3/21/03
HEROIN AND AFGHANISTAN
By J. Parnell McCarter
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.