Crop spraying draws controversy in Afghan drug fight

The US military has so far shied away from playing a more active role in combating drugs in Afghanistan. Analysts say that US military involvement could overly tax its forces, and prove more expensive and time-consuming than mobilizing the Afghan government to tackle the problem.

Afghanistan currently has 1,000 trained and active counternarcotics personnel, about 600 of whom are in the provinces, burning and destroying poppy fields on the ground.

But officials say at least 4,000 officers are needed to actively monitor and destroy poppy farms, and another 5,000 to control the country's porous borders.

While ruling out crop spraying, Karzai is advocating another controversial tactic. In a recent press conference Karzai told reporters that he was considering offering amnesty to former drug traffickers with the hopes that they will lead the Afghan government to the bigger drug lords.

"We are discussing the amnesty issue. We need to make sure that the plan doesn't backfire on us and the big drug lords slip out of our hands," says General Daud.

However, in a country without any kind of formal national identification system, verifying drug traffickers and the identities of drug lords will be a major challenge. And with some 2.3 million Afghans involved in the drug trade the task becomes harder.

Some members of Karzai's Cabinet suggest a "bottom up" approach to the poppy dilemma. Afghanistan's newly appointed counternarcotics minister, Habibullah Qaderi, believes that subsidies and cash incentives should be given to encourage farmers to drop poppies and plant other cash crops.

Qaderi has suggested that the Afghan government pay the farmers involved in cultivating opium at least double the market price for crops such as rice, wheat, and cotton. But subsidies could cost upward of $1 billion for one year, more than has been promised by the US government for the entire antinarcotics effort over three years.

"We can't really beat a $2 to $3 billion-a-year industry with this type of money," said Omar Zakhilwal, chief policy adviser at the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

Afghanistan's long drought compounds the difficulty of finding alternative crops. Poppies require very little water to thrive.

Rubin also warns against eradicating poppy farms too quickly or before taking out the traffickers and the drug lords, as many farmers are still financially indebted to their "bosses" and could revolt against the Karzai government.

"You cannot eliminate 40 percent of the total economy [60 percent of the legal economy] in one of the poorest countries in the world through law enforcement," Rubin says. "And you also cannot do it in one year, or in five years. Economic shrinkage is one of the surest predictors of instability and conflict."

The Afghan government is especially concerned about maintaining security going into parliamentary elections that are scheduled for this spring.

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