce the size and scope of the illicit economy in Afghanistan, but also had serious counterproductive effects on the other objectives of peace, state-building, and economic reconstruction. In a courageous break with a previous counterproductive policy, the U. The U. Rural development policies similarly failed to address the structural drivers of poppy cultivation and many were not sustainable. Most have withered with the significant intensification of insecurity in the country and the Taliban accruing ever growing territorial control and influence. Struggling with mounting insecurity, the Afghan government still has only little independent capacity and, for understandable reasons, political will to mount independent counternarcotics operations and policies, such as alternative livelihood efforts. Indeed, no supply side suppression measures — whether eradication, interdiction, or alternative livelihoods — have ever been effective and lasting anywhere in the world in the context of an on-going war. Peace and security and extensive government presence are inescapable preconditions for successful supply reduction measures. Under conditions of intense and growing insecurity, demand reduction measures in Afghanistan, such as treatment and prevention, have for years been the most permissive and highly beneficial venue for drug policy interventions. Yet they have been never adequately funded or prioritized either by international donors or the Afghan government. With increasing insecurity, and perhaps being on the cusp of a new and dramatically different political and social dispensation in Afghanistan, counternarcotics policy options have shrunk further. The Taliban is stronger on the battlefield than at any point since and poses an ever-increasing threat to the survival of the Afghan government. With or without U. The chance that intra-Afghan negotiations will generate a stable peace settlement is much smaller: Fighting and talking can easily go on for years to come. It will only extend the life support provided to the Afghan government. And the Taliban would only more rapidly become the dominant actor in the Afghan government. Intensified insurgency and civil war, diminished presence of international military forces perhaps soon their full withdrawal , and reductions in foreign aid further curtail counternarcotics policy options. Eradication of drug crops that could be foisted on the Afghan government as a result of external pressure is deeply counterproductive to any counterinsurgency and civil war mitigation efforts and can critically destabilize any peace settlement eventually signed, regardless of whether or not U. However, their withdrawal further limits opportunities for systematic interdiction operations that the Afghan government is not capable of replacing. War will continue to eviscerate alternative livelihood efforts beyond the few pockets of stability. Yet there is a substantial possibility that a peace in which the Taliban is the pre-dominant actor in the Afghan government would instead result in donors cutting off economic aid to Afghanistan, resulting in a significantly worsened economic and humanitarian situation overall, as well as a further entrenched drug economy. The Taliban-run regime could ram through temporary poppy bans, but it would have to struggle to maintain them. As has been the case for several years, for the foreseeable future much of what counternarcotics policies can currently accomplish and should emphasize is to avoid making a very difficult situation in Afghanistan worse. More robustly supporting treatment and prevention, perhaps even in Taliban controlled territories, remains the most permissive and productive domain for drug policy interventions. In Afghan opium production climbed to what then was seen as a staggering 8, metric tons mt. It then rose again to 5, mt in , and remained with some fluctuations at this level. In the estimated opium production was 6, mt. But when one takes into account economic spillovers, with drugs underpinning much of the other legal economic activity such as construction and the purchases of both durables and non-durables , drugs easily constitute a much larger portion of the Afghan economy. The grants also fully finance Afghan security forces. Afghanistan remains both extraordinary dependent on foreign aid and highly vulnerable to external shocks. If international aid dried up, the Afghan economy would head into a catastrophic freefall and the state would melt down, with drugs being all the more significant. For much of the rural population, the opium poppy economy is an essential source of basic livelihoods and human security. When access to the opium poppy economy is cut off, such as through bans on cultivation or eradication or because of drought, large segments of the rural population face economic immiseration and deprivation, even in terms of access to food, medical treatment, and schooling for children. Even urban populations are connected to the drug economy, with construction and trade in urban spaces often underpinned by the drug trade. Also crucially, opium poppy and cannabis cultivation, ephedra harvesting, and the production of opium, heroin, hashish, ephedrine, and likely methamphetamine it is not clear how much ephedra much processing takes place in Afghanistan 12 are extensive sources of employment. In particular, poppy cultivation and capsule lancing for the collection of opium resin are highly-labor intensive, vastly surpassing employment opportunities in all other sectors of the economy except the security sector. For example, poppy cultivation and opium harvesting is five times more labor intensive than wheat cultivation. In , poppy cultivation