Obama and Afghanistan: America's Drug-Corrupted War
Global Research E-Newsletter
By Prof Peter Dale Scott
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16713
Global Research, January 1, 2010
The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was
thought, "changed the political debate in a party and a country
that desperately needed to take a new direction."[1] Like most
preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F.
Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was
the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama
has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America's engagement
in Bush's Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan.
If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters
desired.
Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington
were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment
experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a
promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an
expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S.
influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]
As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter's election:
It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral
domination would be abandoned. But... the 1970s were a period in
which a major "intellectual counterrevolution" was mustered, to
mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of
money... By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented
to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases
(reversing his campaign pledge).[3]
I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter's
promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the
Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld
was prominent.[4]
The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan
It is as if Washington had emerged with only one objective from
America's failure in Vietnam: the urge to do it again and get it
right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the
same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable government to defend. The
importance of this similarity has been stressed by Thomas H. Johnson,
coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval
Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable
phrase, "the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in
Afghanistan than it is a template:"
It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past
century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of
analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently
in connection with Afghanistan.
Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed
away from it.
They should notthe Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict
in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United
States has engaged in an almost exact political and military
reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of
the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.[5]
Many of the common features of an unpopular corrupted government
have been well summarized by Johnson and Mason. In their words,
quoting Jeffrey Record, "the fundamental political obstacle to an
enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate,
militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese
client regime." Substitute the word "Afghanistan"
for the words "South Vietnam" in these quotations and the descriptions
apply precisely to today's government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan,
South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection
of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the
profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside
the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible
cost in our nation's blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close
to exhausting the enemy's manpower pool or his will to fight, and
simply could not be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent
set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest was the
order of the day.[6]
If Johnson had written a little later, he might have added that a
major CIA asset in Afghanistan was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of
President Hamid Karzai;
and that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a major drug trafficker who used his
private force to help arrange a flagrantly falsified election
result.[7] This is a fairly exact description of Ngo dinh Nhu in
Vietnam, President Ngo dinh Diem's brother, an organizer of the
Vietnamese drug traffic whose dreaded Can Lao secret police helped,
among other things, to organize a falsified election result there.[8]
This pattern of a corrupt near relative, often involved in drugs,
is a recurring feature of regimes installed or supported by U.S.
influence. There were similar allegations about Chiang Kai-shek's
brother-in-law T.V. Soong, Mexican President Echevarrma's brother-in-law
Rubin Zuno Arce, and the Shah of Iran's sister. In the case of Ngo
dinh Nhu, it was the absence of a popular base for his externally
installed presidential brother that led to drug involvement, "to
provide the necessary funding" for political repression.[9] This
analogy to the Karzais is pertinent.
An additional similarity, not noted by Johnson, is that America
initially engaged in Vietnam in support of an embattled and unpopular
minority, the Roman Catholics who had thrived under the French.
America has twice made the same mistake in Afghanistan. Initially,
after the Russian invasion of 1980, the bulk of American aid went
to Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, a leader both insignificant in and unpopular
with the mujahedin resistance; the CIA is said to have supported
Hekmatyar, who became a drug trafficker to compensate for his lack
of a popular base, because he was the preferred client of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which distributed American and
Saudi aid.
When America re-engaged in 2001, it was to support the Northern
Alliance, a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition hateful
to the Pashtun majority south of the Hindu Kush. Just as America's
initial commitment to the Catholic Diem family fatally alienated
the Vietnamese countryside, so the American presence in Afghanistan
is weakened by its initial dependence on the Tajiks of the minority
Northern Alliance. (The Roman Catholic minority in Vietnam at least
shared a language with the Buddhists in the countryside. The Tajiks
speak Dari, a version of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun
majority.)
According to an important article by Gareth Porter,
Contrary to the official portrayal of the Afghan National Army (ANA)
as ethnically balanced, the latest data from U.S. sources reveal
that the Tajik minority now accounts for far more of its troops
than the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group... Tajik
domination of the ANA feeds Pashtun resentment over the control of
the country's security institutions by their ethnic rivals, while
Tajiks increasingly regard the Pashtun population as aligned with
the Taliban.
