The Advocate

Drugs and Power in Afghanistan

Gerasimos Karavitis
The original assassins were hashish smokers, as demonstrated by the history of the English word “assassin.” They would smoke hashish, get a glimpse of the ethereal kingdom, contemplate the possibility of experiencing manifold rapture beyond the bounds of time, and then gratefully dedicate their lives to the war against the crusading infidels. Their clandestine soirees were illuminated by the presence of a designated, eloquent ideologue responsible for regulating the amount of hashish that the assassins consumed and for making sure they heard the things they were supposed to hear in their state of blissful paralysis. In this delicate ritual of pleasure, hashish was not—as the assassins were made to believe—a pathway to heaven, but the central resource in the production of a human, all too human, political subjectivity. It was a device of biopower.

Has the utility of drugs evolved or eclipsed since that time? What is the meaning of the recently declared war on drugs in Afghanistan?
Consider some facts. In Afghanistan, the opium poppy is not just another crop, but a nation’s primary source of revenue. According to the most recent report of the UN affiliated Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), the revenues generated from opium production accounted for 60% of the Afghan national GDP in 2004, and amounted to $2.8 billion in returns for farmers and traffickers combined. Despite the considerable decrease in opium production during the last year of the Taliban’s reign, Afghanistan has since regained its place as the world’s top producer, providing an estimated 76% of the world’s supply in 2003 and an estimated 87% in 2004.

Besides increases in output, the past few years have also seen a disconcerting increase in the number of addicts among Afghan nationals. Until recently, opium production did not scandalize the heavily religious consciences of Afghan farmers because the detrimental effects of heroin and other opium products were thought to affect Westerners only. Recent research shows, however, that addiction rates are growing rapidly. Approximately 30-60,000 people in Kabul are currently addicted to opium-based narcotics, and addiction rates are soaring among Muslims in neighboring Iran and Pakistan as well.

The US, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government, and supporting members of the international community fear that revenues raised by the sale of opium might be used to fund the activities of terrorist organizations. But the official, Western-backed Afghan state is only one of the many powerbrokers in Afghanistan. Regional warlords control much of what happens outside of Kabul, and, allegedly, it is within their domains of control that opium is cultivated. The US, the official Afghan state, and their allies believe that the political power of the warlords is largely based on the revenues raised from the production of opium and the control of local drug trafficking routes. And, given the fact that these revenues cannot be monitored, it is suspected that the funds raised by the warlords could be used to finance the activities of organizations like Al-Qaida.

Meanwhile, a consensus has been reached among these allies with regards to what is required to combat the opium trade in Afghanistan. According to statements made by the US Assistant Secretary of State Robert B. Charles, President Karzai’s government, and Antonio Maria Costa of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the strategy agreed upon by has three basic parameters. For one, efforts must be made to eradicate the poppy fields and interdict traffickers, so that the resources funding the illicit activities of terrorist-linked local warlords will cease to exist. Secondly, through the provision of funds and technical knowledge, Afghan farmers must be equipped with the resources required to grow alternative crops; this way—it is hoped—the cessation of poppy cultivation will not generate a class of unemployed, destitute agricultural workers. Thirdly, state laws and judicial institutions must be reformed to make the prosecution of traffickers more effective.

All four parameters converge on the goal of completely eliminating Afghan opium production within the next decade or so, and the aforementioned actors seem genuinely committed to this cause. The Bush administration recently announced that it would be channeling $780 million into drug elimination campaigns in Afghanistan, the lion’s share of which would go into training police officers, establishing police stations, and initiating and supporting agencies intended to assist the official Afghan state in spearheading the anti-drug campaign. On its part, the official Afghan state has matched Washington’s professed zeal to see the anti-drug campaign in Afghanistan flourish. With the financial, technical, and political support of the US and other international allies, the Karzai government has established the Central Poppy Eradication Force (CPREC), the Afghan Counter-Narcotics Directorate (ACND), and other state bureaus to coordinate the domestic campaign. At the Afghan Counternarcotics Conference held on December 9—two days after his inauguration—Karzai poignantly called Afghans to jihad against opium, thus investing the fight with the highly expedient moral tenor of a holy war. Finally, on December 5, 2004, London daily The Independent reported that the United Kingdom had pledged to send 5,000 troops to assist in the interdiction and eradication efforts, and that Germany and Italy have also committed to play supporting roles in the campaign.

