According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the US abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban has had a major impact on the amount of opium being produced in the country. [unodc]
[source, UN]
The massive drop around the time when the US took over is also interesting. What does it represent? If I were to take a guess it’s that the opium farmers ran a crop of some kind of legal grain, instead, while they waited to see how the USA was going to handle things. Prior to 9/11, when the Taliban were running the country, growing opium was illegal unless you had some protection and paid the right people to look the other way. If I’m right about that, we’ll see production kick back up to 1999 levels by 2025. Meanwhile, I’m humming Copperhead Road to myself and wondering if Central American and Mexican cartels will start seeding poppies, or if climate change is going to ruin the growth cycle. (A bit of un-cited googling around indicates that Mexico is the 3rd largest poppy grower in the world, with occasional pressure campaigns from the US.)
Source: Stars and Stripes
The sick joke that was the US “war on opium” in Afghanistan is that it devolved to US soldiers guarding one local farmers’ poppy fields against another, based on the old Kissingerian logic of “who is shooting at us the least, this month?” The internet was full of photos of US troops in poppy fields – obviously, pretty damn funny. I wonder what the soldiers thought, standing out there like sniper targets, surrounded by a sea of happy juice? That kind of messed up illogic is why the US war in Vietnam was such a horrible shambles, too: everyone knew that nobody down there was really interested in building a modern nation, it was one great big smash-and-grab all around.
That’s the first news item I wanted to bring to your attention, because it’s (sort of?) light-hearted. The other is a pretty plausible report in the failing New York Times [nyt] that Israel was funneling Qatarese cash to: Hamas. It’s the same old logic: “who is shooting at us the least, this month?” as part of a divide and rule maneuver against the Palestinian Authority.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that a strong Hamas (but not too strong) would keep the peace and reduce pressure for a Palestinian state.
This is one of those “in a rational world…” things, and we’re not in a rational world anymore. Witness: US soldiers guarding opium poppy fields. Witness: Donald Trump is the republican front-runner for 2024, by a huge margin, and still is not in a federal prison. For that matter, Netanyahu isn’t in prison, either. It makes me think that if I were in prison, I’d sue to be released on the grounds that putting me back on the streets would lower the population of criminals outside of the prison.
Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.
For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?
Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.
You can (and should) read the rest of the story. It’s like some account of a CIA operation, including suitcases full of money being hauled around late at night.
What’s crazy and interesting about this story is the size of the operation has to have meant that a whole lot of people knew about it.
Hamas has always publicly stated its commitment to eliminating the state of Israel. But each payout was a testament to the Israeli government’s view that Hamas was a low-level nuisance, and even a political asset.
and
The administrations of three American presidents – Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. – broadly supported having the Qataris playing a direct role in funding Gaza operations.
Who will they get their realpolitik advice from, now that Henry Kissinger is dead?
In a nod, presumably to the US, the Taliban is not referred to as the government of Afghanistan. They refer only to the “De Facto Authority.” It has a nice ring to it. If it’s a government the US wants to overthrow it’s called “a regime” and if it’s in the gray zone it’s a “De Facto Authority.” I may start referring to the horrible corrupt clusterfuck in Washington as “De Facto Authority.” Since the 2000 and 2016 elections were stolen, it lacks legitimacy. (And that’s without getting into the structural problem that is the electoral college [stderr])
I’m not sure of the timelines so I don’t know if the two are connected but at one point shortly after taking control the US launched a program to help farmers get products to markets. One of the reasons farmers grow opium in the distant corners of Afghanistan is that they can’t get their produce to any market fast enough. Opium is compact and lasts so it works even where other produce doesn’t. The program worked for a while and was popular because the farmers made more money and mostly wanted to get away from opium. The US decided the supply lines for getting the produce to markets out of Afganistan where too long and fragile so they stopped protecting them and the whole thing fell apart.
The sort of situations your talking about are one of the main problems of using realpolitik too much. Too much focus on short term gain and not enough on long term consequences. The enemy of my enemy might be my ally this year but that sort of dealing isn’t building a long term alliance. Rather your providing arms to somebody that will turn them against you as soon as that seems more advantageous. And no matter what else happens the whole thing has unpleasant side effects.
A bit of realpolitik is good for keeping things practical and focusing on what can actually be done and how to get there. Recognizing what actually motivates other countries and their leaders. To much and it poisons the whole process.
My first question about that chart up top would be: just how reliable are these numbers?
Anymore? That rather implies that we were in a rational world at some time in the past… When was that?
