Bringing Logic to Counternarcotics
U.S. Turns a Blind Eye to Opium in Afghan Town – New York Times
From Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal on down, the military’s position is clear: ‘U.S. forces no longer eradicate’ as one NATO official put it.
From Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of McChrystal’s Strategic Advisory Group,
Marja is a special case right now. We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.
This approach should have been taken long ago. It is clear that eradication, despite having been the counternarcotics tool of choice for the U.S. for the majority of the Afghan campaign, does not work. It robs farmers of their livelihood and turns them against the Afghan government and the United States, does not stop the traffickers who make the majority of the profit, and may even drive up selling prices by restricting supply.
Successful counternarcotics in Afghanistan, in the medium if not the longterm, will likely have to combine variants of interdiction and crop substitution strategies that go after traffickers and provide incentives to grow crops other than poppy. By reducing the number of individuals and groups available to buy poppy from farmers and providing farmers with alternative sources of livelihood, this combination could eventually make a solid dent in the Afghan narcotics industry.
Designing effective development strategies and improving domestic policing take time, which for U.S. and NATO commanders is in short supply. Just because a more comprehensive approach to counternarcotics is currently out of reach, however, does not make pursing a counterproductive eradication strategy a good idea. That U.S. commanders are acknowledging that and resisting the urge to pursue an approach that simply doesn’t work purely on principle is a sign that things might be going in a more positive, or at least a more logical, direction.
