Though Britain has been blaring its support for America's "War
on Terror," there is public disquiet in the United Kingdom at one aspect of
the new era of freedom now prevailing in Afghanistan: the renewal of opium
cultivation, banned with unprecedented and near total success by Mullah Omar
in July of 2000. In order to receive U.S. aid, Hamid Karzai's coalition had
to make a pro forma announcement in January that opium cultivation is still
forbidden, but the extent of this renewed commitment to abstention from
Afghanistan's prime cash crop was almost simultaneously displayed in the
unceremonious ejection of Afghanistan's drug control agency from its offices
in Kabul, with the drug czar's desk being kicked physically into the street.
A couple of weeks ago, the London Guardian reported in a
headline that "MI5 (Britain's counter-intelligence agency) fears flood of
Afghan heroin." The ensuing story by Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton Taylor
led with the news that "Police and intelligence agencies have been warned
that Britain is facing a potentially huge increase in heroin trafficking
because of massive and unchecked replanting of the opium crop in Afghanistan
... The expectation is that the 2002 crop will be equivalent to the bumper
one of three years ago, which yielded 4,600 tons of raw opium."
The Guardian went on to report a new assessment by the UN office
for drug control and crime prevention, based in Vienna, that the West stands
to lose the "best ever opportunity" to suffocate the illegal trade.
Afghanistan is the source of 75 percent of the world's heroin and 90 percent
of Britain's supply.
Opium poppies are primarily grown in the south and east of
Afghanistan, the regions domination by the Pashtuns, the ethnic fraction
that sustained the Taliban until such support became an obvious poor bet. In
political terms, it's a safe forecast to say that no serious effort will be
made to interfere with the opium crop. To do so would be to deal the Karzai
regime as serious a blow as did Mullah Omar to loyalty to the Taliban when
he banned opium cultivation (an act variously explained as a last-ditch
attempt to get recognition from the West, or as a price support tactic,
restricting supply).
These developments lend a certain irony to the enormously costly
ads bought by the U.S. government on Super Bowl Sunday to inform America's
consumers of illegal drugs that to buy cocaine or heroin is to help
terrorism. To the contrary, at least so far as Afghanistan is concerned, to
buy heroin and morphine is to provide a sure market for Afghanistan's farm
sector, which employs as many as 200,000 people in the fields harvesting the
opium from the poppy heads. A sure income to the opium farmers means a cut
for the rural barons, whose support is essential for the future well-being
of America's selected government, headed by Karzai.
Meanwhile, readers here in the United States of the magazine
Vanity Fair can marvel at the tact displayed by Maureen Orth in her article
in the March issue on "Afghanistan's Deadly Habit" about "the symbiotic
connection between drugs and terrorism." The impression given by Orth is
that only with the coming to power of the Taliban in 1996 did the opium
industry "grow so quickly that in 1999, Afghanistan produced 5,000 tons of
opium, more than 70 percent of the world's supply." It is true that deep
into the article Orth makes very fleeting reference to the CIA's possible
role in the late 1970s and 1980s in the expansion of opium cultivation in
Afghanistan.
The facts are easily available (and cited at some length in that
very fine book "Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press," coauthored by
Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn). One of President Jimmy Carter's
White House advisers on the drug trade said later that "We were going into
Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the
Soviets ... Shouldn't we try to pay the growers if they will eradicate their
production?" Musto went public with his concerns in an op ed in the New York
Times in 1980.
Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in
the early 1980s stated that by 1981, Afghan heroin producers may have
captured 60 percent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United
States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of
arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77
percent. There were no Super Bowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding
terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the
fight to drive back Communism.
The only possible way to curb the trade is to offer farmers
enough income to grow something else, at a reasonable level of profit.
Decade after decade there has been effort. Mohammed Mossadegh tried crop
substitution in Iran in the early 1950s and was soon toppled with the help
of the CIA, which found some of its allies among the big land barons running
the opium trade. In Afghanistan, Noor Taraki's short-lived new Afghan
government attacked the opium-growing feudal estates and got loans for crop
substitution.
Orth does say frankly that "the Taliban ban on poppy growing was
the largest, most successful interdiction of drugs in history." And in
history's dustbin is where that interdiction speedily ended up. Will the
United States press for crop substitution? Probably not, always for the same
reason: to suppress drug cultivation means putting money in the pockets of
peasants and that means expensive aid programs and also enormous political
risks of offending important, if unpalatable, allies.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
