On April 24, the campaign suffered another blow when a State Department–leased aircraft with sixteen people on board—most of them U.S. drug-enforcement officials—crashed into a row of mud-brick houses in Helmand. At the time, U.S. and NATO officials said only that the two Ukrainian pilots were killed while news reports added that two Afghan girls on the ground also died.
But Mike Winstead, a U.S. Army colonel who helped to coordinate Operation River Dance, said the devastation was far worse. In an Army oral-history interview, he said he rushed to the scene and helped remove the bodies of about fifteen Afghans from their wrecked homes. He also recovered a briefcase of classified documents from the demolished aircraft and a bag with $250,000 in cash that the State Department had sent to pay for the anti-poppy exercise.
The crash underlined the futility of the campaign. “I’m not sure that we were doing much good by the end of it,” Winstead said. “We were really struggling.”
Making matters worse, as the growing season unfolded and the poppies bloomed into spectacular displays of pink-and-white flowers, many Afghans on the eradication teams went AWOL.
According to a U.S. diplomatic cable, most of the stick-swingers “deserted their posts” once they discovered they could earn far more harvesting opium for the farmers than killing the plants for the Afghan government. The farmers offered wages five times higher than the government rate, payable in cash or drugs. By the end of Operation River Dance, the ranks of the eradicators had dwindled from 500 to fewer than 100.
To cover up the debacle, Afghan officials lied in their public reports about how many acres of poppies they flattened, exaggerating the results by severalfold. In a pair of diplomatic cables sent to Washington in May, the U.S. embassy in Kabul admitted that only “a modest amount” of the poppy crop was destroyed and cast doubt on the official Afghan statistics. Yet the State Department certified the false numbers as accurate to Congress, citing them as evidence of a successful mission.
Operation River Dance did succeed in infuriating Helmand’s poppy farmers. To sabotage the eradicators, they planted homemade bombs and other booby-traps in the soil and flooded their fields to bog down the tractors. Many blamed the Americans for ruining their livelihood. They were especially indignant that the Americans were destroying a product consumed mostly in the West. “I had a number of villagers ask me, ‘Colonel, why are you eradicating something that your folks use and want?’ They could not understand that,” Winstead said.
U.S. officials cringed as it became evident their Afghan government allies were pocketing much of the profit from Helmand’s opium and using Operation River Dance to punish their competitors in the drug trade. It dawned on the Americans well into the operation that they were being used.
A May 3 diplomatic cable signed by U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann singled out Helmand’s deputy governor and police chief as “very corrupt individuals.” The cable admitted that the province’s main poppy belt had gone largely unscathed because land there was under the control of “powerful tribal leaders” and officials with “significant interests and influence.” Afghan police also solicited bribes from farmers in exchange for sparing their fields from eradication. This put U.S. officials at risk of being seen as complicit in a major shake-down.
Maj. Douglas Ross, a U.S. military adviser embedded with a unit of Afghan soldiers, called River Dance an “illegal operation” and worried it would trigger a mass revolt against U.S. and Afghan forces. “If somebody’s in there fleecing the people and we’re providing security, then we’re sending the wrong message,” he said in an Army oral-history interview. “Believe me, my hair turned white by the end of this operation.”
The eradication campaign primarily hurt poor farmers who lacked political connections or money to pay bribes. Alienated and destitute, they became perfect recruits for the Taliban.
“Ninety percent of the people’s income of the Helmand province comes from selling poppy. Now we’re taking it away,” Col. Dominic Cariello, a Wisconsin National Guard officer who advised an Afghan army unit during the operation, said in an Army oral-history interview. “Yeah, of course they’re going to take up weapons and shoot at you. You just took away their livelihood. They have a family to feed.”
Farmers who didn’t volunteer to join the insurgency were often conscripted anyway. Prior to planting, many farmers had signed deals with drug traffickers promising to deliver a fixed quantity of dried opium resin, or “poppy gum,” at the end of the season. With their crops razed, they were hard-pressed to pay their debt.
