WHY IS THE U.S. LETTING AFGHAN DRUG PRODUCTION RESUME
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ANALYSIS
By Peter Dale Scott
Tuesday, 19 February 2002
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/qdimu.html
According to the 2/18/02 Financial Times (London), "The US and United
Nations have ignored repeated calls by the international anti-drugs
community to address the increasing menace of Afghanistan's opium
cultivation, threatening a rift between Europe and the US as they begin to
reconstruct the country....
"European governments believe one of the reasons the US is "out to lunch on
the issue", as one diplomat put it, is that Afghan heroin is not a
significant player in the US drugs market, accounting for less than 5 per
cent of consumption. Colombia, he said, was the focus of the US anti-drugs
campaign. This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where Afghan heroin is
viewed as a main source of the region's trade in hard drugs."
This article returns to a split referred to in my earlier postings of late
last year: the US (in contrast to Europe) has no apparent strategy to
counteract the huge increase in opium production that has resulted from the
defeat of the Taliban, which had banned opium production.
The Afghan opium crop this year is now estimated by the Financial Times to
reach 4,500 tons. The Guardian (London) is also pessimistic (see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,653590,00.html):
"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 Guardian has
learned. 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."
How could the US, which until recently spoke loudly and often of the need
to wage a war on drugs, be so silent about the Afghan drug problem? One can
think of a number of possible explanations. One is that drugs are now the
chief source of income for Afghanistan, whose traditional economy has been
almost destroyed.
This is a matter of extreme concern to America's chief ally in the region,
Pakistan. Pakistan, which has had to support about 3 million Afghan
refugees for the last two decades, saw an additional two hundred thousand
flee the country after September 11, 2001 (see:
http://www.paknews.org/top.php?id=1&date1=2001-12-13). The failure to
secure a stable peace has meant that refugees are still coming. Musharraf
and the US have political as well as economic reasons to wish to reverse
this flow. Many of the refugees are disaffected and open to Islamist
recruitment.
This brings us to the sensitive and complex question of the drug
involvement of Pakistan's lead intelligence agency, the ISI (Interservices
Intelligence). The ISI, CIA, and Afghan drug traffic have been a single
story since the CIA, in May 1979, first met with the ISI protege, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar; and proceeded to fund him, even as his guerrilla operation
evolved into a professional drug network with its own heroin labs (McCoy,
Politics of Heroin, 451).
In the words of a Brookings Institution study, "With the knowledge (if not
direct support) of Pakistan's intelligence service and even of the U.S.
CIA, the covert supply of arms to the Afghan resistance movement and the
drug trade became inextricably linked" (Paul Stares, The Rise of the Global
Drug Habit [1996], 35).
Control of drug flows appears to have become part of the CIA-ISI strategy
for carrying the Afghan War north into the Soviet Union. As a first step,
Casey appears to have promoted a plan suggested to him by Alexandre de
Marenches, that the CIA supply drugs on the sly to Soviet troops (Cooley,
Unholy Wars, 128; Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 305-06). Although de
Marenches subsequently denied that the plan went forward, there are reports
that cocaine from Latin America soon reached Soviet troops, and that the
CIA-ISI-linked bank BCCI, along with "a few American intelligence
operatives were deeply enmeshed in the drug trade" before the war was over
(Beaty and Gwynne, 306; cf. 82).
But the plans went farther. In 1984, during a secret visit by CIA Director
Casey to Pakistan, "Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that
they take the Afghan war into enemy territory -- into the Soviet Union
itself....Pakistani intelligence officers -- partly inspired by Casey --
began independently to train Afghans and funnel CIA supplies for scattered
strikes against military installations, factories and storage depots within
Soviet territory....The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in Washington,
who saw military raids on Soviet territory as `an incredible escalation,'
according to Graham Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence [CIA] official
who counseled against any such raids" (Washington Post, 7/19/92).
According to Ahmed Rashid, "In 1986 the secret services of the United
States, Great Britain, and Pakistan agreed on a plan to launch guerrilla
attacks into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan" (Rashid, Jihad, 43). The task "was
given to the ISI's favorite Mujaheddin leader Gulbuddin Hikmetyar" (Rashid,
Taliban, 129), who by this time was already supplementing his CIA and Saudi
income with the proceeds of his heroin labs "in the Koh-i-Sultan area [of
Pakistan], where the ISI was in total control" (M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in
South Asia, 189).
The Islamist movements of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been supporting
themselves with Afghan opium and heroin ever since. Hekmetyar became
estranged from the ISI and Saudi Arabia following his support for Saddam
Hussein in the 1990-91 Gulf War. His place seems to have been taken by
Osama bin Laden, after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan with his entourage
in May 1996, allegedly "on board a Hercules C130, a Pakistani military
plane" (Labeviere, Dollars for Terror, 115).
