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March
6, 2002
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
The
Politics of Afghan Opium
David
Vest
Billy
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Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
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The
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March
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CounterPunch
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Ann
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Putin's
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Ralph
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Dick
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How
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Southern
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David
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Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
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Bernard
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War
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Paul Cox
Boycott
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Bill Sutherland's Quest
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Take This Job and Shove It
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the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
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2, 2002
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Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
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1, 2002
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Terry
Diggs
Why
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David
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Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
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Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
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Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
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St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
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Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
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Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
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in an Afghan Refugee Camp
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March 6, 2002
Politics of a Bumper
Crop
Opium and Afghanistan
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Though Britain has been blaring its support for
America's "War on Terror", there is public disquiet
in the UK 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 US 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 tonnes 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 after the war the West stands to lose the
"best ever opportunity" to suffocate the illegal trade.
Afghanistan is the source of 75% of the world's heroin and 90%
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
a 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 US government on Superbowl
Sunday to inform America's consumers of illegal drugs that to
buy cocaine or heroin is to help terrorism. To the contrary,
at last 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 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 in essential for
the future well-being of America's selected government, headed
by Karzai.
Meanwhile, readers here in the US 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 per
cent. There were no Superbowl 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 have
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 US 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.
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