by Alfred W. McCoy
April 6, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
In ways that have escaped most observers, the
Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death
in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.
After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama
finally launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40 am on February 13,
2010, in a remote market town called
Marja in southern Afghanistan's
Helmand Province.
As a wave of helicopters descended on Marja's outskirts
spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of U.S. Marines
dashed through fields sprouting opium poppies
toward the town's mud-walled compounds.
After a week of fighting, U.S. war commander
General Stanley A. McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's
vice-president and Helmand's provincial governor.
Their mission: a media
roll-out for the general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on
bringing government to remote villages just like Marja.
At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the
vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted
anger.
"If they come with tractors," one Afghani
widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow
farmers, "they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can
kill my poppy."
For these poppy growers and thousands more like
them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with it a
perilous threat: opium eradication.
Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed
strangely unaware that Marja might qualify as the world's heroin capital -
with
hundreds of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick
houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin.
After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand Province produce a remarkable
40% of the world's illicit opium supply, and much of this harvest has been
traded in Marja.
Rushing through those opium fields to attack the
Taliban on day one of this offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy,
the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the
latest crop of peasant guerrillas whose guns and wages are funded by those
poppy plants.
"You can't win this war," said one U.S.
Embassy official just back from inspecting these opium districts,
"without taking on drug production in Helmand Province."
Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul
Sunday, National Security Adviser James L. Jones
assured
reporters that President Obama would try to persuade Afghan President
Hamid Karzai to prioritize,
"battling corruption, taking the fight to
the narco-traffickers." The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of the
economic engine for the insurgents."
Just as these Marja farmers spoiled General
McChrystal's media event, so their crop has subverted every regime that has
tried to rule Afghanistan for the past 30 years.
During the CIA's covert war in the 1980s, opium
financed the mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as President Ronald Reagan
called them) who finally forced the Soviets to abandon the country and then
defeated its Marxist client state.
In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the
country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and
profiting from opium - and then, ironically, fell from power only months
after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the US military
intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the government in
Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have taken
control of ever larger parts of the Afghan countryside.
These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise in
Afghanistan's opium harvest - from just 250 tons in 1979 to
8,200 tons in
2007.
For the past five years, the Afghan opium
harvest has accounted for as much as 50% of the country's gross domestic
product (GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90% of the world's
heroin supply.
The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three
war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it
defies solution by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its most
inept and least competent).
Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and
demanding its total eradication, the Bush administration dithered for seven
years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that
corrupted and crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai. In
recent years, opium farming
has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly
20% of the country's estimated population, and
funds a Taliban insurgency
that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.
To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in poor
nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all
politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels.
The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy
is always to establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit
and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental.
If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done,
then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.
Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in
networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain
of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for
harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment.
So dominant and problematic is the opium economy
in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past
nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?
The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan
wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years - the CIA
covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start
by $900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the U.S. invasion,
occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns.
In each of these conflicts, Washington has
tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military
success - a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan
today the world's number one narco-state.
CIA Covert Warfare,
Spreading Poppy Fields, and Drug Labs - the 1980s
Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert
war against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret operations that it
conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia which stretch for 5,000 miles
from Turkey to Thailand.
In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was revving
up, the United States first mounted covert probes of communism's Asian
underbelly. For 40 years thereafter, the CIA fought a succession of
secret wars along this mountain rim:
-
Burma during the 1950s
-
Laos in the 1960s
-
Afghanistan in the 1980s
In one of history's ironic accidents, the
southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with
Asia's opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into
ambiguous alliances with the region's highland warlords.
Washington's first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded
the country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration
worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a ten-year CIA
campaign to expel the Soviets.
This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War
years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional
warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology,
damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and
fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade.
Of equal import, instead of conducting this
covert warfare on its own as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the
CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service
Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever more
problematic ally.
When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (below
image), as overall leader of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington - with
few alternatives - agreed.
Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2
billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a
violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul
University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders.
As the CIA operation was winding down in May
1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its
key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside
Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.
Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's
covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan
borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen
guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early
1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant
supporters.
Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it
to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's protection.
Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium
production grew ten-fold - from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years
of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. Attorney
General announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the
American heroin supply.
Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani
heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside
Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2
million just five years later.
After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington just
walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over
one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in
place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed
tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the
capital.
Even when Washington finally cut its covert CIA
funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan's ISI continued to back
favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term goal of installing a
Pashtun client regime in Kabul.
Druglords, Dragon's
Teeth, and Civil Wars - the 1990s
Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in a
lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power.
It was almost as if the soil had been sown with
those dragons' teeth of ancient myth that can suddenly sprout into an army
of full-grown warriors, who leap from the earth with swords drawn for war.
