Anti-Climacus

LINK: Hitch has an interesting point here:

"Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" (my italics). Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism.

Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival.

Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives."

It seems like there are two potential answers here:

1. The one Hitch mentions: turning Afghanistan into the state which produces all of our more-or-less legal opiates; while it's perhaps (moral considerations aside) a good short-term solution to the problem, it doesn't give any real incentive to move beyond poppy production (why, as he says, wait five years to get decent vine-related crops when you can be cashing in in six months?), and it still seems open to various ways of cheating on such agreements as may be made (there's still money to be made from illicit opium production, and there's no reason why one would stick to giving everything they grow to the US).

2. The alternative would be for the US government (or, better, groups of investors) to float five-year loans or subsidies to various technological and agricultural ventures to even out the costs of engaging in economic behaviors beneficial to the society at large. Sure, it'd cost merry bushels of cash, but a stable, democratic Afghanistan is worth investing in, right?