Where’s the U.S. Strategy for Counternarcotics in Afghanistan?

Back in September, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing examining the Trump administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, and David Helvey, the official performing the duties of the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, testified before the committee. Representatives questioned them on a variety of important issues: the status of women and girls in Afghanistan, the Russian bounty program, and the continuation of humanitarian aid following U.S. withdrawal.

One subject, however, merited not a single word: Afghanistan’s booming drug trade.

The omission may not have been an accident. As the Taliban and the Afghan government have commenced peace talks and Afghanistan has reentered the national spotlight, President Trump appears more eager than ever to use his last few months in office to fulfill his campaign promise to bring the Afghan conflict to a close. Just yesterday, the new acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, announced that the U.S. will withdraw thousands of American service members from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021. Meanwhile, contrary to Trump’s declarations, many senior military officials worry that a rushed exit could be the downfall of the U.S.-Taliban peace deal forged earlier this year.

Against this background, the illicit drug trade is a bit of an embarrassing subject, one that brings to the foreground the dire situation in Afghanistan today. And with President-elect Joe Biden set to take office on Jan. 20, 2021, it’s worth thinking more about how the U.S. may choose to approach counternarcotics strategy in the region moving forward.

It’s not that nobody is talking about the threat the Afghan drug trade poses. Facing pressure from the U.S. envoy to release a final round of 400 prisoners from the Taliban’s list—a precondition to get intra-Afghan negotiations going—Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has sounded repeated alarms that such releases would worsen the country’s drug crisis. He argued that the release of these prisoners (many of whom were involved in the Afghan drug trade) posed a grave risk, not just to Afghanistan’s stability but also to international security writ large. As the British newspaper The Times reported:

“If drugs go through the roof in the United Kingdom and Europe, all your leaders have been part of this,” Ghani told The Times in one August 2020 interview. “If amphetamines reach the shores of the United States we should know that these are the consequences, and if these people commit crimes, there’s shared international responsibility.”

Despite such concerns, the U.S. continued prodding Ghani to make the concessions necessary for the Taliban to come to the table.

In a conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations on Aug. 13, the Afghan president conceded:

The request for release came from the United States. Without that, we would not have convened the Loya Jirga. But the decision on the release is made by the people of Afghanistan. And it shows a very strong national consensus for moving. Until this issue, there was a consensus on the desirability of peace, but not on the cost of it. We’ve now paid the major installment costs and that means this will have consequence. The list is likely to pose a danger, both to us and to you, and to the world, because it has drug dealers and hardened criminals. That has been shared with all our allies and friends. But again, this is a step that we’ve considered a necessity. (emphasis added)

Ghani may have a political motivation for these warnings, which stress the pain of the concessions he is making with the releases—perhaps overly so. Then again, a number of commentators have argued that his warnings are not wrong.

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