Now consider the politics. When the statements and initiatives of the aforementioned actors are taken at face value, it would seem that the actors aspire to eliminate the production of poppy for the sake of concentrating political power in the hands of the official Afghan state. This would benefit both the Karzai government and Empire. From the perspective of the Karzai government, only if these warlords were eliminated could the official state monopolize the legitimate use of violence within Afghanistan’s geographic domain. And, since opium is a prime source of funding for the warlords, undermining their power means wresting the production and distribution of opium from their control. From Empire’s perspective, a centralized, streamlined, dependent, and loyal Afghan state would establish a bulwark for the expansion and protection of capitalism in a strategically important location.

However, an ulterior motive is likely. Specifically, it is likely that the US, the Karzai government, and allies do not intend to destroy Afghanistan’s poppy fields completely, but rather to seize and use them for profit and the exercise of biopower in the region. Consider, once again, the assassins and the crusaders. As an effect, the assassins’ political subjectivity was based on a ceremony, a well-orchestrated series of emotive pushes and pulls, a meticulous recipe of promises and threats, an interactive sequence made possible by the existence of a hallucinogen: the assassins were formidable as zealots because of the role that their hallucinations of heaven played in constructing their political vision, and the material existence of hashish was the condition that made their hallucinations possible. But what if it were the crusaders who controlled the production and distribution of hashish? What if the clever ideologues who so artfully could roll one’s hopes and fears into a joint did not possess the central resource required for their identity-producing rituals? Would the legions of assassins ever have formed? If so, would they ever have attained the awesome and awful polemical zealotry that struck terror in the hearts of the crusaders?

Obviously, it is impossible to answer these questions with certainty, but one thing seems sanctioned by common sense: had the crusaders enjoyed control over the cannabis of their conquered lands, they would have had an additional resource to use in their war against terror; they would have had a resource which—because of its peculiar chemical attributes—would have provided them with a special ability to control segments of their own population as well as segments of other, possibly inimical populations. For whenever there is need, the capacity to satisfy it carries a strategic potential.
If the crusaders controlled the hashish, for instance, they could have used it to produce subjects with a fighting zeal similar in texture and intensity to that of the assassins. Or, alternatively, they could have sold the narcotic at such low prices that any would-be assassin could very easily be persuaded to let go of his or her anger and all its revolutionary potentiality. Had the poppy fields been under their control, the crusaders could have used hashish, not only to further fanaticize the loyal, but also to anesthetize the potentially disloyal, and even make a profit while doing so.

Of course, hard facts to support the suggested hypothesis do not and cannot exist at present. Yet even a cursory consideration of the possible strategies and outcomes that the US, the Karzai government, and supporting countries have at their disposal suffices to show that the suggested hypothesis is distressingly tenable.

The Afghan farmers who cultivate poppy grant their loyalty to whomever offers to support and to protect poppy cultivation. These farmers know that they could not profit as handsomely from the production of any alternative crop, especially since the recent persecution of poppy farmers in Pakistan and Iran has given Afghan farmers a comparative advantage on the “good.” Presently, therefore, the farmers give their support to the warlords, because it is they who provide them with access to markets and protection from the state’s crackdowns.

As a result, a grave dilemma arises for the allies. If they do not destroy of the poppy fields, the warlords inadvertently retain their political power. But if they do succeed in eradicating the fields while failing to assist the farmers in generating satisfactory revenues from the cultivation of substitute crops, then they—especially the Karzai government—would have to contend with a multitude of dismayed agricultural workers: a population that could quickly turn disloyal to the regime and support the rise of new regional strongmen. And the alternative production strategy developed by the allies is precarious, not only because the soil and weather conditions in Afghanistan are better suited for the production of opium than they are for other agricultural goods, but also because the Afghan farmers are aware of the comparative advantage they enjoy in the opium market.

Thus, if the allies were to follow the optimal course of action, they would seek not to destroy the poppy fields, but rather to seize them. They would allow the farmers to continue cultivating poppy, permit the supply of raw materials to the opium producers, and allow for the continuation of drug trafficking while arranging to profit from it. In the short run at least, this course of action would permit for stability in the country. It would mean that the Afghan nation is not deprived of its major source of revenue, and allow the Afghan state to eliminate its internal enemies while growing richer. It would also provide Empire with a much-desired bulwark in a strategically important location, and – since Afghan-based opium products are sold almost entirely in black markets east of the Atlantic – the Bush administration could not be accused of profiting from drugs sold to its own people.

Gerasimos Karavitis is a student in the M.A. program in Political Science.