PURITAN NEWS WEEKLY

www.puritans.net/news/

3/21/03

 

 

HEROIN AND AFGHANISTAN

 

 

  

By J. Parnell McCarter

Puritan News Service

 

The BBC is reporting in a March 2003 article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2814861.stm) that heroin production has significantly increased since U.S. occupation of the country.  Below is an excerpt:

 

“Monday, 3 March, 2003, 13:08 GMT

 

Afghanistan retakes heroin crown Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taleban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies.

 

The finding was made in a key drug report, distributed in Kabul on Sunday by the US State Department, which supports almost identical findings by the United Nations last week.

 

Low-grade heroin is refined in Afghanistan from opium, which is  manufactured from the extract of poppies.

 

"The size of the opium harvest in 2002 makes Afghanistan the world's leading opium producer," the report said.

 

The International Narcotics Control Strategy Report said the area of land used to cultivate opium poppies reached 30,750 hectares, compared with 1,685 hectares in 2001.

 

Afghanistan overtook Burma - whose production fell for the sixth straight year, to 630 tonnes - as the leading opium producer…”

 

 

While I am unaware of any documented evidence of what is occurring currently, there is documented evidence relating to the nature of Afghan heroin production in the past.   Alfred McCoy has written books and articles on this subject, including The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade .   In an article entitled CIA COVERT ACTIONS & DRUG TRAFFICKING, McCoy has written the following (http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/97-08%20AUG/ciacovert.html) :

 

“In 1980 and 1981, heroin production in Southwest Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan suddenly expanded to fill gaps in the global drug market. Although Pakistan and Afghanistan had zero-zero-heroin production in the mid-1970s, by 1981 Pakistan had suddenly emerged as the world's number one heroin supplier. Reporting from Teheran in the mid 1970s, U.S. Ambassador Richard Helms, the former CIA Director, insisted that there was no heroin production in this region, only localized opium trade. This region, he said, then supplied zero percent of the U.S.  heroin supply. In 1981, by contrast, the U.S. Attorney General announced that Pakistan was now supplying sixty  percent of the U.S. demand for heroin. Inside Pakistan itself the results were even more disastrous. Rising from zero heroin addicts in 1979, Pakistan had five thousand addicts in 1980 and one million two hundred thousand addicts in 1985, the world's highest number in any terms. Why was Pakistan able to capture the world's heroin market with such surprising speed and ease?

 

After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the White House assigned the CIA to mount a major operation to support the Afghan resistance. Working through Pakistan Inter-Service Intelligence, the CIA began supplying covert arms and finance to Afghan forces. As they gained control over liberated zones inside Afghanistan, the Afghan guerrillas required that its supporters grow opium to support the resistance. Under CIA and Pakistani protection, Pakistan military and Afghan resistance opened heroin labs on the Afghan and Pakistani border. According to The Washington Post of May 1990, among the leading heroin manufacturers were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan leader who received about half of the covert arms that the U.S. shipped to Pakistan. Although there were complaints about Hekmatyar's brutality and drug trafficking within the ranks of the Afghan resistance of the day, the CIA maintained an uncritical alliance and supported him without reservation or  restraint.

 

Once the heroin left these labs in Pakistan's northwest frontier, the Sicilian Mafia imported the drugs into the U.S., where they soon captured sixty percent of the U.S. heroin market. That is to say, sixty percent of the U.S. heroin supply came indirectly from a CIA operation. During the decade of this operation, the 1980s, the substantial DEA contingent in Islamabad made no arrests and participated in no seizures, allowing the syndicates a de facto free hand to export heroin. By contrast, a lone Norwegian detective, following a heroin deal from Oslo to Karachi, mounted an investigation that put a powerful Pakistani banker known as President Zia's surrogate son behind bars. The DEA in Islamabad got nobody, did nothing, stayed away.

 

Former CIA operatives have admitted that this operation led to an expansion of the Pakistan-Afghanistan heroin trade. In 1995 the former CIA Director of this Afghan operation, Mr. Charles Cogan, admitted sacrificing the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our main mission was to do as much damage to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade," he told Australian television. "I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes, but the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."…

 

In his book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,  McCoy  has documented a similar pattern of CIA complicity in drug trafficking in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and in Central America involving the contra rebels.