The leadership of the army has been primarily Tajik since the ANA
was organised in 2002, and Tajiks have been overrepresented in the
officer corps from the beginning. But the original troop composition
of the ANA was relatively well-balanced ethnically. The latest
report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction,
issued Oct. 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25 percent of
the population, now account for 41 percent of all ANA troops who
have been trained, and that only 30 percent of the ANA trainees are
now Pashtuns. A key reason for the predominance of Tajik troops is
that the ANA began to have serious problems recruiting troops in
the rural areas of Kandahar and Helmand provinces by mid-2007.[10]
This problem derives from a major strategic error committed by the
U.S. first in Vietnam and now repeated: the effort to impose central
state authority on a country that had always been socially and
culturally diverse.[11] Johnson and Mason illustrate Diem's lack
of legitimacy with a quote from Eric Bergerud:
The Government of Vietnam (GVN) lacked legitimacy with the rural
peasantry, the largest segment of the population... The peasantry
perceived the GVN to be aloof, corrupt, and inefficient... South
Vietnam's urban elite possessed the outward manifestations of a
foreign culture... more importantly, this small group held most of
the wealth and power in a poor nation, and the attitude of the
ruling elite toward the rural population was, at best, paternalistic
and, at worst, predatory.[12]
Thomas Johnson rightly deplores the U.S. effort to impose Kabul's
will on an even more diverse Afghanistan. As he has written elsewhere,
The characterization of Afghanistan by the 19th Century British
diplomat Sir Henry Rawlinson as 'consist[ing] of a mere collection
of tribes, of unequal power and divergent habits, which are held
together more or less closely, according to the personal character
of the chief who rules them. The feeling of patriotism, as it is
known in Europe, cannot exist among Afghans, for there is no common
country' is still true today and suggests critical nuances for any
realistic Afghanistan reconstruction and future political agenda."[13]
According to Thomas Johnson, the first eight years of the U.S. in
Afghanistan have also seen the Army repeating the strategy of
targeting the enemy that failed in Vietnam:
Since 2002, the prosecution of the war in Afghanistanat all levelshas
been based on an implied strategy of attrition via clearing operations
virtually identical to those pursued in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they
were dubbed "search and destroy missions;" in Afghanistan they are
called "clearing operations" and "compound searches," but the purpose
is the sameto find easily replaced weapons or clear a tiny, arbitrarily
chosen patch of worthless ground for a short period, and then turn
it over to indigenous security forces who can't hold it, and then
go do it again somewhere else... General McChrystal is the first
American commander since the war began to understand that protecting
the people, not chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around
the countryside, is the basic principle of counterinsurgency. Yet
four months into his command, little seems to have changed, except
for an eight-year overdue order to stop answering the enemy's prayers
by blowing up compounds with air strikes to martyr more of the
teenage boys[14]
Johnson and Mason's depiction of the Vietnam template underlying
Afghanistan is important. But there is a glaring omission in their
description of power in the Afghan countryside:
When it is in equilibrium, rural Afghan society is a triangle of
power formed by the tribal elders, the mullahs, and the government...
In times of peace and stability, the longest side of the triangle
is that of the tribal elders, constituted through the jirga system.
The next longest, but much shorter side is that of the mullahs.
Traditionally and historically, the government side is a microscopic
short segment. However, after 30 years of blowback from the
Islamization of the Pashtun begun by General Zia in Pakistan and
accelerated by the Soviet-Afghan War, the religious side of the
triangle has become the longest side of jihad has grown stronger
and more virulent.
This remains true, but is dated by its omission of drug-trafficking,
and the militias supported by drug-trafficking, which since 1980
have become a more and more important element in the power-balance.
Sometimes the drug-traffic adds to the power of tribal elders like
Jalaluddin Haqqani or Haji Bashir Noorzai, with tribal drug networks
often passed from father to son. But today one of the most important
power-holders is the drug-trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai
Pashtun from the north without a significant tribal base. Hekmatyar
is much like General Dan Van Quang during the Vietnam War, in that
his power continues to depend in part on his sophisticated heroin
trafficking network in Afghanistan's Kunar and Nuristan provinces.[15]
The more we recognize that today drugs are a major factor in both
the economy and the power structure of Afghanistan, the more we
must recognize that an even better template for the Afghan war is
not the Vietnam war, where drugs were important but not central,
but the CIA's drug-funded undeclared war in Laos, 1959-75.
Afghanistan and the Laos Template
I have quoted at great length from Johnson's pessimistic essay in
Military Review, partly because I believe it deserves to be read
by a non-military audience, but also because I believe that his
excellent analogies to Vietnam are even more pertinent if we recall
the CIA's hopeless fiasco in Laos.
Vietnam, for all its problems with Catholic and Montagnard minorities,
was essentially a state with a single language and a single,
French-imposed system of law. Laos, in contrast, was little more
than an arbitrary collection of about 100 tribes with different
languages, in which the dominant Tai-speaking Lao Loum tribes
compromised, in the 1960s, little more than half of the total
population. Faced with an intractable mountainous terrain, the
French wisely devoted little energy to establishing a central power
in Laos, which then had one capital for the north and another for
the south.[16] Like Afghanistan and in contrast to Nepal, Laos
remained and remains one of the world's last countries without a
railroad.
