Panel I of a Hearing of the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

Statement

Panel I of a Hearing of the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs - Counternarcotics Strategy and Police Training in Afghanistan

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REP. DAVID SCOTT (D-GA): Thanks, Mr. Chairman. And I commend you for this hearing. It's a very, very important one.

Ambassador, this issue is indeed a drug -- illicit drug issue, but more than anything else, to me, it is an economic issue of huge dimensions, particularly when you consider that opium production now accounts for one-third of Aghans' GDP. And Afghans produce 93 percent of all the opiates in the entire world.

The United States and our allies -- international allies, we cannot do this without a full commitment of the Afghani (sic) elected officials. I am not so sure that we have that. We've had all kinds of reports where elected local officials in Afghanistan, for fear of a backlash from their constituencies, will not commit themselves to fully implementing the eradication program.

And you mention in your report, for example, that you favor strong -- as a part of the strategy -- aerial eradication. However, during my recent trip over to Afghanistan, we put that question to President Karzai, and he does not favor that. He does not want to consider aerial eradication.

So when you put all of this together, and you put the reports that are coming out of the local officials, I think we need to really ponder the realistic -- put a realistic picture on just how serious and how committed the local and the elected officials of Afghanistan can practicably be, given the economic scale of this.

And then I think that we might want to look at some other alternatives. For example, the World Health Organization has clearly pointed out the huge cost for opiate derivatives such as morphine and codeine.

Wouldn't it make sense to begin to view this in a more realistic way? I mean, I would love for it to go down. I would for love us to control, but the economy -- the whole nature of this situation says this thing is going to be here. Where is the effort to try to move and to get Afghanistan interested in realizing that this such an important part of the economy and realizing that the high cost of those pain-killing and -reduction drugs are so desperately needed to bring that cost down that we could channel some of this into that area?

So I guess my question is two-pronged here: I don't believe that the local and the national elected officials of Afghanistan practically can do what we want them to do, because of the political consequences to themselves and the huge economic benefit (of that commodity ?).

And then secondly, why can't we begin to channel their interests into the legitimate -- more legitimate uses of the opiate production to help bring down the cost of codeine and morphine?

MR. SCHWEICH: Congressman Scott, these are two questions which we have grappled with very, very seriously over the past several months. And you're right on the money; there are two really critical questions. One, how do we handle the lack of the political will at the provincial and local level, because there is rampant narco- corruption. And we feel the best way to do it is through better police training, better vetting of police chiefs and governors, and that is all in process right now. The U.S. military and the Department of State, working with Afghanistan and several international partners, particularly the Germans and the EU, are working to try to help the Afghans make sure they have less corrupt officials in place.

It's going to be a challenge, though. Wherever there's a lot of narco-money, there's a lot of corruption. But there has been success. As I said, in the north we are seeing less narco-corruption. They're not -- it's not eliminated by any means, but less.

The issue about channeling the massive opium production into more licit channels is something I had about four or five people work for several weeks on and look into very, very closely. The arguments goes -- and it has some appeal when you first look at it -- is that you've got a shortage of painkillers in the Third World, particularly in Africa, where people are suffering from AIDS; you have an abundance of extra excess opium in Afghanistan. Why not find a way to get that opium to those people? And we think that's a very noble cause, and we looked into it very carefully.

Let me just outline for you the challenges with that approach, and explain why at this point we don't think it's a feasible way to do it. You have -- the price for legal opium is less than half the price for illegal opium. So our initial problem is there is no incentive for a farmer or a trafficker or anybody to sell to the licit market when they make two or three times as much selling it as heroin to narco-traffickers, who kill our children around the world.

So the first challenge that we had was, how do we deal with the fact that there's no incentive for a farmer to switch, since we already offer crops that can make that kind of money, the price that you would get for illicit opium? One thought that came up was possibly subsidizing the difference between illegal and legal opium, so that the farmer would get the higher price rather than the lower price. And we looked into that possibility too and we were asked by very high-level people in the State Department to look into that, so we took it quite seriously.

