Persistence in the Political Economy of Conflict: The Case of the Afghan Drug Industry

Links between licit and illicit economies fuel conflict in countries mired in irregular warfare. We argue that in Afghanistan, cultivating poppy and trading drugs bring stability to farmers who face the unintended consequences of haphazard development efforts while lacking alternative livelihoods and security necessary to access markets. Drug trafficking funds the crime-insurgency nexus and government corruption, in turn foiling attempts to establish a unified governance body. We show how individual rationality, market forces, corruption and opium stocks accumulated at different stages in the supply chain counteract the effects of poppy eradication. To that end, we use initial results from a multiagent model of the Afghan drug industry. We define physical, administrative, social and infrastructural environments in the simulation, and outline objectives and inputs for decision making and the structure of actor interactions.