“That drug dealer doesn’t care where he gets the poppy gum but [says], ‘I gave you $2,000 last winter and you owe me eighteen kilos; and if you can’t give me the poppy gum, then I’ll either kill you, kill your wife, kill your kids, or you can pick up this gun and help me fight the Americans,’ ” Maj. John Bates, an aide-de-camp to the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. “We were disgruntling the whole province,” he added. “Helmand exploded.”
Prior to Operation River Dance, Helmand presented a relatively quiet sector in the war with the Taliban. But after the operation kicked off, insurgents poured in. “The eradication campaign also appears to have attracted more Taliban to fight in Helmand, perhaps in an effort to protect their own financial interest and to win favor with the local population by ‘protecting’ their poppy crops,” Neumann reported in the May 3 cable. Two weeks later, another U.S. embassy cable reported that security in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, was “very bad and continuing to deteriorate.”
The spike in violence coincided with the arrival of British troops in Helmand in May as part of a previously planned reshuffling of NATO forces. The British found themselves underprepared and overwhelmed. “As soon as we handed it off to the British within a week they were taking numerous KIAs and WIAs pretty bad,” said Slusher, the Kentucky National Guardsman, referring to troops killed in action and wounded in action. “The drug lords weighed in and the Taliban weighed in and it got real tough.”
Despite the public accolades from U.S. and Afghan officials, Operation River Dance had turned into one of the biggest strategic blunders of the war. Instead of building confidence in the Afghan government and starving the Taliban of revenue, the 2006 Helmand campaign helped to transform the region into a lethal stronghold for the insurgency.
U.S., NATO and Afghan forces would pay dearly for the mistake for the remainder of the war.
* * *
Afghan farmers have tended varieties of the opium poppy—Papaver somniferum—for generations. With a little irrigation, the plants thrive in warm, dry climates. They grow especially well in the Helmand River valley, thanks to an extensive network of canals financed by American taxpayers. In the 1960s, the U.S. Agency for International Development built the canals to stimulate the production of cotton and other crops in southern Afghanistan during the Cold War.
In full bloom, poppy flowers look majestic in incandescent shades of white, pink, red or purple. After the petals fall away, the stem is capped by a seedpod the size of an egg. At harvest, farmworkers slice open the pods to drain a milky white sap that is dried into a resin. For Afghanistan, it is an ideal cash crop. Unlike fruits, vegetables and grains, the resin doesn’t rot or attract pests. It can be easily stored and transported over long distances.
Traffickers take the opium resin to drug labs or refineries, where it is processed into morphine and heroin. Afghan opium feeds the demand for heroin in Europe, Iran and other parts of Asia. One of the few markets it does not dominate is the United States, which gets most of its heroin from Mexico.
Ironically, the only power that has been able to curtail the Afghan drug industry is the Taliban.
In July 2000, when the Taliban controlled most of the country, its reclusive one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that opium was un-Islamic and imposed a ban on growing poppies. Much to the surprise of the rest of the world, the ban worked. Afraid to cross the Taliban, Afgh
an farmers immediately ceased planting poppies. The United Nations estimated that poppy cultivation plunged by 90 percent from 2000 to 2001.
The edict stirred tumult in global heroin markets and disrupted the Afghan economy. Years later, Afghans recalled the moment with awe and said it showed the comparative haplessness of the United States and their Afghan government allies in the opium battles.
“When [the] Taliban ordered to stop poppy cultivation, Mullah Omar could enforce it with his blind eye. No one cultivated poppy after the order was passed,” Tooryalai Wesa, a former governor of Kandahar province, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “Now, billions of dollars came and were given to the Ministry of Counternarcotics. It actually didn’t decrease [anything]. The poppy even increased.”
The Taliban had hoped the 2000 opium ban would win favor in Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But those hopes vanished when al-Qaeda—which had been given sanctuary by the Taliban—launched the 9/11 attacks.
