Gaming the system: how Afghan opium underpins local power.

• Author: Mankin, Justin
• Position: ANDREW WELLINGTON CORDIER ESSAY - Report

Afghanistan's non-democratic local powers grow stronger while international efforts to ballast Kabul's government falter, so robust central governance continues to remain elusive to Afghanistan's leaders. Despite the influx of foreign aid, development agendas, democratic processes and urbanization at the center, localities at the state's periphery--predominantly in the south--are heavily reliant on self-administration and service provision. Entrenched local administrative procedures, based on authority from tribalism or local power brokers' influence, continue to be resilient, while faith in the state is decreasing. Central incompetence, reinforced by endemic corruption and entrenched tribal mores, have fomented a growing sense of confusion and impotence within the country's institutions. This deterioration represents a failure of governance for the Afghan state: the inability to deliver services to the populace. 70 percent of the Afghan population still resides outside of the centrally administered areas in historically fragmented communities, creating political bulwarks that the Afghan government must breach to attain domestic legitimacy and build strong national institutions. Yet some successes are rightly highlighted. In the wake of the 2001 Bonn Agreement, ripples of change advanced: the foundation of the bicameral legislature was poured, de jure human and equal rights were established and the ground for democratic growth was tilled. These successes, however, should be noted with caution for one needs only to look to the fraudulent elections of 2009 to see that these young democratic fields are salted with many of the despotic power structures that have characterized their landscape for centuries.

Some of the very global economic forces that should, theoretically, overthrow the local political status quo are actually playing an important role in sustaining it. Afghanistan's local power brokers are using new opportunities arising from global integration within existing traditional power structures to augment and entrench their power in ways previously unachievable. The term "traditional," however, has two principal limitations. First, there is a question of how much today's tribal structures resemble those of the past; the structures are not static. Second, today's power brokers are revising and overturning "traditional" structure hierarchies, albeit governing in a similar fashion. As Barnett Rubin notes astutely, "Tribalism in the modern world is more often a strategy of state control or social resistance than the culture of an autarchic, kinship-based world that no longer exists, if it ever did." (1) Nonetheless, structures akin to those that have long prevailed still remain to the detriment of the state.

Among the most important forces that sustain these structures--and the focus of this essay--is economic integration. Specifically, it looks to the recent evolution of the Afghan opium trade as a case study. The opium trade includes all opiate-related activities bringing revenues to Afghanistan, from water rights and land tenure for poppies to heroin processing and trans-shipment.

Some observers paint a unidirectional relationship between the evolution of the opium trade and the Taliban insurgency, with the rise of a well-funded insurgency driving increases in cultivation in areas under their control. The impulse to view the opium trade as an indicator of instability is informed by at least two notions. (2) First, civil conflicts rage where they are financially viable--a function of natural resources ripe for exploitation--and eventually devolve into a conflict about the economics of war itself. This was convincingly articulated in Paul Collier's influential work on greed and grievance. (3) Second, the American experience in Colombia can be projected onto Afghanistan. There is considerable pressure to see the Taliban as analogous to the FARC and the drug-terror nexus as symbiotic and linear. It is natural for policymakers to view similar problems as analogues of one another, though it can come at the sacrifice of lasting policy solutions. The view of the Taliban as being similar to FARC may largely be shaped by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's prominent role in both Colombia and Afghanistan. (4) Regardless of the logic to which they subscribe, the account is reductionist; it misses the richness of understanding and implications for policy that comes from viewing the opiate economy as a function of local power dynamics rather than simply insurgency or criminality.

Observers of Afghanistan rightly argue that the drug economy is evolving; modes of opiate production are consolidating in the southern provinces as poppy cultivation declines in the northern provinces. Some argue that the opium economy is reflective of successful counternarcotics (CN) campaigns in the north and the insurgency-fomented instability in the south, and further, that the southern consolidation is illustrative of progress in the fight against the drug trade. Touting the northern poppy cultivation decline as a success, Antonio Maria Costa, director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), claimed in September 2009 that, "The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market...the regional divide of opium cultivation between the south and rest of the country [mirrors] the security situation between the lawless south and relatively stable north of the country." (5)

I argue that the opiate economy's evolution is both a consequence of Afghanistan's local power structures and a cause of their further entrenchment. Local actors have developed innovative ways to participate in the drug economy consistent with their power typologies. It is this dynamic--not simply counternarcotics and insurgency--that has shaped the opium economy. Furthermore, despite regionalization, the trade is more nationally integrated than at any previous time. Progress in the drug war or insurgency should therefore not be measured linearly, and attempts to categorize successes and failures as such miss important considerations. Viewed through the lens of local power, the opium trade's southern consolidation is not a progression, as UNODC would claim, but rather a regression. It portends significant implications for the future of the democracy-building and development projects Afghanistan.

In making my case, I will show that Afghanistan's local power structures principally have two typologies: those powers formed by the Afghan state, and those powers formed by Afghan society. The terms "state" and "society" are problematic when applied to Afghanistan as they do not accurately reflect what they purport to describe. "State" is here meant to capture the various attempts by domestic and foreign powers to politically consolidate the territory of Afghanistan. "Society," in contrast, describes the myriad societies and functions associated with tribal and traditional forms of governance. I use this paradigm to counter arguments about the causes and implications of change in the opiate economy. From a strategic perspective, my account aims to contribute to the larger discourse on local power in an era of globalization.

MAPPING LOCAL POWER IN AFGHANISTAN

In exploring the continued importance of Afghanistan's local power structures, it is useful to map two local power typologies: those powers that form out of the state and those borne of society. The projection of this simple map is informed by two prevailing theories of the genesis of local power. The first argues that local despotic power structures are the form, function and manifestation of the state, even a democratic one. The second claims that the source of local power lies with society. (6) Using both of these theoretical approaches, a simple geographic model can be generated: local power structures in the north of Afghanistan are generally more a product of the state, while those power structures in the south are more reflective of society. In very general terms, good proxies for evaluating the state and society model are ethnicity, which is distinctly geographical in Afghanistan, and proximity to the governmental center, Kabul, as will be explored below. Tajiks and Uzbeks largely control authority and local power in the north with their power stemming more from the state; in the south, local power is generally controlled by Pashtuns and the Baluch and is borne more of society. This paradigm is too simplistic to capture or account for the myriad exceptions to it, but it is useful in examining the evolution of the drug trade from the perspective of...