KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 7 — After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history, American officials have renewed efforts to persuade the government here to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai’s administration, officials of both countries said.
Since early this year, Mr. Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground.
But Afghan officials said that the Karzai administration is now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are even pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring.
The issue has created sharp divisions in the Afghan government, among its Western allies and even between American officials of different agencies. The matter is fraught with political danger for Mr. Karzai, whose hold on power is weak.
Many spraying advocates, including officials at the White House and the State Department, view herbicides as critical to curbing Afghanistan’s poppy crop, officials said. That crop and the opium and heroin it produces have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency.
But officials said the skeptics — who include American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan — fear that any spraying of American-made chemicals over Afghan farms would be a boon to Taliban propagandists. Some of these officials say that the political cost could be especially high if the herbicide destroys food crops that farmers often plant alongside their poppies.
“There has always been a need to balance the obvious greater effectiveness of spray against the potential for losing hearts and minds,” Thomas A. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics issues, said in an interview last week in Washington. “The question is whether that’s manageable. I think that it is.”
Bush administration officials say they will respect whatever decision the Afghan government makes on the matter. Crop-eradication efforts, they insist, are only part of a broad, new counter-narcotics strategy that will include increased efforts against traffickers, more aid for legal agriculture and development, and greater military support for the drug fight.
Behind the scenes, however, Bush administration officials have been pressing the Afghan government to at least allow the trial spray of glyphosate, a commonly used weed-killer, current and former American officials said. Ground spraying would likely bring only a modest improvement over the manual destruction of poppy plants, but officials who support the strategy hope it would reassure Afghans about the safety of the herbicide and make eradication possible. Aerial spraying, they add, may be the only way to make a serious impact on opium production while the Taliban continues to dominate parts of Southern Afghanistan.
On Sunday, officials said, a State Department crop-eradication expert briefed key members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet about the effectiveness and safety of glyphosate. The expert, Charles S. Helling, a senior scientific adviser to the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, met with, among others, the ministers of public health and agriculture, both of whom have opposed the use of herbicides to eradicate poppy, an Afghan official said.
For all the controversy over herbicide use, there is no debate that Afghanistan’s drug problem is out of control. The country now produces 93 percent of the world’s opiates, according to United Nations estimates. Its traffickers are also processing more opium into heroin base there, a shift that has helped to increase Afghanistan’s drug revenues exponentially since the American-led invasion in 2001.
[snip]Moreover, as Afghanistan’s opium production has soared, the government’s eradication efforts have faltered. Federal and provincial eradication teams — using sticks, sickles and animal-drawn plows — cut down about 47,000 acres of poppy fields this year, 24 percent more than last year but still less than 9 percent of the country’s total poppy crop.
So... our war with Iraq has made the Taliban resurgent, funded by the opium poppy. The Taliban who are teamed with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the Taliban who are destablizing Pakistan as we speak.... we have made them stronger by not finishing the Afghanistan War, by not honoring our commitment to bring a functional government to Kabul, a functional democracy to Afghanistan. We wrecked up their country and left.
Poppies grow really well in the fields of Afghanistan, better than most things. So what are we going to do? We are going to take away the Afghani farmer's cash crop without giving him a reason or assistance to grow any other kind of crop.
This will surely make him want to embrace America and all her wonderful freedoms.....
Update: Kevin Drum has more to say:
If it's bad for the Karzai government, good for the Taliban, and won't reduce heroin production anyway, why is President Bush so gung ho about it?
This is a mystery, of course. But the most likely answer is that he's enthusiastic about it for the same reason that he was enthusiastic about sending Heritage Foundation activists to Baghdad in 2003 and believed that instituting a flat tax would kick Iraq's economy into high gear and allow democracy to bloom. As with so many things, it comes down to the fact that he has an everyman's disdain for pointy-headed policy development and a fifth-grader's appreciation for how the world works outside our borders. Remember, here's his version of "strategic thinking":Iran's a destabilizing force. And instability in that part of the world has deeply adverse consequences, like energy falling in the hands of extremist people that would use it to blackmail the West. And to couple all of that with a nuclear weapon, then you've got a dangerous situation. ... That's what I mean by strategic thought.So: hippies bad. Hate hippies. Drug culture bad. Hate drug culture. Drugs come from poppies. Poppies come from Afghanistan. Hulk smash.
That's about it. Too bad there isn't someone in the White House to tell him that the stability of Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban are a wee bit more important than continuing to play to his base's hatred of 60s counterculture. In a development that would be comical if it weren't so genuinely appalling, I guess we now have to rely on the CIA for that.
