Daniel’s a hundred per cent right to call for an end to some of the more stupid measures taken in Afghanistan in the name of counter-narcotics work. Take aerial spraying off the table? Absolutely. Avoid alienating farmers in order to avoid swelling the insurgents’ ranks? Sign me up.
But I think we need to go much further than this. Daniel argues that coalition forces in Afghanistan should focus on:
…arrests and the prosecution of drug lords and their backers in government. Unless these “narcotics entrepreneurs” are targeted, arrested and prosecuted, little will change.
As he noted yesterday, the FT’s recent leader on this subject agrees with him, arguing that:
…while crop eradication and locking up bad guys may be an important part of addressing the crisis, they are not by themselves a solution. That can only come over years of a sustained and consistent strategy to develop a real market economy which would provide a better livelihood for farmers than the dangerous and volatile drugs business.
That will, it is true, require security and a role for the military. It will mean targeting the middlemen, smugglers and, yes, chemists who operate the infrastructure of the drugs business, hitting their finances and improving co-operation with Afghanistan’s neighbours.
Above all, it will mean that while the small poppy farmer escapes the attentions of the authorities, the big drug barons do not. That demands ending the de facto impunity enjoyed by some Afghans, a move that can be sanctioned by only the president.
I hate to be a sceptic, but, well, I’m a sceptic. Targeting the big drug lords, the middlemen and smugglers is certainly preferable to targeting small farmers from a development point of view. But it’s still pretty pointless. Just look at Colombia, where massive resources to the war on drugs have made negligible impact. True, interdiction efforts can influence the street price a bit – maybe even quite significantly, as in the aftermath of the destruction of the Medellin Cartel in 1989 – but the effects never seem to last much beyond a year. For all the hullabaloo about the war on drugs, the long term price trend for most illegal narcotics has been downwards.
What’s more, we all know that this emperor has no clothes. When I worked in the government, I used to ask the Afghanistan experts I came across what assessment had been made of what effect even a best case scenario on counter-narcotics in Afghanistan would have on the street price of heroin in the UK, or how we could be sure that production wouldn’t just be displaced to Turkmenistan instead. The answers I got back were never very encouraging.
None of this, of course, is to dispute the underlying point about just how corrosive organised crime is to the legitimacy and effectiveness of states (c.f. Mark’s recent post on Guinea-Bissau, or mine on Italy and Mexico). But the point is that if we want to halt that process of corrosion, the it’s not Helmand, or even Kabul, that’s the front line. The real front line is with our policy of Prohibition, and the fantastically profitable economic opportunities that it introduces.
The war on drugs will never, ever be won on the supply side. And until we figure that out and internalise it in our policies, the margins on illegal drugs will remain astronomical, the incentives for organised crime and insurgent movements will stay irresistible, and states will keep failing. After all, we can all see that Prohibiton in America created and sustained Al Capone. So which bit about sustaining his inheritors at the global level is it that we don’t get?