To supplement their own minimal presence in Laos, the French relied
on two minorities with two completely different non-Tai languages,
the Vietnamese and the Mio or Hmong. The protracted French war in
Indochina produced two combating armies in Laos, the pro-French
Royal Laotian Army, in uneasy alliance with Hmong guerrillas, and
the pro-Vietnamese Pathet Lao.
Thus Laos, when it became nominally independent in 1954, was a
quasi-state with two armies, a collection of tribes with different
languages and customs, and tribe-dividing borders defined arbitrarily
to suit western convenience.
All this might have remained relatively stable, had not Americans
arrived with naove notions of "nation-building." Misguided efforts
to establish a strong central government rapidly produced two
dominating consequences: massive corruption (even worse than
Vietnam's), and civil war.[17]
It would appear that the CIA in Laos, reflecting the opposition of
the Dulles brothers to any form of neutralism, intended to divide
the country and make it an anti-Communist battlefield, rather than
let it slumber quietly under the guidance of its first post-French
prime minister, the neutralist Souvanna Phouma (nephew of the king).
A CIA officer told Time magazine in 1961 that the CIA's aim "was
to polarize' the communist and anti-communist factions in Laos."[18]
If this was truly the aim, the CIA succeeded, creating a conflict
in which the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on
one part of Laos, more than in both Europe and the Pacific during
World War Two.[19]
Despite this absurd and criminal U.S. over-commitment, the end
result was to turn Laos, a profoundly Buddhist nation with an
anti-Vietnamese bias, into what is nominally one of the last remaining
Communist countries in the world.
And our principal ally, a Hmong faction allied earlier with the
French, suffered devastating, almost genocidal casualties. (The
London Guardian charged in 1971 that Hmong villages who "try to
find their own way out of the war even if it is simply by staying
neutral and refusing to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the CIA
army are immediately denied American rice and transport, and
ultimately bombed by the U.S. Air Force.")[20]
No one has ever claimed that in Laos, as opposed to Vietnam, "the
system worked,"[21] or that the U.S. might have prevailed had it
not been for faulty decision-making at the civilian level.[22] From
a humanitarian standpoint, America's campaign in Laos, was from the
outset a disaster if not indeed a major war crime. Only one faction
profited from that war, international drug traffickers whether
Corsican, Nationalist Chinese, or American.
With the beginning of CIA support for him in 1959, the CIA's client
Phoumi Nosavan, for the first time, directly involved his army in
the opium traffic, "as an alternative source of income for his
[Laotian] army and government...
This decision ultimately led to the growth of northwest Laos as one
of the largest heroin-producing centers in the world" in the late
1960s.[23] (The CIA not only supported General Ouan Rattikone
(Phoumi's successor) and his drug-funded army, it even supplied
airplanes to senior Laotian generals which soon "ran opium for them"
without interference.)[24] Conversely, when the US withdrew from
Laos in the 1970s, opium production plummeted, from an estimated
200 tons in 1975 to 30 tons in 1984.[25]
America's Addiction to Drug-Assisted War: Afghanistan the 1980s
It is hard to demonstrate the CIA, when unilaterally initiating a
military conflict in Laos in 1959, foresaw the resulting huge
increase in Laotian opium production. But two decades later this
experience did not deter Brzezinski, Carter's national security
adviser, from unilaterally initiating contact with drug-trafficking
Afghans in 1978 and 1979.