@JM:
Yeah, you’d have thought somebody would have learned that after the whole thing with Ho Chi Minh, but as I’ve said before, the only thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.
I’m not so sure that opium/heroin will ever replace fentanyl again.
From what I’ve heard the rise of fentanyl is really a response to the “efficiency” of the DEA in getting big drug busts.
You could import 50 of kilos of pure heroin or a single kilo of fentanyl which has the same effect as the heroin. Which is easier to hide/transport?
Where it go off the wall is stuff like Carfentanil which is claimed to be 100 times stronger than fentanyl. So now you only need 10 grams instead of 50 of kilos of pure heroin. That’s roughly a tablespoon, and would be pretty easy to hide. At that point you just put it in the mail, which apparently (If you can really believe anything the DEA says) they do…
There is also the capability of bio-engineering, while it may not have been done yet it will almost certainly be possible in the future to brew up some heroin or cocaine in a lab with what basically amounts to the kit required to brew beer. OK, so you need some super fancy yeast first. It will happen given time. What’s the DEA going to do then? Have daily inspections of every micro-brewery in the country?
w.r.t. Afghanistan, JM’s comments above ring true to me. Very early in the War in Afghanistan, there actually did appear to be an earnest effort at winning ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘nation-building’. That lasted until the war bogged down, the allied forces obviously weren’t being treated as saviours marching in, and the news cameras stopped paying 24/7 attention. By the time attention started shifting over to Iraq instead, any attempt at actually handling Afghanistan properly was thrown out.
One of the things that I’ve found interesting is that the U.S. has talked about ‘Reconstruction’ a lot, starting back at the American Civil War, to Wilson’s Fourteen Points in World War One… the U.S. actually did manage to pull this off mostly successfully in World War Two, but never really before or since, despite WWII showing that yes, it can actually work and lead to good results. (Of course, since Stalin refused to co-operate after WWII, the Marshall Plan was limited in how far it could go, but Japan’s Reconstruction at gunpoint actually seemed to work out reasonably well for them in the long run.)
w.r.t. Isreal…
I remember a talk years ago where the speaker was opining on the classic ‘terrorist versus freedom fighter’ distinction, and his take on it was the only real difference is actually in the goals, not the means used to achieve them. A ‘freedom fighter’ wants to succeed in their plan to free their people and will then be willing to lay down arms and support peace. A ‘terrorist’, on the other hand, often wants the conflict to continue because the conflict removes the possibility of any middle ground and makes people desperate, allowing the terrorist group to become the defacto representatives of chunks of the populace because they’ve made any more moderate positions impossible to safely hold.
Under that definition, yes, Hamas is certainly a terrorist group even if they were elected as the local government; the PLO has wavered across both sides of that distinction; and Israel (and the Netanyahu government in particular) has definitely acted in the manner normally associated with terrorists by deliberately preventing any attempts at actual peace. Hamas and Netanyahu both need each other to keep the conflict spiralling out of control and keep their own populations ‘in line’ with the hardline politics.
So it surprises me not at all that this was happening.
When I went to Afghanistan shortly before the USSR invaded, little kids in every city came up to me selling handfuls of hash and opium (“Mazar-I-Sharif Number One!”).
Back during the good ol’ daze of the Carter-Reagan “give the Russians their own Vietnam” stoking of the Afghan-Russian War, we saw a stream of rumors (not sure how much hard evidence came with it) that the CIA encouraged Afghan entrepreneurs to set up labs to refine opium into heroin and peddle it to Russian troops (who then brought their new habits home and enhanced the Soviet crime culture to major effect – the evidence for that part seemed pretty clear).
None of the US Afghan vets I’ve spoken to has mentioned anything like the bright-eyed brats selling countercultural commodities that I encountered; perhaps the Taliban managed to enforce its counter-narcotics program so thoroughly that it eliminated that whole delivery chain.
@3 Patrick Slattery:
The custom drug manufacturing problem is still a ways off but it’s really the same issue that is boiling up right now with “ghost guns” where people can manufacture a gun with a 3d printer and a few tools.
The solution either way is really to make mental health a priority and cut into the number of people who want to do those things.
@5 Pierce R. Butler:
After Vietnam the US military had a big drug problem. It took a couple of decades but they finally got it under control. When the US invaded Afghanistan the military knew it could be problem and instituted random screening for all soldiers in Afghanistan on a regular basis on top of the yearly mandatory screening for all US military personal.
