Afghanistan's drug war has failed

After spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to eradicate the fields of poppies that produce opium in Afghanistan, the United States suddenly announced in June that, in the words of special Af-Pak envoy Richard Holbrooke, "eradication is a waste of money." Instead, NATO and Afghan forces are trying to focus on the nexus between the opium trade and Taliban financing. Nobody has watched these developments more closely than Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. A frequent visitor to Afghanistan himself, he also has a staff of some 360 locals "crisscrossing the country," tracking the growth and sale of narcotics. In a series of interviews with NEWSWEEK's Christopher Dickey, Costa talked about the surprising drug story behind the war story in Afghanistan. Excerpts:

Why give up on poppy eradication?
Last year the Afghan government eradicated 5,000 hectares of about 159,000 that were cultivated. More than 70 military and militia men were killed and a couple of hundred million dollars were spent—tens of thousands of dollars per hectare—to destroy 3 percent of the crop. Eradication is supposed to have a double function: first, to reduce cultivation; and second, to deter farmers from planting. But nobody is deterred by a 3 percent risk. The money would be better spent on development assistance, like hospitals and schools.

You've suggested that Afghanistan produces much more opium than the world actually consumes.
Oh, yes. Since 2005 the Afghans have cultivated almost twice world demand. The bottom should have fallen out of the opium market. It has not. And we have been wondering what happened to the opium, where it is. Now, in a number of military operations in the southern provinces, NATO troops have found huge amounts, which is evidence that the Taliban have been sitting on huge stockpiles.

Prices dropped last year to about half what they were in 2005, and there are signs the Taliban are hoarding to try to corner the market. At one point, you suggested they might actually have tried to discourage poppy cultivation themselves to bolster the prices of their opium reserves.
Yes. And what the recent NATO military operations are showing us is that the Taliban are much closer to running the business than we thought. NATO has been seizing precursors, seeds, opium, laboratory equipment, arms, pickup trucks—all sorts of insurgent equipment in drug markets and warehouses that have been attacked. All of this suggests the insurgents are very, very, very heavily involved in the trading itself. This is, in a sense, surprising. We had thought they were just taking a cut of about 10 percent. We believed that they were motivated, basically, by religious and political extremism. But it looks like they are actually doing it for the money. Whether it's for themselves, or whether it's to finance Taliban crime cartels or their cause around the world, this is very hard to say. But I think it deserves very close scrutiny.

How much money are we talking about?
Wholesale in Afghanistan alone was about $3 billion last year. Worldwide retail—what's sold on the streets of Naples or Marseilles or London—was about $52 billion.

Where's the biggest group of consumers?
Iran. It has a very high addiction rate: the Iranian government says a couple of million people. We say up to 3 million people—6 percent of the population. They do opiates in general, with a lot of morphine, and heroin.

Is the Iranian government helping or hurting the fight against the trade?
The Iranians have invested a significant amount of money and blood. They have a lot of vulnerability because of their proximity to Afghanistan. They lost 3,200 border guards and policemen in the fight over the past five years. And they have put up an infrastructure along the border that consists of hundreds of kilometers of ditches. The effort is definitely gigantic, and they are very effective as a police force.