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- Afghanistan siyaasa nira ŋun nyɛ doo (dag)
- políticu afganistanu (ast)
- Afghan epidemiologist and public leader (en)
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- Dr. Faizullah Kakar, PhD (en)
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- Afghan (en)
- American (en)
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- 1996 (xsd:integer)
- 2009 (xsd:integer)
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- 2020-03-30 (xsd:date)
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- 1992 (xsd:integer)
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- Dr. Faizullah Kakar, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of public health, was the member of Karzai’s cabinet best qualified to evaluate the risks that might be posed to the Afghan people by aerial spraying. He had grown up in Kabul but earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Earlham College in Indiana, a master’s degree in toxicology from Indiana University, and a doctoral degree in epidemiology from the University of Washington. He had later worked for the World Health Organization in Pakistan. Kakar understood that glyphosate was widely used by American gardeners and farmers, who poured about one hundred million pounds of the stuff on their lawns and fields every year. The Environmental Protection Agency judged that glyphosate had “low toxicity” for humans, “slight toxicity” for birds, and was harmless to fish and bees. Apart from requiring a warning label, the E.P.A. did not restrict the chemical giant Monsanto from manufacturing or selling Roundup to Americans. Yet Kakar seriously doubted that it made sense to douse Afghan fields with the stuff. “You are telling us about how safe it is,” he told Doug Wankel, the D.E.A. official in the Kabul embassy. “Remember D.D.T.?” He was referring to dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, a synthetic insecticide developed in the 1940s. Initially popular and believed to be safe, D.D.T. turned out to be highly persistent in the environment and was ultimately classified by the E.P.A. as a probable human carcinogen. Kakar pointed out that Afghanistan had “a much more agricultural economy” than the United States, that runoff from fields went straight to local water supplies, and that many Afghans were “totally dependent” on farming. The country could not afford a massive spraying campaign based on current scientific assessments, only to discover later that glyphosate was not as safe as advertised. Kakar propounded his views before Karzai and the full Afghan cabinet. He said that while the Americans “used thousands of pounds of the same spray safely in California,” the United States did much better at protecting its water sources, whereas Afghans “drink from open watercourses.”
“This is the most popular chemical in the world,” Bill Wood pointed out. Yet Wood and other advocates for spraying underestimated the asymmetries of power in these arguments with Afghans. Most Afghan decision makers were not in a position to independently judge the longterm public health risks of glyphosate. And why should they accept E.P.A. judgments as gospel, given America’s own history of regulatory failures involving chemicals and public health? Amrullah Saleh and other cabinet ministers objected to the spraying plan on the grounds that “Taliban propaganda would profit greatly from any spraying.” Karzai’s instinctive sense was that if farmers and itinerant poppy pickers in Helmand and Kandahar looked up and saw American helicopters thundering over the horizon as dusters poured chemicals onto their fields, they would recall the atrocities of Soviet aerial warfare and blame Hamid Karzai. Gradually during 2007, while remaining cautious about offending President Bush, but with the unified support of his cabinet, Karzai made his position clear to the Americans: He opposed aerial spraying. He also opposed any role for the U.S. military in fighting drug production. (en)
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- Excerpt from book "Directorate S" by Steve Coll (en)
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- Dr. Faizullah Kakar, PhD (Retired) (en)
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