By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 29, 2020
The good news is that Afghanistan has developed a new
industry that gives it something valuable to export other than heroin. The bad
news is that it is methamphetamine.
As everybody who became an expert in the chemistry of
methamphetamine cooking by watching Breaking Bad knows, one of the
hurdles to setting up an illegal methamphetamine factory is the acquisition of
ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in most meth production. For
years, meth producers relied on such laborious measures as buying vast amounts
of over-the-counter cough syrup and slowly extracting pseudoephedrine from it,
thereby producing the raw material out of which methamphetamine ultimately is
synthesized. Afghanistan is not a country that one would describe as richly
blessed with natural resources, but it is home to wild-growing Ephedra
sinica, a shrub native to northern China, out of which may be extracted
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
A thousand pounds of dried ephedra plants can produce
about 17 pounds of meth, which Afghanistan-based journalist Kern Hendricks
reports is worth about $50,000 locally. In foreign markets, that quantity
of meth ultimately might fetch as much as a few hundred thousand dollars.
Of course, the Taliban bosses are up to their turbans in
the meth trade, imposing a “tax” on drug producers that puts millions and
millions of dollars a year into their coffers.
That new money is pumping new life into the operations of
a resurgent Taliban. And the Taliban is patient.
One of the Trump administration’s final acts in office
will be attempting to execute a hasty and headlong retreat from Afghanistan,
with the president having announced, via Twitter, a complete withdrawal of U.S.
troops by year’s end, which came as a welcome surprise to the Taliban and a
nasty surprise to the U.S. military. Trump being Trump, the announced move may
or may not actually come to pass, but the Taliban expects that it will see a
partial or complete return to national power in the vacuum left behind by the
expected American drawdown. It already is able to boast that when the Trump
administration was seeking to conclude American affairs in Afghanistan, it
mainly negotiated with the Taliban, not with the Afghan government.
Joe Biden’s attitude toward Afghanistan so far does not
differ radically from Trump’s; rather than a complete withdrawal, he says he
favors leaving a small counterterrorism force in the troubled country. “A Biden
administration strategy of maintaining a residual force — even a narrowly
focused one — would require a renegotiated deal with the Taliban, which the
insurgent movement has already rejected,” the Associated Press reports. “The
Afghan government, which has complained bitterly about being sidelined in U.S.
negotiations with the Taliban, wants the deal scrapped entirely.” Biden, like
Trump, views the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan principally as a drain on
national resources that could be better used filling potholes in Poughkeepsie —
“nation-building at home,” Biden calls it, echoing language used both by Donald
Trump and by Barack Obama.
Since first invading Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda nearly 20 years ago, the United States consistently has
failed to achieve its goals there. Brute force is not sufficient: In 2001,
there was bumptious talk of bombing Afghanistan “back into the Stone Age,” a
hollow threat to a country that already was there. The country is backwards,
savage, and intractable. Americans have found it very easy to kill Afghans but
impossible to govern them. And the Afghans, unhappily, have not had much more
luck governing Afghans.
One of the fundamental reasons for our failure in
Afghanistan is the persistent inability of the United States to comprehend the
character of our adversary there: The Taliban is not first and foremost an
atavistic Islamic religious movement — it is that in the minor part, but it is
first and foremost a crime syndicate.
Like the old Sicilian Mafia or the modern-day Hamas, the
Taliban is both a violent criminal organization and a provider of social
services and municipal or quasi-municipal governance in the areas it controls.
Both the 19th-century Sicilian Mafia and the Taliban simultaneously acted as
enforcers of public morality and entrepreneurs in criminal vice; if that Mafia
history is redolent of the Saudi mutaween, it offers a reminder of
Sicily’s history as an Islamic emirate and the seat of Muslim power in Italy.
Sicily’s Mafia, like the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, has always had a political
and religious character. So has the Taliban. And, like the drug cartels of
Mexico and similar enterprises elsewhere in Latin America, the Taliban was able
to insinuate itself opportunistically into public affairs because it was able
to compete successfully with a weak state. The Taliban was born in the poppy
fields as much as it was in the madrassas.
Either the Afghan state will control the Taliban or the
Taliban will control the Afghan state. Until September 11, 2001, the United
States had no urgent belief that what happens in Afghanistan matters here. We
learned our lesson the hard way, but we have nonetheless begun to forget it.
The problems of Afghanistan may not be as close to us as the problems of
Mexico, but in both cases there really is no alternative to building state
capacity and effective institutions. The partial reversal of earlier successes
in Colombia remind us that this is an uncertain business in which even modest
advances must be defended jealously for decades before they become truly
durable.
We do not want to turn Afghanistan into an American
garrison state or colony, and it is long past time to admit frankly that the
optimism of the “democracy project” of the George W. Bush years has proved
unfounded. At the same time, American interests will not be served by
abandoning the Afghan government to a revanchist Taliban and thereby courting
anarchy or worse.
Above all, we should not enter into the delusion that we
can make a deal with the Taliban any more than we can make a deal with the
Mexican drug cartels or the mob, or indulge the even more dangerous delusion
that we can simply wash our hands of Afghanistan — because if we do, the meth
will be the least of our troubles there.
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