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ASSISTANT SECRETARY SCHWEICH: Thank you for the opportunity to meet with you here today and discuss the counternarcotics program in Afghanistan, the new strategy that we put together, as well as police issues that are related to that counternarcotics strategy.
In January of this year, there was a cabinet level meeting at the White House in which an initial briefing showed what you all had referred to today, that there would be another increase in the opium production in Afghanistan this year between fifteen and twenty percent over last year. This was very alarming for those who are present and as a result, they asked Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and drug czar John Walters to convene a interagency committee to look seriously at the strategy for combating opium in Afghanistan to develop new ideas and new approaches to leave nothing off the table and to come up with a new integrative strategy that would help resolve the problem.
I had the honor of being appointed the coordinator of that effort. We had representatives at very senior levels from the Department of Defense, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Office of National Drug Control Policy at a series of meetings in which we discussed the increase in production and how we might go about resolving that and developing a better strategy to do so. And what I'd like to do today is talk to you about what the results of that set of meetings was and how it's reflected in our new strategy, how we've been able to take that strategy both to the international community and the Government of Afghanistan and how we are now in the process of implementing it. And I have to say I do believe I'm optimistic this strategy will work if we allow it to proceed.
The first thing we noted as we met to discuss how to refine the strategy was that while there is an overall increase across the country, approximately 17 percent this year over last year, there are new trends in opium production and trafficking across Afghanistan that had to be taken into account as we developed the strategy. If you'll look at the map that's on the TVs and next to me here, for the first time ever, we see a bifurcation of opium production in Afghanistan. If you look at the provinces that are in dark blue or light blue, they are either zero poppy provinces or provinces that are experiencing sharp reductions in opium production and that's basically a line about 10 o'clock on the map right across here, whereas in the south, there are alarming increases in opium production. So what we first realized was we cannot have a strategy that is Afghan wide. It has to recognize that there is in fact a sharp downward opium production, particularly in key opium producing provinces like Balkh and Badakhshan which are now close to zero poppy and an alarming increase in Helmand, Kandahar, Farah and some of the southern provinces.
Another fact we noted as we were doing our deliberations for the new strategy was that those provinces which have reduced to zero opium or near zero opium, which are the blue and light blue provinces there, are among the poorest provinces in Afghanistan, not the wealthiest provinces in Afghanistan. It appears that the poor farmers in Afghanistan are now turning away from opium production in large numbers, whereas you look in Helmand Province, one province now has 53 percent of all the opium production in all of Afghanistan. It's never been anything close to that before.
Helmand is the wealthiest province in Afghanistan. There is infrastructure, there are roads, irrigation, access to markets, and many alternative crops available to the farmers in Helmand. So we knew we had to look at things very differently than we had in the past. And in fact the new UN survey that just came out two weeks or three weeks ago confirms that. It says -- and I'll just quote here, "Opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no longer associated with poverty," quite the opposite. They've noted the same thing in their own activities and surveying that they have done. So we wanted to develop a strategy that, one, consolidated the gains in the north; made sure there's no resurgence in that area. We wanted to learn the lessons that we (inaudible) from the successes in the now thirteen poppy free provinces in the north. And we wanted to determine why the wealthiest provinces in the south, such as Helmand and Kandahar, are experiencing massive increases in opium production that offset the gains that we're experiencing in the north. And the answer was referred to, I think in the statement of Mr. Pence and the chairman. It was pretty clear what was happening here.
Poppy cultivation is no longer associated with poverty in Afghanistan. It is associated with two other factors: one, insecurity. In the north, there's relative security, less incidents of bombings and attacks, less Taliban presence and we see people turning away from opium production because there is security. In the south, particularly in Helmand Province, where more than half the poppy is grown, there is insecurity. The Talaban is more active there. There is less of an opportunity for law enforcement activity in Helmand and therefore there is an increase in poppy production.
The other point that we noted was it relates to the political world that was referred to by both the chairman and the ranking member in their statements. In the north we've seen governors who, for whatever reason and despite in some cases rather difficult tasks, have decided to enforce the law and prevent poppy production. And they have shown political will and even in poor provinces have been able to stop farmers from growing opium. In the south and in the central part of the country there's been less political will, more corruption on the part of police chiefs and less willingness to fight the opium trade.
So as we develop a strategy, we wanted to make sure we consolidated the gains in the north, had greater political will and recognize that insecurity is the principle reason poppy is grown and therefore there would have to be a more coordinated effort for the counter-Taliban and the counter-opium efforts. And those were the principals that informed the strategy that you have in front of you here today that changed the way we approach the poppy problem in Afghanistan.
