Drug Warrior Meltdown of the Week

Thomas Schweich, the man who's been in charge of the State Department's anti-drug efforts in Afghanistan for the past few years, wrote in the New York Times Magazine this week about how everyone from the Pentagon to the Swedes are responsible for the opium problem in Afghanistan. Schweich was originally sent to Afghanistan to work as a deputy under Anne Patterson, who herself was sent to Afghanistan after working for years in counter-narcotics in Colombia. The two of them were tasked with eliminating opium production in a country where it was the single largest industry.

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

It would be one of many for Schweich. Some of them are documented fairly well by Schweich himself within this piece, others have already been pointed out very well by others. Barnett Rubin, for instance, identified what is probably the biggest mistake with the way Schweich approached this issue; he assumed that the Afghan government had the power to do things it was clearly not capable of doing:

To his credit, Tom tried to introduce more incentives and more enforcement. It is very good that he compiled a list of corrupt officials with data that would hold up in a US court (and he is a law professor, not, I think of the Yoo/Addington variety, so he should know). But just who did he think was going to arrest or fire these people?

It's simple: assume the existence of a state.

What does this mean? Tom Schweich says that Afghanistan's Attorney-General, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, says he wanted to arrest 20 corrupt officials and that Karzai stopped him. Unlike Tom, I have known Sabit for 20 years. He helped me in my research by introducing me to some of his colleagues in Hizb-i Islami. But I would not necessarily take everything he says literally.

Actually Sabit did try to arrest a corrupt official one time, General Din Muhammad Jurat, one of the most powerful Northern Alliance commanders in the Ministry of the Interior. The upshot was that Jurat detained Sabit and disarmed and beat his men. This was not in a remote area on the Pakistan border but less than an hour's drive north of Kabul in an area considered to be under "government" control. What does that mean? It means that Jurat and people like him are the government. There is no state that operates independently of power holders like Jurat. The project is to build such a state, not assume its existence and use it based on that false assumption.

Throughout the piece, Schweich accuses the Pentagon of malfeasance when it comes to the opium issue. The Pentagon did not consider the opium issue to be something they needed to deal with. They saw their job as one of defeating the Taliban, not stopping drug trafficking. Eventually, as it became more and more obvious that the Taliban was strengthening itself through the opium industry, the internal battles between the Pentagon and the State Department over what to do about Afghanistan began to shift more in favor of the State Department's view.

In February 2007, Condoleezza Rice went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee for a meeting that drew absolutely no attention from the media, and discussed in very vague terms that there needed to be a new strategy which would "help the Afghan government improve the quality of life for its people by extending security, providing good governance and opening up new economic opportunity". Despite my own foolish optimism at the time, Schweich reveals that they were intent on going even more full speed in the wrong direction:

By late 2006, however, we had startling new information: despite some successes, poppy cultivation over all would grow by about 17 percent in 2007 and would be increasingly concentrated in the south of the country, where the insurgency was the strongest and the farmers were the wealthiest. The poorest farmers of Afghanistan — those who lived in the north, east and center of the country — were taking advantage of antidrug programs and turning away from poppy cultivation in large numbers. The south was going in the opposite direction, and the Taliban were now financing the insurgency there with drug money — just as Patterson predicted.

In late January 2007, there was an urgent U.S. cabinet meeting to discuss the situation. The attendees agreed that the deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and John Walters, the drug czar, would oversee the development of the first interagency counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan. They asked me to coordinate the effort, and, after Patterson’s intervention, I was promoted to ambassadorial rank. We began the effort with a briefing for Negroponte, Walters, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and several senior Pentagon officials. We displayed a map showing how poppy cultivation was becoming limited to the south, more associated with the insurgency and disassociated from poverty. The Pentagon chafed at the briefing because it reflected a new reality: narcotics were becoming less a problem of humanitarian assistance and more a problem of insurgency and war.

