Is The US Helping To Finance Drug Production In Afghanistan?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its 2007 report today. The yearly report chronicles worldwide efforts at eliminating organized crime, human trafficking, and reducing the threats to at-risk states attempting to ward off becoming failed states because of crime.

This year's report had some very unflattering things to say about the state of Afghanistan, one of the United States' fronts in the global "war on terror," and the continued production of the lone cash crop to originate in that nation: white and red poppies, the source of opium and its more common derivative, heroin. In the report's words, despite a sixth straight year of significantly decreased poppy production in southeast Asia, mainly in Laos and Myanmar, worldwide opium production increased by 46%, fueled exclusively by the resurgence of Afghani poppy growth. Afghanistan is now back at its pre-war record levels of opium production with over 494,200 acres (200,000 hectares, about 772 square miles) of the nation planted with illicit poppies. Now, Afghanistan accounts for about 95% of the world's opium production.

The UNODC report would have one believe that the only areas of increase were in Helmand, and parts of  Kandahar provinces -- close to the Pakistani border, and controlled by the Taliban. But other sources point out that the opium growth in other areas of the country is rising much faster than in the Taliban-controlled areas. In fact, it's areas nominally controlled by the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai.

The sad truth is that these allegations are just now becoming widely apparent. But, there is nothing new about this sordid business.

Afghanistan has been a national basket-case since the Taliban took over in 1996. Criminality, insecurity, and the Afghan government's inability to extend the rule of law to all parts of the country have allowed the nation to become a host to terrorists, a "failed state." According to the CIA, "[i]t will probably take the remainder of the decade and continuing donor aid and attention to significantly raise Afghanistan's living standards from its current level, among the lowest in the world." In that environment of poverty, the best crop to grow was poppy, which occurs naturally in the region. It provides poppy seeds for your morning bagel, but more importantly to Afghanis, it can be processed in a relatively easy process (mainly consisting of heat, water, ammonia, activated charcoal and a sodium carbonate) into raw heroin, ready for export and "cutting" later on.

The US plays into this (re-)developing mess in that the government -- specifically the CIA -- was in the drug game in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power. The CIA, in an effort to destabilize Soviet sympathizers in Afghanistan, and finance the muhajadeen got in bed with Pakistani and Afghan drug lords, including members of what would become the Northern Alliance, whom we used to push the Taliban out of power in 2001:
     

"Because the US wanted to supply the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan with stinger missiles and other military hardware it needed the full cooperation of Pakistan. By the mid-1980s, the CIA operation in Islamabad was one of the largest US intelligence stations in the World. `If BCCI is such an embarrassment to the US that forthright investigations are not being pursued it has a lot to do with the blind eye the US turned to the heroin trafficking in Pakistan [and Afghanistan]', said a US intelligence officer. "The Dirtiest Bank of All," Time, July 29, 1991, p. 22.)

And as recently as 2001, the US publicly turned to a trusted ally in the Northern Alliance -- who was coincidentally a convicted drug trafficker -- Ayub Afridi. According to the Asia Times, since 2001, the US has relied on Afridi and his cohorts, to build coalitions in Afghanistan.

Afridi was a key player in the Afghan war of resistance against the Soviet Union's occupying troops in the decade up to 1989. It is a matter of record that top US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials believed in the early 1980s that they would never be able to justify a multibillion-dollar budget from the government to provide support to the mujahideen in the fight against the Red Army. As a result, they decided to generate funds through the poppy-rich Afghan soil and heroin production and smuggling to finance the Afghan war. Afridi was the kingpin of this plan. All of the major Afghan warlords, except for the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masoud, who had his own opium fiefdom in northern Afghanistan, were a part of Afridi's coalition of drug traders in the CIA-sponsored holy war against the Soviets.  - Asia Times, Dec. 4, 2001

So, apparently the US, has since 2001, been in direct partnership with known drug traffickers, including present Afghan president Hamid Karzai, despite telling the US public that drug money supports Al Qaeda and terrorism. In fact, the London Observer in 2001 stated that "[d]uring the (Taliban-imposed) ban the only source of poppy production was territory held by the Northern Alliance. It tripled its production. In the high valleys of Badakhshan - an area controlled by troops loyal to the former President Burhannudin Rabbani - the number of hectares planted last year jumped from 2,458 to 6,342 [about 6,075 to 15,671 acres]. Alliance fields accounted for 83 per cent of total Afghan production of 185 tonnes of opium during the ban."

And of late, since at least 2005, it seems that the Pentagon, in a blatant example of hypocrisy, doesn't want anyone to do anything about the drug trafficking from the world's poppy garden. Until recently, the Pentagon actively resisted in any way interfering in the burgeoning drug trade -- in part, undoubtedly, because it was funding local warlords involved in the trade. According to the the New York Times' Thom Shanker, "One military officer who has served in Afghanistan gave a more pointed assessment: 'What will be history's judgment on our nation-building mission in Afghanistan if the nation we leave behind is Colombia' of the 1990's?"

So, in part, we have the War on Terror to thank for every new heroin addict in the United States.

In simplest terms, the US proclaimed -- but never prosecuted --  a war on drugs against the Taliban or Osama bin Laden, because of its awareness that the bulk of the Afghan drug-trafficking was now in the hands of those about to become the US' latest drug-trafficking proxy, the Northern Alliance. In fact, the drugs we claim to want to keep from showing up on American shores are both financing and exacerbating the "war on terrorism." This is part of a recurring pattern in the CIA's long-time involvement with drug traffickers, going all the way back to Vietnam.

 Such revelations make one question what the president's recent reference to Vietnam was really all about.