by Steve Coll
A fierce argument erupted among U.S. intelligence agencies about whether opium and heroin were, in fact, a significant aspect of the Taliban’s insurgency. The argument would go on inside classified conference rooms for several years. Analysts at D.I.A. discounted Braun’s initial study comparing the Taliban with the F.A.R.C. There was no consensus on a basic question, namely, whether opium money was an indispensable, growing source of finance for the Taliban. Data about drugs and Taliban finance was inherently sketchy and often inferred from scattered criminal cases and detainee testimony. A few key points were well established. The Taliban imposed two religious taxes, ushr and zakat, on the opium economy. The taxes hit farmers, truckers, morphine makers, and smugglers. The tax rates were 10 and 20 percent, prescribed by the Koran, and so not subject to change. Therefore, as opium growing boomed in the south in 2006 and 2007, it was logical to conclude that the Taliban’s coffers had also swelled. But how much money did the Taliban really earn? The movement did not have Swiss bank accounts that could be hacked and analyzed.
If the Taliban imposed ushr and zakat taxes on the $4 billion estimated export value of the 2006 opium crop, then it might earn upwards of $500 million annually from drug trafficking, D.E.A. studies estimated. That would be a huge sum for a guerrilla force of the Taliban’s scale. But what evidence was there that the Taliban could tax the full $4 billion in revenue? Wasn’t it more likely that they could access only the “farm gate” crop of about $1 billion? In that case their take might be $100 million. When the D.E.A.’s analysts first circulated its $500 million estimate, D.I.A. analysts challenged their assumptions.
The debates frustrated those like John Walters, the White House drug czar, who felt the agencies were deliberately shading analysis to support their preferred policies. Those analysts who doubted the D.E.A. emphasized that the Taliban had many other sources of income besides drug taxes: They also taxed other forms of smuggling, and they had long-standing business and preaching networks in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf countries. And of course they enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan. Why should the United States distort its already overstretched war strategy to attack one source of Taliban and Al Qaeda finance without making an equal effort to choke off the other income sources, or to eliminate the Pakistani sanctuary?
At the Pentagon, Mary Beth Long fought back by producing dossiers of evidence showing that American troops were tripping across narcotics in the same places where they were finding weapons caches in Taliban strongholds. Analysts at D.I.A. told her she was factually wrong; C.I.A. analysts were less vocal, but made their opposition clear. The main push back came from the Army and Central Command. Long wasn’t sure why the uniformed services were so adamant, but she concluded that they just did not want to see a linkage between drug revenue and the Taliban’s return because it would complicate their mission.7
Long created more dossiers of evidence showing caches of narcotics discovered on the Afghan battlefield alongside rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices. She briefed members of Congress and was eventually able to present to President Bush and the Principals Committee in the Situation Room. She tried to convince them “about the perils of allowing the opium trade to run unaddressed.”8
At the White House, Long was pushing on an open door. With her evidence, along with the analysis of Braun and others at D.E.A. and at the State Department, the idea took hold in the Bush administration that the model for fixing Afghanistan was in Colombia. The long American effort there to strengthen the state, defeat drug traffickers, and isolate Marxist guerrillas was known as Plan Colombia. The Clinton administration had conceived Plan Colombia in 1998. The Bush administration had embraced and advanced it, aligning closely with President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, a conservative. The plan’s elements included aerial spraying of coca fields, crop eradication by Colombian forces on the ground, American security and intelligence support for military and police, exports of helicopters, aircraft, weapons, eavesdropping equipment, and other gear, and staunch political backing for the elected government in Bogotá.
As with all things in Afghanistan, however, ambition outstripped means. On January 24, 2007, General Dan McNeill, the newly appointed commander of N.A.T.O. forces battling the Taliban, met George W. Bush in the Oval Office. After a few minutes of picture taking and question shouting from journalists, the two men were alone. “Tell me what you think you can do,” Bush said.
“First on my list is to get the Europeans outside the wire and into the fight,” McNeill answered.
