MacGyver-ing Afghanistan: better living through chemicals?
Should we buy Afghanistan's opium crop in exchange for health care and other relatively simple things the Afghan people need? Then use the opium to manufacture legal drugs and sell them? If not, why not?
MiguelitoH2O's "Tough Guy" post gave rise to a complex and interesting discussion about Afghanistan. Hardnosed. Facty. I was glad to see Dan K back in action and in his element. Hardly an attaboy or co-sign in sight, just the occasional gruff compliment or "I'll concede the point" in the event of a serious rhetorical goring. (I enjoy my TPM Cafe in all its flavors, from blonde and creamy smooth to hot, dark and spiked with bathtub gin, so please don't think I'm recommending any particular mode here.)
But like I say, it was a good discussion, and I hope that some of it will be diced up and re-posted in future so those who missed it can partake. One point that kept coming up (and I hope I can adequately explain this) is that the situation on the ground is way more complicated than we think. Pakistan has nukes. People are poor. The religious aspect is complicated. AQ is not the Taliban, and vice versa. The opium crop is a huge factor. The country is gigantic and mountainous. They don't even speak English there. Etc.
What it comes down to is that it's tough for a US military effort to be anything other than asymetric and ultimately ineffective, especially when it comes to cultivating hearts and minds.
Then Saladin made a suggestion about the opium:
"Look this ain't rocket science. There is a simple solution- we make it legal and then buy it all up for medicine. We did it in the 70's in Turkey.
Check out this paper.
http://www.poppyformedicine.net/documents/Political_History_Poppy_Licensing_Turkey_May_2006
Bonus: Everybody loves painkillers."
This got me thinking, maybe every military base should include a children's clinic/hospital, and people could pay for their children's care with opium poppies. The kids would have to be brought in by their mother or some other female caregiver. There could also be stores, same form of payment. The object would be to create simple ways of working with what's actually there on the ground and with the people (MacGyver-ing) rather than trying to do more complicated military operations which fail.
Back at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, I remember reading that everywhere Osama bin Laden went, he brought a goat for dinner, which is one of the ways he cultivated loyalty. It seems like if we're going to stay in Afghanistan at all, we ought to be looking for what ordinary people want and figure out how to get it to them while cutting those other guys we don't like out of the deal. The Bush Administration chose to see enemies--maybe we need a more customer-service approach.
I know this will come off as gee-whiz, and I don't care. Those of you who are experts in this area can take it from here. I'm just saying that when it comes to protecting an area rife with nukes and enemies, it might be smart to figure out how to corner the market on good will, and if it takes spending a billion bucks on poppies, it could be the best billion we ever spent.
More bonuses: Poppies are pretty, and their seeds make for delicious bagels and strudels.
One additional note: when I checked this post for formatting, I noticed an ad in the sidebar "Meet Afghan girls for dating and marriage." One hardly knows what to say.
September 2, 2009 3:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
As I understand it the legal production of opium already exceeds the demand and Afghanistan produces many time the amount needed for production of medicines. So we would have to stop buying opium from India and Turkey to buy just a fraction of the Afghanistan harvest. Or buy many times the amount of opium needed and, what, store it or destroy it?
September 2, 2009 3:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right after posting this I hopped on Google News and found an article saying the same thing. Definitely took the wind out of my sails. Many Afghan farmers are getting out of the business of growing opium because it's just not worth it.
Still, I think there's an argument for buying the opium that the farmers do raise. (and storing or destroying it) Cutting off the money supply to the illegal dealers and sellers would be a strong stabilizing factor for the region. No opium, no cash for the Taliban or Pakistani extremists, less drug money floating around the region. Something for the US to work on with the people who live in the region...
(To take up the production slack we could give the morphine to other nations, or make codeine cough syrup available over the counter again so people could get a decent night's sleep when they have a cough....;^)
We could also pay people the price of opium for other crops. The goals would be to cut the amount of illegal money in the area and create a way to work with local farmers.
September 2, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
A lot of the problem here is that those illegal dealers and sellers you want to cut off the money supply to are the people who run things in their little corner of the Hindu Kush. They've been part of the equation for our policy in Afghanistan for some time, and some have worked quite closely with our CIA. As I noted in my blog yesterday, one of Karzai's VP's is alleged to have been heavily involved in drug traffiking by the CIA since as far back as 2002. Neoboho made what I thought was an accurate assessment of what the effects of trying to buy out the opium supply in Afghanistan would look like. In the end, I fear that if you were able to unravel the threads of the opium trade in Afghanistan we might be surprised to see the players are all very much intertwined with our economy as well as our foreign policy. What tangled webs.
September 2, 2009 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink