Not that it is a new observation, but the US government is of the opinion that it can export lessons from fighting narcotrafficking funded insurgents from Colombia to Afghanistan. The latest piece on this theory comes to us from the CMS: US applies Colombia antidrug lessons to Afghanistan.

Long term readers will not be shocked to learn that I am highly skeptical of such potential applications of lessons from Plan Colombia to Afghanistan, if anything because I think that the empirical evidence demonstrates that the anti-drug effort in the Andes has largely been a multi-billion dollar, decades long failure.

Indeed, the article does pay at least some heed to that notion:

After nearly 10 years and $6 billion in US aid, Plan Colombia’s focus on massive forced eradication of coca crops has only recently made a dent in the South American country’s cocaine production.

This is something of an understatement, and at a minimum begs the question of whether a 10-year effort that only makes a “dent” in cocaine productions is worth a $6 billion price tag. One especially wonders this when one considers that the “dent” in question doesn’t really equate to a significant diminution of supply on the street or even a significant increase in price (not to mention the increase in cultivation in Peru).

The lesson that are supposedly to be export to Afghanistan is the notion that crop eradication alone is not sufficient to stop illicit drugs and that some sort of rural development program is needed. Now, anyone with knowledge of Plan Colombia may find this somewhat ironic, as allegedly the Plan was supposed to focus heavily on crop substitution and rural development from the beginning, but instead a focus on crop eradication and security issues ended up dominating the policy (and took far and away the lion’s share of the funds). If anything, this is not a new idea, per se, nor some newly minted lesson generated from years of trial and error.

Also, part of the problem here is the perception that things have radically improved in Colombia to the point that the country in on some clear trajectory to having solved, or at least substantially contained, it major problems of violence and criminality. The actual facts are that while things are better in Colombia they are better in relationship to one of the country’s worse spates of violence in the early part of this decade, not better is the sense of the problems coming to a close. At the moment the situation is simply closer to the norms of the last several decades of Colombian history, which is hardly peace and tranquility. There is still a massive internal displacement problem, an ongoing guerrilla war with two active guerrilla groups, substantial narcotrafficking, continued paramilitary violence and so forth. In other words, “better” does not mean “all the troubles have been fixed.” And yet, to read a lot of US press coverage, one would get the impression that there is light at the end of the tunnel. This is sadly, not the case. There are still numerous endemic problems in Colombia that are far from being solved.¹

Also, in regards to Colombia and Afghanistan parallels, while there are some factors that are quite similar, they are hardly identical cases. To wit:

Bruce Bagley, a drug expert at the University of Miami, says that exporting elements of Plan Colombia to Afghanistan is premature. “In Afghan­istan, nation- and state-building has not been achieved yet, so lessons from Colombia are basically irrelevant,” he says. Colombia had a well-established government, army, and economy when Plan Colombia was launched in 2024.

No small thing, that. Even with the troubles of the Colombian (which has been described as “weak” if not “partially collapsed”) and it is far, far more developed that Afghanistan’s state. At the moment, the Afghan state has to figure out basic governance beyond Kabul. As such, it seems rather unlikely that it will be asserting itself effectively into the poppy-cultivating hinterlands.

1. I am not the only one to take this view. I attended a presentation at the US Institute for Peace this summer made up of numerous Colombianists, and they all had a similar prognosis. [↩]