Did you know the one thing missing from Southern Afghanistan was an increased focus on eradicating poppies? After a whopping three day visit to the country, U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, certainly thinks so. He is pushing for a NATO mandate to eradicate opium crops and “go after traffickers,” or else the Taliban will triumph. Then again, Gen. David McKiernan politely offered a different story, downplaying the need for crop eradication and instead urging a focus on narcotics traffickers. Is there a method to the madness?
Opium is really little more than an indicator—sometimes of the complexity of Western understanding of the region, sometimes of local levels of militant activity, and sometimes merely of a global demand for a very effective mind-altering substance. There is precedent for opium’s legal cultivation in former narco-states, such as Turkey and India. In these cases, growing restrictions have transformed once-illegal enterprises into steady and reliable suppliers for the pharmaceutical industry. Looking further afield, there appears to be much promise in the utilization of poppy for the production of both biodiesel and ethanol—alternative fuels whose sustainable production would seem to offer many solutions to many problems currently plaguing U.S. foreign policy.
But figuring out ways to co-opt opiate smugglers seems to elude not only U.S. officials, but the reporters who cover them. Thomas Schweich, the State Department official in charge of counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan, wrote a bizarre essay in the July 27 edition of The New York Times Magazine, in which he argued several contradictory points. One of the most notable asserted that Afghan famers largely accepted a widespread eradication campaign based on aerial spraying—despite the impassioned editorials against such practices in local Afghan newspapers, local reports of panic and psychosomatic illness in sprayed areas, and even official State Department concerns over the health consequences of certain aerial anti-narcotics compounds.
Schweich also neglected to mention his own involvement in a 2007 U.S. Institute of Peace panel, discussing the ways interdiction, anti-corruption efforts, and increased local security are far more effective than eradication efforts in stemming poppy cultivation (though, according to the transcript, Schweich wanted an eradication policy in place for farmers who did not comply with alternative enforcement measures).
Where were the fact-checkers looking at Mr. Schweich’s 5,500 words of contradictions? The very simple fact underscoring the difficulties of curtailing opium cultivation in Afghanistan is that, put simply, opium is the local economy in many areas of the country. Because USAID can’t provide direct cereal crop assistance to other countries, it also can’t give farmers realistic alternatives to growing poppies. The money is simply too attractive. Similarly, almost no other crop, including cereal crops or fruits or other cash crops, has an industry willing to front the capital necessary for large-scale cultivation—making poppy one of the only financial options for cash-strapped farmers.
There are some areas where this can be seen on an annual basis. Nangarhar province, in the east of the country, has an unpredictable and quite volatile cultivation pattern: According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, in 2006, it was virtually poppy-free, yet 2007 saw a 285 percent increase (pdf), making the region one of the country’s top poppy producers. Yet in 2008 it again was virtually poppy-free (pdf). This shift cannot be tied only to security, as Mr. Schweich would like to claim: Nangarhar is not noticeably safer than it was in 2007, yet poppy cultivation there dropped to virtually zero. Similarly, in Khost province, just south of Nangarhar, poppy cultivation has been practically disconnected from the region’s growing insurgency; Khost hasn’t been a significant source of the crop for years. Indeed, it is remarkable to see the entirety of Eastern Afghanistan almost empty itself of opium even as violence rose 40 percent amid major coordinated militant attacks; the South, meanwhile, saw violence levels rise to relative highs—nearly even with violence in the East. Yet today, the South is the epicenter of opium cultivation, and not the East.
This represents another in a series of hypocritical Foust essays. He begins by mocking Gen Craddock's "whopping three day visit" to Afghanistan;implicitly claiming that the General can't make any informed or reasoned policy statements conerning opium and Afghanistan with such brief time on the ground. A typical Foust attack that he also aims at embedded journalists. Yet Foust has NEVER stepped a foot in Afghanistan, much less ever conducted any research there! Of course he did publically beg for people to send him money for travel a few months ago on a blog. Nonetheless Foust can criticize one and all on their views concerning Afghanistan often in very cruel ways. You would be more hard pressed to find a more inexperiened Afghan "expert".
Why the CJR continues to publish his hypocritical bribble is beyond me. I would suggest that the CJR ask him to write an article on his employer - the Human Terrain System. You won't find him writing on HTS or HTTs, something he apparently knows but refuses to admit at all costs. For a good article on the employer that Foust refuses to acknowledge see http://cryptome.org/hts-madness.htm . After reading this article you will see why Foust refuses to write articles on the HTS even after his colleagues are killed senselessly.
Posted by Tracy on Mon 6 Oct 2008 at 04:48 PM
Readers can find more about this issue in the July 26 Times Union, where editor Rex Smith gives his own account of why he ran this release:
Particularly interesting is this: "I had been intrigued by the idea of Pro Publica, and impressed by the credentials of its first two big hires: editor-in-chief Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, and managing editor Steve Engelberg, a onetime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and, until recently, a managing editor of The Oregonian. For months, they have been recruiting strong reporting and editing talent, aiming for a New York-based staff of a couple dozen
With all due respect to ProPublica, what is so special about this staffing pattern?
Every advocacy organization with any brains tries to hire former journalists to promote its point of view.
As one such, I can testify that newspapers (including, in former times, the T-U itself) generally go out of their way to disregard the journalistic backgrounds of people who have "changed sides" (as has been said to my face) in evaluating the newsworthiness of the material being promoted.
When an organization declares its political goals on its web site and then offers copy only on condition that it be printed in time to influence a governor's bill-signing, that's advocacy - whatever the former careers of its employees.
Posted by Willon on Tue 23 Feb 2010 at 03:07 AM