In a few days the world with learn whether a new national entity has been created — the first freely elected warlord narco-democracy.
Afghanistan’s electors gave Hamid Karzai a clear majority of votes in October presidential elections.
But before his formal inauguration early next month, Karzai must select a cabinet, which is going to be near impossible without including representatives of the country’s regional warlords whose power rests on the cultivation and trafficking of opium poppies from which heroin is manufactured.
A report released last week by the United Nations’ Office of Drugs and Crime confirms what had been evident for some time. Afghanistan now produces 87 per cent of the world’s supply of opium poppies and the money from this trade — about $3 billion US a year — accounts for two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product.
Revenues from this trade sustain the regional warlords whose power has revived since the U.S.-led invasion in 2002 ousted the puritanical Islamic Taliban regime that gave shelter and support to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network.
Karzai has vowed to have no warlords in his administration and “to be dedicated, strong, in working against” the opium industry.
But it will be a wonder if he can construct a cabinet that is regionally representative without including, at the very least, surrogates for the warlords who will pull strings from their provincial strongholds.
And the cultivation of opium poppies is so well-established among destitute farmers as the only dependable crop that can produce real economic growth that it will take many years, much money and even more effort to find a substitute.
In the UN report the head of the Drugs Office, Antonio Maria Costa, set out his anxieties in bold terms.
“The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality as corruption in the public sector, the die-hard ambition of local warlords, and the complicity of local investors are becoming a factor in Afghan life,” he said.
A survey by the UN agency estimates that one in 10 Afghans are involved in the trade that now dominates the trade in street-trafficked heroin in Europe. “Opium cultivation could ultimately incinerate everything . . . democracy, reconstruction and stability,” Costa said.
Setting aside the high decibel count in Costa’s language, there’s a strong element of truth in his warning.
The economics of the situation speak powerfully. Afghan farmers are earning about $4,000 US a year from the cultivation of opium poppies, 10 times what they could expect from more traditional crops like cotton.
In a country where life is tenuous at the best of times, but where there is devastation from 25 years of warfare, the choice is not difficult for farmers to make. The same goes for the officials and ministers up the trafficking line.
For the moment President Karzai has effective control only of the capital, Kabul, despite the backing of several thousand North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops — including 800 Canadians — and even more Americans running round the Hindu Kush looking for bin Laden.
Those troops are, however, going to have to be committed to Afghan-istan for a prolonged rebuilding campaign of at least 20 years, according to Canadian military commanders. Task No. 1 is to try to disarm the regional warlords.
Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, has a clear political mandate from all over Afghanistan. His immediate problem is that some of the warlords who fielded candidates against him can also now claim political legitimacy, even though they lost.
So regional warlords like Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, Hazara leader Mohammed Mohaqeq or Tajik leader Ahmad Wali Massood may not appear in the cabinet by name, but their surrogates will be there.
Karzai has a useful little clause in the Afghan constitution that allows him to politely decline bringing into his cabinet the mountain bandits themselves: Afghan ministers must have a university degree.
But his choices are civil war or creating a big-tent cabinet. Karzai shows every sign of being a big-tent man with a long view of history.
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