The problem with that turned out to be that if you guarantee a high price, a price that's two or three times higher than they can get for any other crop in the world, there's only 14 percent of the population involved in opium production right now. And based on experiences in Guatemala and some other countries where this was tried, we felt that then everybody would start growing opium. You basically would have this big opium state where everybody was subsidized to grow opium. And 193,000 hectares, which is already an oversupply, more than the world needs, of opium, would double or triple or quadruple. And everybody would be growing it, and it would cost many billions of dollars a year in subsidies in order to do that.

The third problem is infrastructure. In India, for example, there are 6 (thousand) or 7,000 hectares of legal opium or poppy being grown -- 6 (thousand) or 7,000 hectares, not 193,000 hectares like you have in Afghanistan. Even in India, where there's an established police, law enforcement mechanism, an infrastructure to process the opium, they have a 30 percent bleedoff rate to the illegal market. And right now, Afghanistan, with, you know, 20 or 30 times as much opium, much less of a central government presence -- we don't think there'd be any way to control it, to manufacture it or to distribute it.

And finally you might have read this article in The New York Times about the issue you were talking about, about three weeks ago, about opium in Africa. And they said the first obstacle is not lack of supply. The first obstacle is cultural. Many cultures in Africa frown upon use of painkillers. And so the first thing we'd have to do, before we could get that distributed into Africa, would be again a public information campaign to get people to accept it. Then we'd have to have a way to distribute it in a way that would get to the people and again not be bled off to the illegal market.

Our conclusion was, Congressman, that while the idea does have some appeal, and we don't discount it at all, in Afghanistan at this time, it's not a realistic way to go. We decided we'd like to proceed more the way we've done it in Thailand and Laos, which also have large opium problems. And they did it with a balance of incentives through alternative crops, rather than opium, and disincentives through interdiction and eradication. So that's where we've decided to go.

REP. SCOTT: If I may, Mr. Chairman, let me go back to the one point that -- one of the issues that I raised, that you didn't respond to, in terms of the difference.

Can you comment on why you continue to push for the aerial eradication? And the president of Afghanistan is opposed to that. What's that all about?

MR. SCHWEICH: Yeah, actually in our strategy, we advocated for non-negotiated eradication. So we don't go to the poor farmers; we go to the rich people. Although the strategy says there's two ways to do that. One is manually with force protection, and the other is aerially.

The policy of the United States is not aerial eradication. The policy of the United States is forced, non-negotiated eradication of wealthy landowners and corrupt officials. The Afghan government will decide how to implement that, and we will defer to them.

So we really aren't pushing for aerial eradication; we're pushing for non-negotiated eradication. There's two ways to do it: on the ground or by the air. So whatever the Afghan government decides, that's what we'll do.

REP. SCOTT: Okay, and finally, Mr. Chairman, if I may, I'm a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. And we have a meeting coming up this weekend in Iceland, where we'll be going. So your answer to this question would be very helpful.

Regarding the efforts of our fellow NATO members in Afghanistan, would you comment on which nations are contributing a great deal to this effort? And also, would you share with me which nations, in your opinion, need to contribute more?

MR. SCHWEICH: I think that, for the purpose of the situation and international relations, I will comment more on the ones that are contributing significantly. And if you want me to touch -- (chuckles) -- on or talk about other issues, I'm happy to do that.

REP. D. SCOTT: All right --

MR. SCHWEICH: The principal partner for us in fighting drugs in Afghanistan is the United Kingdom. And there's been a lot of press about a riff between the U.S. and the U.K. on that -- I just don't see it. I work with my U.K. counterparts on a regular basis; they come visit me, I visit them, we go to Afghanistan together. They've put hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. They have their troops in Helmand province, too, so they have a vested interest in getting rid of this problem, since that's where more than half of the opium is.

We are having more regular coordination meetings. They have gotten Task Force Helmand, which is the ISAF group in Helmand Province, more involved in the counternarcotics effort, and I've seen an even redoubled effort on the part of the United Kingdom over the past several months to help combat this trade. So if there's one country I would say is helping the most, I would say it's the United Kingdom.

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