provided up to , full-time-equivalent jobs according to the U. The past two decades of economic development and alternative livelihood efforts have not altered these realities and predicaments. Poppy is deeply entwined in the socio-economic fabric of the country, and hence, inescapably, in its political arrangements and power relations. The Taliban is profiting from the drug trade, as are various criminal gangs sometimes connected to the government , the Afghan police, various militias, tribal elites, and many ex-warlords-cum-government officials at various levels of the Afghan government. Sometimes these layers, including of those nominally on the opposite sides of the violent conflict, strongly overlap and multiple intersections and connections exist among them. Police units, often highly abusive and criminalized, tax the drug economy. Local commanders and powerbrokers equally tax it and may own or sponsor poppy fields as well as rent land to poppy farmers and provide microcredit for cultivation. Border officials, such as at Kabul airport, let trafficking pass for a cut of drug profits. With its widespread territorial influence and reach throughout the country, the Taliban taxes cultivation, processing, and smuggling of drugs; and units and members of the Taliban are deeply involved in all these elements. In various years, the Taliban allows its fighters to disengage from fighting in order to collect the drug harvest. The Taliban also collects taxes from independent drug traders and various criminal groups, while suppressing others. In contrast, the attitude of the Islamic State in Khorasan toward the drug economy has been varied. Its western branch in Herat, now largely moribund, was deeply implicated in the drug trade. Its eastern branch in Nangarhar, surprisingly, sought to suppress opium poppy cultivation there, despite the highly negative economic impact on local populations. The Taliban thus taxes government grants to local areas as well as sometimes making sure they are not stolen by corrupt Afghan government officials , legal and illegal mining and logging, legal agriculture, cell phone tower operators, and various other forms of local economic activity. At the height of the U. Although time series, baselines, and reliable data are lacking, there is a widespread sense that opiate use and opioid use disorder have been on a dangerous rise in Afghanistan. In , the U. Department of State assessed that in 3. There is no reason to believe that both the absolute numbers and the drug use trends have changed significantly. A confluence of dangerous conditions spurs on drug abuse: a highly traumatized population dealing with economic deprivation, insecurity, and war; the availability of cheap drugs; and a regional setting of extensive drug use in Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, and Russia, to which Afghan migrants and refugees are frequently exposed. But it also greatly strengthens the Taliban politically. Because of the lack of security and a host of structural factors that prevent the population from accessing economic inputs and markets, opium remains frequently the only viable livelihood source for vast segments of the rural population. This political capital secured by the Taliban was augmented greatly during the time the Afghan government and international donors promoted eradication and bans on opium poppy cultivation. A second set of threats that the opium poppy economy generates is intensification of local criminality and conflicts among criminal groups and powerbrokers not related to the Taliban. There is a risk that fighting over the spoils of the drug economy among these actors will intensify and further undermine local security, as their funding from other sources, such as from the usurpation of economic aid or contracts related to the presence of international military forces in Afghanistan, dries up when international forces withdraw. Already, insecurity throughout the country has risen due to pervasive criminality, not only the Taliban potent insurgency. In a political system underpinned by patronage, where the central government for over a decade paid off warlords and powerbrokers by tolerating corruption and not enforcing rule of law, the opium poppy economy has been a key mechanism of keeping such actors anchored in the political system. Such a political management approach contradicts the acute need to improve governance; but it is also driven by the weakness of the center. Thus, if middle-level powerbrokers in particular were to face a reduced access to the opium poppy economy, they might exhibit a greater willingness to rock the system, instigate instability, and even trigger intensified and highly complex violence outright, or simply defect to the Taliban. Already, many are engaged in negotiations with the Taliban, expecting that the Taliban will become a powerful and likely dominant actor in a future Afghan government. Striking deals with the Taliban is also a mechanism of immediate survival in the face of Taliban attacks. In addition to the difficult and deteriorating security situation and intensifying civil war in Afghanistan, the pervasive lack of rule of law also undermines governance and fuels corruption. With strong origins in centuries of patronage, corruption is critically exacerbated by large inflows of money, not just from the drug trade, but also from foreign aid. Corruption and abuses of power also pervade all domains of the Afghan economy, including in legal commodities. This has become critical in Afghanistan, where overall governance is poor, and abuses of power and usurpation of public resources and private money are extensive. However, it is vital to