Apr 07, 2008

Grim News From Afghanistan

by Laura Starita

Recent news from Afghanistan is troubling for those hoping that the country can escape from its decades-long cycle of violence. Most of the media has focused on the security situation and troop shortages, but the underlying issues of economic development are equally important. A short piece in the Financial Times a few weeks ago announced the publication in Kabul of a study conducted by an association of nonprofits, which concluded that the aid effort for Afghanistan has been “wasteful and ineffective.” Western countries have delivered only a fraction of the funds they pledged to the relief efforts, and 40 percent of the funds paid went to Western consultants and corporate contractors. Another third of funds, totaling $5 billion, cannot be accounted for at all.

A longer, more disturbing piece in Newsweek documented the increased trend among Afghan poppy farmers of giving their young daughters away in marriage to cover business debts. This phenomenon has evolved from a confluence of factors, most relevantly the continued prevalence of groom’s families paying dowry to the family of the bride and persistent rural poverty. In the Southern region highlighted by Newsweek, poor farmers put themselves into debt at the beginning of the planting season in order to purchase inputs for their plots. At the end of the season the farmers are expected to honor those debts in the form of harvested opium. But the efforts of the US government and its allies to eradicate the opium trade from the country means that these farmers often find their crops destroyed before harvest by US and NATO eradication teams. A New Yorker article from July, 2007 highlighted the unfairness with which eradication takes place in Afghanistan. Eradication teams consist of contracted employees working for the Afghan Eradication Force; they are equipped with vehicles and tools to destroy crops. What they are not given is sufficient military backup to protect them. As a result, they can be very vulnerable to attacks from Taliban or private militia groups, and so they often ignore large, strategically-placed plots and instead target small, less dangerous locations. By definition this means that wealthy landowners who can afford Taliban protection keep their poppies and the poor do not.

Thus, when the lender returns for his product at the end of the growing season the farmer has no opium, opening the possibility that the lender will ask for the farmer’s daughter for his son or nephew, or even for himself. The fate of these “opium brides” is mixed. Few women in rural Afghanistan have a choice in who they marry. Some of the matches made in this way are no worse or better than other marriages, but some amount to nothing short of slavery.

More than ninety percent of the world’s illegal heroin originates in Afghanistan. The heroin trade contributes to a growing drug abuse problem in Central Asia and around the world, and funds the Taliban-sponsored instability in the country. For those reasons and a host of others, eradicating poppy cultivation is, and should be, a front-line priority of US and Western policy in central Asia. Yet the US government has handled that effort with a remarkable amount of short-sightedness. Initiatives to provide Afghan farmers with alternatives to poppies have gone from non-existent, to illogically targeted to large landowners. US programs do not broadly support alternative livelihoods for farmers, nor do they provide access to markets for the goods those farmers produce—as shown in Sarah Chayes’ December, 2007 article in The Atlantic. Ms. Chayes is the founder of a company that provides such alternative livelihoods and market access, yet has given up on funding from official aid sources because of the insurmountable obstacles put in her path by US aid agencies.