What is Afghanistan good for?

Americans, weary of the war in Afghanistan, are doubting that anything good can come of it, and wondering if it will ever be over.  Two recent reports reminded me of what Afghanistan is good for.

The first is  “Afghanistan’s Drug Career: Evolution from a War Economy to a Drug Economy” from the Afghanistan Analysts’ Network (AAN).  The second, “Afghanistan Beyond the Fog of Nation Building” from the Silk Road Studies Program here at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, is about the importance of transit routes across Afghanistan and their potential to contribute to building peace there.

Like it or not, Afghanistan is remarkably good for the production of opium poppy.  The AAN report is interesting on the political economy of the drug trade, which implicates President Karzai and other “political upperworld” figures in protecting and profiting from it.  But it is remarkably tame in its recommendations.  Twenty or thirty years will be required, it says, for its “holistic” approach to work.  The initial steps recommended are modest adjustments of current policies:  eradication should be applied to all poppy fields in a given district, interdiction should target bigger traders, and alternative livelihoods should encompass rural development in general and not just crop substitution.  I suppose any long journey starts with just a few steps, but it is hard for me to picture that these recommendations will really carry us through several decades.

More interesting is S. Frederick Starr’s enthusiastic endorsement of transportation as the key to economic development in Afghanistan:

The reopening [of] all these age-old transit routes across Afghanistan is the single greatest achievement of U.S. foreign policy in the new millenium. It was unintended, unrecognized, and, by most Americans, unacknowledged, even thought they paid for it with the lives of loved ones and with hard-earned tax money. Nonetheless, this development offers the most promising solution to the U.S.’ present strategic dilemma and the key to possible success in Afghanistan and the region….Whatever its larger geopolitical significance, the reopening of continental transport and trade to, from, and across Afghanistan is the single most important determinant of the future of Afghanistan itself….This is not a scheme devised by GS-12 bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom for some generic distant land. It is the logic of Afghanistan itself and has been validated by the experience of 3000 years.

So who stands in opposition to 3000 years of experience? According to Starr,

At a series of meetings held throughout the autumn of 2010 representatives of the State Department were, to say the least, reserved about a strategy based on the opening of transport corridors, presumably out of concern that it might be taken as an alternative to the development of agriculture or the exploitation of mineral resources rather than the essential and unavoidable measure for achieving them.

Starr goes on to suggest that resistance is softening, and there is enthusiasm in military and some other circles.  But the high-level support he sought has not yet emerged.  That is what is needed to drive what Starr suggests: a regional Coordinating Council on Continental Transport and Trade to pursue the strategy of reopening the corridors of transport and trade that war has done much to clog in recent decades.

Of course when it comes to cross-border trade, nothing moves more expeditiously than drugs.  That is the trick here:  helping the Afghans to create a border regime that will allow legitimate trade and block the illegitimate version.  It will not be easy–in fact, it requires just the kind of state Afghanistan lacks, and that the AAN report suggests will be difficult to construct because of the interaction of the drug economy with top levels of the Karzai government.  We’d all like to avoid the daunting task of state-building in Afghanistan, but few good things can happen if we don’t embrace the requirement.