“You need to do this,” Bush agreed. He told McNeill that they would speak regularly and that the president would ask from time to time what equipment or additional troops the general needed to fulfill his mission. “And you have to tell me,” Bush said. “Don’t worry what anyone else thinks.” He warned McNeill, however, “I’ve got to take care of this Iraq thing first.”
That same week, Bush convened a National Security Council meeting about the exploding poppy problem in Afghanistan. The president wanted more effort on eradication. He appointed a new ambassador-level State Department coordinator on drugs and corruption in Afghanistan, Tom Schweich, and he directed the White House drug policy czar, John Walters, to get more involved. The Pentagon, State, D.E.A., and C.I.A. were all to be part of a new counternarcotics and poppy eradication effort, even though each of these agencies harbored different views about the wisdom of poppy eradication in Afghanistan. Before their differences were resolved, money began to flow. Congress allocated more than $1 billion to overt counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan for the two years between October 2006 and October 2008.9
Bush’s adaptation of Plan Colombia for Afghanistan constituted the most significant change in U.S. policy in the war since 2002. Yet in early 2007, the Iraq war dominated media coverage, and the change was not clearly visible to the public. Bush’s intentions were hardly disguised, however. As the new ambassador to Kabul, the president nominated William Wood, a career foreign officer who had served as the U.S. ambassador to Colombia since 2003. As the new ambassador to Pakistan, Bush nominated Anne Patterson, who had been Wood’s predecessor in Bogotá. For the next several years the two most important American diplomats in South Asia would be career officers who had spent years fighting Colombia’s cocaine cartels and Marxist insurgents under the premises of Plan Colombia.
The most dramatic aspect of Plan Colombia was the aerial spraying of coca crops with herbicide. In late 2006 and early 2007, for Afghanistan, Bush advocated strongly for spraying poppy crops from airplanes in the heart of Taliban country. He repeatedly told John Walters, “You have got to spray. I’m a spray guy.”10
One reason there was little debate in Washington about Bush’s turn in Afghan policy was that leading Democrats backed the president’s new priorities. On January 28, 2007, the same week as the “urgent” cabinet meeting on the opium problem, newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi led a Democratic congressional delegation to Kabul to meet Karzai. They talked mainly about Pakistan and poppy. On drug eradication, the Democrats told Karzai flatly, “Future U.S. aid to Afghanistan could erode if poppy cultivation was not brought under control.” Karzai admitted it was “a deep problem” and promised that his government would “eradicate as much poppy as it could.”11
William Wood landed in Kabul that spring. No longer did American ambassadors live in cramped trailer parks. The same construction boom that had brought Orange Julius to Bagram Airfield had delivered a new high-rise apartment building for diplomats. It rose next to a large, barricaded, modernized embassy building. As Condoleezza Rice put it, “The big, ugly building . . . sent the message that, for better or worse, we were in Afghanistan for the long run.” The ambassador’s residence now constituted a penthouse on the high-rise’s top floor, with an outdoor veranda offering dramatic views of the Kabul skyline.12
Wood was a tall man who fired off one-liners and enjoyed “the occasion
al cigarette and Scotch on the rocks,” as the ambassador’s British counterpart, Sherard Cowper-Coles, put it. He enjoyed history and English literature, especially P. G. Wodehouse. Wood arrived in Kabul with every reason to believe that the White House’s plan to spray Afghanistan’s poppy fields would work. During 2006, his final year as ambassador to Colombia, aerial coca crop eradication had reached its apex. American-supplied aircraft sprayed glyphosate, a herbicide sold commercially under the brand name Roundup, on 400,000 acres of Colombian coca, the most ever destroyed from above. The Colombian government declared a triumph.13
Wood’s message was “It worked okay in Colombia, but it should work really well in Afghanistan” because the terrain in Kandahar and Helmand was flat and the poppy crop was tightly packed in a few green belts irrigated by rivers. A few spray planes and armed helicopters could swoop north to south over the Helmand Valley, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of poppy. “If people would just come to their senses, we could eliminate this problem in three weeks,” Wood told Tom Schweich, who agreed with him.14
