Inside Afghanistan’s ‘Narco-State’

By David Axe

"I took to heart [Afghan president] Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake."
So begins Thomas Schweich’s excellent piece in The New York Times Magazine. For two years beginning in 2006, Schweich was a senior U.S. counter-narcotics official in Afghanistan, a country where poppies — the major ingredient in opium — represent the biggest source of income for farmers, insurgents and corrupt government officials. Breaking opium’s hold on the Central Asian country is key to building a secure, self-sufficient Afghanistan, Schweich contends. But getting there from here has proved nearly impossible. Despite a lot of rhetoric, the country’s opium crop has been steadily increasing.
Part of the problem? Karzai himself opposes the most effective tactic for eliminating poppies — namely, aerial spraying.

He claimed to fear that aerial eradication would result in an uprising that would cause him to lose power. We found this argument perplexing because aerial eradication was used in rural areas of other poor countries without a significant popular backlash.

"Ground-based eradication was inefficient, costly, dangerous and more subject to corrupt dealings among local officials than aerial eradication," Schweich writes. "But it was our only option."
Why did Karzai object to spraying? "While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters."