As of March 31, 2015, the United States has provided $8.4 billion for counternarcotics (CN) efforts in Afghanistan since 2002.
—Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report to the United States Congress, 2015
Many ordinary Kandaharis believe the government’s counter-narcotics programs are also corrupt. Villagers do not believe the government genuinely wants to curb the opium industry, but instead wants to damage the farmers and dealers who do not serve the government’s own cartel. This impression breeds resentment; when police are dispatched to insurgent-controlled districts to cut down poppy fields, their actions are seen as hurting the poor, weak, and tribally disenfranchised. As a result, such actions often result in violence.
—Kandahar Province Handbook, 2008
Every Wednesday morning District Governor Salih Mohammad walked across the district center compound to his office building and met with the elders assembled in his conference room. On alternate weeks they discussed different subjects, so some village elders only came every other week. On some days a dozen would show up, and on other days thirty-five would come. They talked about projects, or about security, or about the problems of the villages. In the fall of 2012 the DG spoke often about poppy.
In a country that is the world’s number-one producer of opium poppy, particularly in the southern tier of the country, Maiwand District was notorious. Poppy fields lined both sides of the main river channel coming from the mountains to the north. Over the previous ten years the poppy problem had grown worse, not better. Eventually Afghanistan was producing 90 percent of the world’s poppy crop. The resulting oversupply drove down heroin prices in America, where drug use skyrocketed.1
Because poppy needs relatively little water to grow compared to wheat and vegetables, Kandahar’s ten-year drought had pushed more farmers into planting it. Security had been so bad for so long, the Taliban also pushed farmers into growing poppy; the insurgents taxed the trade and relied on it for perhaps 40 percent of their funding.2 To make money many landowners imported sharecroppers into the central valley of Maiwand to grow poppy under contract. It was cultivated almost everywhere, including Band-i Timor. The problem expanded every year, feeding a vicious cycle. The more poppy fields bloomed, the more water the farmers pumped from the aquifer below the desert floor. The more the traditional wells and water sources dried up, the poorer the people became. So they grew more poppy to compensate, and the cycle began again.
In his weekly meetings the DG consistently called upon the elders to stop poppy production. Fall was the time farmers began to plant the crops that would appear the following spring. By April the bright flowers would be replaced by the ugly, bulbous seed pods from which farmers would extract the milky opium fluid. The DG stepped up his pressure on the elders. In late November 2012 he told them that there was an alternative to growing poppy.
“The U.S. made a commitment that no one can grow opium,” he told about twenty elders one day in November. “We have wheat and fertilizer. I want farmers to use wheat. Bring letters from farmers to the people’s shura and then they can get it.”
For years the U.S. government had tried to shift farmers away from poppy and into other crops. The Americans had tried small-scale projects to grow saffron, cumin, and other crops. But those scattershot ideas had failed to solve the problem. They also offered the stick; every year the Americans paid hundreds of millions of dollars to knock down the poppy plants before they could be harvested. In 2013 the government in Maiwand planned to knock down a thousand acres of poppy. In 2011 the former chief of police and the district governor had charged farmers a fee to keep them off the list of fields targeted. Now the old police chief had left, so that scam was unlikely to reappear. But piecemeal eradication efforts failed to halt the scourge.
It wasn’t just Maiwand; the counternarcotic effort was failing nationwide. Farmers across Afghanistan cultivated 131,000 hectares of poppy in 2011, even more in 2012, and in 2013 they grew 209,000 hectares.3 Almost 3,000 hectares grew in Maiwand alone.
Given a general lack of seriousness about stopping the poppy, we knew nothing would change in Maiwand. We received multiple reports that the district chief of police accepted bribes when his men intercepted smugglers in the southern half of the district, though the U.S. soldiers didn’t think the allegations were fully proven. Assertions about corrupt Afghan officials were nothing new; even Hamid Karzai was accused at one time.4 In Kandahar Province, though, the allegations were very often true. The Americans regarded the Maiwand police chief as an effective leader and were loath to lose him.
