Johann Hari

This week, the British army is battering its way into a staggering, starving region – a place where half the people are suffering from malnutrition – to hack to pieces the only profitable crop they have.

Sayed Rikan is a terrified 43 year-old opium farmer from the East of Afghanistan, and he told me yesterday, “My village depends on growing opium for us to eat. We grow the [opium] poppies for survival, for life." He explained his reasons for this risky decision: "We have a long drought in Afghanistan, for six years now, and the poppy does not need much water to grow. And please understand: one kilo of opium makes $150. Seven kilos of wheat makes $1. When you are hungry and your children are dying, this is no choice.”

Some Sayeds will fight back against Our Boys to protect the thin row of poppies standing between them and starvation – in which case they will be shot.

Sayed is not alone. Some 60 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP stems from the heroin trade – and the US and Britain are committed to systematically destroying it. Sayed has already seen them try to do this once. “Last year, a plane appeared at midnight in the sky and it let out a long green spray over our fields,” he says. “Animals started to die and the people outside began to cough and be sick. The next day, all the crops died. Not just the poppies. The wheat, the fruit trees, everything. Now nothing grows there.” The British and Americans officially deny this policy of “fumigation”, so no compensation has been paid to Sayed and his neighbours, even though they starved for weeks as they trudged to new land. (Some were so disgusted they trudged off to join the jihadists of the Taliban). A similar US-led campaign of chemical poisoning has been linked to an epidemic of cancers in Colombia.

“Yes, we expect them to come to our new fields,” Sayed says. The Afghan Human Rights Organisation says that British troops oversee the destruction of opium fields “though chemicals and manually, where they hack the crops apart with sticks.” Never mind that most Afghans are already dead by the age of 45. Never mind that a quarter of their children never reach their fifth birthday. There’s a “war on drugs” on, and the Anglo-American alliance puts this attempt to wipe out heroin – which their own officials say is a “totally ineffective” way to reduce drug use back home – before Afghan life.

While British troops touched down for this programme of economic vandalism in the Helmand province, Tony Blair was proudly unveiling a plan for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in London. Nobody noted the irony. But so long as the international prohibition of drugs continues, any plan to unite and rebuild Afghanistan might as well be stuffed into a crack-pipe and smoked. Criminalizing heroin has one effect, and one effect only: it hands the industry over to armed gangsters. That’s bad enough on a British council estate, where they fill the area with guns and panicky sweat. But in Afghanistan, it means 60 percent of the country’s economy is controlled by armed gangs – increasingly accountable to the woman-hating, psychopathic Taliban – who have a vested interest in keeping the country in chaos. They will always have more cash and more guns than the elected government – so Hamid Karzai, the elected President, will remain forever the Governor of Kabul, gazing out at a narco-state he does not control.

This “war on drugs” is a massive gift to international gangsterism, radiating out from Afghanistan across the world. It hands them a £5bn-a-year industry, tax-free. This isn't merely the view of leftie legalizers like myself –the gangsters themselves privately gloat about it. Michael Levine, America’s most distinguished federal narcotics agent, worked undercover with some of the world’s most powerful drugs cartels, and came face to face with (amongst others) la Mafia Cruzena, the Bolivian cocaine cartel. In his book ‘Fight Back’, he explains, “I learned that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it… The only US action they feared was an effective demand reduction program back home. On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business’.” When Levine recounted these comments to his boss – the officer in command of the paramilitary operation attacking South America – he replied, “Yeah, we know [military operations] don’t work, but we sold the plan up and down the Potomac.” There are Taliban warlords near Sayed right now drawing exactly the same gleeful conclusions as Jorge Roman.

Sometimes the drug warriors try to present a more moderate face than the slash-and-burn smoking through Helmand towards Sayed’s village. They propose ‘crop substitution’, which sounds like a good idea at first: rather than simply trash crops, why not pay the farmers to grow something else instead? There have been a few pilot schemes here and there, but the plans always smack up against an insurmountable problem: to replace the opium industry of Afghanistan alone would cost $5bn, which is more than the combined aid budgets every country in the world is offering to the country. It is not going to happen: crop substitution is a mere propaganda pill, offered to make the policy of destroying the livelihoods of desperately poor people sound less vicious. For Sayed, it mean being offered seven kilos of potatoes – and that’s it.

There are two possible futures for Afghanistan. In the first, Hamid Karzai responds to the clear democratic will of his people – “everyone I know wants the poppies to be legal,” Sayed says, and the Afghan Human Rights Organisation agrees – and legalises the supply of heroin. Only once Karzai can tax the country’s single biggest product and reclaim it from criminal gangs is there any chance of extending democratic rule beyond Kabul.

But the other, darker Afghanistan looks more likely – one where Karzai ignores his people and follow the dictates of the ex-drug user George W Bush to create a “drug-free Afghanistan”. This is a recipe for endless civil war, with a heroin-fatted Taliban launching more and more raids to burn girls’ schools and trash any rebuilding, far onto the historical horizon. “I do not want to live in that Afghanistan,” Sayed says softly.

POSTSCRIPT: Comments very welcome at johann@johannhari.com.

For more of my writings on drug legalisation, click on the 'archive' button above and then click on 'drugs'.