-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.counterpunch.org/bumpercrop.html
}}}>Begin
March 6, 2002
Politics of a Bumper Crop
Opium and Afghanistan
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Though Britain has been blaring its support for America's "War on Terror", there is
public disquiet in the UK at one aspect of the new era of freedom now prevailing in
Afghanistan: the renewal of opium cultivation, banned with unprecedented and near
total success by Mullah Omar in July of 2000.
In order to receive US aid, Hamid Karzai's coalition had to make a pro forma
announcement in January that opium cultivation is still forbidden, but the extent of
this renewed commitment to abstention from Afghanistan's prime cash crop was
almost simultaneously displayed in the unceremonious ejection of Afghanistan's drug
control agency from its offices in Kabul, with the drug czar's desk being kicked
physically into the street.
A couple of weeks ago the London Guardian reported in a headline that "MI5
[Britain's counter-intelligence agency] fears flood of Afghan heroin". The ensuing
story by Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton Taylor led with the news that "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 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."
The Guardian went on to report a new assessment by the UN office for drug control
and crime prevention, based in Vienna, that after the war the West stands to lose the
"best ever opportunity" to suffocate the illegal trade. Afghanistan is the source of
75% of the world's heroin and 90% of Britain's supply.
Opium poppies are primarily grown in the south and east of Afghanistan, the regions
domination by the Pashtuns, the ethnic fraction that sustained the Taliban until such
support became an obvious poor bet.
In political terms, it's a safe forecast to say that no serious effort will be made to
interfere with the opium crop. To do so would be to deal the Karzai regime as a
serious a blow as did Mullah Omar to loyalty to the Taliban when he banned opium
cultivation (an act variously explained as a last-ditch attempt to get recognition from
the West, or as a price support tactic, restricting supply).
These developments lend a certain irony to the enormously costly ads bought by the
US government on Superbowl Sunday to inform America's consumers of illegal
drugs that to buy cocaine or heroin is to help terrorism. To the contrary, at last so
far
as Afghanistan is concerned, to buy heroin and morphine is to provide a sure market
for Afghanistan's farm sector, which employs as many as 200,000 in the fields
harvesting the opium from the poppy heads. A sure income to the opium farmers
means a cut for the rural barons whose support in essential for the future well-being
of America's selected government, headed by Karzai.
Meanwhile, readers here in the US of the magazine Vanity Fair can marvel at the tact
displayed by Maureen Orth in her article in the March issue on "Afghanistan's Deadly
Habit", about "the symbiotic connection between drugs and terrorism". The
impression given by Orth is that only with the coming to power of the Taliban in 1996
did the opium industry "grow so quickly that in 1999 Afghanistan produced 5,000 tons
of opium, more than 70 per cent of the world's supply".
It is true that deep into the article Orth makes very fleeting reference to the CIA's
possible role in the late 1970s and 1980s in the expansion of opium cultivation in
Afghanistan.
The facts are easily available (and cited at some length in that very fine book
Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press, coauthored by Jeffrey St Clair and
Alexander Cockburn). One of President Jimmy Carter's White House advisers on the
drug trade said later that "We were going into Afghanistan to support the opium
growers in their rebellion against the Soviets Shouldn't we try to pay the growers if
they will eradicate their production?." Musto went public with his concerns in an op ed
in the New York Times in 1980.
Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s
stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the
heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979
alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-
related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year
about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given
their lives in the fight to drive back Communism.
The only possible way to curb the trade is to offer farmers enough income to grow
something else, at a reasonable level of profit. Decade after decade there have been
effort. Mohammed Mossadegh tried crop substitution in Iran in the early 1950s and
was soon toppled with the help of the CIA which found some of its allies among the
big land barons running the opium trade. In Afghanistan , Noor Taraki's short-lived
new Afghan government attacked the opium-growing feudal estates and got loans for
crop substitution.
Orth does say frankly that "the Taliban ban on poppy growing was the largest, most
successful interdiction of drugs in history." And in history's dustbin is where that
interdiction speedily ended up. Will the US press for crop substitution? Probably not,
always for the same reason: to suppress drug cultivation means putting money in the
pockets of peasants and that means expensive aid programs and also enormous
political risks of offending important, if unpalatable, allies.
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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