Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xii, 281 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-3976-7.
The phenomenon of opium cultivation in Afghanistan has been so widely publicized that it is very tempting to equate “Afghanistan” with “opium.” According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, opium output in Afghanistan in 2018 totalled 6,400 tonnes, making up the overwhelming volume of what is produced worldwide. Afghanistan’s opium trade has been the subject of a range of useful scholarly and popular studies, including Alain Labrousse’s Afghanistan: Opium de guerre, opium de paix (Éditions Mille et Une Nuits, 2005), Joel Hafvenstein’s Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier (The Lyons Press, 2007), Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009), and David Mansfield’s A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan (Hurst & Co., 2016), as well as a steady flow of specialist and technical reports produced by the UN and the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) in Kabul. Bradford’s excellent book very usefully augments this existing literature, locating attempts to prohibit opium in Afghanistan in a rich historical context sensitive to both the international pressures encountered by Afghan governments, and to challenges arising from processes of state formation.
The book blends discussion of international history and the history of Afghanistan in an accessible fashion. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the author adopts a largely chronological approach to dealing with the evolution of both drugs policy in Afghanistan, and the Afghan state itself. He notes at the very least a correlation between the modernizing impetus of King Amanullah (1919–1929) and the disposition at the time to see drug addiction as somehow anti-modern. He goes on to show how Afghanistan’s push to engage with the wider world following its joining of the League of Nations in September 1934 saw its approach to drugs increasingly entangled with the wishes of the United States, which during the Second World War was interested in purchasing Afghan opium. He then offers a meticulous case study of the 1958 prohibition of opium by the Afghan government and of the way it sought to pursue this prohibition in the province of Badakhshan. Subsequent chapters deal with the “hippy trail” of the 1960s, the effects on Afghanistan of the War on Drugs of the Nixon Administration, and the origins of opium cultivation in Helmand, where recent efforts to address the problem of poppy cultivation have failed rather spectacularly (see David Mansfield, The Helmand Food Zone: The Illusion of Success, Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, November 2019). The central argument of the book is well captured in Bradford’s persuasive conclusion that “what has developed, arguably over the last century, and has become most acute in Afghanistan in the last decade and a half, is the perception that drugs are the cause of instability, crime and political chaos. However, underscoring these conceptions is a lack of historical understanding about the mutually constitutive relationship between opium and state formation that has shaped the conditions that now characterize the opium trade in Afghanistan. Throughout the last century, drug control often amplified the issues of governance that gave rise to, or sustained, either nonstate actors or criminal organizations” (220–221).
Poppies, Politics, and Power fills a notable gap in studies of Afghanistan, and does it very well. The author makes admirable use of his sources to bolster a credible and interesting line of argument. In doing so, he contributes to a growing literature which challenges older accounts of state formation in Afghanistan that understate both Afghan agency, and the powerful effects of interactions between actors in Afghanistan and players in the wider world, all with objectives of their own to realize. In this respect, he walks alongside other researchers such as Robert Crews, Nile Green, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, B.D. Hopkins, Magnus Marsden, and Mujib Rahman Rahimi, whose works have raised important new questions about how Afghanistan and Afghans have connected with the wider world, in material, political, and ideational terms.
Bradford’s careful analysis also brings into sharp focus an issue which he does not confront directly, but which Afghanistan’s recent experience itself has illustrated, namely that there can be acute tension between on the one hand the requirements of an international legal regime that has developed incrementally through the interaction of a multiplicity of actors, and on the other hand the policy settings that an evidence-based appraisal of a complex problem might dispose one to adopt. The international narcotics regime is strongly prohibitionist in its thrust, but bitter experience suggests that in the real world, strict prohibitionist approaches can have dramatic unintended consequences that thwart the realization of the objectives that the proponents of prohibition have advanced. The experiences stemming from the “wars on drugs” mounted by successive US governments have not been especially happy ones. Prohibition drives up prices, attracts criminal networks into drug distribution, and can set the scene for attempts by cashed-up cartels to corrupt processes of state building in order to advance their own nefarious interests. Just as the factors that have contributed to opium cultivation in Afghanistan are complex, so too are the policy settings that might succeed in confronting the problem. Bradford’s penetrating analysis leaves open the question of whether an approach grounded in the requirements of international law is more likely to be part of the solution, or part of the problem.
William Maley
The Australian National University, Canberra