It is clear that this time the Carter White House foresaw the drug
consequences. In 1980 White House drug advisor David Musto told the
White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that "we were going into
Afghanistan to support the opium growers... Shouldn't we try to
avoid what we had done in Laos?"[26] Denied access by the CIA to
data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns
public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times Op Ed that Golden
Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a
medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that "this
crisis is bound to worsen."[27]
The CIA, in conjunction with its creation the Iranian intelligence
agency SAVAK, was initially trying to move to the right the regime
of Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan, whose objectionable policy
(like that of Souvanna Phouma before him) was to maintain good
relations with both the Soviet Union and the west. In 1978 SAVAK-
and CIA-supported Islamist agents soon arrived from Iran "with
bulging bankrolls," trying to mobilize a purge of left-wing officers
in the army and a clamp-down on their party the PDPA. The result
of this provocative polarization was the same as in Laos: a
confrontation in which the left, and not the right, soon prevailed.[28]
In a coup that was at least partly defensive, left-wing officers
overthrew and killed Daoud; they installed in his place a left-wing
regime so extreme and unpopular that by 1980 the USSR (as Brzezinski
had predicted) intervened to install a more moderate faction.[29]
By May 1979 the CIA was in touch with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the
mujahedin warlord with perhaps the smallest following inside
Afghanistan, and also the leading mujahedin drug-trafficker.[30]
Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of women not wearing
burkas, was not the choice of the Afghan resistance, but of the
Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), perhaps because he was the
only Afghan leader willing to accept the British-drawn Durand Line
as the Afghan-Pakistan boundary. As an Afghan leader in 1994 told
Tim Weiner of the New York Times:
"We didn't choose these leaders. The United States made Hekmatyar
by giving him his weapons. Now we want the United States to shake
these leaders and make them stop the killing, to save us from
them."[31]
Robert D. Kaplan reported his personal experience that Hekmatyar
was "loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and
moderate alike."[32]
This decision by ISI and CIA belies the usual American rhetoric
that the US was assisting an Afghan liberation movement.[33] In the
next decade of anti-Soviet resistance, more than half of America's
aid went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who soon became "one of Afghanistan's
leading drug lords."
Brzezinski was also soon in contact with Pakistan's emissary Fazle
ul-Haq, a man who by 1982 would be listed by Interpol as an
international narcotics trafficker.[34]
The consequences were swiftly felt in America, where heroin from
the Golden Crescent, negligible before 1979, amounted in 1980 to
60 percent of the U.S.
market.[35] And by 1986, for the first time, the region supplied
70 percent of the high-grade heroin in the world, and supplied a
new army of 650,000 addicts in Pakistan itself. Witnesses confirmed
that the drug was shipped out of the area on the same Pakistan Army
trucks which shipped in "covert" US military aid.[36] Yet before
1986 the only high-level heroin bust in Pakistan was made at the
insistence of a single Norwegian prosecutor; none were instigated
by the seventeen narcotics officers in the U.S. Embassy. Eight tons
of Afghan-Pakistani morphine base from a single Pakistani source
supplied the Sicilian mafia "Pizza Connection" in New York, said
by the FBI supervisor on the case to have been responsible for 80%
of the heroin reaching the United States between 1978 and 1984.[37]
Meanwhile, CIA Director William Casey appears to have promoted a
plan suggested to him in 1980 by the former French intelligence
chief Alexandre de Marenches, that the CIA supply drugs on the sly
to Soviet troops.[38] Although de Marenches subsequently denied
that the plan, Operation Mosquito, went forward, there are reports
that heroin, hashish, and even cocaine from Latin America soon
reached Soviet troops; and that along with the CIA-ISI-linked bank
BCCI, "a few American intelligence operatives were deeply enmeshed
in the drug trade" before the war was over.[39] Maureen Orth heard
from Mathea Falco, head of International Narcotics Control for the
State Department under Jimmy Carter, that the CIA and ISI together
encouraged the mujahedin to addict the Soviet troops.[40]
America's Return in 2001, Again With the Support of Drug-Traffickers
The social costs of this drug-assisted war are still with us: there
are said, for example, to be now five million heroin addicts in
Pakistan alone. And yet America in 2001 decided to do it again: to
try, with the assistance of drug traffickers, to impose nation-building
on a quasi-state with at least a dozen major ethnic groups speaking
unrelated languages. In a close analogy to the use of the Hmong in
Laos, America initiated its Afghan campaign in 2001 in concert with
a distinct minority, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. In a
closer analogy still, the CIA in 2000 (in the last weeks of Clinton's
presidency) chose as its principal ally Ahmad Shah Massoud of the
Northern Alliance, despite the objection of other national security
advisers that "Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established
a permanent base [with him] in the Panjshir, it risked entanglement
with the heroin trade."[41]
There was no ambiguity about the U.S. intention to use drug traffickers
to initiate its ground position in Afghanistan. The CIA mounted its
coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even importing
drug traffickers, usually old assets from the 1980s. An example was
Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon in France, whom "British and
American officials... met with and persuaded... to return to
Afghanistan."[42]
In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S.
intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug
syndicates.
With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft
flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled,
from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a
Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007.
Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most
powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the
conventional wisdom on this matter:
Partly this has been from realpolitik - in recognition of the local
power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been
from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers
have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US
budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound
(as the U.S. is) by the rules of war... These facts... have led to
enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or
more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks,
particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they
affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health
and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and
indeed the whole of US society.[43]
Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky
and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American
banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug
trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated "that $500 billion
to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks
worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through
United States banks."[44] The London Independent reported in 2004
that drug trafficking constitutes "the third biggest global commodity
in cash terms after oil and the arms trade."[45]
Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist
one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug
traffic.