Spraying would affect British forces deployed to Helmand. Wood sought an ally in the new British ambassador to Kabul, Cowper-Coles. He invited him one evening for drinks on his veranda. Looking over the parapet “through the dust-filled night at the uncertain flickering of Kabul’s lights,” Wood laid out his vision. To Cowper-Coles, it conjured up the Robert Duvall scenes in Apocalypse Now. Wood hoped to wipe out poppy fields in Helmand and Kandahar before the end of 2007. Cowper-Coles feared crop dusting in the Taliban heartland “might risk turning an insurgency into an insurrection.” The British ambassador dubbed Wood “Chemical Bill,” a moniker that stuck.15
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There was another way to consider the problem of drugs and the Taliban. Perhaps it was not that opium caused war. Perhaps it was war that caused opium. Afghan farmers had grown poppy crops for centuries. But it was not until the Soviet invasion and the scorched-earth civil wars that followed that the opium economy grew to such scale. The fighting destroyed irrigation systems, “leveled the cities, cratered the roads, blasted the schools,” as a British-funded report written for the Karzai government put it. Half of all farms were abandoned. The state collapsed in many rural areas. In these dire conditions Afghan farmers turned to opium production to survive. The returns per acre were higher, the crop was unusually weatherproof, and it did not require elaborate storage or marketing. An opium crop could be raised in just six months and stored as a form of savings. This was also Karzai’s explanation about the spread of poppy across his native Kandahar. After the Soviet invasion, “there was complete despair,” he told an American television audience in 2006. “No Afghan family was sure if they were going to have their house the next day.” They needed ready cash, “so poppy came to Afghanistan out of an extreme desperation.”16
Since the 1980s, there had been a self-reinforcing cycle in the opium belt: War created desperation, which made opium attractive for poor farmers, which created profits for warlords, who then used those resources to fight for greater wealth and power, which created more desperation for poor farmers.
Britain had agreed to become the “lead nation” on narcotics policy after 2002 because Afghan heroin was sold on British streets and Prime Minister Tony Blair was personally enthusiastic about the drugs portfolio. British and Australian Special Forces formed a clandestine paramilitary force, Task Force 333, to raid labs in Helmand and Kandahar and to mentor Afghan special police. Yet British development specialists opposed militarized poppy eradication and aerial spraying—they thought it was counterproductive, unfair, and unsustainable, a view shared in much of the British military, whose generals concluded they had enough of a fight on their hands in Helmand without aggravating farmers and itinerant laborers. The British developed an integrated policy emphasizing public education, demand reduction, and the development of alternative livelihoods for farmers that might compete with the allure of poppy prices. The approach made sense on paper but it was obvious by 2006 that it was having little to no impact on crop production.
Britain’s Foreign Office also allocated tens of millions of dollars to pay Afghan farmers to eradicate their own poppy fields. The money yielded corruption, agricultural market distortions, and confusion. Career MI6 officers assigned to work on Afghanistan, who were drawn into these antidrug schemes, concluded that the British narcotics brief was a waste of time and effort. The C.I.A. had been blinded to Afghanistan’s political deterioration and the Taliban’s revival by the distractions of Iraq and the agency’s relentless, narrow focus on Al Qaeda, these British officers felt. But they were willing to concede that MI6 had been similarly blinded by opium.17
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Faizullah Kakar, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of public health, was the member of Karzai’s cabinet best qualified to evaluate the risks that might be posed to the Afghan people by aerial spraying. He had grown up in Kabul but earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Earlham College in Indiana, a master’s degree in toxicology from Indiana University, and a doctoral degree in epidemiology from the University of Washington. He had later worked for the World Health Organization in Pakistan. Kakar understood that glyphosate was widely used by American gardeners and farmers, who poured about one hundred million pounds of the stuff on their lawns and fields every year. The Environmental Protection Agency judged that glyphosate had “low toxicity” for humans, “slight toxicity” for birds, and was harmless to fish and bees. Apart from requiring a warning label, the E.P.A. did not restrict the chemical giant Monsanto from manufacturing or selling Roundup to Americans. Yet Kakar seriously doubted that it made sense to douse Afghan fields with the stuff.
