Afghanistan, Opium, and Western Intervention: On a Talk in Athens, Ohio

On Thursday, November 12, 2009 Ohio University graduate student and Afghan native Roshan Noorzai spoke in an event hosted by People for Peace and Justice (Athens, Ohio) and the Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies. His talk addressed the topic, "What can the U.S. do to help the people of Afghanistan?"

While I have many things to say about Noorzai's talk, I will focus for now on one issue that came up time and again from the audience: What can be done about opium trafficking? Noorzai's response was, to my mind, his best moment of the evening. His answer went something like this:

The people in Afghanistan for the most part do not engage in the illicit use of heroin or opiates. To that extent, opium production and distribution is not an Afghan problem but a Western one. If the question really is what the U.S. can do to help the people of Afghanistan, then the question of opium production can function as a self-centered diversion.

The best part of his response was to then ask why people in the West, and particularly in the U.S. (the topic under discussion), do not likewise see arms production as a Western problem. Yes, heroin production leads to death and suffering around the globe--but nowhere on the scale of weapons production! How many more Afghan lives are destroyed by western-made weapons than American lives by heroin?

Noorzai was pointing to one contradiction (among many) in the liberal and progressive western responses to the problems in Afghanistan: The focus inadvertently ends up coming back to how the war hurts Americans (through heroin production) rather than on the suffering of the Afghan people. Instead of focusing on the mayhem and murder we unleash upon the Afghan people--what we claim to be concerned with by staging such talks in the first place--we all too often end up focusing on issues that change that focus, such as heroin production, political corruption, and the status of Afghan women.

On this last point, Noorzai also mentioned that the West is very quick to criticize the danger posed to Afghan women by the Taliban, but we tend to overlook two other things: 1. the warlords from the northwest of the country are equally brutal and repressive; and 2. the danger to Afghan women from the war itself is much more profound, whether we're talking about death and destruction from bombs and guns, psychological destruction from the loss of family members and refugee life, rape and brutality by soldiers from all sides, and the utter destruction of daily life.

Fight first to stop the brutality brought on Afghan women by the war--for which the U.S. is largely responsible--and then let the Afghans themselves work on the social problems they face, which has much more chance of success (as defined by Afghans themselves) once the bombs stop falling and the foreign troops go home. In short: If you want to help Afghan women, stop bombing them!

One angle that Noorzai did not pursue is the likely role of the U.S. government itself in the boom in heroin production since the 2001 invasion. With evidence available about CIA drug running during the Vietnam War and the Iran-Contra era, there is no reason to assume that similar operations are not underway now in Afghanistan. We might do better looking at our own government rather than at Afghan poppy growers when we face the major rise in heroin use in our towns across the U.S.

In any case, despite my discomfort at Noorzai's apparent embrace of "westernization" and "development," I believe that his response on the opium issue goes a long way toward teaching us that even benign, "humanitarian" interventions in the lives of Afghans by progressives in the U.S. can often end up in self-centered gestures that divert attention from the people we claim solidarity with. Such gestures all-too often function as imperialism with a happy face.

--George Hartley