As soon as the U.S. military invaded and removed the Taliban from power in 2001, Afghan farmers resumed sowing their poppy seeds. U.S. officials and their allies recognized the problem would likely snowball but couldn’t agree what to do.
The U.S. military was focused on hunting for al-Qaeda leaders. The State Department had its hands full trying to solidify the new Afghan state. Though poppies had nothing to do with why the United States had declared war, members of Congress pressed the Bush administration to prioritize the issue.
Michael Metrinko, the U.S. diplomat who survived captivity during the Iranian hostage crisis, said, “Everyone from Congress brought it up immediately,” when they visited the mothballed U.S. embassy compound in Kabul in 2002. In a diplomatic oral-history interview, he recalled an exchange with one unnamed lawmaker who refused to drop the issue. “I looked at the congressman and I said, “Congressman, we don’t have a functioning toilet here in the embassy yet. I share one with about a hundred other men. How far do you want me to go trying to eradicate the poppy production on the other side of the country?”
President Bush persuaded the United Nations and European allies to devise a strategy for tackling opium poppies. In spring 2002, British officials, who had agreed to take charge, floated an irresistible offer. They agreed to pay Afghan poppy farmers $700 an acre—a fortune in the impoverished, war-ravaged country—to destroy their crops.
Word of the $30 million program ignited a poppy-growing frenzy. Farmers planted as many poppies as they could, offering part of their crop to the British for destruction while selling the rest on the open market. Others harvested the opium sap right before destroying their plants and got paid anyway. “Afghans, like most other people, are quite willing to accept large sums of money and promise anything knowing that you will go away,” Metrinko said. “The British would come and hand out sums of money and the Afghans would say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, we’re going to burn it right now,’ and the Brits would leave. They would then get two sources of income from the same crop.”
In a Lessons Learned interview, Anthony Fitzherbert, a British agricultural expert, called the cash-for-poppies program “an appalling piece of complete raw naivete,” saying that the people in charge had “no knowledge of nuances and [I] don’t know they really cared.”
In 2004, as Afghan farmers tilled more soil to grow poppies and the British struggled to cope, the Bush administration started to reconsider whether it should become involved. But the U.S. bureaucracy lacked consensus and direction on how to address the problem. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL, was supposed to oversee the U.S. policy. But INL posted just one employee to the U.S. embassy in Kabul at the time, according to Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces from 2003 to 2005.
The U.S. military possessed exponentially more resources than the State Department but commanders hesitated to touch the issue. They did not see fighting drug traffickers as part of their mission and worried that targeting farmers would put their troops at risk. The CIA was reluctant to jeopardize its relationships with warlords over drugs. NATO allies couldn’t agree what to do, either.
“There was literally no coordination and a lot of interagency fighting—not only between your agencies, but between your agencies and our agencies, British agencies,” British Maj. Gen. Peter Gilchrist, who served as Barno’s deputy commander from 2004 to 2005, said in an Army oral-history interview. “So it was just dysfunctional. It just wasn’t working. We weren’t getting any traction at all.”
In November 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a snowflake to Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s policy chief, to complain about the Bush administration’s aimless approach. “With respect to the drug strategy for Afghanistan, it appears not to be synchronized—no one’s in charge,” he wrote.
As the number of suicide bombings and other attacks rose from 2004 to 2006, members of Congress and agents from the DEA and INL argued that opium profits were fueling the insurgency. Other U.S. officials countered that the funding sources and motivations behind the insurgency were more complex, but lost the debate. The Bush administration decided to take a harder line with Afghan poppy growers and set aside $1 billion a year for programs like Operation River Dance.
By declaring opium an enemy, the United States effectively opened a second front in the war in Afghanistan.