As Senator Levin summarizes the record: "Estimates are that $500
billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved
internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is
estimated half of that money comes to the United States"...
Washington and the mass media have portrayed the U.S. in the forefront
of the struggle against narco trafficking, drug laundering and
political corruption:
the image is of clean white hands fighting dirty money from the
Third world (or the ex-Communist countries). The truth is exactly
the opposite. U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of
policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those
funds in legitimate businesses or U.S.
government bonds and legitimating them. The U.S. Congress has held
numerous hearings, provided detailed exposis of the illicit practices
of the banks, passed several laws and called for stiffer enforcement
by any number of public regulators and private bankers. Yet the
biggest banks continue their practices, the sums of dirty money
grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have
neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices
that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.[46]
In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this analysis found support
from the claim of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on
Drugs and Crime, that "Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept
the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis."
According to the London Observer, Costa said he has seen evidence
that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment
capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year.
He said that a majority of the $352bn (#216bn) of drugs profits was
absorbed into the economic system as a result... Costa said evidence
that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was
first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors
around 18 months ago.
"In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid
investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the
banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an
important factor," he said.[47]
Why This Drug-Corrupted War Will Continue
Thus the war machine that co-opted Obama into his incipient escalations
of an unwinnable war is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside
Washington. It is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide
coalition of forces in our society. For this reason the war machine
will not be dissuaded by sensible advice from within the establishment,
such as the recommendation for Afghan counterterrorism from the
RAND Corporation:
Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against
al Qa'ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy
to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment
than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint
or none at all.[48]
It will not be dissuaded by the conclusion of a recent study for
the Carnegie Endowment that "the presence of foreign troops is the
most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."[49]
To justify its global strategic posture of what it calls "full-spectrum
dominance," the Pentagon badly needs the "war against terror" in
Afghanistan, just as a decade ago it needed the counter-productive
"war against drugs" in Colombia.
Full-spectrum dominance is of course not just an end in itself, it
is also lobbied for by far-flung American corporations overseas,
especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil with huge investments in
Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. As Michael Klare noted
in his book Resource Wars, a secondary objective of the U.S. campaign
in Afghanistan was "to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf
and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil."[50]
The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the
protracted conflict generated by "full-spectrum dominance" in
Afghanistan, and some of the beneficiaries may have been secretly
lobbying for it. And I fear that all the client intelligence assets
organized about the movement of Afghan heroin through Central Asia
and beyond will, without a clear change in policy, continue as
before to be protected by the CIA. And America's superbanks like
Citibank the banks allegedly "too big to fail" are now since the
downturn even more dependant than before on the hundreds of billions
of illicit profits which they launder each year.[51]
In both Afghanistan and Laos (as opposed to Vietnam) heroin has
been by far the principal export, and so important that simply to
curtail the production of opium has risked impoverishing those in
the areas where opium was grown.
This was the reason given for not disrupting heroin flows in the
severe winter of 2001-02, the first year of the American invasion
of Afghanistan. The economy was so devastated that, without income
from opium, large numbers of Afghans might have starved.
According to Australian journalist Michael Ware, Time Magazine's
correspondent in Kandahar, opium is still the main support of the
Afghan economy, as well the main support for both the Karzai
government and the Taliban opposition:
You take away the opium and you suck the oxygen out of this economy
and you'll be treading on the toes of significant players who have
built empires around the opium trade, and that includes political
and military figures as well as criminal and business figures here
in Kandahar.[52]
A consistent bias of U.S. news reporting on opium and heroin in
Afghanistan has been to blame the Taliban for their production, and
not also the government. For example, the New York Times reported
on November 27, 2008 that
"Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the
Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in
an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing
for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of
the United Nations drug office [UNODC], says."[53]
But as Jeremy Hammond responds,
In commentary attached to the UNODC report, Mr. Costa asks, "Who
collects this money? Local strong men. In other words, by year end,
war-lords, drug-lords and insurgents will have extracted almost
half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production
and trafficking." Notably, Mr. Costa does not answer his question
with "the Taliban", but includes a much broader range of participants
who profit from the trade that includes, but is in no way limited
to, the Taliban.[54]
Citing the statistics in the UNODC's annual reports, Hammond estimates
that the reported Taliban revenues from opium ($75-100 million) are
only about 3 percent of the total earned income in Afghanistan ($3.4
billion), which in turn is only about five percent of the UNODC
estimate of what that crop is worth in the world market ($64
billion).[55]
