John Oliver discusses the United States Agency for International Development, why the Trump Administration has gutted it, who is being impacted, and how the Cha Cha Slide can help us get to the bottom of this.
Never ask a woman her age
Never ask a man his salary
Never ask what why USAID spent $1.46B in Afghanistan to increase opium production.
USAID tried to change this state of affairs, spending $1.46 billion on “alternative development programs” from 2002 to 2017. The goal was to encourage farmers to move away from opium by providing fertilizers, equipment, and other assistance for non-opium farming. But some of that money “inadvertently supported poppy production,” the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported in 2018.
In other words, Afghan farmers were happy to take USAID’s help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there, according to SIGAR. Overall, the size of the opium fields grew from almost nil in 2001—the Taliban had tried to enforce a drug ban on the eve of the U.S. invasion—to 350,000 hectares (an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island) in 2017.
The failed war on drugs was not the only USAID boondoggle in Afghanistan. In a 2021 review of the war effort, SIGAR noted that USAID spent $335 million on a power plant that was rarely turned on, $175 million on roads that floods washed away within a month, and $7.7 million on an industrial park that had no power. Asked by SIGAR about its poor planning, USAID declared that micromanaging these projects would be “counterproductive” to the goal of “increasing Afghan self-reliance.”
The reflexive need for seemingly erudite and outspoken TV progressives to leap to the defense of a program that has long done more harm than good is dizzying. That is, until you remember who is planning to acquire HBO.
From an article dated last year:
“This is false. USAID never intended to support opium poppy cultivation or the Taliban, and in fact the United States sought to stem it. The White House cites a right-wing news site’s account of a 2018 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) — whom President Donald Trump recently fired — that found that USAID efforts to fund alternative development projects during the George W. Bush administration (2005 to 2008) had failed. The Taliban before 2001 had successfully banned poppy cultivation, but the U.S. invasion led to a power vacuum that was exploited by poppy growers. USAID was the lead U.S. agency for implementing alternative development projects, modeled after a more successful effort in Colombia, but the report documented how conflicts among agencies and with allies hampered the effort. It’s a stretch to now, years later, accuse USAID of helping the Taliban.”
Also, before you come at me for posting a WaPo link, the author of that Yahoo article is a hardline Libertarian and right wing weirdo. He’s literally an editor of Reason Magazine. So, I’ll take the WaPo article over him just about any day of the week.
USAID never intended to support opium poppy cultivation or the Taliban, and in fact the United States sought to stem it.
Is the US or the Taliban responsible?
The simple facts are that opium production was high under the US influenced government of Afghanistan of the 1970s, decreased 10-fold by 2001 under the Taliban, and then increased 30-fold and more under the US to the same level as in the 1970s
The power vacuum created by the invasion of Afghanistan is not the same as USAID funding poppy farming. Correlation is not causation. When the Taliban was overthrown local poppy growers took advantage. We didn’t move in there with the intent to grow more opium.
