Posted June 12, 2009

One of the most incisive lines in Gretchen Peters’ new book about the Afghan opium trade is buried on page 134: “The Taliban and their allies may be earning hundreds of millions from the drug trade, but one thing almost everyone interviewed for this project agreed on was that crooked members of Hamid Karzai’s administration are earning even more.” Opium may be bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda, as the book’s subtitle announces, but the huge participation of Afghan government officials in the production and trafficking of opium is a profoundly inconvenient fact for the United States/NATO mission in the country.

But it’s not only the Afghan government that provides official cover to the illicit industry, according to Ms. Peters. Stand in Kabul and pick any direction on the compass—all around Afghanistan are countries that have consistently provided routes to Western drug markets. She documents elements of the Iranian intelligence services (probably rogue factions) helping to organize transport convoys to Turkey, and making their payments in kind in the form of weapons. The countries of former Soviet Central Asia provide a meeting and transfer point between Russian mafia and Afghan drug smugglers. Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, practically invented many of the trade routes that have extended to the Gulf emirates of Dubai and Sharjah since the 1980s.

The most damning parts of the book are Ms. Peters’ analysis of the U.S.’s counternarcotics policy itself, which hardly even existed in the first years after the fall of the Taliban regime. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously declared that the U.S. military would have no part in fighting the drug trade. That task was handed off to the British. Later, when the U.S. undertook a limited effort at counternarcotics, the teams sent out to confront farmers were not given helicopter rides or military protection; they naturally cancelled the missions, since they involved traveling to some of the most dangerous areas in Afghanistan. Ms. Peters describes the perception among many Afghans, and even Western officials, that the U.S. policy was to condone the drug trade.

The tentacles of the opium industry reach the highest levels of the Afghan political elite. A former governor of Helmand, by far the largest opium-producing province, was found in the possession of tons of the drug; President Karzai rescued him from prosecution by appointing him to the upper house of parliament. The highest anticorruption official had been the object of a narcotics sting in a Las Vegas hotel room in the 1980s. Indeed, Mr. Karzai’s own brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, appears to be one of Afghanistan’s biggest opium kingpins, according to Ms. Peters’ reporting. In May, Ahmad Wali Karzai threatened to beat a McClatchy reporter after he confronted him with some questions about his involvement in the drug trade, throwing him out of his Kandahar compound quite unceremoniously.

Despite all that, the subtitle (probably the concoction of an enterprising editor) is not entirely misleading. Ms. Peters makes the case that the Taliban are increasingly connected to the drug trade. The areas with the most cultivation of poppies also happen to be in areas where the Western military presence is most diffuse. But she also presents evidence that there are criminal bands working in the opium trafficking industry who simply call themselves “Taliban” because it is a brand name with a reputation for ruthlessness and effectiveness. Ms. Peters is reluctant to make any concrete claims about the degree to which the jihadist insurgent groups led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Haqqanis and Osama bin Laden actually make money off of opium. Her best hypothesis is that they probably skim from the trade indirectly, but later she acknowledges the view of some Western officials that the core of insurgent funding is Gulf Arab donations, not narcotics.

What is clear from Ms. Peters’ account is that there are people on both sides who have a large stake in making sure the Afghanistan conflict continues. Drug traffickers, be they official or criminal, profit from the instability. One case study in the book clearly points to this conclusion. Arguably the most important drug kingpin of the last two decades, Haji Bashir Noorzai, had been an original funder of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 1994. At that time, the trafficking routes were littered with roadblocks set up by local warlords who collected “taxes” on the goods passing through. Mr. Noorzai was growing tired of paying the tax, and according to Ms. Peters, invited the Taliban to eliminate his obstacle. After 2001, Mr. Noorzai played both sides of the conflict by courting American agents with useful intelligence on his former Taliban partners, all the while developing his opium empire. He was recently lured to New York by the promise of more cooperation with Americans, but was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents upon arrival.

Ms. Peters makes some excellent policy suggestions at the end of her book. She is sensitive to the situation of small Afghan farmers, who would be crushed by debt to traffickers if their crops were eradicated. Instead, she suggests that counternarcotics policy should be oriented toward netting the big traffickers, including, if necessary, the traffickers who work inside official government positions. She also calls for a concerted diplomatic effort that involves Iran, which also has an interest in curtailing the trade and stabilizing its basket-case neighbor. In addition to these policies, Ms. Peters maintains that any counternarcotics strategy will fail without the accompaniment of classical counterinsurgency tactics: protecting the population and bringing insurgents into the political realm.

A subject the book does not treat in detail, but equally important to the economic and political aspects of opium, is the destructive growth of drug addiction in the region, and inside Afghanistan itself. Radio Free Europe has reported on the rising epidemic among women in Badakhshan Province, where people are already desperately poor. Likewise, Pakistan and Iran have seen rates of heroin use jump. As in the West, addiction to opiates leads to a rise in prostitution and the spread of AIDS. This is not to say that a regional “war on drugs” is the answer, but it does add urgency to the need to wean Afghanistan off of its deadly habit.

Ian Chesley studied Central Asia at Harvard University and was awarded a doctorate in Slavic languages in 2007.