It is because of the larger share of drug profits going to supporters
of the Kabul government that U.S. strategies to attack the Afghan
drug trade are explicitly limited to attacking drug traffickers
supporting the Taliban.[56] Such strategies have the indirect effect
of increasing the opium market share of the past and present CIA
assets in the Karzai regime (headed by Hamid Karzai, a former CIA
asset),[57] such as the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, an
active CIA asset, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former CIA asset.[58]
As I have observed elsewhere about the U.S. campaign against the
FARC and cocaine in Colombia, the aim of all U.S. anti drug campaigns
abroad has never been the hopeless ideal of eradication. The aim
of all such campaigns has been to alter market share: to target
specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under
the control of those traffickers who are allies of the state security
apparatus and/or the CIA. This was notably true of Laos in the
1960s, when the CIA intervened militarily with air support to assist
Ouan Rattikone's army, in a battle over a contested opium caravan
in Laos.[59]
Consequences for America of a Drug-Corrupted War
But this toleration of the traffic has led to another similarity
with Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s: the increasing addiction of GIs
to heroin, Afghanistan's principal export. Despite the denial one
has come to expect from high places, it is (according to Salon's
Shaun McCanna),
not difficult to find a soldier who has returned from Afghanistan
with an addiction. Nearly every veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom
I have spoken with was familiar with heroin's availability on base,
and most knew at least one soldier who used while deployed.[60]
And the reported easy availability of heroin outside Afghanistan's
Bagram air base, like that four decades ago outside Vietnam's
American base at Long Binh, points to another alarming similarity.
Just as at the height of the Vietnam war, heroin was shipped to the
United States in body bags containing cadavers,[61] so now we hear
from Heneral Mahmut Gareev, a former Soviet commander in Afghanistan
that
Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of
Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan
brings them about 50 billion dollars a year which fully covers the
expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are
not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.[62]
Gareev's charge has been repeated in one form or another by a number
of other sources, including Pakistani General Hamid Gul, a former
ISI commander:
"Abdul Wali Karzai is the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan," he
stated bluntly. He added that the drug lords are also involved in
arms trafficking, which is "a flourishing trade" in Afghanistan.
"But what is most disturbing from my point of view is that the
military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being used.
You said very rightly that the drug routes are northward through
the Central Asia republics and through some of the Russian territory,
and then into Europe and beyond. But some of it is going directly.
That is by the military aircraft. I have so many times in my
interviews said, Please listen to this information, because I am
an aware person.' We have Afghans still in Pakistan, and they
sometimes contact and pass on the stories to me. And some of them
are very authentic. I can judge that. So they are saying that the
American military aircraft are being used for this purpose.
So, if that is true, it is very, very disturbing indeed."[63]
Another slightly different testimony is from General Khodaidad
Khodaidad, the current Afghan minister of counter narcotics:
The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are
earning money from drug production in Afghanistan. General Khodaidad
Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces
controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, IRNA reported
on Saturday. He went on to say that NATO forces are taxing the
production of opium in the regions under their control.[64]
I do not accept these charges as proven, despite the number of
additional sources for them. None of the sources quoted here can
be considered an objective source with no axe to grind, and worse
charges still are easy to find in wilds of the Internet.
However the charges are plausible, because of history. Just as in
Vietnam and Laos, the United States made its initial alliances in
Afghanistan with drug traffickers, both in 1980 and again in 2001;
and this is a major factor explaining the endemic corruption of the
U.S.-sponsored Karzai regime today.
There should be an official Congressional investigation whether the
United States did not intend for its Afghan assets, just as earlier
in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, to supplement their CIA subsidies
with income from drug trafficking.
In short, the impasse the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, in its efforts
to support an unpopular and corrupt regime, must be understood in
the light of its past relations to the drug traffic there a situation
which resembles the past U.S. involvement in Laos even more than
in Vietnam. It is this sustained pattern of intervention in support
of drug economies, and with the support of drug traffickers, that
so depresses observers who had hoped desperately that, in this
respect, Obama would bring a change.
The question remains: how many Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis
will have to die, before we can put an end to this drug-corrupted
and drug-corrupting war?
　
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor
at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and
researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the
poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. His prose books include
The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond
(in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia,
and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection
(in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the
CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics
and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995,
2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March
2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of
War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).
　
Notes
[1] John Nichols, "Obama's Campaign Merits a Peace Prize," Nation
(blogs), October 10, 2009,
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/482916/obama_s_campaign_merits_a_peace
_prize.
[2] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007), 65-69.
[3] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 66-67.
[4] Scott, Road to 9/11, 67-68, referring to the Rumsfeld Commission
to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.