When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the communist
regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three years, Pakistan
still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn, unleashed his artillery on
the besieged capital. The result: the deaths of an estimated 50,000 more
Afghans.
Even a slaughter of such monumental proportions,
however, could not win power for this unpopular fundamentalist.
So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban and in
September 1996, it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the Northern
Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of the capital.
During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned heavily on
opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest to 4,600 tons
by 1999.
Throughout these two decades of warfare and a
twenty-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself was slowly
transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem - with herding, orchards,
and over 60 food crops - into the world's first economy dependent on the
production of a single illicit drug. In the process, a fragile human ecology
was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.
Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where clouds
arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is an arid
land. Its staple food crops have historically been sustained by irrigation
systems that rely on snowmelt from the region's high mountains.
To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan
tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles every year
to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important of all, farmers
planted perennial tree crops - walnut, pistachio, and mulberry - which
thrived because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are remarkably
resistant to the region's periodic droughts, offering relief from the threat
of famine in the dry years.
During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated the
herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the
orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with firepower, the
Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society's economic jugular,
violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan warfare by cutting down
the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.
All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a veritable Gordian
knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole solution.
Like Alexander's legendary sword, it offered a
straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any aid to
restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their orchards, Afghan
farmers - including some 3 million returning refugees - found sustenance in
opium, which had historically been but a small part of their agriculture.
Since poppy cultivation requires nine times more labor per hectare than
wheat, opium offered immediate seasonal employment to more than a million
Afghans - perhaps half of those actually employed at the time. In this
ruined land and ravaged economy, opium merchants alone could accumulate
capital rapidly and so give poppy farmers crop loans equivalent to more than
half their annual incomes, credit critical to the survival of many poor
villagers.
In marked contrast to the marginal yields the country's harsh climate offers
most food crops, Afghanistan proved ideal for opium.
On average, each hectare of Afghan poppy land
produces three to five times more than its chief competitor, Burma. Most
important of all, in such an arid ecosystem, subject to periodic drought,
opium uses less than half the water needed for staples such as wheat.
After taking power in 1996, the Taliban regime encouraged a nationwide
expansion of opium cultivation, doubling production to 4,600 tons, then
equivalent to 75% of the world's heroin supply. Signaling its support for
drug production, the Taliban regime began collecting a 20% tax from the
yearly opium harvest, earning an estimated $100 million in revenues.
In retrospect, the regime's most important innovation was undoubtedly the
introduction of large-scale heroin refining in the environs of the city of
Jalalabad. There, hundreds of crude labs set to work, paying only a modest
production tax of $70 on every kilo of heroin powder. According to U.N.
researchers, the Taliban also presided over bustling regional opium markets
in Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, protecting some 240 top traders there.
During the 1990s, Afghanistan's soaring opium harvest fueled an
international smuggling trade that tied Central Asia, Russia, and Europe
into a vast illicit market of arms, drugs, and money-laundering. It also
helped fuel an eruption of ethnic insurgency across a 3,000-mile swath of
land from Uzbekistan in Central Asia to Bosnia in the Balkans.
In July 2000, however, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar suddenly
ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in a desperate bid for international
recognition. Remarkably enough, almost overnight the Taliban regime used the
ruthless repression for which it was infamous to slash the opium harvest by
94% to only 185 metric tons.
By then, however, Afghanistan had become dependent on poppy production for
most of its taxes, export income, and employment. In effect, the Taliban's
ban was an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society
to the brink of collapse. This was the unwitting weapon the U.S. wielded
when it began its military campaign against the Taliban in October 2001.
Without opium, the regime was already a hollow
shell and essentially imploded at the bursting of the first American bombs.
The Return of the CIA,
Opium, and Counterinsurgency - 2001-
To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully
mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and
cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local
allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban's opium ban and
reviving the drug traffic.
Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban,
officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the
heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a Tokyo international donors'
conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai, the new Prime Minister put
in place by
the Bush administration, issued a pro forma
ban on opium growing - without any means of enforcing it against the power
of these resurgent local warlords.
After investing some three billion dollars in Afghanistan's destruction
during the Cold War, Washington and its allies now proved parsimonious in
the reconstruction funds they offered. At that 2002 Tokyo conference,
international donors promised just four billion dollars of an estimated $10
billion needed to rebuild the economy over the next five years.
In addition, the total U.S. spending of $22
billion for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply
toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for
agriculture. (And as in Iraq, significant sums from what reconstruction
funds were available simply went
into the pockets of Western experts,
private contractors, and their local counterparts.)
Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during
the first year of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's opium harvest surged to
3,400 tons.
Over the next five years, international donors
would contribute $8 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium would infuse
nearly twice that amount, $14 billion, directly into the rural economy
without any deductions by either those Western experts or Kabul's bloated
bureaucracy.
