Drugs and Afghanistan

Mohammad Qasim Fahim was Ahmed Shah Massoud’s successor as the top Tajik military commander in Afghanistan. He served as Defense Minister in the initial interim administration of post-Taliban Afghanistan, and then when Hamid Karzai ran for his first term as president backed Karzai’s main rival (a Tajik) and was sidelined from the first Karzai administration. But facing a stronger electoral challenge the second time around from another Tajik, Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai reasonably chose to try to broaden his electoral appeal by bringing Fahim back into his coalition as a Vice Presidential candidate. Fahim has also spent considerably more time fighting the Taliban than any American on the planet, dating way back to the mid-1990s.

He’s also, it seems, heavily involved in drug trafficking and apparently the US government is considering going after him.

Maybe I just have a soft spot in my heart for Tajik warlords, but this seems mildly insane. We recall from The Wire that when the Baltimore Police Department succeeded in taking down the Barksdale crew this didn’t make demand for illegal narcotics suddenly vanish. What happened instead was that putting a major drug supplier out of business proved to be a boon to rival drug operations. The situation in Afghanistan seems to be precisely the same. The only sources of non-trivial revenue in Afghanistan are drug trafficking and American aid money. The Taliban doesn’t get any American aid money, so they rely on drug trafficking. And drug trafficking is lucrative because lots of people outside of Afghanistan are addicted to heroin. Apparently, Marshall Fahim also gets money from drug trafficking. But taking him out doesn’t eliminate the demand for drugs. And it doesn’t reduce the supply of drugs available to the Taliban. Instead, it puts the Taliban’s competition out of business, thus increasing their revenues.

As an added bonus, it’ll create huge new political headaches for Karzai!