Opium could snag accord
Opium production could unravel new peace deal
With the U.S. near a deal with the Taliban, a watchdog says the White House has neglected a major source of instability in Afghanistan: opium.
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration said it’s on the brink of inking a deal with the Taliban that could pave the way for an end to America’s longest war.
But despite the zeal to reach a political settlement with the militant Afghan group, the White House has neglected to address a major source of instability in the country – opium production – according to a government watchdog.
The Trump administration does not have a current counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan, the special investigator who oversees U.S. spending in Afghanistan has found, even though that country is the source for 90% of the world’s heroin and the Afghan drug trade fuels a insurgency against U.S. troops.
The drug trade is the Taliban’s cash cow. It funds the Islamic fundamentalist group’s fighters and pays for the bombs and weapons used to kill U.S. and Afghan security forces. Some fear that if the opium trade is not snuffed out, any U.S.-brokered peace deal could unravel.
“It’s important that the United States have a clear, robust counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan because its drug trade constitutes a high-risk threat to our reconstruction and security goals there,” John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
“Afghanistan’s opium trade undermines our goals in several ways – by financing insurgent groups, fueling government corruption, eroding the legitimacy of the Afghan government, and exacting a devastating human and financial toll.”
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. had reached an “understanding with the Taliban on a significant and nationwide reduction in violence across Afghanistan.” The countdown to the signing of a peace agreement on Feb. 29 to end the 18 years of war in Afghanistan was to begin at midnight Friday, when a seven-day “reduction of violence” promised by the Taliban went into effect, an Afghan official said.
Richard Olson, a former State Department special representative for Afghanistan, said the drug trade problem must be part of the Afghanistan peace talks going forward.
“The substantial revenue stream from narcotics production, which mostly flows to the Taliban right now, is actually one of the main drivers of the conflict,” Olson said at a Tuesday forum on the emerging U.S.-Taliban deal. “And so it is absolutely an issue that will have to be addressed.”
The U.S. government has already spent more than $8 billion to combat the drug trade in Afghanistan since 2001, and yet the country remains the world’s top producer of heroin, the resin obtained from opium.
“It has been a problem that has defied us – for all the time we’ve been engaged in Afghanistan,” Stephen Hadley, a national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, said at the forum, hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace. “At the end of the day, the Afghans are going to have to decide what is the right kind of counter-narcotics strategy for themselves.”
Trump administration officials have not disclosed if or how the opium trade will factor into the U.S.-Taliban agreement.
But officials have described it as a relatively narrow deal in which the Taliban will agree not to let terrorists use Afghanistan as a training ground for attacks, and the U.S. will set a timetable for withdrawal.
As top State Department officials pursued that political settlement, the diplomatic agency quietly shelved efforts to come up with a new plan to curb opium production in that war-torn country, according to a Jan. 10 letter Sopko sent to key members of Congress.
Top advisers to President Donald Trump defended the administration’s approach to Afghanistan and said they have not abandoned efforts to curb opium production.
“The U.S. government has invested millions of dollars over the last several years (on counter-narcotics initiatives),” Lisa Curtis, Trump’s top national security adviser for South and Central Asia, told USA TODAY during a forum earlier this month.
“But, frankly speaking, this is a major, comprehensive problem that is intertwined with criminal networks, corruption, shortfalls in the legal system,” Curtis said. “It’s a very complicated issue.”
Attacks on the labs that process poppies have been conducted through the Obama and Trump administrations with marginal effect.
In 2018, for instance, the coalition announced a campaign that targeted 73 drug labs, estimating that it had cost the Taliban $42 million in revenue. That’s a fraction of the nation’s $1.6 billion drug trade.
The administration seems to be focused on reaching a peace deal first, and then relying on the Taliban to help reduce opium production.
But experts say the U.S. won’t be able to achieve a viable peace deal without also addressing Afghanistan’s opium production.
“The drug trade is a cash cow for terrorists,” Matthew Reid, a Marine Corps colonel who served in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province from 2017 to 2018, wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article.