[5] Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, "Refighting the Last War:
Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," Military Review, November-December
2009, 1.
[6] Johnson and Mason, "Refighting the Last War,", 5, citing Jeffrey
Record, "How America's Own Military Performance in Vietnam Aided
and Abetted the "North's" Victory, in Marc Jason Gilbert, ed. Why
the North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 119.
[7] New York Times, October 28, 2009.
[8] Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997),
239; A.J.
Langguth, Our Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 99;
Alfred W.
McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago
Review Press, 2003), 203 (drugs).
[9] McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 203.
[10] Gareth Porter, "Tajik Grip on Afghan Army Signals New Ethnic
War," IPS News, November 28, 2009,
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49461.
[11] Spencer Tucker, Vietnam (Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, 1999), 87.
[12] Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics Of Defeat: The Vietnam War In Hau
Nghia Province (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1991) 3; quoted in
Johnson and Mason, "Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template," 5.
[13] Thomas H. Johnson, "Ismail Khan, Heart, and Iranian Influence,"
Strategic Insights, July 2004,
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/jul/johnsonJul04.asp.
[14] Johnson and Mason, "Refighting the Last War," 7-8.
[15] Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling
the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's
Press, 2009), 127-29.
[16] The southern provinces were administered directly by a risident
supirieur in Vientiane, who also supervised , but indirectly, the
quasi-independent northern Kingdom of Louangphrabang.
[17] Corruption within the U.S. Aid program (or boondoggle) in Laos,
centered about bribes paid by CIA contractor Willis Bird, produced
a Congressional investigation. See Scott, Drugs, Oil and War, 196,
Martin E. Goldstein, American Policy Toward Laos, 186-87; U.S.
Congress, House U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Report no. 546,
86th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington: GPO, 1959).
[18] Time, March 17, 1961; discussion in Scott, War Conspiracy, 78.
[19] Keith Quincy, Hmong: history of a people Cheney, WA: Eastern
Washington University, 1995), 163. To this day the CIA's fact sheet
on Cambodia lists, as the chief environmental problem in Laos,
"unexploded ordnance" (all of it American); see CIA, The World
Factbook,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/la.html.
[20] Guardian (London), October 14, 1971. Cf. McCoy, Politics of
Heroin, 320-21.
[21] Cf. Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam:
The System Worked (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1979).
[22] Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New
York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[23] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 300.
[24] John Prados, Lost Crusader: the Secret Wars of CIA Director
William Colby (New York: Oxford UP: 2003), 168.
[25] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40.
[26] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461; citing interview with Dr. David
Musto.
[27] David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980; quoted in McCoy,
Politics of Heroin, 462.
[28] Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and
the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002), 223; Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison,
Out of Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16-17, 23-28.
[29] Scott, Road to 9/11, 77-79; Little, American Orientalism, 150.
[30] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 46, 49; McCoy, Politics of Heroin,
475-78.
[31] New York Times, 3/13/94.
[32] Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in
Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Random House, 1990), 68-69.
[33] Brzezinski for example writes that "I pushed a decision through
the SCC to be more sympathetic to those Afghans who were determined
to preserve their country's independence" (Brzezinski, Power and
Principle, 427). On the same page he writes that "I also consulted
with the Saudis and the Egyptians regarding the fighting in
Afghanistan." He is silent about the early, decisive, and ill-fated
contact with Pakistan.
[34] Scott, Road to 9/11, 73-75, citing Christina Lamb, Waiting for
Allah:
Pakistan's Struggle for Democracy (London: H. Hamilton, 1991), 222;
cf. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 479. Fazle ul-Haq was the governor
of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province; at the same time he was
also an important CIA contact and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen,
some of whom -- it was no secret -- were supporting themselves by
major opium and heroin trafficking through the NWFP. However, after
lengthy correspondence with Fazle ul-Haq's son, I am persuaded that
there are no known grounds to accuse Fazle ul-Haq of having profited
personally from the drug traffic. See "Clarification from Peter
Dale Scott re. Fazle Haq," 911Truth.org,
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090223165146219.
[35] Scott, Road to 9/11, 73-75; citing McCoy, Politics of Heroin,
475 (leading drug lords), 464 (60 percent).
[36] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461-64, 474-80; Lawrence Lifshultz,
"Inside the Kingdom of Heroin," Nation, November 14, 1988: Peters,
Seeds of Terror, 37-39.
[37] Ralph Blumenthal, Last Days of the Sicilians (New York: Pocket
Books, 1988), 119, 314.
[38] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 128-29; Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank,
305-06.
