Obama’s Afghan Mistake

That is how Richard Holbrooke once described the Bush administration’s counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan. And even if one allows for the Holbrookian propensity to exaggeration and bombast, the ambassador had a good point. The addiction to eradication — the president had declared himself to be “a spray man” — confounded efforts to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign. And so it was slightly jarring to hear President Obama, in outlining his broader Afghanistan strategy this morning, mention the need for an expanded counternarcotics program. The drug trade “undermines the economy” and “fuels the insurgency,” he said. While the full details and costs of the revitalized counternarcotics program are not yet clear, Yochi Dreazen reported in this morning’s Wall Street Journal the effort will be ambitious. The “counternarcotics offensive” will be focused in the Helmand River valley — not just the main source of the opium trade but a hotbed of the insurgency — and on providing “alternative livelihoods” to poppy cultivation. Under this plan, reports Dreazen,

This is an anodyne description of what promises to be a genuinely bold stroke. Helmand province, along with Kandahar just to the east, is by far the highest incidence of insurgent attacks in Afghanistan. The British forces who have been fighting intensely there since 2006 will also be increased from 8,000 to about 10,000, and Helmand will be a focus of many of the additional U.S. troops to be deployed under the Obama plan. Tackling the drug trade problem simultaneously — and Helmand accounts for about half the total Afghan poppy crop — surely means that the levels of violence will skyrocket. The tactic of providing alternative livelihoods, particularly substituting wheat for poppies, is hardly a guarantee of counterinsurgency success, as Holbrooke himself once made plain: