[IVY]

Afghanistan: The Drug War Collides With Nation-Building

An article in Slate earlier this week notes that "the war against opium in Afghanistan is stumbling badly." There is also tension between the State Department and the Defense Department as to the best course of action. The DoD is weary of increased interdiction efforts, as it may place troops at risk of a popular backlash.

The U.S. involvement in international interdiction has been nothing short of a disaster, as it is in almost all instances ineffective and also contributes to a great deal of anti-American sentiment in targeted countries. Afghanistan is a stunning example of this. Once upon a time the U.S. supported the Taliban -- chiefly because they eradicated the opium trade. This anti-drug zeal trumped the naked human rights abuses of the theocracy and its more clandestine support of transnational Islamofascist insurgenices (you know who).

Today, the U.S. has put Afghan President Harmid Karzai in an unfortunate position. As Bosco observes:

Karzai faces a torturous choice in trying to kick his country's habit. If he attacks the trade too aggressively, he could cripple the country's economy and generate a nasty political backlash. Aerial spraying is particularly touchy, since many Afghans still remember napalm runs by Soviet aircraft as they tried to crush the mujahideen.
The development of a non-narcotic agricultural center is imperative. Afghan farmers must be given assurances that there will be a reasonable expectation of profit in the short-term and the long-term, and that the government will enforce property rights and business transactions through a stable, impartial judiciary.

These important structural concerns are hardly ever covered in the press, and they are imperative in fostering a functional, transparent market-based economy. As Hernando de Soto has shown through his incisive volume The Mystery of Capital, the establishment and enforcement of secure property rights are necessary conditions to sustained economic growth and political stability in developing nations.

Also, the United States could help great deal by retracting its anti-opioid bias in medical practices. Given the DEA's current jihad against pain management doctors, that is nothing less than a pie-in-the-sky scenario.

The great lesson of the current Afghan dilemma: nation-building is never easy, and when the drug war is thrown into the mix the problems become even more intractable. In Beltway logic, however, there is no vicissitude that cannot be ameliorated with the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.