Seven years into our attempts to transform Afghanistan into a stable and progressive country, we still have not been able to credibly answer an important question:
What is the business plan for a stable and progressive Afghanistan?
It may seem glib talking about “business plans” for Afghanistan when people are dying daily (US soldiers, impoverished citizens, etc), but it is actually a fundamental issue. We can do all the “peacekeeping” or “peacemaking” we want, but without a viable economic plan things will simply regress towards the preexisting and terrible “mean” for that country. By analogy, a bicycle not in forward motion is unstable and will fall on its side. It’s no different (but much more complex) for a society; without a legitimate story of “what they are going to do?”, all the stabilization effort will be for naught.
In contrast, the situation in Iraq is actually much simpler. Despite large factional problems between the Sunnis/Shiites/Kurds, the country has a clear and viable business plan. “We export oil, which we can extract at low costs and sell to the world. Over time, we hope to use the profits from this to branch out into other value-add things.” That’s actually a pretty good plan. Things can get gummed up in the implementation, but the basis is sound.
Compare this with Afghanistan. What is the business plan here? Decades of war have ruined the infrastructure and decimated the educational base. They have no cheap oil or natural gas to export. No valuable mineral resources are sitting near the surface that can be developed. No shipping ports from which to ship things in or out of to other countries. Seemingly the one great business plan is “We can grow Poppies, extract opium, and sell that for a profit internationally.” To be fair, this is a GREAT business plan, but it also one that currently concentrates power in the wrong hands, and one that the international community finds unacceptable. There are only two potential paths forward:
#1 Try to find an alternate set of crops that Afghanistan can grow with a “comparative advantage” There are efforts to try to do this. See the WSJ’s article “US Seeds New Crops to Supplant Afghan Poppies” ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125021357982431177.html). There are however perhaps two potentially fatal flaws here: (i) Commodity food prices are low and are heavily subsidized in advanced western countries – this makes achieving any “comparative advantage” or even “comparative parity” impossible. How to truly make a sustainable profit here in a poor and not technologically advanced economy is a hard problem. (ii) Poppy and the opium derived from it are high-value goods – this is where the money is. Doing this is swimming against a swift current – good luck.
#2 Honestly embrace the truth that there is a lot of money in Afghan Poppy (Opium) cultivation and swim with the tide instead of against it. This is an unpalatable choice – very few people are “pro opium”, yet it must be weighed against the alternatives. In a very real way the alternative is “more deaths” of US soldiers and civilians, “more expense” in continuing operations to fight the underground economy. As distasteful as bringing Poppy and Opium cultivation into the legitimate economy is, it is perhaps the best option for giving Afghanistan a legitimate and stability maintaining “business plan”.
So as a country, we have three options:
1. Give up. The pack up and leave option is tempting, but bad news. Let's remember that the original response to terrorism that brought us to Afghanistan (with international support I might add), was a direct result of the abdication of responsibility following the post-Soviet implosion of Afghanistan into a failed state.
2. Be righteous and continue to ignore the "business plan problem". We can swim against the firm economics of Poppy/Opium cultivation and pour massive funds into trying to develop Afghanistan into a more modern and self progressing economy that can find a new "business plan". This is super hard and the chances of success are low, because the infrastructure and educational base are very low. (No one is lining up to build factories or call centers in an unstable Afghanistan). This will take decades, if it is even possible. People will continue dying, and large scale resources will be spent.
3. Abandon righteousness, and legitimize the only business plan that has proven to be successful in the region in the last 30 years. Yep, it's Poppy/Opium production. Let's have the courage and pragmatism to acknowledge this and to bring it into the legitimate economy. Make it legal, and drive the corruption out of it. Use it to build the tax base, and move forward.
Let's face facts... if we cannot solve the business plan problem, we cannot be successful. This is not a partisan issue - it's a fundamental issue of "Do we have the courage to take the steps that will succeed, even if we find those steps highly unappealing?"
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