Recent meeting at Canadian embassy with impatient U.S. envoy left Afghan politicians feeling bitter and insulted
GRAEME SMITH
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
August 5, 2008 at 4:12 AM EDT
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Long-simmering tensions between the Afghan government and its Western supporters over the opium trade have broken out into angry confrontations behind closed doors recently, including a stormy recent meeting at the Canadian embassy.
Accounts vary about exactly what happened when U.S. Ambassador William Wood sat down with his Canadian counterpart and a gathering of Kandahar's political leaders on July 12, but five sources who attended the session described it as a strong sign of rising U.S. impatience with the local government's stand on drugs.
Afghan politicians also expressed bitterness after the meeting, saying they felt insulted by the U.S. envoy and complaining that an argument over opium smuggling had, ironically, broken down a discussion about the kind of agricultural policy that might encourage farmers to grow legal crops instead of narcotics.
Afghanistan's flourishing opium trade has ranked among the most contentious issues between the Kabul government and its backers in recent years, but the disagreements have rarely surfaced in public. One of the strongest recent statements came from former U.S. counternarcotics official Thomas Schweich, who published an article in The New York Times Magazine accusing President Hamid Karzai of obstructing drug-control efforts and saying that senior government officials are corrupted by opium money. The Afghan President vehemently rejected the claims.
Even before Mr. Schweich's article was published, however, such disagreements were already emerging in private. The meeting at the Canadian embassy last month had been intended to bring together diplomats, local politicians and fruit traders to talk about promoting agricultural exports. Illegal exports weren't on the agenda, but soon dominated the conversation.
People who gathered in the Canadians' well-appointed conference room appear to have understood the meeting differently if they spoke English, Pashto, or both languages, but Kandahar's provincial council chairman, Ahmed Wali Karzai - who speaks English and understood the U.S. envoy without translation - said he remembers the discussion turning toward drugs when Mr. Wood complained that agricultural exports are hampered by Afghanistan's reputation as a source of opium.
"He said there is a drug problem that stops everything. Nobody can trust," said Mr. Karzai, who is the younger half-brother of the President. "For example, if we ask for a visa to take our fruit to Europe, that will be one of the issues."
When asked whether the U.S. ambassador was accusing Kandahar's leaders of involvement in the illegal trade themselves, Mr. Karzai said: "I don't want to make a comment on that. You know, you heard, that's the way it was. These are all political issues. None of these issues are legal. Drugs, these are accusations, these are perceptions. There's no proof for the last seven years."
A spokesman for the U.S. embassy declined to comment.
What apparently galled the Afghan politicians the most was the U.S. ambassador's suggestion that even Russia and Central Asian countries, barely more developed than Afghanistan itself, were reluctant to accept legitimate Afghan trade because of the opium problem.
"They say the Russian President says to build a wall around Afghanistan to stop drugs," Mr. Karzai said. "You know, the people who are sitting in that room had family members killed by the Russians and they had wounds on their bodies from the Russian times," he said, referring to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. "They didn't take it well, the elders, the members of the provincial shura [council]. They were very unhappy about this. They didn't like the Russian example."
Mr. Wood left the meeting before it finished, saying he had other obligations. He had promised to attend the session for an hour, and he had already stayed 15 minutes more than the time allotted.
Canadian Ambassador Arif Lalani, who by all accounts had distanced himself from the exchange between the Kandahar leaders and his U.S. counterpart, tried to continue the discussion about agricultural policy but the participants apparently lacked enthusiasm.
"The U.S. ambassador walked out," a provincial council member said.
"The meeting lost its taste afterward."
It was a disappointing result for the Afghans, who had been hoping to get help with their fruit exports during harvest season. Kandahar's streets are lined with vendors selling heaps of fresh melons, tomatoes and other produce at this time of year, often getting low prices because of plentiful supply and a need to sell quickly before their products spoil in the summer heat.
Prices are also depressed by the monopolistic practices of Pakistani traders who control the business by handing out loans that oblige their Afghan counterparts to sell at fixed prices, Kandahar's politicians say. Despite rising fuel and food costs around the world, farmers on the Afghan side of the border get only $1 for 4.5 kilograms of grapes, and about 50 cents for 4.5 kilograms of tomatoes, and local residents say the prices haven't changed in decades.
The Kandahar council had been hoping to break the Pakistani traders' control of the business by setting up their own financing system and improving cold-storage facilities.
Promoting rural agriculture is often described by Canadian officials, and many leading experts, as the best way of slowly replacing Afghanistan's opium with legitimate crops.
The United States also funds rural development, but U.S. officials usually emphasize a need for eradication of the poppy fields.
Disagreements have emerged among NATO countries in recent years about eradication, with some U.S. officials pushing for aerial spraying of the fields and facing resistance from their Canadian and British counterparts.
In his recent article, former U.S. counternarcotics official Mr. Schweich also criticized the Afghan President for failing to tackle high-level corruption.
"He [Mr. Karzai] perceives that there are certain people he cannot crack down on and that it is better to tolerate a certain level of corruption than to take an aggressive stand and lose power," Mr. Schweich wrote.
The President's lack of action against major drug barons was defended by Barnett Rubin, a prominent academic on Afghan affairs, who argued in a blog posting that Mr. Karzai cannot enforce rules that might jeopardize the fragile government.
"He has decided not to lose power trying to do things that might fail disastrously," Mr. Rubin said.
In public, Mr. Wood has played down the rifts over counternarcotics.
"The upcoming season offers new hope for new progress against opium and heroin production in Afghanistan," the U.S. ambassador told a June conference in Kabul, according to a transcript of his speech. "The international community is increasingly united against drugs."