understand that many forms of the Afghan economy are highly criminalized, including economies in legal commodities. Mining and logging are pervaded by evasion of rules and regulations from licensing to extraction and custom evasion. Many forms of the legal economy are associated with pervasive land and resource theft and monopolization by powerbrokers linked to the Afghan government. In the years when eradication was promoted by the United States and other international donors and adopted by the Afghan government, the sense of grievance was particularly intense. Eradication— itself perverted by corruption and directed against political rivals or communities that could not afford to pay bribes to the eradication teams and government officials — emiserated local communities while powerbrokers got away with land theft and legal resource monopolization. Yet the international community never adequately prioritized acting against, let alone meaningfully countering, the predatory economic activities of powerbrokers fighting the Taliban or Afghan government officials. They intensely resented the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that became entrenched over the prior decade. After an initial period of hope and promise following Taliban rule, governance in Afghanistan came to be defined by weak-functioning state institutions unable and unwilling to uniformly enforce laws and policies. Instead, official and unofficial powerbrokers have issued exceptions from law enforcement to their networks of clients, who have thus been able to reap high economic benefits and even get away with major crimes. Despite initial public optimism, the administration of President Ashraf Ghani September - has not managed to significantly curtail corruption or reduce the abusive distortions of the overall criminalized economy, rein the abusive practices of various powerbrokers and government officials, or otherwise robustly increase accountability. Moreover, despite steady pressure from donors to move against corruption and strengthen accountability mechanisms, the will and capacity of the Ghani administration weakened over time as it became increasingly dependent for its survival on the very problematic powerbrokers whom the Taliban also courts. In a rare display of sticking to formal conditionality of aid, the U. On the one hand, the opium poppy economy is the principal economic activity and lifeline. On the other hand, the illegal economy also generates macroeconomic distortions such as inflation, real estate speculation, and the Dutch disease of making other sectors comparatively unproductive. Finally, as already described, the low cost and easy availability of opiates is contributing to a serious and perhaps worsening public health crisis of drug use. The initial objective of the U. Dealing with the illicit economy was not considered to be integral to the military objectives. Thus, until U. Meanwhile, it relied on key warlords, who were often deeply involved in the drug economy since the s, not simply to provide intelligence on the Taliban, but also to carry out direct military operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda. By , increased interdiction was undertaken instead. Its goal was to target large traffickers and processing laboratories. Immediately, however, the effort was manipulated by local Afghan strongmen to eliminate drug competition and ethnic, tribal, and other political rivals. Instead of targeting top echelons of the drug economy, many of whom had considerable political clout, interdiction operations were largely conducted against small vulnerable traders who could neither sufficiently bribe nor adequately intimidate the interdiction teams and their supervisors within the Afghan government. The result was a significant vertical integration of the drug industry in Afghanistan. The other — again undesirable — effect of how interdiction was carried out was that it allowed the Taliban to reintegrate itself into the Afghan drug trade. Having recouped in Pakistan, the Taliban was once again needed to provide protection to traffickers targeted by interdiction. Alarmed by the spread of opium poppy cultivation, some public officials in the United States in and also started calling for a strong poppy eradication campaign, including aerial spraying. Violent strikes and social protests immediately rose up against it. Another wave of eradication took place in , when reduction in poppy cultivation was achieved. Most of the reduction was due to cultivation suppression in Nangarhar province where, through promises of alternative development and threats of imprisonment, production was slashed by 90 percent. However, alternative livelihoods never materialized for many. The Cash-for-Work programs reached only a small percentage of the population in Nangarhar, mainly those living close to cities. The overall pauperization of the population there was devastating. In fact, the antagonized poppy farmers came to constitute a strong and key base of support for the Taliban, denying intelligence to ISAF and providing it to the Taliban. Just like interdiction, eradication was plagued by massive corruption problems, with powerful elites able to bribe or coerce their way out of having their opium poppy fields destroyed, or by direct eradication of the crops of their political opponents. And it was the poorest farmers, most vulnerable to Taliban mobilization, who bore the brunt of eradication. Temporary local poppy suppression frequently required a combination of buyoffs of influential maliks tribal elders , promises of alternative livelihoods, and threats of poppy crop eradication and imprisonment of violators. Farmers close to the provincial capitals could sometimes manage to cope with poppy bans by switching to crops such as vegetables, increasing dairy production, and working in construction cash-for-work programs. Farmers away from provincial centers frequently suffered great economic deprivation. Since their income often crashed by a large percent and none of the promised alternative livelihoods programs ever robustly materialized speedily enough and in a lasting way, their political restlessness and outright support for the Taliban steadily grew. Not surprisingly, eradication teams frequently came under attack, an insecurity that prevented their further activities. Recognizing the counterproductive effects of eradication, the Obama administration broke with decades of U. For several years, the United States government provided limited funding and technical assistance to Afghan governors who decided to proceed with eradication. Thus in , the Afghan government eradicated only hectares of poppy, i. The core components of the Obama administration counternarcotics policy became interdiction of Taliban-linked drug traffickers and rural development. Scaling back eradication strongly enhanced the new counterinsurgency policy focus of the Obama administration on providing security to the rural population. However, reducing instability and the size of the drug economy also depend on the actual operationalization of the strategy, and much of that faltered in design and implementation. Going after Taliban-linked traffickers became the sole counternarcotics mandate of ISAF forces, though other international and Afghan counternarcotics units, with U. Drug Enforcement Administration assistance, could target other traffickers as well. Under the premise that Taliban financing and its battlefield capacity would be weakened, the raids often wiped out the entire savings of a household. Thus, in areas that were subject to intense interdiction raids, the effects of supposedly selective and hearts-and-minds-oriented interdiction in fact resembled those of eradication. Meanwhile, the opium poppy economy frequently shifted to areas that were less intensely patrolled by ISAF and the Afghan government. One was to signal to Afghan power brokers that the best way to conduct the drug business in Afghanistan is to be closely aligned with the Afghan government and, better yet, to provide counterinsurgency services — such as intelligence, militias, and real estate property — to U. The very hard choice of pursuing only a certain type of trafficker — namely, those linked to the Taliban — may well be necessary and appropriate under conditions of insurgency and a very extensive drug economy that includes all types of actors, including government officials. But coupling such hard choices with indiscriminate seizure of opium stocks at the level of the household frequently poor households further alienated the population from the government. Moreover, it inadvertently defined as a good policy the privileging of the most powerful actors, thus contradicting public claims of accountable governance. At the end of , the U. Whatever counternarcotics interdiction efforts were undertaken by the Afghan military forces or special Afghan counternarcotics units, they were frequently warped by corruption. Even when big traffickers are captured, they often easily bribe their way out of prison. In , when the Trump administration came to power and laid out its Afghanistan policy, the U. This time, interdiction centered on intensified bombing of drug labs, depots, and smuggling trucks. Interdiction was a much better policy choice than disastrous eradication and allowed synchronization with counterinsurgency efforts, particularly as early on the Trump administration sought to see counternarcotics efforts strengthened. Yet, as was inevitable for reasons described above, despite hundreds of presumed drug targets hit in peak years of and of the aerial interdiction effort, the interdiction neither succeeded in weakening the Taliban nor fundamentally changed the dynamics and drivers of the Afghan drug trade. Economic development efforts by the international community in Afghanistan, including alternative livelihood efforts, were plagued by a vacillation between two competing understandings of the purpose of economic development projects: to buy off the population and wean it off from the insurgents; and to produce long-term sustainable rural development. The latter were designed as short-term cash-for-work programs, lasting weeks or at best months. Their goals were to keep Afghan males employed, so that economic necessities did not drive them to join the Taliban, and to secure the allegiance of the population who, ideally, would provide intelligence on the insurgents. Under this concept, U. Although U. Nor was adequate consideration given to the development of assured markets; consequently, much of the produce cultivated under the USAID-contracted programs sometimes did not find buyers and rotted. There is also little evidence that these programs secured the allegiance of the population to either the Afghan government or ISAF forces, or resulted in increases in intelligence from the population on the Taliban. At other times, they have spurred new tribal rivalries and community tensions. Nor did the programs address the structural deficiencies of the rural economy in Afghanistan, including the drivers of poppy cultivation. A microcredit system, for example, continues to be lacking throughout much of Afghanistan. In fact, many of the stabilization efforts, such as wheat distribution or grant programs, directly undermined some of the long-term imperatives for addressing the structural market deficiencies, such