The poppy war

That,in essence,is the dilemma faced by the NATO allies in Afghanistan. To avenge the attack by Al Qaeda on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11,2001 (9/11),the Americans launched an all-out war on Afghanistan targeted at Al Qaeda and the Taliban but directed essentially at capturing or killing one man,Osama bin Laden. No one knows whether Osama is dead or alive—indeed,whether,in fact,he died eight years ago,either as a result of American bombing or of kidney failure,but if the NATO allies are growing weary of the chase and the Americans,after close to a decade,are drawing down their military occupation of Iraq to facilitate the release of resources to persist with their war in Afghanistan,it only validates the point that if the Americans have their Drones and Daisy Cutters,and can say “Oops! Sorry” over killing hundreds,indeed,thousands of innocent Afghans in “collateral damage”,their opponents have an equally potent weapon: the poppy.

The poppy keeps hundreds of thousands of American and other Western kids in hypnotic joy—it kills,not like the Drone,instantaneously,but over several years,in the course of which the victim is sent into transports of synthetic happiness—Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,instant Nirvana. Besides,it provides the wherewithal to the Taliban and Al Qaeda to fight their unequal war against an array of the world’s mightiest military forces.

To win NATO’s war in Afghanistan,Gretchen Peters wants the Americans to wipe out the cultivation of poppies in Afghanistan. A noble and unexceptionable objective. But perhaps better achieved by deploying the awesome power of the United States on stopping the drugs reaching their shores and undermining the lives of all those lost children. If the US has—as it does—the might to send swarming into the skies over Afghanistan an armada of the most sophisticated killer machines in the history of war—to kill,moreover,without being killed and maim without being maimed (for,remember,the Drone is unmanned)—then one wonders why all this magnificent technology and administrative prowess cannot be harnessed to fighting the drug menace on home soil so that the wretched Afghan farmer (and his Taliban/Al Qaeda patron) are denied the market to secure the humongous sums of money they need to procure arms from the same Western markets to keep at bay the unimaginable military might of the very same West?

The drug menace is not,as Ms. Peters seems to think,a supply side problem. Narco-terrorism is not going to be solved by burning poppy fields. Nor,as Ms Peters wants,by interdicting from the air trucks and lorries carrying morphine base from Helmand province,the overwhelmingly largest producer of poppies and,not surprisingly,the province most out of control of Kabul,nipping across the border into neighbouring Pakistan (a drive about as long as it takes to get from Delhi to a picnic at Sohna). The drug business is just too profitable for intrepid growers and truckers not to find other ingenious ways of smuggling poppy products into lucrative Western markets where they command prices hundreds or even thousands of times higher than their derisory costs of production. As any American liberal free-marketeer should know,the market,after all,rules—whether in McDonald hamburgers or brown sugar.

So,if instead of thinking that Homeland Security is about making passengers take off their shoes before boarding aeroplanes,the US Government were to deploy Shock and Awe against their own legions of consumers—by which I mean American drug users,American drug pushers,and American drug traffickers—in the manner of Singapore or Malaysia,besides getting their NATO allies to do more to interdict the drug traffic,almost all of which passes through NATO territory,starting in Turkey,there is some hope that the drying up of Western demand may render drug abuse less profitable for the Afghan peasant and,therefore,less significant to terrorists in their search for weapons with which to continue their asymmetric struggle against superior military might. American consumerism,however,prevents such stern action—and so the monster turns on itself,supplying the narco-terrorist with the means for continuing his battle to rid his land of the foreigners occupying his land,a stalemated war that has already lasted almost as long as both the World Wars put together.

The Peters method will never end the war in Afghanistan. Nor will a NATO “surge”. Only a political solution hammered out by the Afghans themselves through their traditional manner of consultation will endure,backed by international guarantees of non-interference,along the lines proposed in their individual capacities by the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for West Asia,Chinmay Gharekhan,and M. Hamid Ansari,before he became Vice-President. Nothing else will stop this slide into disaster. America needs fewer Indian computer coolies and more Indian foreign policy advisers!