ABSTRACT
In many ways, an account of Britain’s counter-narcotics narrative appears to be simply an adjunct to the wider stabilisation narrative outlined in the previous chapter. Indeed, counter-narcotics arose out of the same philosophical and institutional milieu as the stabilisation agenda. The assumptions informing the development of counter-narcotics policy in Afghanistan fit the criteria of liberal peace theory insofar as the drugs trade represented a challenge to the development of liberal democratic governance. Those involved in the manufacture and trafficking of opium were considered to be malignant social actors comprising an alternative locus of power to the Kabul Government’s officials, and so combatting their activities could be reasonably seen as a means of promoting a more accountable system of administration and the growth of licit economic activities. Pursuit of counter-narcotics in Afghanistan also fulfilled other aims implicit within stabilisation. It coincided with New Labour’s ethical foreign policy by focusing on the evils of heroin use on the streets of Britain. Moreover, counter-narcotics held ostensibly strategic aims for global security, as the opium economy was seen as a considerable source of revenue for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Perhaps most importantly, Britain’s role in counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan fulfilled its own strategic objective of maintaining the alliance system by contributing not only to Britain’s ‘soft power’ development agenda but also, crucially, by ‘showing willing’ to the alliance by performing a task assumed to be beneficial to the US-led War on Terror but which the Americans were themselves reticent to participate in.