I can't say exactly what the Pentagon was thinking, but they had a reason to be upset that something that wasn't a problem of humanitarian assistance in the first place was undermining the war effort because of the people who kept mistakenly insisting that it was. And in fact, just before this passage, Schweich talked about being irate over the fact that the British military was openly trying to disassociate itself with the anti-poppy effort:

A nearly equal challenge in 2006 was the lack of resolve in the international community. Although Britain’s foreign office strongly backed antinarcotics efforts (with the exception of aerial eradication), the British military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military. British forces — centered in Helmand — actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort. I had to fly to Brussels and show one of these leaflets to the supreme allied commander in Europe, who oversees Afghan operations for NATO, to have this counterproductive information campaign stopped. It was a small victory; the truth was that many of our allies in the International Security Assistance Force were lukewarm on antidrug operations, and most were openly hostile to aerial eradication.

The arrogance of this paragraph is just stunning. Not only was Schweich promoting policies that were guaranteed to put coalition troops in harms way without fixing anything, but he then tattled to Brussels when British troops started taking measures to protect themselves from the fallout. What an incredible prick.

But it actually gets worse. At the same time that Secretary Rice was misleading Congress about the nature of the State Department's counter-narcotics goals, the State Department was busy sending former Colombian Ambassador William Wood to Afghanistan and trying to find ways to push for aerial drug eradication. Karzai, along with a number of foreign governments, pushed back hard, knowing that it would cause a real humanitarian disaster, not like the pretend one that Schweich, Patterson, and the band of fools thought they were combatting.

Back to the New York Times article, Schweich downplays the seriousness of spraying glysophate across the Afghan terrain, falsely claiming that there haven't been problems in Colombia. He amazingly tries to claim that eradication does not affect poor farmers, as if a farmer whose entire opium harvest is destroyed because he couldn't afford to bribe the government eradication team can just pull some money out of his retirement fund to feed his family for the next year. One could speculate that Schweich believes such transparent nonsense because if he questioned it, he'd see the grimmer reality that opium eradication doesn't just help the Taliban by giving them access to expensive weaponry, it also gives them more recruits. Why both Karzai and the Pentagon are reluctant to go along with his plans should not be a mystery to anyone.

As Jacob Sullum points out here, Afghanistan really is a narco-state. Schweich talks about times in the past where heroin production has been eliminated from a country, but none of those places compare to the size and scope of the drug trade in Afghanistan. In addition, anti-drug operations like the ones he cited didn't create any permanent reduction in the global heroin markets, as the production just moved elsewhere. It's conceivable that with enough money, enough troops and enough disregard for the health and safety of ordinary Afghans, you could move some of the opium production elsewhere, perhaps to Iraq. But just as with our efforts within Colombia, this strategy provides no overall high level benefit to combatting drug addiction in the world, which is ostensibly the goal of doing this in the first place.

Schweich complains about Karzai in much the same way that other anti-drug officials do, as if he's a symbol of some moral failure rather than the expected by-product of having to lead a nation where a criminal class has far more power. Schweich thinks that Afghan farmers can be shamed out of growing the most expensive crop simply because people in European cities that they've never heard of and will never see are willing to spend hundreds of Euros on what's made from their plants. He's a man who's so far entrenched into the delusion of the drug war that he can write something like this and not have the vaguest clue how retarded he sounds. As evidence of this, he even provides some suggestions for going forward at the end. Here's the first one:

1. Inform President Karzai that he must stop protecting drug lords and narco-farmers or he will lose U.S. support. Karzai should issue a new decree of zero tolerance for poppy cultivation during the coming growing season. He should order farmers to plant wheat, and guarantee today’s high wheat prices. Karzai must simultaneously authorize aggressive force-protected manual and aerial eradication of poppies in Helmand and Kandahar Provinces for those farmers who do not plant legal crops.

Schweich actually believes that Karzai is capable of doing this, but refuses not to, either out of laziness or corruption. In reality, Karzai would be assassinated within the hour if he tried to do this. Maybe now that Schweich's time in Afghanistan is up, he can visit reality next.