Franklin Pierce Huddle Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 7 of 8
Drugs from Afghanistan are a problem for the West. I think I read recently that 80 percent of the heroin in Europe comes from Afghanistan, or something like that.
That's right, yeah.
A lot of that passes through Tajikistan and, actually, is a great source of the money that flows through the economy, correct? What are the numbers there, or the percentages?
You can see the pained look on my face; I'll tell you a funny story.
When I was in Burma, we did a study once on what was the effect on the local economy of the drug trade. We found out that it actually had much less effect, because most of the real money was being made by those who were moving it up the ladder. And so, in the case of Burma, where much of the money was being made in Thailand or the U.S., or wherever, the farm-gate price is very low.
In a sense, that paradigm is true in Tajikistan. The drugs leave Afghanistan. They go through all the Central Asian countries. Tajikistan seizes, by far, the most. They have a more active counter-narcotics program than some of the others. Plus, I suspect that the presence of the Russian border guards there helps to be tougher on enforcement. But what happens is the amount of money that's spun off into the local economy from that is actually quite small. You don't see what I would call the classic signs of "narco-money," you know, fast cars and so on. You see very, very little of that. I think most of the big money is probably winding up inside Moscow and other major Russian cities.
By far, the biggest source of income for Tajikistan is the aluminum plant, cotton sales, and remittances from laborers who go abroad, because once the economy suffered decline and the civil war, about a third of the adult male labor force went off to work, much of it in the former Soviet Union, sending back remittances.
Now, long-term, if we're looking at our interest in the region, it's going to take both a settlement and stabilization in Afghanistan, and then also some sort of regional development for all of the Central Asian countries, as opposed to one rising to the top because of one resource. One or another of the countries have oil, but others don't.
You should be in my business, you ask good questions. I mean, you framed it exactly right. That, in fact, is the thrust of U.S. policy. We recognize one of the problems with Tajikistan, which is a very poor, isolated country: How does it make a living? How does it develop trade, and so on? Well, the answer is, one, it has to build up its neighbors, or have neighbors that are better off. If you draw the bad luck to have, say, Afghanistan as your major neighbor to the south, you've got to do something. And a regional approach is clearly the way to go.
Tomorrow, for example, I'm going to a company called Aqua here in San Francisco that has a pretty good size in investment in Tajikistan in bottled water. They have, probably, one of the world's two or three underground aquifers for water, absolutely delicious, beautiful water. One of the problems they face is it's hard to sell to one of their immediate neighbors of Tajikistan because they have an 85 percent duty on this. And to break down these tariff walls, to improve the communications ... there are no plane flights, for example, from Uzbekistan, Tashkent to Tajikistan. To encourage that is the only way to go, because the region can only survive in a global economy as we midwife it into the global economy. We have to create a large enough entity within that area, so that it can be competitive.
I guess we have an interest on the security side in seeing that these economic developments occur, so that one of these countries doesn't become a basket-case, which then becomes a haven for the terrorists, as was the case in Afghanistan.
Yes, that, but also just our human decency values. We don't want to leave poor people with no chance to try to improve their livelihood. I'd like to see everybody have a chance to put food on the table.
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