The first area we looked at was public information. The Taliban is the master of public information. They were defeated badly militarily over the past two years. They've regrouped. They've gone more toward insurgency type tactics and most importantly, they've gone more toward an aggressive information campaign, trying to convince farmers that the international community will not stay, that it does not have the perseverance to stay, that you ought to grow opium, because that's the way to make money and don't side with the government or the law. Therefore, we knew we had to have a much better public information campaign than we had in the past. It is a very vital part, since the Taliban has such an effective campaign, that we have an equally effective counter campaign on public information.
In the past the public information campaign has focused principally on what I would call traditional advertising methods, posters, billboards, radio advertisements, even television and those areas of Afghanistan have television. And while that has had some effectiveness and some provinces, it really isn't the way things operate in Afghanistan and it isn't the way the Taliban operates in Afghanistan. The way the Taliban intimidates people into growing opium and convincing people that the coalition forces will lose is word of mouth, going from city to city, tribe by tribe, of trying to convince them on an individual basis that this is the way to go, so we knew we had to focus more on word of mouth and individual activity as well. As a result, the new public information campaign focuses less on advertisements in radio and more on meeting tribe by tribe, village by village, shura by shura, engaging Islamic leaders. I know Congress Rohrbacher has come in. He's advocated that approach and we've adopted that approach in all the provinces.
We now have poppy elimination teams expanding throughout the country, meeting with tribes right now as we speak in several provinces, meeting with religious leaders, adding fora, bringing various Muslim-type kits -- information about how it's again Islam to grow poppy, how it's causing an increasing drug addiction rate in the country, ruining relations with neighbors and undermining Afghanistan's standing in the international community. This is what we did on a pilot basis last year in Balkh and Badakhshan. You see almost no poppy there this year.
The UN survey that just came out said that was the principle reason opium farmers turned away was Islamic reasons and relations to its shuras. And so we have expanded dramatically the public information campaign to do a word of mouth situation. We couldn't get into Helmand last year, which is why we weren't effective there. This year ISAF has cooperated with us, provided us force protection for these activities from August 25th through September 6th of this year. Three hundred Afghan police and 66 internationals with support from ISAF, the NATO forces in Afghanistan, spread out through Helmand Province and they issued the same message in the south that we were able to successfully issue in the north last year and now they're going to Nangahar, Kandahar and numerous other provinces where we were unable to get the message out adequately in the past.
We are optimistic that the use of Islamic leaders, local shuras and the cooperation of the military is going to improve our public information campaign so that it rivals that of the Taliban and that we will be able to get the message out more effectively this year. And it's actually going on as we speak. I had really good reports over the last couple of weeks of the activity and I actually went out to Afghanistan three weeks ago to coordinate on those activities. So we think we've significantly refined the public information campaign to meet the Taliban threat and the way they handle things and we do expect to see positive results. ISAF, which shied away from counternarcotics messaging in the past has now embraced it fully. There are biweekly meetings with ISAF to coordinate the public information campaign across the country and we think the Afghan people finally are now getting a consistent international message and a consistent message between civilian, law enforcement and military authorities that, as the ISAF posters says and the ISAF messaging says, "Poppy breeds insecurity, insecurity hurts your life" and that's the messaging that's going across. So the first assignment to what you see and the new strategy which is now being aggressively implemented is to improve the public information campaign and we do feel optimistic that that is occurring and we will get the right message out this year across the country for the first time.
The next thing that has to happen is alternative development. U.S. Agency for International Development has led that effort, costs have been running roughly $150 million a year to provide farmers with alternatives. Over 800,000 farmers have gotten seed and fertilizer and other things like that that have helped give them an alternative crop. And we think and the UN has confirmed this also, we always look to them for their sort of secondary look at our activities, that most of the farmers in Afghanistan now do have a viable alternative crop to grow. The problem is not having a crop. But as I go out and talk to farmers in places like Nangahar and Balkh, what they tell me is I actually have something new to grow now, something that gives me a relatively good income, not close to what you get from opium. That's basically impossible. But I can't get the goods to market. Opium keeps for three years or four years or five years. Peaches and fruit trees and nuts and other crops like that, they only keep for a few days. And I've worked closely with Senator Bond's office and I've worked closely with others who are advocating agricultural extension services, buying cooperatives. AID is working with us on all this. And there will be a shift in the alternative development effort now, away from providing seed and fertilizer, which we think most farmers actually have now and more toward providing access to markets. Roads, particularly buying cooperatives that guarantee a decent price, agents in (inaudible) that will now sell these goods to other countries. It's interesting. If you grow lettuce in Jalalabad and you sell it in the local market, you might get a few pennies for it. If you have a buying cooperative that can sell it in Dubai, you get ten or fifteen times as much money for that and that's where we're trying to focus our efforts now, which is access to markets in not only in Afghanistan and not only improving the quality of the products that they grow with fruit trees and animal husbandry, but getting them to foreign countries and to hotels in Kabul and places where the same crop can get more money and that's a principle new change in the way AID is focusing its efforts that was recommended by this group I have been discussing and they're in the process of implementing that now.
The other problem we've heard about and this is what we heard a lot about from several senators and congressmen is that once AID's program is done, there's no one to go to for advice to continue that. So agricultural extension services advocated by people like Duncan Hunter and (inaudible) are now a major part of our program. There's a new $20 million RFP out for that. We intend to have people from American land-grant universities and other places in these areas after the main program is done to provide continuing advice on how to grow crops and get them to market. And we are again optimistic that as we shift toward this access to markets and extension services approach to alternative development, we will see increasing rewards and the capacity for sustained reduction in those provinces that have already turned away from poppy production.
The third piece and by far the most controversial piece is eradication. Crop eradication has been described as depriving poor farmers of their livelihood, turning hearts and minds to the Taliban and causing problems for the counternarcotics efforts. It's interesting however, though, the new UN report advocates more eradication, not less eradication. They recognize that there is no crop we can offer the Afghans that even comes close to the product of opium. The best we can get is 40 or 50 percent with fruit trees which takes several years to grow. And there is universal agreement among our Afghan partners who have it in their National Drug Control Strategy.
The United Nations report that just came out, the U.S. Government through the interagency, both the AID people and the law enforcement people and the international community, the UK which recently release a statement on this, that we do need to continue to crop eradicate, but it needs to be done differently than it's been done in the past. In the past, eradication has been done inadequately. There hasn't been enough to deter farming. The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has told me you need to eradicate 20 to 25 percent of a crop in order to deter planting the next year. And by the way, that's the objective of eradication is to deter planting. You get your numbers down for the current year, but that's not really why we do it. The objective is to interject risk to the farmer so that he or she takes the alternative that's offered that doesn't pay as much money. You have to have that risk. We haven't done enough. We've gotten 10 percent instead of 20-25 percent. But more importantly, it has not been done equitably. Eradication has been by negotiation. The government-led eradication force and the central force, both of which are funded in part by the United States will go into an area to eradicate and it will be met by militias and powerful tribal leaders who are involved in the opium trade, corrupt officials, and they will be stopped. And first of all, there'll be several days of negotiation where no eradication occurs at all. And then second, what happens is they say, okay, you can eradicate these three fields here, but stay away from those five or six fields over there. And as a result, the eradicators are moved toward the less powerful and away from the more powerful.
As I mentioned before in Helmand Province, it's the richest province in Afghanistan. If it were a country, it would be the fifth-largest recipient of U.S. development assistance of any country on earth. Most of the poppy in Helmand Province is grown by corrupt officials, wealthy land owners and opportunists. But we don't eradicate because they're too powerful and they're able to turn away the eradication force. So this year the eradication effort will be dramatically changed. We hope to get increasing support from the military in terms of information, intelligence, force protection activity. They don't participate directly in eradication activities. But we are optimistic they will help enable those activities where we will hit the wealthy people, the rich people who are involved in poppy cultivation, which are vast tracts of land in Helmand Province, rather than the poor people and the less powerful, so that (inaudible) eradication this year. We think it is an essential component to discerning poppy production, that it will focus on the wealthy farmers, the opportunists, the corrupt police officials, people who grow on government lands in areas where we have to send a message that no one is too rich or too powerful to be immune from the law, which prohibits poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. So we do intend to continue the eradication along those lines and we have the complete backing of the Government of Afghanistan, our UK partners and the United Nations for that type of an approach this year. And it's, in fact, recommended in the new United Nations report.
The next piece, which is very, very important and where more U.S. resources are going than any other area is taking down high-value targets. So far there have only been four very high-value targets who have made it into the United States and a very limited number who have been prosecuted in Afghanistan. U.S. resources in '07 will increased from $137 million last year for taking down high-value targets to $355 million this year in taking down high-value targets. So we will increase our efforts dramatically to bring down the high-level traffickers because no matter how much you hit the farmers, unless people see the traffickers are vulnerable, you will not succeed in this effort.
Let me explain very briefly -- I know I have only a little more time -- why we haven't been able to get high-value targets so far. We have information about many high-level Afghans who are involved in the opium trade, but this isn't democracy and the mere fact you have information does not mean you can prosecute them. There actually has to be evidence against them. And what we have not been able to do is substantiate that these people are high-value targets with the kind of evidence you would want: controlled deliveries, telephone conversations, take-down operations with fingerprints, those types of activity that you would need.
