Is Afghan Poppy Crackdown Working?

It looks for now like it is, as the President Hamid Karzai’s hardline stance against the drug crop may be having a significant effect.

The top U.N. drug official is heading to Afghanistan to check out reports that farmers are heeding government calls for a “holy war” on the rampant drug trade by slashing opium cultivation.

Foreign and Afghan officials are forecasting a drop of between 30 percent and 70 percent in this year’s crop, as once verdant expanses of poppies are being sown with wheat instead.

In eastern Nangarhar province and southern Helmand, poppy production could be down by more than three-quarters this year, the officials said, though reliable statistics are not yet available.

The reports suggest at least an initial response to President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-sponsored campaign against the illegal Afghan narcotics industry, which last year supplied an estimated 87 percent of the world’s opium, the raw material for heroin.

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Skeptics say drought, disease and falling opium prices — not Karzai’s eradication program — are responsible for the drop in cultivation.

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The United Nations said that although bad weather and plant disease significantly reduced the opium yield last year, the total output was about 4,200 tons. It valued the trade at $2.8 billion, or more than 60 percent of the country’s 2003 gross domestic product, and warned that Afghanistan was turning into a “narco-state.”

Under pressure from the United States and Europe, Karzai has called for “jihad,” or holy war, against the drug industry, which is believed to benefit guerrillas, warlords and corrupt officials.

Foreign diplomats give some of the credit to Mohammed Daoud, a former militia commander and the government’s top anti-narcotics cop. Daoud, a deputy interior minister, summoned provincial police chiefs to Kabul and told them they would be fired if they didn’t halt poppy cultivation.

Daoud said in an interview he expected cultivation to fall by 50 percent to 70 percent this year.

A Western official involved in counternarcotics was more cautious, saying the decrease could be 30 percent or more.

Even worst case, this is a vast improvement. So what’s the pocketbook hit for Uncle Sam right now?

The U.S. government is paying thousands of people in Helmand and Nangarhar $3 a day to clean irrigation ditches and repair roads instead of planting poppy.

Really, just a pittance. Is it worth it, along with the continued military efforts for stability?

Farmers in two traditional growing areas of Nangarhar told an AP reporter they stopped planting poppies because they were told to by powerful local landowners and security officials.

“It was good business, but they said we should stop, and wait and see,” said Abdul Wahid, a bearded sharecropper resting under a stand of mulberry trees next to his fields.

“If we get help, maybe it’s gone for good. If not, we’ll plant again.”

Yes. Yes. Yes.