as the development of microcredit or the establishment of local Afghan seed-banks, seed markets, rural enterprise, and value-added chains. Because of land density issues in Afghanistan, the lack of sustainability of the favorable wheat-to-opium price ratios under which the program took effect, and the limited ability of wheat cultivation to generate employment, wheat turned out to be a singularly inappropriate replacement crop. The result: persisting deep market deficiencies, displacement of opium poppy cultivation to new insecure areas or Afghan deserts, and compromised rule of law. Not all efforts to suppress poppy cultivation in Afghanistan were always exercised through the bulldozing of poppy plants. Moreover, poppy farmers have adapted by buying new pumps, increasingly powered by solar energy. With the bulk of drug policy efforts by the Afghan government, foreign donors, and even non-state actors focused on the supply side measures, demand reduction policies have been grossly neglected and often misguided. Their mere extent has been highly inadequate to the public health challenge the country faces. Although drug treatment centers existed in Afghanistan in , their total service capacity was believed to be 39, patients, a tiny fraction of those in need of treatment. Moreover, the quality of treatment is often poor. Afghan NGOs tend to provide detoxification assistance, but post-detoxification support is far less robust. In , the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics reported a 92 percent relapse rate for those who received treatment. Prevention efforts have been even more inadequate. To be synchronized with violence reduction and state-building, counternarcotics policies must be judicious, well-sequenced, and well-prioritized. In Afghanistan, this requires the policies to be guided by three objectives and principles: limiting the most dangerous security threats emanating from Afghanistan; increasing the stability and legitimacy of the Afghan government; and enhancing human security. At the same time, the counternarcotics policies must be cognizant of the inescapable grip of the security realities on the ground. Amidst the steady worsening of the security situation, a poor prospect for a peace deal being achieved between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and a high chance of intensified civil war — whether or not U. The prospect is for the counternarcotics policy space to become even more profoundly constrained, at least until a stable government emerges and conflict has ended. Foreign Policy. Drugs, security, and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan. Sections Sections. Contact Foreign Policy Media Office. Sign Up. Commentary Testimony Drugs, security, and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan. Vanda Felbab-Brown. Counternarcotics Strategy in Afghanistan. Defense Policy U. Related Books New Global Dynamics. Bombing to Provoke. Landing the Paris Climate Agreement. Since , the percentage of drugs to licit GDP has oscillated between 60 and 30 percent, not because the illicit economy has been reduced, but due to the expansion of some sectors of the legal economy, such as telecommunications. See, for example, Christopher M. Blanchard, Afghanistan: Narcotics and U. Oxford: Oxford University Press, , , See, for example, Thomas Schweich, U. A UNODC drug use survey in Afghanistan suggested that the number of adult drug users in Afghanistan was close to one million, or about 8 percent of the population between the ages of 15 and See John F. See Pain, Opium Trading Systems. See David Mansfield, Pariah or Poverty? For details, see, Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up, Provincial governors in Afghanistan can choose to engage in their own eradication efforts. During , 2, ha were thus eradicated in Afghanistan under this governor-led eradication program. Note the recent notorious case of a leading Afghan heroin trafficker on the U. Spreads the Cash to Fight the Taliban. More On. Afghanistan affectations. The dubious joys of standing up militias and building partner capacity: Lessons from Afghanistan and Mexico for prosecuting security policy through proxies.

Drugs, security, and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan

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Drug use has been driven by persistent poverty and decades of war that left few families unscarred. Families once able to get by found their sources of income cut off, leaving many barely able to afford food. Millions have joined the ranks of the impoverished. Drug users can be found around the capital, Kabul, living in parks and sewage drains, under bridges and on open hillsides. A survey by the United Nations estimated that up to 2. Seven years later, the number is not known, but it is believed to have only increased, according to Dr Zalmel, the head of the Drug Demand Reduction Department, who like many Afghans, uses only one name. The Taliban has launched an aggressive campaign to eradicate poppy cultivation. Earlier this summer, Taliban fighters stormed two areas frequented by drug users, one on the hillside and another under a bridge. They collected about 1, people, officials said. It is the largest of several treatment camps around Kabul. There, the residents were shaved and kept in a barracks for 45 days. They receive no treatment or medication as they go through withdrawal. The camp barely has enough money to feed those who live there. Published On 25 Jul 25 Jul Such camps do little to treat addiction. A week after the raids, both locations were once again full of hundreds of people using drugs.

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