Barnett Rubin, the academic expert on Afghanistan and former U.N. adviser, said the Bush administration misunderstood the factors behind the Taliban’s resurgence. “We somehow came up with the explanation that it was drugs: the Taliban profit from drugs, and therefore drugs cause the Taliban,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview.
At the same time, people besides the Taliban were getting rich from the drug trade. Governors, warlords and other senior Afghan officials who were supposedly allies of Washington became hooked on opium profits, collecting a cut from farmers and traffickers operating in their areas of influence. U.S. and NATO officials belatedly recognized that drug-related corruption was undermining the broader war and threatening to turn Afghanistan into what they called a “narco-state.”
In an October 2004 snowflake, Rumsfeld reported to several senior Pentagon officials that the French defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was worried the opium industry could weaken President Hamid Karzai’s grip on power. “She thinks it is important to act soon, to avoid having a situation where drug money elects the Afghan Parliament, and the Afghan Parliament then opposes Karzai and corrupts the government,” Rumsfeld wrote.
A year later, Neumann sounded a similar alarm. “Many of our contacts correctly fear that the burgeoning narcotics sector could spin Afghan corruption out of anyone’s control,” Neumann wrote in a classified September 2005 cable to officials in Washington. “They fear that the sheer mass of illegal money from growing, processing, and trafficking opium could strangle the legitimate Afghanistan state in its cradle.”
But U.S. officials remained at odds about what to do.
After Operation River Dance demonstrated the folly of attacking poppy fields with tractors and sticks, some Bush administration officials and members of Congress pushed to adopt a more aggressive approach that Washington had backed in Colombia to combat cocaine trafficking. A core part of that program, known as Plan Colombia, was the aerial spraying of herbicides to eradicate coca plants. The Bush administration hailed Plan Colombia as a success, despite concerns that the herbicides could cause cancer.
Some U.S. officials doubted it would work in Afghanistan for those and other reasons. John Wood, a National Security Council staffer in the Bush White House, said in a Lessons Learned interview that Colombia’s then-president, Álvaro Uribe, was a reliable ally who supported aerial spraying: “Uribe was a credible leader and linked insurgency and drugs. The Colombian military was competent.”
In contrast, the Afghan security forces were much weaker and Karzai, the Afghan president, was less committed. In public, Karzai declared a “holy war�
� against poppies and called the business “more dangerous than terrorism.” But in private, he had serious doubts.
Karzai and his cabinet ministers resisted the U.S. spraying proposal. They feared the herbicides could poison water and food supplies, and that rural Afghans would rebel if their government allowed foreigners to unleash strange substances from the sky. “Karzai thought this would be seen by Afghans as chemical warfare against them,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul from 2003 to 2005, said in a Lessons Learned interview.
On another level, Afghan officials knew that if the spraying worked, it would crush the one part of the national economy that was thriving. And that would alienate rural Afghans even more.
“Urging Karzai to mount an effective counternarcotics campaign was like asking an American president to halt all U.S. economic activity west of the Mississippi,” Ronald McMullen, who served as director of INL’s Afghanistan-Pakistan office, said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “That was the magnitude of what we were asking the Afghans to do.”
U.S. military leaders were equally leery of spraying, despite the Bush administration’s support for it. Most commanders saw opium as a law-enforcement problem. They also worried about potential health risks to their troops and had flashbacks to the Vietnam War, when U.S. forces sprayed Agent Orange—a toxic defoliant—over tropical jungles.
The military’s reticence irritated members of Congress. Politically, it was hard to explain to voters why Americans were fighting a war to rescue a country that produced more opium than any other in the world. It didn’t help when newspapers published photos of U.S. soldiers patrolling on foot through poppy fields in full bloom (most U.S. units were under orders not to interfere with the farming).
Shortly after Operation River Dance commenced in March 2006, a congressional delegation led by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) visited Afghanistan to discuss eradication efforts with U.S., Afghan and British officials. INL arranged for some of the lawmakers to tour central Helmand by helicopter.
The Afghanistan Papers Page 15