[39] Beaty and Gwynne, 306; cf. 82; also Allix, La petite cuillhre,
35, 95;
Peters, Seeds of Terror, 45-46.
[40] Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, March 2002, 170-71. A Tajik sociologist
added that she knew "drugs were massively distributed at that time,"
and that she often heard how Russian soldiers were "invited to
taste."
[41] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA,
Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September
10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536.
[42] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the
Media on Terror's Trail (Washington: Brassey's, 2004), 9. On December
4, 2001, Asia Times reported that a convicted Pakistani drug baron
and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi, was also released from
prison to participate in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
(http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CL04Df01.html); Scott, Road to 9/11,
125.
[43] Peter Dale Scott, "Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam: The Deep
Politics of Drugs and Oil," http://www.peterdalescott.net/qov.html.
[44] U.S. Congress, Senate, Minority staff report for Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money
Laundering: a Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities
(November 9, 1999), http://hsgac.senate.gov/110999_report.htm. These
figures are both much used and much disputed, along with their
relevance. But even if the real figures are only half those estimated
by the Senate report, dirty money would appear to be a structural
part of the U.S. economy. Those who deny this remind me of the
economists who, as late as the 1950s, argued that U.S. foreign trade
(then listed at about 2 percent of GNP) was too small to be a
significant element in the U.S. GNP. No one would make that argument
today.
[45] Independent (London), February 29, 2004. Cf. Michel Chossudovsky,
"The Spoils of War: Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade,"
GlobalResearch, May 5, 2005,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20050614&a
rticleId=91.
[46] James Petras, "`Dirty Money' Foundation of U.S. Growth and
Empire," from La Jornada, May 19, 2001, Narco News 2001,
http://www.narconews.com/petras1.html.
[47] Rajeev Syal, "Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims
UN advisor," Observer, December 13, 2009,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-
claims.
[48] RAND Corporation, "How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for
Countering al Qa'ida," Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008),
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html.
[49] Gilles Dorronsoro, "Focus and Exit: an Alternative Strategy
for the Afghan War," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
January 2009, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf.
[50] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global
Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001; quoted in David Michael Smith,
"The U.S. War in Afghanistan," The Canadian, April 19, 2006,
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2006/04/19/01181.html,
emphasis added. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 169-70.
[51] U.S. Congress, Senate, Minority staff report for Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money
Laundering: a Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities
(November 9, 1999), http://hsgac.senate.gov/110999_report.htm.
[52] "Afghanistan - America's Blind Eye," ABC/TV (Australia), April
10, 2002, Reporter: Mark Corcoran,
http://www.mickware.info/2002/files/2b3c5632e1c8fa1ad68b6f83ae91a8c3-93.php.
[53] Kirk Kraeutler, "U.N. Reports That Taliban Is Stockpiling
Opium," New York Times, November 27, 2008.
[54] Jeremy R. Hammond, "New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role
in Opium Trade," Foreign Policy Journal, November 29, 2008,
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2008/11/29/new-york-times-misleads-on-tal
iban-role-in-opium-trade/.
[55] Personal communication of December 29, 2009, citing UNODC
Reports of 2008 and 2009.
[56] James Risen, U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,
New York Times, August 10, 2009: "United States military commanders
have told Congress that... only those [drug traffickers] providing
support to the insurgency would be made targets."
[57] Nick Mills, Karzai: the failing American intervention and the
struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007), 79.
[58] New York Times, October 27, 2009.
[59] Valentine, Strength of the Pack, 333.
[60] Shaun McCanna, "It's Easy for Soldiers to Score Heroin in
Afghanistan,"Salon, August 1, 2007,
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/07/afghan_heroin/. Cf.
Megan Carpentier, "Is The Military Ignoring The Heroin Problem In
The Ranks?", AirAmerica.com, October 20, 2009,
http://airamerica.com/politics/10-20-2009/military-ignoring-its-heroin-proble
m/?p=all; Gerald Posner, "The Taliban's Heroin Ploy," The Daily
Beast, October 19, 2009,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-19/the-heroin-bomb/ful
l/.
[61] Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People,
Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield,
OR: TrineDay, 2009), 171; cf. 103.
[62] Gen. Mahmut Gareev, ""Afghan drug trafficking brings US $50
billion a year," RussiaToday. August 20, 2009,
http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-20/afghanistan-us-drug-trafficking.ht
ml.
[63] Jeremy R. Hammond, "Pakistan: General Hamid Gul on Destabilizing
Pakistan," Foreign Policy Journal, August 27, 2009,
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56790.shtml.
[64] "Occupiers involved in drug trade: Afghan minister," IranPressTV,
November 1, 2009,
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110130§ionid=351020403.
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