“You are telling us about how safe it is,” he told Doug Wankel, the D.E.A. official in the Kabul embassy. “Remember D.D.T.?”18
He was referring to dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, a synthetic insecticide developed in the 1940s. Initially popular and believed to be safe, D.D.T. turned out to be highly persistent in the environment and was ultimately classified by the E.P.A. as a probable human carcinogen. Kakar pointed out that Afghanistan had “a much more agricultural economy” than the United States, that runoff from fields went straight to local water supplies, and that many Afghans were “totally dependent” on farming. The country could not afford a massive spraying campaign based on current scientific assessments, only to discover later that glyphosate was not as safe as advertised. Kakar propounded his views before Karzai and the full Afghan cabinet. He said that while the Americans “used thousands of pounds of the same spray safely in California,” the United States did much better at protecting its water sources, whereas Afghans “drink from open watercourses.”19
“This is the most popular chemical in the world,” Bill Wood pointed out. Yet Wood and other advocates for spraying underestimated the asymmetries of power in these arguments with Afghans. Most Afghan decision makers (and for that matter, many Colombians) were not in a position to independently judge the long-term public health risks of glyphosate. And why should they accept E.P.A. judgments as gospel, given America’s own history of regulatory failures involving chemicals and public health?20
Amrullah Saleh and other cabinet ministers objected to the spraying plan on the grounds that “Taliban propaganda would profit greatly from any spraying.” Karzai’s instinctive sense was that if farmers and itinerant poppy pickers in Helmand and Kandahar looked up and saw American helicopters thundering over the horizon as dusters poured chemicals onto their fields, they would recall the atrocities of Soviet aerial warfare and blame Hamid Karzai. Gradually during 2007, while remaining cautious about offending President Bush, but with the unified support of his cabinet, Karzai made his position clear to the Americans: He opposed aerial spraying. He also opposed any role for the U.S. military in fighting drug production.
Karzai battled within his cabinet to impose his view. In September 2007, Vice President Ahmad Zia Massoud, a brother of the la
te guerrilla leader, published an opinion piece in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper arguing in favor of aerial spraying. Karzai blew up at him at a cabinet meeting the next day, by Massoud’s account.
“You wrote on your own will or did the foreigners tell you to write it?”
“I don’t have any contact with any foreigners but I know you do,” Massoud answered.
“Oh, brother, those years have long gone in which you could print out your own money and do and say whatever you want,” Karzai said, referring to the years of the early 1990s when Massoud’s brother was Kabul’s leading power.
“Mr. President . . . we all know the foreigners brought you to Uruzgan in U.S. helicopters.”
“If you want to resign, you can resign right now,” Karzai said.21
The problem was, for the advocates of Plan Colombia in the Bush administration, without aerial spraying in Helmand and Kandahar, there was no realistic path to reduce opium production enough to hurt the Taliban. The State Department contracted with DynCorp, a private security firm, to train Afghan forces to eradicate poppy fields one by one, on the ground. Taliban and armed drug gangs attacked the Afghan forces. Without the efficiencies of aerial spraying, all the ground eradication programs combined never eliminated more than 10 percent of the national poppy crop. “Ground eradication will never work,” the D.E.A.’s Mike Braun argued. “You are going to have to hit it hard from the air.”22
The British encouraged and supported Karzai’s conclusion that aerial spraying was dangerous. Schweich raised the possibility that the United States could spray in Helmand and Kandahar even without Karzai’s direct permission. His opponents in Washington replied with classified memos arguing that if the United States proceeded on its own, “you would be conducting chemical warfare” in violation of international law.23
