The Quiet Violence of Empire by Wesley Attewell;

Author:Wesley Attewell; [Attewell, Wesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC015000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography, POL059000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Middle Eastern, SOC042000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Developing & Emerging Countries
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2023-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Stabilizing Southern Afghanistan

Beginning in 2007, the U.S. military’s assessment of counternarcotics as mission creep slowly shifted. Military leaders were undoubtedly concerned by the latest geographical reorganization of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. The UNODC’s 2007 poppy cultivation report maps these shifts, showing how Afghanistan’s insurgency and drug trade were flourishing in the “same lawless terrain,” often in “mutually reinforcing ways.”123 Within a year, concerted eradication efforts had increased the number of poppy-free provinces from six to thirteen. Yet levels of poppy cultivation remained at an all-time high. Figure 12 explains this contradiction by highlighting a concentration of poppy cultivation in Helmand and Kandahar.124

The UNODC seized upon this geographical trend as clear-cut evidence for treating poppies as a military problem. Helmand and Kandahar were not only two of the “richest” provinces in Afghanistan, they were also neo-Taliban strongholds. If poppy cultivation was once a symptom of poverty, it was now inextricably linked with insurgency. Neo-Taliban insurgents, the UNODC argued, were funding their operations by extracting rents from local narco-economies. For this reason, the U.S. military needed to become more directly involved in the counternarcotics effort. Otherwise, Afghanistan would collapse under the combined “blows of drugs and insurgency.”125

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