At the DST we tried to persuade the staff at KAF to lay out an alternate crop that might work for us. They refused. Cotton was not viable, they said. Even though Helmand, fifty miles to the west, had a thriving cotton industry in the 1960s, attempts by USAID to revive it had faltered badly. Saffron was apparently too fragile, of inferior quality for world markets, and of too small a scale. Cumin, too. Beyond that there were no options. Instead headquarters offered subsidized seed wheat and fertilizer, which had also been sent to Maiwand the previous spring. But the basic economics of growing wheat in a drought zone made no sense to the farmers. They would grow it to eat but not to sell, because the cost of running the irrigation pumps was more money than they could get by selling the wheat. Nor would these commodity distributions reach most farmers in such a large district. Distributing subsidized seed and fertilizer was a Band-Aid approach that appeared to solve a problem but in reality masked it, unaddressed, for years.
As time went on the district fell into a listless state. The farmers barely made ends meet, the water supply continued to shrink, and no one could think of a solution. Some of the elders and soldiers said darkly that the only long-term solution would be to completely clear out the population of the district.
The government couldn’t offer answers to the farmers because it lacked answers. We saw the malaise on our patrols.
One day we approached a group of farmers seated outside a mosque in a village a kilometer south of the district center. The police had just shooed the men out of the mosque so our patrol could speak with them. Prayers were finished, so the men were in an agreeable mood as they sat in the dust along the wall surrounding the mosque. The men opened tins of low-grade hashish and put the green powder in their mouths as they talked. Some sat in the shade of the wall and others sat in the sun, but no one cared about the glare. They were weather-beaten from decades in the harsh sun, their eyes bright beneath the mahogany of their skin.
“The government gives us nothing,” one man grumbled good-naturedly.
“It’s been twenty years!” exclaimed another with a laugh.
Sure, they conceded, the government provided polio shots this year to their kids, who also went to the single official school open in the district, a thousand meters away. But they received no help with water or seeds or new crops.
“It’s not just the water that’s the problem. There are no crops that will work anyway,” an elder explained, absentmindedly drawing circles in the dust with a stick. The economics of farming simply didn’t add up.
I had heard similar opinions in 2010, when I visited the district as a field researcher for the U.S. Army. Back then we had walked the fields south of the district center on a bright, sunny day in February, the poppy leaves sprouting about four inches out of the ground. In the fields farmers hunched over their poppy plants, weeding. In spots the ground was damp from being irrigated the day before. In field after field men tended the crops. We stopped to talk to them.
One farmer explained that every day he watered his fields he used thirty liters of fuel. Each liter cost at least a dollar, which he bought on credit.
“At the end of the year we have to pay the shopkeeper,” he told me. “But we still owe at the end of the year.” He said he still owed his shopkeeper $2,000, because when he sold the poppy the previous year it hadn’t earned him enough money to pay all of his debts.
Another farmer a few fields away agreed.
“At the end of the year we still owe,” he complained. He said farmers could hold off selling the poppy resin until they could get a good price from buyers who came to the village, but it still wasn’t enough.
“So we also work at the bazaar,” he said.
The problem was intractable because there were so few options. The regular economy was overwhelmingly rural. The bazaar near the district center was a thriving hub, with hundreds of shops that serviced the district and the traffic on Highway 1. The roadway, which was part of the national ring road that connected Kandahar to Herat in the west, passed between the market stalls and was a shopkeeper’s dream. But most people didn’t work in the bazaar. They worked in the fields.
The national government was having almost no effect. By the end of December 2012 the province had spent half of all its development money for the ministries, about $20 million, and not a single project had reached Maiwand. Nor had any projects gone to the rural districts in Kandahar Province, according to the people at KAF. The ministries in Kabul didn’t trust the provincial staff, so Kabul-based staff spent the money, and they funded projects near Kandahar City. The system had almost completely seized up, both isolating the villagers from the government and reducing their chances of finding employment by working on the projects.
Worse, we discovered that a major Afghan government program to bring projects into the districts, the National Solidarity Program (NSP), was a hotbed of corruption in Maiwand. The program, designed to push projects into the villages, had been functioning for years. The villagers would elect a council, which work with the NSP officials in Kandahar City and with the district development official to get projects it nominated.
Unfortunately in the few villages in Maiwand where the program existed the village councils were controlled by a small number of corrupt men who colluded with the NSP officials in Kandahar City and the district development official to steal the money. They simply filed phony plans for projects and pocketed the money sent from the province to pay for work that was never done. The money was then split among all of the officials. The corrupt village council members closed off membership from anyone not in on the scheme. The scam had been going on for so long the villagers forgot a council even existed.
