4/10/03
WILL AFGHANISTAN BE THE MODEL?
The
war in Iraq is drawing to a close. What
will its American-devised government look like? We cannot be sure yet. But
we should be asking: will Afghanistan be the model?
Below
are excerpts from an article at http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=13000
entitled “What's America's Real Role in the Afghan Heroin Trade?”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Obeidullah Shanawaz’ farm is a mini-monument to recent Afghan history. The wealthy farmer took me on a walking tour of seemingly barren fields that will soon be sprouting winter wheat and vegetables. "Over here," he says, "are stables once owned by the king." That would be stables built around 1900. "Over here," he says somewhat more grimly, pointing to a splintered frame, "is where the warlords fired rockets at my front door." Shanawaz’ farm, on the outskirts of Kabul, was in firing range of warlords battling for control of the city in the early 1990s. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989 and the government they left behind fell in 1992, warlords who now belong to the Northern Alliance began a bitter civil war that caused more destruction to the cities than ever occurred during the Soviet occupation.
Shanawaz opposed the Taliban, which took over in 1996, and welcomed their recent downfall. But the new U.S.-backed regime hasn’t exactly inspired his confidence. He walks over to the spot in front of his house where his Land Rover was parked before a local Northern Alliance commander stole it. He says he has spent the last month trying to get it back, to no avail, even though he has the name of the commander who commandeered the car. So far, no policeman or government official in Kabul will do anything about it. Shanawaz says Afghanistan has no effective central government, police, or army. Local warlords rule as they did in the 1990s. And that’s why opium poppies are back in bloom…
When the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan last October, the Taliban crumbled, and farmers started planting poppies once again. Heroin smuggling shot up. "The people need to earn money," says Shanawaz matter-of-factly. Shanawaz doesn’t grow poppies. Neither do any other farmers around Kabul, mainly because the soil there is ill-suited for the crop. But he understands the politics of the heroin trade. By walking away from Afghanistan during the civil wars of the 1990s, says Shanawaz, the U.S. essentially guaranteed that drugs would flourish under the Northern Alliance warlords. "Now the U.S. feels the pain of forgetting Afghanistan," he says. Shanawaz also understands the social impact for addicts in Afghanistan and the west. "It’s a big problem all over the world," he says, looking out over his land, "especially for the young generation. Now we have a new government. I hope for our people" that the heroin trade stops, he says.
But so far, it seems to be just the opposite. The U.S. is pursuing the same policies that led to the flourishing drug trade in past decades.
Peshawar, Pakistan
Ahmad points across the railroad tracks where regular Pakistani police don’t patrol. "That’s where the drug dealers are," he says. As if to emphasize the point, we hear several shots from an AK-47 rifle. "Don’t worry," says Ahmad, "when they see a foreigner, they like to have some target practice. But they’re not shooting at us." It’s purely an intimidation tactic, he explains...
But the sharp rise in heroin smuggling is more than a byproduct of a chaotic war. It’s a direct result of U.S. policy, according to high-ranking Pakistani military officials and sources in the drug trade. They ought to know. After all, they cooperated with the U.S. in establishing the heroin trade in the first place.
Islamabad, Pakistan
Hamid wasn’t always a heroin smuggler. Like many people in Pakistan during the lawless 1980s, Hamid was drawn to heroin smuggling with dreams of easy profits. Hamid, who doesn’t want his real name published in the U.S. media, was once a successful businessman in Pakistan. He stands five-foot, seven inches tall and sports a mustache, a ubiquitous style in these parts. He dresses casually in gray slacks and sports shirt.
When he started smuggling in the 1980s, a kilo of heroin purchased for $100 from Afghanistan, he says, would sell for $100,000 in New York. Hamid figured he could beat the odds of getting caught. He didn’t. After being caught at JFK airport with a kilo, he spent several years in a federal penitentiary. Now, he says, he’s a legitimate businessman again. No more drug smuggling since that last run-in with the DEA.
Although Hamid was a small-time smuggler, he is intimately familiar with the Afghan/Pakistani drug trade. Afghanistan had produced opium for centuries. Locals smoked or ate the opium, but before 1979 it wasn’t processed into heroin. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan that year, the U.S. supported the Mujahadeen, who wanted to oust the Soviets. The Mujahadeen became proxy warriors in the Cold War battle against the Evil Empire. But, particularly in the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration needed an off-the-books method to finance the Mujahadeen. The U.S. also wanted to hook the Soviet soldiers on heroin, according to Hamid.
So the CIA gave the Mujahadeen some helpful lessons, Hamid says. The CIA "helped train a few Afghans and showed them how to make heroin out of opium," he says. "They convinced them, this is how you finance your war, like they did with the [Nicaraguan] Contras in the 1980s."
Hamid admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of such training; his information comes from conversations with others in the drug trade. But other sources confirm the U.S. role in the heroin trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The CIA "needed more money than they could provide to Afghans for their war," says Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier general. He says the CIA instructed top generals in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to sanction the drug trade. General Qadir says while the DEA tried to stop the heroin smuggling, the CIA "as a matter of policy was saying its okay." CIA officials justified drug dealing on the grounds they were promoting a greater good, according to Qadir, who bases his conclusions on conversations with fellow generals and top ISI officers.
Throughout the 1980s, the CIA shipped increasingly sophisticated weapons to the Mujahadeen through the Pakistani port of Karachi, then by truck to border towns, and then by mule over the mountain passes into Afghanistan. Heroin followed the same route on the return trip, according to many sources.
