Report by Afghan Inspector General’s Office Says Counter-Narcotics Efforts in Afghanistan Have Been Forgotten by the White House and Rest of US Government

October 31, 2014

The latest quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has just been released.The report can be accessed here.

It has a few positive accomplishments to mention (like Hamid Karzai is no longer the president of Afghanistan). But the report’s coverage of the dramatically increasing amount of opium poppies being cultivated in Afghanistan makes for depressing reading. The billions of dollars spent by the U.S. government on counter-narcotics appear to have been wasted, like so many other US Government reconstruction programs in Afghanistan through lack of attention or managerial ineptitude.

But the report’s authors take the White House and the rest of the US government to task for dropping the ball on the Afghan counter-narcotics program. According to the report, “counternarcotics appears to have fallen off the agenda of both the U.S. government and the international community, despite the fact that it is impossible to develop a coherent and effective strategy for a post-2014 Afghanistan without taking full account of the opium economy. As long as insurgent commanders are able to fund themselves through the opium trade, and as long as corrupt officials profit from the illicit economy, there may be few incentives for making peace in some areas of the country”

For our neglect, the narcotics traffickers we can expect a windfall opium crop over next couple of years. And we in the West can expect recorfd amounts of heroin on our streets.