Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 9 2005 (IPS) — Canada and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) could soon find themselves smack dab in the middle of a Colombian-style drug war in Afghanistan, warns a prominent drug control expert.

“You are setting yourselves up to be targets,” said Cindy Fazey a British criminologist at the University of Liverpool and former chief of demand reduction at the United Nations Drug Control Programme.

She and others believe the United States, which has been somewhat restrained for strategic reasons, is stepping up pressure for the eradication of the purple and pink fields of poppies.

This could cause the U.S.-led NATO forces in the central Asian country, including more than 1,000 Canadian troops in the Kandahar region, to suddenly find themselves mired in a full-scale shoot-out, not just with al Qaeda forces but with opium gangs.

It will not matter, Fazey says, that Canadians are engaged in a softer development approach, financially enticing Afghan farmers in Kandahar to grow a less lethal crop like wheat.

“A lot of the farmers are now dependent on a very lucrative crop [opium],” she told IPS. “If you take that away, what is going to happen? You are going to have resentment against the invaders. [Some of the farmers] have Kalashnikovs.”

Unlike the U.S., which focuses on the criminal prosecution of users and sellers, Canada has officially sought to balance its adherence to international bans on drugs like heroin with recognition that addiction is primarily a public health issue.

A spokesperson for the Canadian International Development Agency says that is exactly why the government supports the anti-opium plan of Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai government. This promotes alternative livelihoods for farmers, legal action against producers, processors and traffickers, the establishment of a criminal justice system and treatment of addicts.

All of these are viewed as key to building stability and democracy in Afghanistan. “This approach takes into account the complexity of the drug issue and aims at limiting the social and economic disruptions caused by eradication and interdiction,” says CIDA spokesperson Eleonora Karabatic.

But according to Fabrice Pothier, the head of policy analysis for the Paris-based Senlis Council, an international drug policy forum critical of the current global war on drugs, crop eradication is still the primary strategy. This “gets more than half” of what is being invested in the counter-narcotics plan in Afghanistan, he says.

Before this fall’s parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, Washington was downplaying eradication in the face of the violent resistance encountered by poppy eradication teams in the countryside, says Pothier. He expects a return to “a more strict approach” to the opium problem when planting season begins again at the end of the year.

“If you look at the counter-narcotics implementation plan recently set up by the Afghanistan government with the help of the UK, eradication and interdiction are clearly priorities,” he says.

Pothier also points to a March 2005 agreement between Washington and Kabul stipulating that the U.S. will help train the Afghan eradication forces and provide emergency support to these operations.

Until now, experts say the counter-narcotics strategy has not been very forceful. The fact that most heroin from Afghanistan goes to Europe and not to the U.S., whose biggest supplier is Colombia, means the U.S. traditionally has been content to put its alliances first.

But Fazey sees a hardening of the U.S. position. The more muscular approach, she says, comes in part because U.S. officials are “very irritated” with the failure of the British counter-narcotics strategy and “want something done”.

According to John Sifton, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who just returned from Afghanistan, “You are basically looking at a situation where many de facto rulers, people who may not have official government posts but who in reality exercise a huge amount of control at the local level – I am not talking about the Kabul government, but the local governments – are involved in drug trafficking.”

British forces sought to discourage opium cultivation by paying Afghan opium growers 800 dollars per hectare of land to grow wheat instead. But this has not worked, Fazey reports, because the same farmers can earn 12,000 dollars per hectare for opium cultivation.

Rather than try to beat the price that Afghan farmers earn for opium, the Canadian International Development Agency has created a four-year initiative in Kandahar to provide a range of services – including irrigation, roads and credit – to local farmers to make the switch from opium more attractive, says Vincent Raiche, a CIDA analyst for Afghanistan.

“When you look at alternative livelihoods you have to look at the whole spectrum of economic development and economic activities in the region,” he said.

But all of these plans could be undone by U.S. impatience, Fazey warned. Although the Karzai government absolutely opposes aerial spraying of the vast opium crops with pesticides, and it is officially not part of the counter narcotics implementation plan, she is not sure the U.S. has complied.

Fazey maintains she has heard from what she calls “informed gossip” in Afghanistan that U.S. forces were experimenting with aerial spraying last year. “I wouldn’t discount [defoliation of opium crops]; they would go in unilaterally and start spraying,” she said.

Recently, the Senlis Council, working with academic and medical researchers around the world, has been pushing for the legal licensing of opium production in Afghanistan for the production of codeine and morphine – as is already done in India, Turkey and Australia. Participating Canadian researchers have found that only 24 percent of the demand for painkillers in developing countries is currently being met.

So far, no national government or the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – which supports the current counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan – has expressed support for this proposal.

Nevertheless, one leading expert on Afghanistan, New York University political scientist Barnett Rubin, says the Senlis proposal merits a closer look. “I can’t endorse it at this point. I don’t know enough about all of the details, but I think dismissing it out of hand is very mistaken,” he told IPS.

But Human Right Watch’s Sifton believes it is premature to talk about a licensing regime for opium in a country like Afghanistan.

“What Afghanistan needs is not an anti-drug strategy. What it needs is a developmental strategy to restore law and order, reform the police, the courts and judicial system and only then, will stop illegal activities,” he said in an interview.