Tariq Zafar, who heads a major Pakistani drug-rehabilitation program in Islamabad, says U.S. support of drug smuggling had a devastating impact on Pakistan. "Every city along the smuggling route from Afghanistan to Karachi saw an explosion in drug addiction," he says.
Guns, drugs, and anticommunist politics became inextricably intertwined. By the time the Mujahadeen came to power in 1992, heroin was the country’s number one export. The Mujahadeen warlords almost immediately began fighting among themselves and used the heroin trade to finance their wars. They either directly controlled the trade or taxed the smugglers. Those warlords who survived the civil war, and later battles with the Taliban, renamed themselves the Northern Alliance.
In 1996 when the Taliban came to power in most of the country, they initially banned all smuggling as anti-Islamic; poppy fields were burned. But within a year, the Taliban discovered that heroin provided a great deal of national income and encouraged farmers to plant poppies once again. Within a few years the Taliban became isolated internationally because of their policies banning women from schools and workplaces, their destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues, and their harboring of Osama bin Laden.
In an effort to assuage international opinion, the Taliban banned poppy production and drug smuggling. Such activity became "un-Islamic" once again, and this time the prohibition stuck. According to UNDCP figures, however, poppy production continued in territory held by the Northern Alliance. Northern Alliance rebels were fighting a seemingly losing battle against the better organized Taliban, and they needed all the financing they could get.
"The Northern Alliance has always been producing drugs," notes General Qadir. "It was never a moral issue. It was economics."
And the economics that kept the Northern Alliance dealing drugs during the 1990s still apply today.
Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Retired Brig. General Hamid Gul isn’t an easy man to see. He’s constantly on the phone with government officials, army leaders, and the media. He canceled one interview with me and only reluctantly agreed to schedule another. But once we finally met, he was very friendly in a patrician sort of way.
Gul, who still has the ramrod straight bearing of a military man, lives in Rawalpindi, a half-hour drive from Islamabad, which is also headquarters for the Pakistani army. Fine hand-woven carpets grace the floors of his walled mini-estate, situated in a neighborhood occupied by other retired officers.
From 1987 to 1989 Gul headed the ISI, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA. The ISI was the main conduit for CIA funds and arms to the Mujahadeen. Later the ISI helped install the Taliban. Gul, who remains intimately familiar with all the players in Afghan politics, says that Northern Alliance warlords continue their drug smuggling today. He says he has first-hand knowledge that some ministers in the U.S.-backed, interim government of Hamid Karzai use drug money to bolster their power, although he declines to name names. He says the U.S. knows the players as well as he does.
"Warlordism is supported by drug trafficking and gun-running," says Gul. "This is going to increase, in my opinion. This is the American choice."
Gul is a controversial figure in Pakistan because of his avowedly right-wing, pro-Taliban views. He helps lead a group called the Afghan Defense Council, which strongly opposes Pakistan’s pro-U.S. policy on Afghanistan. But others highly critical of the Taliban also share his assessment of the new Afghan government.
NGO worker Ahmad notes that General Abdul Rashid Dostam, now Afghan deputy defense minister, has historic ties with the drug trade. He was "not just taxing the poppy production," says Ahmad. He was "helping direct it. Poppy is the only worthwhile source of foreign exchange for" the Northern Alliance.
Ahmad says, however, that Karzai’s government faces a lot of
international pressure to crack down on the drug trade. In mid-January Karzai announced that he would continue the Taliban prohibition against poppy growing and heroin production.
But Karzai has no functioning national police force or army. In fact, Karzai’s minister of transportation was murdered at the Kabul airport in mid-February, and several top government intelligence officials were charged with the crime. Press reports indicate the murder may have resulted from a dispute over lucrative smuggling routes, but the case has been hushed up.
In April government forces tried to go after poppy growers in the rural areas near Jalalabad. But Northern Alliance warlords organized the farmers to block roads. Afghan refugees trying to return from Pakistan were temporarily halted. Eventually, the government backed off.
"We have an apprehension about the Northern Alliance warlords expanding drug smuggling," says Brig. General Inam Ul Haq, head of Pakistan’s Anti Narcotics Force (ANF) in Peshawar. The ANF is Pakistan’s DEA. Karzai "is appeasing the warlords, and [allowing drug trafficking] could be one way to do that."
The U.S. could make international aid to Afghanistan contingent on poppy eradication, says Brig. General Ul Haq somewhat wryly, noting that for years the U.S. used such threats to pressure Pakistan to cooperate with American efforts to stop heroin smuggling from Afghanistan. "Now the shoe is on the other foot," he says.
The real test comes later this year. Poppies planted in November will be harvested this spring. It takes another few months for the opium to be processed into heroin, warehoused, and then spirited out of Afghanistan.
…But there’s an even bigger political problem. Payments made directly to poppy farmers would eliminate warlords’ heroin-smuggling profits. So far the U.S. shows no signs of challenging the lawlessness of the warlords, let alone cutting into their drug profits. They remain allies in the bigger U.S. war against terrorism.
And one thing remains certain. If the U.S. takes no action, Afghanistan will certainly become a major supplier of heroin once again.
Oakland-based freelance journalist Reese Erlich traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan on assignment for Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corp. Radio and Common Ground Radio. A version of this article originally appeared in the East Bay Monthly magazine in Berkeley.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
(Editor’s Note: Since May 1, 2002 Afghanistan has indeed become a major supplier of heroin once again. And warlordism reigns as the effective government experienced by most of the people of Afghanistan. The real solution to the situation in Afghanistan in other countries is not a political revolution or more foreign aid, but a Biblical reformation in which the people of Afghanistan and their government embrace the reformed Christian gospel and become reformed Christian.)