The enormous challenges faced by Afghanistan will be laid bare before international leaders as they meet in London today. Gordon Brown and David Miliband are hosting a conference to try and force the creation of new political solutions to tackle Afghanistan’s domestic problems. But experience has shown that Afghanistan’s problems have international consequences and now require international solutions.
The Foreign Office admits that Afghanistan is the world’s leading supplier of opiates, with over 90 per cent of the supply of heroin on the UK’s streets originating from Afghanistan. What is not always admitted by ministers is that opium cultivation and our inability to tackle it is at the heart of Afghanistan’s current security problems and is intrinsically linked to the endemic corruption which is killing off any chance of a peaceful future for the Afghan people. The World Bank argues that opium is a “grave danger to the entire peacebuilding and reconstruction agenda” in Afghanistan.
In 2007 Afghanistan was responsible for 93 per cent of the world’s opium, which was double the amount it produced in 2005, representing 13 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP. Although the removal of the Taliban from the capital Kabul and the signing of the Bonn Agreement following the coalition invasion changed the political reality of Afghanistan, the structures of the opium economy stayed the same and continue to feed the corruption that goes with it.
Afghan farmers are driven to grow poppies to ensure their family’s financial survival and to pay off debts, and while the opium ban led to a massive reduction in production, this also created a ten-fold increase in the price of opium; which further incentivised farmers to produce the crop. The increased price, but lower availability means many poorer farmers with limited opportunities to earn a living and support their families have been dragged into a cycle of poppy production by the appalling financial prospects in rural Afghanistan.
The expanding and increasingly profitable ‘opium economy’ in Afghanistan today has allowed a parallel state to emerge, undermining all aspects of law enforcement from the police to the judiciary. The Afghan highway police were disbanded in 2006 due to the astoundingly high levels of corruption related to the opium economy within their forces. And evidence from the most prolific poppy-growing regions of Helmand and Kandahar suggests that senior police officers in those areas can expect up to $100,000 in illicit income in just six months for supporting drug production and cross-border trafficking. The impact is evident to many Afghan citizens. The opium economy has allowed private interests to ‘capture’ parts of the Afghan state, taking resources out of the public sector and placing them in private hands.
This was undoubtedly exacerbated by the initial mistakes made by the transitional Afghan government and the international community immediately following the coalition invasion. Eradicating the drug economy was not initially a priority for the international community. Security and political stability were seen as the paramount concerns and President Karzai and his international supporters were too heavily focussed on counter-insurgency rather than tackling the opium economy. In hindsight, it’s clear that Karzai feared turning the counter-insurgency operation into a counter-narcotic one in case this upset the fragile power-sharing balance he had established.
The instability caused by corruption and the drugs trade means that even increased resources to support the Afghan government’s apparatus may not be enough to eradicate the drug economy. It is vital that today’s London conference sees investment from the international community to eliminate the Afghan opium economy.
The military investment that has been made by our government in Afghanistan has cost a great deal both financially and in terms of the number of our servicemen and women who have lost their lives. The work done by the Foreign Office such as establishing the counter-narcotics task force and spending £130 million on alternative livelihoods benefiting 32,000 farmers should be expanded.
The government’s need to limit public spending at home, the fluctuating financial markets, and the challenge of converting foreign office budgets into local currencies is a challenging backdrop to the London conference. But if we are serious about defeating the Taliban and establishing a peaceful, stable and democratic Afghanistan, then we have to invest our resources in tackling the opium economy that is doing so much to undermine our military efforts there.
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