Random off-topic contribution:
@Patrick Slattery #3
If you work out the genes you need you might even be able to get the plasmids printed by a reputable 3rd party. Then you just have to handle inserting it into a yeast strain.
If you want a 1,000L of ethanol a week you need a brewery, 100L of opiate is enough to kill most of a city so you only need to be growing a small amount of yeast solution. Like basement brewery level. Handling the yeast strain is easy enough.
Hardest part is purifying the opiate, which I’m not going to look up because I don’t want to know
@jenorafeuer #4
Israel aren’t terrorists, the soldiers are a formal part of a nation state. And that state has formal relationships with most of the world, so they’re not even a rogue state. Just a nation state doing state stuff, like genocide, and ethnic cleansing
dangerousbeans@#8:
If you work out the genes you need you might even be able to get the plasmids printed by a reputable 3rd party. Then you just have to handle inserting it into a yeast strain.
OK, now you let the cat out of the bag.
That’s something I have been wondering about for a while. Why not engineer some roundup-ready(tm) marijuana and coca plants? Opium poppies, too. Heh, heh, heh. There are a lot of fun chimeras that could be (I think?) created. How about koi with chromatophores? Or UV glowing koi? Or bioluminescent koi? I suspect that every restaurant on the pacific rim would want a big tank of those baddies.
As far as purifying the opiate, it’s easy. For starters, raw opium is fine. You just eat it, like the surrealists did in the 1900s. Wash it down with alcohol to cover the taste, which is unnecessary because the alkaloid numbs your tongue pretty quickly. It’s hard to pick out the details but it appears that the absinthe drinkers weren’t just drinking absinthe, they were dissolving opium in the stuff, too. “Oh, ho! it dissolves in alcohol!” and then the rest is fairly standard perfumers’ refinement – dissolve it, filter it, tray it, then scrape it off the tray or leave it at whatever concentration you like. If yeast were producing enough opiate to be interesting, by definition eating the yeast would also be interesting. One could sell home yeast kits for a lot of money. “just pour a can of caffeine free coca cola in every so often and don’t drink more than a shot at a shot.
dangerousbeans@#8:
Israel aren’t terrorists, the soldiers are a formal part of a nation state.
I know you’re being sarcastic-ish but that triggers me, so you get the standard rantlet.
The definition of “terrorism” has been carefully tailored only to make a distinction between state activity and non-state activity, so that states don’t have to wrestle with the thorny problem that otherwise states are the biggest sources of terrorism, and the CIA is the world’s largest and best-funded terrorist organization.
his take on it was the only real difference is actually in the goals, not the means used to achieve them
Eh. Terrorism is a strategy, toward political goals – and political goals are the same (it’s political!) regardless. It’s a strategy among many, such as gerrymandering, authoritarianism, democracy, propaganda, negotiation, cooperation, etc. What people have trouble with is recognizing that, there is nothing particularly special about it. For example, “saturation bombing” is another strategy that can be used to attempt to achieve certain political goals. If we want the discussion to stay in the realm of “realpolitik” one might argue that strategies are equal, in terms of their goals, if not their methods.
If you accept my argument above, then we can actually make sense of statements like “we had to bomb the city (strategy) in order to save it (goal)” – it’s a bad strategy but in that formulation it makes sense: “we had to buy the city (strategy) in order to save it (goal)”
And, if you accept that, then there are some strategies that are more or less effective, and others that are more or less available. Hamas’ Oct 7 attack was a strategy (we can call it “terrorism”) that they used because a strategy of saturation bombing was not available to them. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, “if it were possible to call down lightning, that is how we would fight.”
The elephant in the room is the observation that some strategies are more or less effective, and some cause more or less harm to bystanders. Of course we should choose our strategies based on that they ought to have a chance of working and do less harm. If you accept all of that (which I argue in good faith) then terrorism is probably an ineffective strategy preferred by those who have already lost and are going to lose. I’d even argue that terrorism is an admission of defeat, because it implies that a given combatant would do something more effective if they had the option.
Hamas launches those pathetically stupid missiles into Israel because that’s all they appear to be able to figure out to do. [Elsewhere I have mentioned that they probably would have done better to figure out how to remotely aim and fire those missiles on a horizontal trajectory aimed at Israeli border posts. Now, I sure bet they wish they had something that could hit a tank or APC. Are Ukrainians somehow smarter than Palestinians? Or maybe they’re meaner?]
@Marcus
Yeah, I agree on “terrorism”. It’s bullshit designed to privilege state violence, not anything useful