Struggling Over a Policy Fix
Seven thousand miles from Afghanistan's poppy fields, another fierce drug war is being waged, this one in the hallways of official Washington over a fractured Afghan anti-narcotics program. For two years, policymakers have fought over how to curb the exploding drug trade, with no clear solution in sight.
The policy war claimed its first casualty in March, with the resignation of the State Department's top narcotics control official, Robert Charles, the assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement. Charles quit in frustration, he told U.S. News, over the government's failure to confront an Afghan drug problem rapidly spinning out of control. He is one of a growing chorus of critics who warn that a surging opium trade will destroy the nascent Afghan state; fuel corruption, crime, and terrorism across Central Asia; and dump tons of dope into Russia and the West. "If we don't take action now, we may lose everything to a runaway heroin trade," Charles says. "We still haven't made the hard decisions."
Charles was among a handful of intelligence and counternarcotics officials who sounded the alarm in late 2003, as CIA estimates indicated the Afghan poppy crop had doubled in just a year. He and his allies argued for a massive program of aerial spraying--which proved key to wiping out vast tracts of South American cocaine fields--and for the U.S. military to prioritize counternarcotics alongside counterterrorism.
No support. Little progress ensued. The then U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad (now tapped to become ambassador to Iraq), and others argued successfully that an aggressive antidrug program could spark uprisings among powerful warlords and loosen what little grip Washington's ally, President Hamid Karzai, had on the country. Also opposed were top Pentagon officials, who worried over "mission creep" and dwindling assets drained by the Iraq war. So stingy were U.S. Central Command units in Afghanistan that they refused at least five times last year to give Drug Enforcement Administration agents air support, according to a letter from the Central Command to Congress.
The Afghan narcotics problem, as a result, remained on Washington's back burner. Then, late last year, new CIA estimates showed that Afghan poppy cultivation had more than tripled to levels never seen anywhere before. Alarms went off in Congress and the White House. Charles and others put together a $780 million plan for an Afghan drug war, with aerial spraying, faster training of narcotics and border cops, aid for alternative crops and development, and military-backed raids on growers, labs, and warehouses.
But today, the Afghan plan remains mired in controversy. Matters came to a head at a December meeting of the National Security Council, in which top administration officials debated what to do. The same concerns reappeared: fear of destabilizing Karzai's government and of sparking a civil war. It was decided to hold off on aerial spraying, to keep the U.S. military in strictly a support role, and to do nothing whatsoever that might undermine Karzai. Says one official involved in the debate: "It's like choosing between radiation and chemo."
This story appears in the June 6, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.