While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush
administration downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to
Great Britain and police training to Germany. As the lead agency in Allied
operations, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department
regarded opium as a
distraction from its main mission of defeating the Taliban (and, of course,
invading Iraq).
Waving away the problem in late 2004, President
Bush said he did not want to,
"waste another American life on a narco-state.''
Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, U.S. forces worked closely
with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.
After five years of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan's drug production had
swelled to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007,
the U.N. reported that
the country's record opium crop covered almost 500,000 acres, an area larger
than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tons at the
start of American intervention in 2001,
Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tons
of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin
supply.
In this way, Afghanistan became the world's first true "narco-state." If a
cocaine traffic that provided just 3% of Colombia's GDP could bring in its
wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that
country's government, then we can only imagine the consequences of
Afghanistan's dependence on opium for more than 50% of its entire economy.
At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's Federal
Narcotics Service
estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at
$65 billion.
Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to
Afghanistan's farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64
billion balance "to the drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the
Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.
Indeed, opium's influence is
so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from
village leaders to Kabul's police chief, the defense minister, and
the
president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and
crippling is this corruption that, according to
recent U.N. estimates,
Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes.
Not surprisingly, the government's repeated
attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the
U.N. has called,
"corrupt deals between field owners, village
elders, and eradication teams."
Not only have drug taxes funded an expanding
guerrilla force, but the Taliban's role in protecting opium farmers and the
heroin merchants who rely on their crop gives them real control over the
core of the country's economy.
In January 2009, the U.N. and anonymous U.S.
"intelligence officials" estimated that drug traffic provided Taliban
insurgents with $400 million a year.
"Clearly,"
commented Defense Secretary
Robert Gates, "we have to go after the drug labs and the druglords that
provide support to the Taliban and other insurgents."
In mid-2009, the U.S. embassy
launched a
multi-agency effort, called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, to cut
Taliban drug monies through financial controls.
But one American official soon compared this
effort to "punching jello." By August 2009, a frustrated Obama
administration had
ordered the U.S. military to "kill or capture" 50
Taliban-connected druglords who were placed on a classified "kill list."
Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact,
declined
somewhat - to 6,900 tons last year (still over 90% of the world's opium
supply).
While U.N. analysts attribute this 20% reduction
largely to eradication efforts, a more likely cause has been the global glut
of heroin that came with the Afghan opium boom, and which had depressed the
price of poppies by 34%. In fact, even this reduced Afghan opium crop is
still far above total world demand, which
the U.N. estimates at 5,000 tons
per annum.
Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts next
month, indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some U.S. officials
who have surveyed Helmand's opium heartland see signs of an expanded crop.
Even the U.N. drug experts who have predicted a continuing decline in
production
are not optimistic about long-term trends.
Opium prices might decline for a few years, but
the price of wheat and other staple crops is dropping even faster, leaving
poppies as by far the most profitable crop for poor Afghan farmers.
Ending the Cycle of
Drugs and Death
With its forces now planted in the dragon's teeth soil of Afghanistan,
Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending cycle of drugs and
death.
Every spring in those rugged mountains, the
snows melt, the opium seeds sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters
takes to the field, many to die by lethal American fire. And the next year,
the snows melt again, fresh poppy shoots break through the soil, and a new
crop of teen-aged Taliban fighters pick up arms against America, spilling
more blood.
This cycle has been repeated for the past ten
years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely.
Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan's
rural economy - with its orchards, flocks, and food crops - as high as $30
billion or, for that matter, $90 billion dollars, the money is at hand. By
conservative estimates, the cost of President Obama's ongoing surge of
30,000 troops alone is $30 billion a year.
So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would
create ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan,
making it possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without
joining the Taliban's army.
Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has no
realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of
Afghanistan's agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now
numbers about 120,000 soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban's growth into
an omnipresent shadow government and an effective guerrilla army.
The idea that our expanded military presence
might soon succeed in driving back that force and handing over pacification
to
the illiterate, drug-addicted
Afghan police and
army remains, for the
time being, a fantasy.
Quick fixes like paying poppy farmers not to
plant, something British and Americans have both tried, can backfire and end
up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation. Rapid drug eradication
without alternative employment, something the private contractor
DynCorp tried
so disastrously under a $150
million contract in 2005, would simply plunge Afghanistan into more misery,
stoking mass anger and destabilizing the Kabul government further.
So the choice is clear enough:
-
We can continue to fertilize this deadly
soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome -
for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan
-
Or we can begin to withdraw American
forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its
orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation
systems ruined in decades of war.
At this point, our only realistic choice is this
sort of serious rural development - that is, reconstructing the Afghan
countryside through countless small-scale projects until food crops become a
viable alternative to opium.
To put it simply, so simply that even Washington
might understand, you can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a
narco-state.