FLASH 23 (2/19/02): Why Is the US Letting Afghan Drug Production Resume?
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 (
FLASH 5 and
FLASH 7)
: 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:
"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.
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).
At first, according to Pakistani Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, ISI was reluctant to to more than smuggle written propaganda material into the Soviet Union."Thus it was the US that put in train a major escalation of the war which, over the next three years, culminated in numerous cross-border raids and sabotage missions north of the Yalu" (Yousaf, The Bear Trap, 189).
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).
Casey's Central Asian initiative of 1984, made at a time when right-wing oil interests already had their eyes on Caspian Basin oil, is the source of the heroin-financed Islamist groups like the IMU who are the scourge of Central Asia today.
The Islamist movements of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been
supporting themselves with Afghan opium and heroin ever since.
This raises the question whether the US is tolerating the resumption of the drug traffic today in order to continue the destabilization of the Central Asian States it wishes to penetrate and influence.
But Hekmetyar became estranged from the ISI and Saudi Arabia following
his support for Saddam Hussein in the 1990-91 Gulf War, and particularly when
Pakistan, under pressure from the US, began in 1994 to extradite wanted
Arab-Afghans to their home countries in Algeria and Egypt (Jane's
Intelligence Review, 4/1/95).
His place was eventually 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). Bin Laden's first anti-American
fatwa of 8/23/96 referred explicitly to the "sons of the
land of the two holy places [Saudia Arabia], [who] by the command of
Allah...are also fighting in Tajikistan."
From 1996 to 2001 bin Laden was a source of support, along with
"Islamic charities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States," for the
Tajikistan-based
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).
This 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.
Unquestionably the US has done much in the past few years to combat Islamism in Central Asia, especially after reports that bin Laden would try to hit U.S. Embassies and oil company offices there (Rashid, Jihad, 166, 191-92). Yet one can also
reasonably ask if the US CIA
could not have the same motives as the Russians to tolerate IMU
movements (in this case with drugs). The IMU drug flows both threaten
the Uzbek regime and corrupt 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 allegations 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. (According to Maureen Orth in the March 2002 Vanity Fair, The Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policies estimated that in 1996 more than $180 million in drug profits had been invested in Russian privatization, mostly in the energy and telecommunications industries.)
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.
An even more lurid tale of Mobil's involvement with a Russian mafia company was told by Seymour Hersh in the 7/9/01 issue of the
New
Yorker:
`....Williams authorized Mobil to advance an estimated forty-five million dollars to Atlas to enable it to buy Russian crude oil, which it would then trade elsewhere, at a high profit. Atlas was to pay off the advance in monthly installments of five million dollars, but after a few months it simply stopped paying, blaming the chronic Russian monetary crisis. Atlas had essentially stiffed Mobil and dared it to come after its money. Florence Fee, a Russian-speaking oil manager, was hired by Mobil in 1997 and assigned to the Moscow office. She sent an E-mail on June 1,1998, to a dozen Mobil executives warning the company to be careful in pursuing the money. "When you are talking about attaching the assets of Atlas," she wrote, "you are basically talking about crossing the mafia. The mafia do not play by the same rules as Western business or legal circles, and have no regard whatsoever for the law.. .. There have (so far) been few attacks on foreigners in this country, but those there have been have always been linked to attempts to cross the mafia."
`Bryan Williams, meanwhile, had made extraordinary efforts to minimize the extent of Mobil's losses to Atlas. He arranged on paper for the sale of Mobil products to a company that, in turn, sold them to an Atlas subsidiary. Mobil then repurchased the Mobil products -- again, on paper -- from the Atlas subsidiary. at a higher price. The "profit" Atlas made was supposed to be credited against its debt to Mobil. The deal went forward, Patten Boggs noted in a report, "although it did not have any apparent valid business purpose."'
Finally there is the question of the extent to which US and European banks profit from laundering the proceeds from the Afghan drug traffic. (The high-end profits are of course realized in the countries of destination, not where the opium originates.) The scholar Alain Labrousse, formerly editor of the respected Geopolitical Drug Dispatch, has estimated that 80 percent of the profits from drug-trafficking ends up in the banks of the wealthy countries or their branches in the underdeveloped countries where there is weaker legal control. As I have noted elsewhere, the current US dependency on foreign oil has required a large favorable flow of petro- and narco-dollars.
Today it seems more and more clear that in the current decade the Bush administration is exerting its own pressures, from Georgia to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, to neutralize Russian influence. The United States has already stationed 1,000 troops in Uzbekistan, and 300 close to the Chinese border in Kyrgyzstan, with more scheduled to arrive.
One can argue that this U.S. presence on Russia's borders should benefit both the region and the United States, by increasing the new nations' autonomy from Russia, and facilitating the export of their oil and gas.
But these states, especially the dictatorship of Uzbekistan, are so oppressive and corrupt that armed opposition to them is virtually inevitable. The influx of U.S. military aid and corporate investment tended up to now, in the eyes of observers like Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, to benefit only those at the top. On the one hand, "Military aid has not been accompanied by large-scale economic incentives;" and on the other, "Western oil company investments, by creating an extremely wealthy, corrupt minority class, are breeding even greater social discontent."
The State Department seems determined to ignore this problem, proclaiming on its website that
"The United States... values Uzbekistan as a stable, moderate force in a turbulent region." This recalls the absurd claims made once by the State Department about Diem's Republic of Vietnam. If in truth the US has learned nothing since that war, one can predict confidently that US troops will once again be shot at. The American people must work to find better approaches to the social problems of the area, in which the mistakes of the past will not be repeated.
(For my earlier stories on drugs see below at
FLASH 5 (A): Pre-1990 Drug Networks Being Restored Under New Coalition?
and
FLASH 7: Official UN Report about Northern Alliance Drug-Trafficking)