>From 1996 to 2001 bin Laden was a source of support, along with "Islamic
charities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States," for the Uzbek Islamic
resistance known since 1998 as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU
(Rashid, Jihad, 154; cf. 133, 140, 165). Bin Laden has allegedly, with ISI
and Taliban blessing, used the former Hekmatyar drug network to sustain the
IMU; he even instituted a regular air service between Nangarhar, where the
opium was grown, and Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, a city with a reported
heroin lab where the IMU had a major base (Labeviere, 105, 113 [air
service]; Cooley, 154 [heroin lab]; Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 150).
The IMU has since allegedly established heroin labs in Tajikistan (Rashid,
Jihad, 165).
In this period the IMU "extended its control of the heroin trade from
Afghanistan through Central Asia to Europe, using its network of militants
across the region as couriers" (Rashid, Jihad, 154). His network included
militant Chechens, who have used drug profits to finance their rebellion
against Russia.
As happens everywhere, the drug trade has corrupted those who came in
contact with it, especially in Pakistan. In 1989 ISI Chief Gen. Hamid Gul
was fired by Benazir Bhutto, after he had become controversial "for his
alleged involvement in the drug trade" (M. Emdad-ul Haq, Drugs in South
Asia, 213). But Bhutto's problems with Gul may have involved Islamist
terrorism along with drugs. An Islamist, Gul in the fall of 1988 instructed
all Pakistani legations to issue "special tourist" visas to all Islamists
volunteering to join the Afghan jihad (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 24).
But a more important explanation for the intelligence drug-connection, one
which I have developed elsewhere, is geostrategic. Like any other state,
the US top priority in its drug strategy is to control the illegal drug
traffic that affects it. This is a more urgent and immediate priority than
the quasi-utopian goal of eliminating the drug traffic. Illegal trafficking
creates networks that constitute alternatives to established state power.
Understandably, the US would rather have networks under its control
operating chiefly in other countries, than networks not under its control
operating in the United States.
In the present case, most of the opium and heroin exiting Afghanistan now
flows north into the oil-and-gas-rich states of Central Asia where the US
seeks to gain influence. This traffic is chiefly controlled by the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an overtly Islamist terrorist group that is
said to have threatened (in conjunction with bin Laden, as I have reported
elsewhere ) the offices of US oil companies in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
(Cf. Rashid, Jihad, 166.)
Despite these facts, the relationship between the US and the IMU is far too
complex to make the IMU an obvious target for the US "war against terror."
If the CIA, via its sister agency the Pakistan ISI, can maintain a degree
of control over the drug flow reaching the IMU, this confers a degree of
influence over not just the IMU but the Government of Uzbekistan.
Ahmed Rashid (Jihad, 178) reports the belief among Tajik officials that
Russia, while officially opposing the IMU, tolerated their raids "because
Moscow was trying to pressure [Uzbek dictator] Karimov into accepting
Russian troops and greater Russian influence in Uzbekistan. The fact that
since 1999 the Russian army had three times helped evacuate IMU guerrillas
to Afghanistan was undeniable."
This mirrors the speculation offered years ago by a major German magazine
about a right-wing Cuban-American drug kingpin, Alberto Sicilia Falcon,
based in Mexico City. The allegation was that Sicilia, with CIA approval,
was offering arms and funds to left-wing guerrilla groups in Central
America, so that states in Central America would be forced to rely on the
US Government for military assistance.
Even without this example, one can reasonably ask if the US CIA would not
have the same motives as the Russians to facilitate IMU movements (in this
case with drugs). The IMU drug flows both threaten the Uzbek regime and
corrupts its officials. In this way they make it easier for the US
government to secure military agreements, and for US corporations to secure
access to resources through their own corrupt offers.
What is true of Uzbekistan and its sister states is true of Russia itself.
There have been alleegations that drug money has helped fund the
privatization of Russian oil and other assets, thus opening up Russia and
Central Asia to penetration by major US oil corporations.
For example a story commissioned in August 2001 by the Center for Public
Integrity reported that in April 2001, Halliburton (whose former CEO was
Richard Cheney) obtained $489 million in credits from the U.S.
Export-Import Bank for its Russian partner, a Russian oil company drawing
on drug trafficking and organized crime funds. The company was owned by a
bank said to have arranged with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela of the Cali
cartel for the laundering of Colombian drug profits through Russian
investments. (see: http://www.public-i.org/story%5F01%5F080200.htm)
Copyright 2002 Peter Dale Scott
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