We discovered the scheme by obtaining the NSP list of projects from the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team, visiting the villages, and asking the local people about the projects on the list. They knew nothing about any projects. DG Salih Mohammad was furious when he heard about this, and we spent five months trying to track down the responsible officials. By March of 2013 the DST was closed, with only occasional visits by USAID officials based in a neighboring district. We ran out of time to bring the offenders to justice.
The last option to boost employment was to rely upon the Americans. USAID instituted a major project to build sidewalks in the bazaar and beautify the place, and almost two hundred men worked on the project. We tried to put in a road-graveling project to the village of Loy Karez, a few kilometers south of the district center. But again the Americans could do little to affect most of the villages. USAID contractors would not operate farther than three kilometers from the district center. The villagers in the district were largely left to their own devices. Gold-plating the area around the district center was not the answer, and the larger problem remained.
By the spring of 2013 we’d run out of time. If we were lucky, one last USAID agricultural program might show up in late 2013. By then the DST would be closed. One of our last initiatives was to distribute chickens to women who lived near the district center. Pushed hard by KAF, the military, and my DST teammate, this plan gave women forty chickens each, along with some feed to keep the birds alive for a month. Run by an NGO, the project cost more than $30,000. This was the chicken-farming model that had failed in Dand, yet here it was again. There were too few chickens to make a viable business. Half the chickens were almost certainly dead within the first week. I tried to find out what happened to them, but, like so many other projects, few traces remained. Several women told us after a few days that the chickens were mostly alive. We could not contact the other women, because the NGO neglected to take their husbands’ phone numbers so we could call and check. The entire enterprise was a farce.
Then we received word in February that the DST would close the following month. Over the previous year we’d managed to set up a system that could continue into the future. There was a fully functional district development assembly of elders, who served as a point of contact for village elders who wished to request improvements for their villages. The elders on the assembly could select projects, handle the oversight of the contractors, and provide reports on finished work. But now the Afghans were aghast that the DST would close, and they appealed the decision to KAF, because they saw their only funds going with it. They were right.
When we left, nothing replaced us. As in Dand we had built the system with the expectation that the official budget system would kick in and there would be projects flowing from the province down to the districts. In the spring of 2011 KAF informed us all of this would happen in the fall of 2011. In the fall of 2011 we were told it would happen in 2012. In 2012 we were told it would happen in 2013. The passage of time showed these assurances to be the triumph of hope over reality.
In 2015 the situation was sufficiently bad that the central government authorized the provincial ministries to receive 40 percent of their development budget directly, as a block grant, without the need to check with Kabul first for spending decisions. In the first five months of that year the national ministries had managed to spend only 17 percent of the budget for projects. The promise of block grants seemed like a single bright spark in a dark constellation of unfulfilled expectations. The minds of the central mandarins were probably focused on budget problems after two thousand staff members in the president’s office were not paid for six months.5
Left to fend for themselves, the Afghan farmers simply adapted as best they could and carried on. The pumps watered the poppy, and life continued as it had for decades. There was nothing at this point the district government could do to stop poppy cultivation. It was impossible to hold back the inexorable tide of green, white, and pink that filled the desert plain as far as the eye could see.
As the DST closed, my final day in Maiwand was March 11, 2013. A small contingent of soldiers from the battalion remained at the base. Within months it would be turned over to a U.S. Special Forces team.
The rotors of the gray helicopter sent to pick me up were audible a minute before it appeared as a dot against a brilliant blue sky. It flew alongside the base and swooped onto the landing pad, blowing dust against the gray HESCO walls. My DST teammate would stay for another few days. I loaded up my bags and boxes, waved good-bye, and the chopper jerked into the air, nose down, passing over the bazaar as we turned for KAF and headed for home. After a week at KAF I was back in the United States. Within the next week, after stopping in DC to sign some paperwork and have a mission debrief that lasted twenty minutes, I was home in Massachusetts.
In Maiwand and Dand we had tried to make changes that would sustain the Afghans for years to come. In Maiwand I felt happy that we had changed the way the district government worked so that villagers were involved and the district had a functioning government. Again, as when I left Dand, I had deep forebodings about the future of the district. Preserving the gains made at our low level in a rural district depended on forces at the upper levels, beyond our power to change or even influence. If the upper levels didn’t work, the lower ones wouldn’t last.
I suspected the U.S. civilian effort to help Afghanistan had been set on autopilot a long time before my service there. Whether the system that remained after its ministrations worked or not would hardly matter to the American bureaucrats now leaving the country and heading home. We were drawing down, and the civilian war in the countryside was all but over.