It's Like Farmville, Only With Poppies

How do we fix the Afghan poppy problem? By growing Not Poppies!

The Obama administration is overhauling its strategy for eliminating Afghanistan's flourishing drug trade, a key source of funds for the Taliban. Its plan hinges on persuading farmers like Mohammed Walid to grow something other than poppies.

What, you thought I was kidding? That's the plan, Stan.

Obama administration officials say the U.S. will largely leave the eradication business and instead focus on giving Afghan farmers other ways of earning a living.

The new $300 million effort will give micro-grants to Afghan food-processing and food-storage businesses, fund the construction of new roads and irrigation channels, and sell Afghan farmers fruit seed and livestock at a heavy discount. The U.S. is spending six times as much on the push this year as the $50 million it spent in 2008.

"We're trying to give the farmers alternatives so they can move away from the poppy culture without suffering massive unemployment and poverty," says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development official leading the drive. "The idea is to make it easier for farmers to make the right choice."

Unfortunately, we've kind of bombed the rest of Afghanistan's economy into smoking piles of ash. The good news is, with all the money we've thrown at the problem that's gone missing in the region, somebody should have the money to pay off the farmers to start growing poppies again.

It's win-win!

Senior Obama administration officials say bluntly that earlier U.S. efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's poppy fields have failed. The Bush administration initially envisioned spraying herbicide on the poppies from planes or tractors, but that was vetoed by the Afghan government. Instead, Washington paid American contractors and Afghan security personnel hundreds of millions of dollars to slash and burn individual poppy fields.

The eradication effort has been widely unpopular in Afghanistan and hasn't discernibly hurt the drug industry here. Afghanistan accounted for 12% of the world's opium production in 2001, according to the United Nations. By 2008, it accounted for 93%.

Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters in Washington late last month that the U.S. "wasted hundreds of millions of dollars" on eradication. "All we did was alienate poppy farmers," he said. "We were driving people into the hands of the Taliban."

My friend remarked "We should just unionize the farmers, have them take over the drug trade, have the head of the drug trade as a puppet of the U.S., sell all the opium to China and then use that money to buy Iraqi oil."

And I'm having trouble seeing the downside to that one. It certainly makes more sense than the glorious Charlie Foxtrot we have over there now in Sandboxistan. After all, we singlehandedly revived the opium trade in Central Asia.

How's that for your free market?