And so what's happened is the Drug Enforcement Administration has ramped up its efforts to get the increase of evidence gathering capability in a lot of very, very admirable ways. Recently the National Interdiction Unit has trained 105 top-level Afghan investigators who now are experts in gathering evidence. They have a sensitive investigation unit and a technical investigative unit that will be able to actually build the cases against the high-value traffickers that we've not able to do. So we are now developing very detailed lists. We'd like to give you a classified briefing at some point on who those people are. But we are now optimistic we know who the HVTs are and that we are gathering evidence that will stand up in court against them and there will be an increasing number of those activities going on. Karen Tandy, the head of DEA is now in Afghanistan and Pakistan just finishing up a trip to coordinate with military authorities to get increasing Department of Defense and ISAF support for these activities and there will be a ramp-up in take-down operations for high value targets over the next several months.
Once you're able to actually gather the evidence against these people, it is very important you have access to them. Some of them are very well protected and well defended. The Department of Defense has now provided the six, and soon to be eight, Mi-17 helicopters with trained Afghan pilots to go in and extract these people. So we now have the capacity to gather evidence and we have the capacity to extract them.
The last piece then is the ability to prosecute them and put them in jail. The Afghan justice system was ravaged by the Taliban and by their Soviet predecessors. It was virtually nonexistent when the international community took over in coordination with the Afghan Government in 2002. Over the last several months, the Italian Government has hosted an international conference that pledged another $100 million towards justice sector reform. There is now a counternarcotics tribunal in Afghanistan that has exclusive jurisdiction over all cases with three kilograms of heroine or more. It now has 1,700 cases in it and recently sentenced some Afghan officials to 17 years in prison as a result of being involved in a conspiracy to traffic $30 million worth of heroin into the United States. It is up, it's functioning. There are new resources, there are embedded prosecutors, embedded investigators and embedded judges who are handling counternarcotics cases. And therefore we now feel we have a place to try them. We are also encouraging high-value targets to be extradited to the United States and to Europe if possible, so that our communities can see that these drugs are affecting our country as well.
Now, I don't want to overstate the success of this effort. It's embryonic. It's at its beginning stages, but there now is a court that can do it. There are now investigators who can gather evidence and take down high-value targets. There is now an airlift capability and there is a renewed commitment from the international military forces to enable these activities. So we are optimistic that we will be seeing more high-value targets taken down in Afghanistan, tried in Afghanistan and tried in the United States. In fact, we will soon announce a fourth HVT who will be extradited to the United States shortly. And as I said, there are plans now to take down several more over the next few months.
So I don't want to sugar-coat this, Mr. Chairman. I don't want to say that we have total success here, but I want to be realistic about it. There is success in the north of the country. We have 13 poppy free provinces and five more that are close to being that. That's more than half the country. There is a plan in place to take advantage of that situation and have sustained reductions with public information, better alternative development. We have a Good Performers' Initiative, which will award those provinces which stay poppy free with substantial additional development assistance. We have a better eradication plan which will focus on wealthy farmers who are flaunting the law in wealthy areas of Afghanistan. We have increased evidence gathering capability, airlift capability and prosecutorial capability of takedown to HVTs. We have a renewed commitment and specific coordination between the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force -- ISAF -- the military authorities, who are going in -- very helpful in this public information campaign in the fall and in helping identify the high-value targets which we'll be after over the next six months. So while it is not a success story, I will admit that it is a -- there is cause for optimism with this new strategy.
What we're looking for now is that the international community support us. I've been to now, I think, 15 capitols of Europe and two more next week, to try to enlist their support in terms of financing and people for this activity. I've been to Kabul in the past month, working with the Ministry of Counternarcotics and the Ministry of Interior. They are very, very optimistic about this new plan and its possibilities for success and we're hoping to have continued strong congressional backing for the counternarcotics activity in Afghanistan.
The last thing I'd like to say in my opening statement is about police. You were right in that there has been over 80,000 police trained, but only about 40 percent of them are equipped right now and we don't know exactly how many are on the job. That's why we're making major changes to the police program as well, sending mentors and advisors out into the field to ensure that there is no corruption, that police who are on the job are staying on the job. We have an automated pay system now, so their money can't be taken which was happening. We have international ID cards for the police, so we can identify who they are and where they are and making sure they're on the job. And we're trying to take that issue that you raised, Mr. Chairman, very seriously, too, because unless we can extend police into all areas of the country, we can't compete on the counternarcotics effort either.
So that's basically a summary of where we are on this plan. I do believe that we have strong international backing, good support from the military authorities and strong support from the Afghan Government, all of which I'm optimistic about, that we will be able to see a turnaround, not only in the north of the country, but in the south of the country in the next 12 to 24 months. It won't be eliminated that quick and will take many years, like it did in Thailand in Laos and Pakistan. But we do think we can see a sustainable turnaround, such that the Taliban will be cut off at the source of financing, such that narco-corruption will not be polluting the political system that's in Afghanistan in such that illicit economy will be allowed to grow in a way that will not be burdened by the narco-economy.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
