Poppies and Pomegranates in Kandahar

As goes Kandahar Province, so goes Afghanistan. And as go the “paradoxes” of counterinsurgency operations – as General David Petraeus’ field manual calls the shifty phantoms that have found a fine haunt in the pomegranate orchards of Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley – so goes the war. Last October, as American bombs fell on the sleepy village of Tarok Kolache – an orphaned ghost town under the tenancy of IED-sewing Taliban – commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn cringed: “not because I cared about the enemy we were killing or the HME destroyed,” he said, “but I knew the reconstruction would consume the remainder of my deployed life.”

Indeed, with all the mosque groundbreakings and village ribbon-cuttings in the past month alone, reconstruction is consuming Arghandab itself. What is especially encouraging is the US army’s decentralized Hayekian approach: village shurahs, local Afghan National Security Force commanders, the district governor, the District Stabilization Team, and civilian assistance groups are carrying out their respective duties, with President Karzai’s network pointedly uninvited (though his taxmen are surely salivating at the opportunities). The pomegranate villages may not yet have been destroyed in vain.

But even as Arghandabers chisel out compensation with municipal flare, the paradox of the pomegranate raps on: Try as they might to compensate the farmer whose few mangled trees amounted to his living, ISAF’s orchard renovations and USAID’s energy Americana solar panel schemes will never compete on the market economy of Kandahar’s rural badlands. For here, in the land of Plan B “alternative livelihoods,” the Taliban cash cropper with grade-A opium poppy is king.

With poppy-based opium funding all evils in Afghanistan – from Taliban payrolls to the corruption in the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics itself – it is no wonder that the US allotted over $2 billion between 2005 and 2010 to stem narcotics activities in Afghanistan, according to last year’s Government Accountability Office report. Working in the shadows of the forgotten war within the forgotten war, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Britain's Serious Organized Crimes Agency, and the Afghan-led Major Crimes Task Force routinely score operational successes, including last October’s DEA-Russia co-nabbing of more than $60 million worth of heroin in raids on just four drug labs in northeastern Afghanistan.

Yet now in its 10^th year, the war on opium poppy is failing. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s December “Afghanistan Opium Survey” admitted “cause for concern” in the self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity and opium price rises. Indeed, the value of Afghan opium rose 164% in 2010 on the wings of a poppy blight, wheat drought, and rising violence. A January Washington Post article headlined “Success of Afghan drug war is waning” pointed out that more and more Afghan farmers are turning to opium poppy cultivation as an economic necessity, often paying protection taxes to the Taliban. “Most of the trafficking we see is in Kandahar,” said anti-narcotics police head Bazz Mohammed Ahmadi, “and we have no control there.”

Such dourness is strange in the context of recent Afghanistan war assessments. Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid suggested last November that the Taliban, far from content with their lucrative opium monopoly, are “exhausted by the war” and “would like to see peace.” The December “Responsible Transition” report by Andrew Exum and Lieutenant General (Ret.) David W. Barno – said to have strong influence on President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy – claims to outline the path to a “more sustainable U.S. and allied presence,” without ever mentioning poppy.

In Arghandab, however, where the only peace the Taliban would like to see is the peace of neo-Deobandi Shariah law, and the Taliban-warlord opium monopoly rivals the importance of Soviet-era Stinger missiles, poppy-free reconstruction plods ahead. The buzz is “alternative livelihoods,” like pomegranates, wheat, and saffron –but all are less profitable alternatives to the one crop capable of riding out the snaps and spins of the country’s security maladies. Valiant are the Afghans who reject the Taliban’s promise of poppy farm protection, and instead receive death threats when seen waiting at the district center for their $170 pomegranate tree compensation.

The poppy paradox is simple: a licensed poppy-for-medicine economy would increase poppy supply, thereby decreasing opium prices. As incomes along the value chain rise for regular Afghans – i.e. the COIN center of gravity – the insurgency’s monopoly crumbles apart. Afghans, no longer settling for “alternative” livelihoods, can now pursue “preferred” livelihoods, with no more need for Taliban protection. As the insurgency shrivels, security increases, and Afghan farmers now have the time, money, and certainty to invest in those same trusty pomegranates.

The questions beg ironies: Will licit poppy production increase the opium supply? In fact, as repeated International Council on Security and Development studies show, a poppy-for-morphine program would undercut the comparative advantage of the opium trade, diverting poppy to the licit medical market. As it is, even wounded Afghan soldiers are lucky to receive morphine, with the Army Surgeon General removed last month for siphoning off $42 million in army medicines; Will coalition partners approve? Actually, the US already buys poppy-for-morphine from Turkey and Australia, so any objections are self-serving; Will the program flop amid Afghanistan’s lawlessness? The criminal patronage networks and the Taliban already grow poppy, and only stand to lose when competitors sprout up in law-abiding pockets of the country.

Kandahar’s unusually “kinetic” winter, including the assassination of the deputy governor this week, is likely an indicator of an insurgency that feels threatened by ISAF’s population-centric reconstruction efforts, particularly in Arghandab. This makes the counter-productiveness of Afghanistan’s poppy policy all the more regretful. Reconstruction may consume the rest of the deployed life of the soldiers of Flynn's 1-320^th, and wisely so. But until such reconstruction includes mention of poppy, soldiers will continue to spend their lives deployed in Afghanistan indeed.

(Photos courtesy of Founders' Porch)